Countries may want to vaccinate their own citizens first, even those in much less danger. However, to save as many lives as possible, priorities must be set globally. Health professionals, the elderly and those at high risk are the first who should have been vaccinated.
Clinical trials could have been started immediately to assess whether delaying the second dose would work well, and allow for a wider geographical distribution of doses. The initial results on the protective effect of the first doses were encouraging.
Some countries, such as Canada and Great Britain, did extend the period between doses as a strategy to vaccinate more of their citizens, with good results. More of its vulnerable population was quickly protected. In addition, some immunologists had predicted, with longer intervals people are still protected: in part, an unusually short period between the first two injections had been set to speed up trials. However, in the United States, these adaptive strategies could not be studied or implemented.
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What needs to happen
When the pandemic ends, the temptation will be to turn the page and return to what had been normal life. It will be good if it is so for each person. Instead, the cracks uncovered in our governments and public health institutions by two years of inertia, errors, and resistance to evidence make a broad and rigorous dissection of what happened essential if we are to correct course in future challenges.
National and international committees need to help us see where we went wrong, without scapegoating, and how to respond to future outbreaks, without becoming defensive and justifying what public health authorities and national leaders did during this time even if it was well intentioned. In some countries, it would be easy to focus only on political leaders like President Donald Trump, who seriously undermined the US response. But top health officials, top scientists, and state governors made many missteps along the way. At a time of growing international mistrust, we need to work to increase mutual trust and cooperation. We need to better understand how to quickly incorporate scientific evidence into public policies on the matter, and better understand the human reaction to such important and complex events.
If we can do that, saving lives and mitigating future suffering, it won’t make up for the losses and hardships we’ve endured in the last two years. But we can at least say that we did our best to learn from it; let that be a positive legacy of all this.
Zeynep Tufekci (@Zeynep) is an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina, author of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest and opinion columnist.
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