{"id":11598,"date":"2021-02-11T08:47:30","date_gmt":"2021-02-11T13:47:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=11598"},"modified":"2021-02-11T08:47:19","modified_gmt":"2021-02-11T13:47:19","slug":"political-immunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=11598","title":{"rendered":"Political immunity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two TCNJ professors take a shot at explaining how a vaccine for COVID-19 has turned political.<\/h3>\n

When students and faculty were sent home from their classrooms last March, Amanda Norvell, TCNJ biology professor and interim dean of the School of Science, understood that a vaccine, specifically a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine that would protect against COVID-19, would be an important step in returning to normalcy. And to have that vaccine within a year, she thought, would be \u201cpretty miraculous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, by the close of 2020, pharmaceutical companies Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca reported that their COVID-19 vaccines were not only safe, but effective beyond expectations. Norvell, who teaches classes on the biology of human disease and prevention, was excited: The vaccines were promising in their own right and also were proof of concept. That is, they could elicit an immune response against an invading pathogen \u2014 like a virus \u2014 training the immune system to fight off that invader in the future.<\/p>\n

The leading COVID-19 vaccines vary in terms of how they\u2019re delivering coronavirus proteins into your immune system, but almost all are targeting the same molecule on the virus, the spike protein, which is found on the outside of the virus. \u201cIt\u2019s great news that the immune response directed at the spike protein confers protection,\u201d Norvell says, adding that it will help with the development of other vaccines in the future. \u201cThese pharmaceutical companies are reporting efficacy rates of 90%, which is pretty amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Amanda Norvell<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Working together, the global research community made this discovery in short time. And the devastating prevalence of COVID-19 had an upshot when it came to vaccine trials: it meant researchers were able to gather more data quickly. For an expert like Norvell, this only inspires confidence. But while trust among the scientific community grows, there is also a rising tide of skepticism: In a STAT\/Harris poll, one in three Americans said they would be reluctant to get a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as it was available. That could be a big problem in building herd immunity, Norvell says.<\/p>\n

When most of the population is vaccinated against a pathogen, those who aren\u2019t vaccinated or whose systems don\u2019t respond to the vaccine are unlikely to encounter the disease, and the spread stops, Norvell explains. This pattern is known as herd immunity. \u201cIn class, we talk about how your choice to not vaccinate doesn\u2019t just impact you. It can affect individuals who are non-responders, those who are immunocompromised, and even babies,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs someone with a background in immunology, but also as a patient and a parent, I trust that any vaccines we get have had enough testing to determine safety,\u201d Norvell says, adding that adverse effects that remained undiscovered after a trial are a \u201clightning strike\u201d of a possibility, too improbable to even consider. But, she says, anti-vaccination groups seize upon and inflate this sense of danger, overshadowing vaccines\u2019 well-known benefits of protection.<\/p>\n

Vaccine skepticism is not new \u2014 the first American anti-vaccination activists appeared on the record in the late 1870s \u2014 but the movement\u2019s reach has gained notable ground since 2016. Norvell speculates that one reason for this growth in anti-vaccine sentiment is social media, which makes it easy to disperse misinformation under the guise of credibility. In her classes, she shows her students how groups with objective and official-sounding names sow skepticism online and encourage people to circumvent public safety measures. But in 2020, politics also played a role.<\/p>\n

According to TCNJ Political Science Department Chair Daniel Bowen, when an issue breaks along such a stark party divide, it may well have less to do with the issue at hand, and more to do with how leaders shape public opinion.<\/p>\n

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Daniel Bowen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cAt the beginning of the pandemic, we did see some unification around communal support of one another through preventive measures against COVID-19, but there were other messages activated and framed in terms of liberty, distrust of government, and distrust of big business,\u201d Bowen says. Sometimes, this was for short-term political gain, he says, but it may do long-term damage.<\/p>\n

\u201cDistrust of government is certainly a long-standing thread in American politics,\u201d he adds. \u201cThe difference more recently is that that distrust has become starkly partisan,\u201d with each side doubting the leadership of the other. \u201cWe\u2019re at the point where we\u2019re in a crisis and we need corrective action, but the lack of trust is out there undermining our ability to fight a pandemic,\u201d he says. \u201cIt really does harm our ability to act collectively to solve a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

The vaccine debate has become a key element of this partisan conflict. Recently, the political right, with its concern for personal liberties, has increasingly incorporated vaccine opposition into its platform. In spring 2019, while the U.S. was weathering the most severe measles outbreak since 1992, Republicans rejected six Democrat-supported state bills to tighten vaccination requirements for school-aged children. Further, they introduced legislation to make vaccination requirements less<\/em> stringent in two more states.<\/p>\n

But Bowen is optimistic vaccines will be returned from political opinion into the realm of evidence-supported science. One source of this optimism is that before losing the presidential election, Donald Trump celebrated the development of an effective COVID-19 vaccine through Operation Warp Speed and then delivered it to patients as a landmark achievement for his administration.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf Trump used the federal government to help develop the vaccine, and President Joe Biden uses the federal government to help disseminate it,\u201d Bowen speculates, their bipartisan investment could help to diffuse some of the politicization and build trust \u2014 both in the government\u2019s purpose of serving the people, and in the solutions they offer.<\/p>\n

According to Norvell, vaccine adoption is America\u2019s path to herd immunity, so trust in vaccines \u2014 especially a COVID-19 therapy \u2014 can\u2019t come soon enough.<\/p>\n

Illustration: Tim Enthoven; Photos: Peter Murphy<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two profs talk about the science and politics of vaccines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":331,"featured_media":11661,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-on-campus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/331"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11598"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11677,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11598\/revisions\/11677"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}