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Why I Will Take Whichever (Approved) Covid-19 Vaccine I’m Given
An epidemiologist’s personal perspective
Note: This is my individual opinion about my own choices. There’s a bit of public health stuff in here too, but what I’m really going over is why I will make a choice for me and not what the best decision for society as a whole might be from an epidemiological standpoint.
After a year of darkness, vaccines really are the light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel. Yes, vaccination programs take time, and yes, they don’t fix anything immediately. There’s also a huge issue with wealthy countries hoarding vaccine doses and something of an ethical nightmare about how we effectively distribute these life-saving interventions across the globe.
All that being said, the Covid-19 vaccines are nothing short of a scientific masterpiece. We should all be immensely grateful to be potentially getting one in 2021, rather than years from now.
But despite the generally fabulous nature of the situation when it comes to vaccines, many of us are now faced with something of a difficult question: Which vaccine should I get?
Now, granted, this isn’t a problem for much of the globe. In many countries, the answer will simply be “whichever vaccine is available” because the luxury of multiple vaccines is not something that everyone can afford.
Forget society for a moment, because here I’m talking about you and me, the people actually getting the vaccine. What matters to us?
That being said, it’s an interesting question to answer. Everyone has started discussing efficacy, with the headline numbers from vaccine trials thrown around every time the discussion begins. Do you want the AstraZeneca vaccine, with only 62% efficacy, or would you rather get the much better-sounding Moderna immunization that works 94% of the time? It seems like an easy choice, and I think ultimately that it really is.
