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any drug, under certain circumstances, could cause adverse effects. take too much vitamin c, for example, and you can contract anything from heartburn to kidney stones, according to the mayo clinic . some psychiatric drugs could lead to cardiac effects or death .
vaccines are different. they provide long-term protection with just one or a few doses. they are highly specific and targeted — making them much safer than other drugs. a hardcore fact is that vaccines have prevented 2.5 million deaths per year, according to a 2013 report of the world health organization. occasionally, however, a single fraudulent study can shed a dark veil on an otherwise life-saving technology. most notorious is the setback of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (mmr) following a 1998 study by andrew wakefield, a british gastroenterologist, suggesting an association between the vaccine and autism. since then, hundreds of studies have dismantled the fallacy, including a recent danish trial that included more than half a million children. but the harm was done.
wakefield’s publication fuelled the conspiracy story of those who distrust science. even if extensively disproved, why do some people believe in those myths? perhaps, as professor noah harari sums it up, “because those stories build their personal identity.”
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political figures, celebrities, medical professionals and religious leaders have urged people to get vaccinated, but for some, it hasn’t been words but rather measures, such as the vaccine passport, that have prompted them to roll their sleeves up.
according to the centers for disease control (cdc), unvaccinated people are 11 times more likely to die of covid-19. a ratio that might escalate with the rise of sars-cov-2 variants since the level of antibodies generated by the vaccines — several-fold higher than that of a viral infection whether it is symptomatic or not — not only elicits cross-variant neutralizing responses but also boost the immune response to new infections . even if herd immunity is far away or unachievable according to the latest reports, vaccines do considerably reduce the probabilities of hospitalization and death.