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Merry Christmas! The approval of the BioNtech / Pfizer vaccine, with more to come, is the best news possible at the end of a horrific year. Vaccination is humanity’s most vital innovation, it banishes plague after plague from the face of the earth. It’s a technology that is so counterintuitive it seems magical, but when it works, it can’t be beat. The extinction of smallpox in 1977 was probably the greatest scientific achievement.
Britain has been among the countries most incompetent at handling the pandemic, taking a far too top-down and centralized approach, but it will be the first to get the vaccine, weeks before America and a month before the bureaucratic dinosaur cumbersome on the other side of the Channel. We can thank Kate Bingham, our brilliant biologists and the Medicines and Health Products Regulatory Agency. I remember being told by someone with insider experience long before that that the European Medicines Agency was adding very little to what we do at national level except for duplication and delays .
I will join the queue for a vaccine with enthusiasm in my turn. The chances of a harmful side effect are low for three reasons: the trials were actually longer and had more participants than normal; we know more about how to avoid bad side effects than in the past, when mistakes were more common; and the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are neither live nor contain any protein, just RNA (the slightly heavier cousin of DNA), so there are fewer problems.
In fact, these messenger RNA vaccines are probably the future of vaccines. They can be developed and tested faster than the old approach using whole viruses or proteins. And speed is what has been lacking in vaccine development for too long. Wayne Koff, president of the Human Vaccines Project, issued a premonitory warning in 2019, before anyone had a cough in Wuhan: “Vaccine development is an expensive, slow and laborious process costing billions of dollars, taking decades, with less than 10 per percent success… There is clearly an urgent need to determine how to improve not only the efficacy of the vaccines themselves, but also the very processes by which they are developed. “
It’s a bit of a shame, frankly, that we haven’t been able to speed up vaccine development before that. The private sector found them unprofitable, the public health establishment preferred to lecture us on junk food, and the World Health Organization announced in 2015 that the 21st century’s greatest threat to human health – la health, notice! – was climate change. Which suggests that he was not focused on his daily work. We have therefore embarked on the path of a new highly contagious virus without sufficient preparation. Hope we have learned this lesson.
So this is a technical solution that should end the Covid nightmare, where handwashing, modeling, behavioral science, social distancing, non-pharmaceutical interventions and lockdowns have been so disappointing. If it understands anything about human psychology, the government should stop talking about “not letting down” and instead develop a plan to lift its restrictions step by step as the vaccine rolls out. Tell those who have been vaccinated and those who have had the virus to resume normal life, not by showing their passports at checkpoints, but by using common sense. List the dates he expects to break the rules.
Ideally, to slow the pandemic, you could start by vaccinating the working-age population, both to help them return to work and because they are the most likely spreaders of the virus. But naturally, to save lives, governments around the world will first vaccinate the most vulnerable. This means that it may take a little longer to achieve herd immunity through vaccination (which is the goal), but it will at least reduce the death rate, now well below 1 % and rapidly decreasing as we learn to treat people.
All of this means that we don’t have to wait until everyone has received the vaccine to lift restrictions on travel and social diversity. There will be setbacks, maybe even scandals that the media can enjoy. But there really is light at the end of the tunnel.
Matt Ridley is the author of How Innovation Works (Harper Collins)
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