Vaccine hesitancy is more dangerous than rare side effects

‘If you sail a massive liner across the Atlantic, you are going to have to make at least one course correction.’ This was the analogy used by professor Jonathan Van-Tam, the UK’s deputy chief medical officer, when explaining why the UK has opted to change its approach to vaccinating healthy 18 to 29-year-olds. For this group, officials argue, there is no point in taking any risk whatsoever, no matter how negligible, and that instead they should be offered the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines instead of Oxford-AstraZeneca.

On the one hand, from a clinical perspective, this seems very reasonable — why take any risks if there is a better choice available? But managing pandemics isn’t just about making course corrections to navigate around the currents of clinical risk. It’s also about understanding how to strategically work with the public, to build trust that motivates them, and to foresee how their perceptions might impact upon their choices.