Why do people seem to want to believe vaccines aren't effective?

[Notabove25]

Or not effective enough?

All the evidence I've seen, seems to be that even one dose offers a very high level of protection against becoming seriously ill, even if it can't protect you 100% from ever returning a positive test.

Why do some people seem desperate to believe that vaccination won't help, that there's still a high possibility of getting long Covid after the jab, that mutations will render it useless etc?

To my mind, most of the most vulnerable are now vaccinated or will be very soon, which is excellent news and really should mean we can start getting back to normal. Why do so many seem to want to believe otherwise?

Your immune system degrades as you get older so it may be that not all elderly people will make antibodies from 1 shot alone. Luckily there's more to the immune system than antibodies.

Exactly StarCat ,the point being 50% (or 1 in 2) of over 80s dont have antibodies!

Ahaa i see Porcupine, i presumed that the presence of antibodies were a measurement of immunity.. bearing in mind thats kind of how the vaccine works.. so no antibodies doesn't necessarily mean no immunity?

I am extremely phobic. I wish I was a fainter but I am a nasty combo of fight and flee. I will consider the vaccine when it is in a form other than injection.

I was thinking this would actually be a really good vaccine for anyone trying to overcome a needle phobia, because it is so so so small compared to normal injections - 0.5mL for AZ and 0.3mL for Pfizer, and the needle was correspondingly tiny. I didn't even feel it. If you looked away, you might not even be sure it was done, except you can feel the nurse touching your arm a bit.

@Thimbleberries

I am extremely phobic. I wish I was a fainter but I am a nasty combo of fight and flee. I will consider the vaccine when it is in a form other than injection.

I was thinking this would actually be a really good vaccine for anyone trying to overcome a needle phobia, because it is so so so small compared to normal injections - 0.5mL for AZ and 0.3mL for Pfizer, and the needle was correspondingly tiny. I didn't even feel it. If you looked away, you might not even be sure it was done, except you can feel the nurse touching your arm a bit.

No, my phobia is about control and other people doing things to me. It has nothing to do with pain. For me anyway.

Exactly StarCat ,the point being 50% (or 1 in 2) of over 80s dont have antibodies!
Sorry I was a bit thick there!!

I always find it sad how people who are resisting covid vaccine are ridiculed and abused. I think it widens the gulf between those who will have it and those who won't.

What we know so far is that there is an over representation of BAME in vaccination refusal and that this relates to a suspicion amongst this group of government and media. The experience of BAME is that life favours white people, that institutions and media are designed by and for white people and to be navigated with a good degree of suspicion. This cannot be healed with the promotion of a vaccine campaign, it will take years of commitment to doing better by BAME.

So maybe people who are confident about getting vaccinated could stop railing against those who are not, because it doesn't help, and gee I don't know, maybe govt and media could work more closely with underrepresented communities to help them gain confidence.

@Jellykat not an expert. But I know that some people who test positive dont make antibodies or only make short lived ones (I'm in the latter group) and that the ability to make them at all decreases with age. When I got COVID for the second time I had lost my antibodies but only had it mildly, presumably because other parts of my immune system (t cells?) recognised it promptly. So I wasnt immune in the sense that I could catch it again, but I had some immunity so wasnt very ill.

Ahaa, thank you Porcupine i get it now!

Some people are stupid and some miserable. The anti-vaxxers (that's what they are really) are both.

Do you know many anti-vaxxers then LastTrainEast ?
I know quite a few and theyre neither stupid or miserable.. just different

It's possible the vaccines may be less effective against the 'Brazil strain', but 'less' does not equal ineffective. So your claim above is nonsense.

^Yes this. It’s simply what happens with flu. There’s a different strain and a new jab offered to protect vulnerable people from catching it.

There will be mutations, which might be resistant to the vaccine in its current form. But it won’t be a case of going back to the beginning; the scientists have said it will only take a few weeks/months to adapt the vaccine to protect us against the dominant mutation of the virus.

The stats on the vaccine are incredible from the speed, safety, effectiveness to the roll out and take up. I've no idea why we're not focusing on the positives that vastly outweigh the challenges of a few people who can't or won't have it or that it may be slightly less effective against some variants. It's been a credit to everyone involved except the comms team. Absolutely brilliant.