In our efforts to have everyone vaccinated against COVID-19, there has emerged a blind spot that we must acknowledge. I’m talking about an inclination to unwittingly stigmatize the unvaccinated. This has implications for our society moving forward from this pandemic.
If you’ve been following my writing on COVID-19 from the start, you know that I’ve been advocating for mass vaccination as one of the ways out of this pandemic crisis. Now I’ve been thinking about it for some time, so let me make this qualification. Controlling the spread of COVID-19 is a public health measure that must be based on sound science. And by science I mean not just medical science but also social science as well – of the need to protect the social fabric.
Günter Kampf of the University Medicine Greifswald in Germany, in the November 2021 issue of the prestigious Lancet Journal, called on high-level officials and scientists to stop the inappropriate stigmatization of unvaccinated people and “to put extra effort into bringing society together.”
Kampf wrote that it is wrong to speak of a pandemic of the unvaccinated. “Historically, both the USA and Germany have engendered negative experiences by stigmatising parts of the population for their skin colour or religion,” Kampf wrote. Kampf believes that the same negative experience can happen to a society in the case of stigmatizing the unvaccinated.
Society can easily slide down into blaming the pandemic’s persistence almost entirely on the unvaccinated. This is wrong because while there is evidence that variants of the virus emerge from the bodies of the unvaccinated, there is also increasing evidence that vaccinated individuals continue to have a relevant role in transmission, Kampf pointed out.
“In Massachusetts, USA, a total of 469 new COVID-19 cases were detected during various events in July, 2021, and 346 (74%) of these cases were in people who were fully or partly vaccinated, 274 (79%) of whom were symptomatic. Cycle threshold values were similarly low between people who were fully vaccinated (median 22•8) and people who were unvaccinated, not fully vaccinated, or whose vaccination status was unknown (median 21•5), indicating a high viral load even among people who were fully vaccinated,” Kampf wrote.
So where do we draw the line between simply protecting the health of the community and stigmatizing those unvaccinated members of the community?
The key, I think, is to base all our public health measures on sound scientific principles. Senate President Vicente “Tito” Sotto III, for example, has a point in questioning the “no vax, no ride” policy of the government. He said it discriminates against unvaccinated commuters and that the government should “instead explore alternative means to convince the public to avail of its free vaccination program.”
I, on the other hand, see more than discrimination in the “no vax, no ride” policy. Be it in the case of air or land transportation, the unwitting message that reaches the people is this: The vaccinated can go easy on “mask, hugas, iwas” (mask, hygiene, distancing) protocol when among their fellow vaccinated riders; that the unvaccinated don’t have such privilege.
Truth is, between an unvaccinated person who is wearing a face mask properly and a vaccinated person who is not wearing a face mask or is wearing it improperly, I’ll choose the unvaccinated to be with me in a ride anytime.
Restrictions on the unvaccinated are okay. Making life a bit more difficult for the unvaccinated because sound science demands so (e.g. antigen testing before boarding) is okay. But they must not be deprived of access to public transportation and other basic services.