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Vol VII, Issue 2
Date of Publication: May 07, 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20529/IJME.2021.061
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Book Reviews
Vaccine hesitancy: Don’t blame the public
Abstract:
As a Maternal-Foetal Medicine specialist, I take care of high-risk pregnant women every day in the United States. Nowadays, several times each day in my office, I am asked about the Covid-19 vaccine by these patients. In my discussions with these women and their partners, many of them show real concerns about vaccines. It is understandable that pregnant women would proceed with caution with a new vaccine. However, my discussions with these families reveal something much broader: a general concern about vaccines and other recommended public health approaches.
Copyright and license ©Indian Journal of Medical Ethics 2021: Open Access and Distributed under the Creative Commons license ( CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits only non-commercial and non-modified sharing in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Comments:
This is one of the best book reviews I have ever read. Even though there are exceptions, which I call vaccine deniers because they reject all vaccines totally irrationally (1), the public should not be blamed for vaccine hesitancy. As Adam Urato writes in his review, the public knows how corrupt Medicine is and “wants major public health institutions that are free from Pharma influence.”
In my own book about vaccines, which was republished last month with an updated corona chapter (1), I write that we should try to understand where the vaccine denial comes from: “When people who think the end justifies the means work for governmental or international agencies, the official advice about vaccines can become misleading, and the consequences can be serious. Citizens might decide to reject all vaccines when they find out they have been fooled by the authorities in relation to a particular one where they were already in doubt. I shall give many examples in this book that prove we cannot always trust official recommendations about vaccines, or the way authorities interpret the evidence.”
1. Gøtzsche PC. Vaccines: truth, lies, and controversy. New York: Skyhorse; 2021.
I think the reviewer has unbalanced the book’s argument somewhat with these sentences (I am only basing it on his own words without having read the book):
“So why is there such a lack of trust? Goldenberg focuses on three main explanations for the lack of trust: social media, medical racism, and commercialisation of biomedical science. She seems to weight them somewhat equally in her book. However, from my standpoint, and from what I hear from patients, the third reason (corporate influence) is by far the most important. Simply put, the public has lost trust in medicine because medicine is now seen to have been corrupted by corporate cash.”
No doubt, this is fair game for reviewing — since reviewing is one person’s reading.
However, it results in a problem. What follows these lines is the reviewer’s argument of the force of pharma on public health government alone, rather than a critical account of how the author argues the two other reasons equally stressed by her (social media and medical racism).
Because we are all only too familiar with this third aspect — corporate control of medicine and public health, we find it comforting to focus on it. By not looking at the other two avenues opened by the author, i.e., social media and medical racism, we don’t see what the new perspective being added by the author to the picture is (it may well be unimportant, but since the author has obviously made a significant argument it could have been dealt with less summarily).
The only thing I am saying is, that as central as corporate corruption of medicine is to the problem, there are many, many other forces at work in different situations. In the Indian context, for example, when NDTV (a channel) carries a clip of a rural woman of a difficult socio-economic background refusing a vaccine, there is some other reason than distrust of corporate pressure on government.
As people who are both activists in and thinkers about medicine, we should look at these different issues.
Thank you very much for your comments and your compliment, and your work in this area. The public’s vaccine hesitancy does indeed make sense given how the system currently works.
Thank you for your comment. I think you are correct that readers would benefit from hearing Maya Goldenberg’s full argument and I encourage them to read this book. Given the space limitations of a review, I chose to focus on the aspect of this issue that stands out most to me, both from my numerous discussions with patients throughout this pandemic and my own thinking on these issues. I think you are right to point out the importance of looking at the many dimensions to this.
So if we know that vaccine hesitancy is a symptom or result of multinational corporations/ big pharma. What then Does one actually say to inform them that this Covid 19 is truly a threat globally and we need to do all we can to help prevent the spread.? When I speak to someone who believes Fauci has millions and is in league with big pharma how to educate people about taking the Covid vaccine if it’s available?