Vaccines (but not as you know them)

It has long been recognised that attitudes towards vaccines may be vaccine-specific, so that people may take up some, but not others.

On the COVID-19 vaccine

On July 26 2021, the following statement was posted on Twitter about the COVID-19 vaccine:

It’s not even a real vaccine. You can catch Covid and also spread it if you are vaccinated. You don’t catch polio or MMR after you are vaccinated.

My colleagues and I came across this comment and many like it while analysing a nine-million-word dataset consisting of tweets about the COVID and MMR vaccines posted between 2008 and 2022, to learn more about vaccine scepticism. We discovered that the author of this tweet is not alone in questioning the status of the COVID-19 vaccines as vaccines, and comparing it to others.

Vaccines (but not as you know them)

Our study also investigated how, in the years of the pandemic, people compared the COVID-19 vaccines unfavourably with the MMR vaccine. Many described a perception that the COVID vaccines were not very effective at preventing infection:

Yes because the covid vaccine is just like the MMR vaccine. NOT. MMR vaccine provides 99.8% protection from catching measles, mumps or rubella. Covid vaccine does NOT stop you from catching covid. Vaccinate away but it’s not going to stop covid.

Shot or vaccine?

Some people go one step further and state that, therefore, the COVID-19 vaccines are not vaccines:

How about we start with the fact that it’s not a vaccine, it’s a therapeutic. True vaccines immunize you from the virus. The COVID “vaccine” still allows you to catch COVID just with lesser symptoms. Not the same with polio, MMR, etc.

In some tweets, posters use the term “shot” in contrast with “vaccine”, to suggest an inferior intervention, despite the fact they mean the same thing:

Stop calling it a vaccine. It’s a shot.

A new type of vaccine scepticism

In our data, there is almost no evidence before 2020 of people claiming that some vaccines are not in fact vaccines. In the period 2020-2022, this form of scepticism increased rapidly in relation to the COVID-19 vaccines, and also applied to the flu vaccine:

Can you tell me more about this “vaccine” for the flu that allows tens of thousands of deaths? That’s not a vaccine, it’s a flu shot. Much different than say a polio vaccine or MMR vaccine. I would argue that we do NOT have a flu vaccine.

How can we explain this?

Experts were already aware that some diseases, such as measles, are vaccine-preventable: if you are vaccinated, you are extremely unlikely to be infected. In contrast, other diseases, including influenza and COVID-19, are vaccine-modifiable: if you are vaccinated, you may still be infected, but you are much less likely to become seriously ill or die.

This is not to do with the quality of the vaccines, never mind their status as vaccines, but with differences between, for example, more stable viruses and viruses that mutate over time, and between different rates at which immunity wanes.

Conclusion

If left unaddressed, this new scepticism may affect the take up of seasonal flu and COVID-19 vaccines, as well as confidence in vaccines in future pandemics.

FAQs

1. What is vaccine scepticism?
2. How does the COVID-19 vaccine work?
3. What are the differences between vaccine-preventable and vaccine-modifiable diseases?
4. How can we address vaccine scepticism?