Evaluate vaccines based upon science not prejudice

Editor's note: Jonathan Arnott is a former member of the European Parliament. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Science and politics are poor bedfellows. Science is, or at least should be, about the search for truth. There is no room for disagreement, except to the extent to which the data is insufficient to draw firm conclusions. When science cannot tell us something with absolute accuracy, it's able to tell us how confident it is in its findings. This is the reason for a "confidence interval": we can say with 95 percent, 99 percent or 99.9 percent certainty (depending upon how sure we need to be) that the truth can be found within a particular range. There exists a precision that defies the nebulous language of politics.

The role of politicians, when fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, is to develop public policy based upon input from scientists and others. Government is not run by scientists for good reason: there is a balancing act between the scientific advice, the needs of the economy, and the need to protect healthcare services to limit excess mortality from causes unrelated to the virus. A hard-nosed economist would utilize phrases such as "the value of statistical life," the amount of money that governments should be willing to spend per life saved. It would be inhuman to apply such an approach absolutely rigidly at all times and in all situations, but governments around the world have – in some sense – the responsibility of weighing up all of the various considerations.

There is another darker underbelly of politics in the time of COVID. In a democracy, governments are – naturally – concerned about public opinion. That public opinion can often be manipulated by being perceived through the lens of a media which may not be impartial, or even informed about the science. At the start of the pandemic it was rare to find a science journalist who actually had a degree in science. Without the slightest clue of what a technical scientific paper actually meant, journalists would often print total nonsense as though it were scientific fact. The British tabloid press was regularly lampooned for its ridiculous medical stories, to the extent that at first readers failed to grasp the actual level of seriousness of this particular virus.

The Russian Sputnik vaccine and the Chinese Sinovac vaccine became the subject of negativity in the Western media. When a media outlet is used to writing "Russia bad" and "China bad" headlines, it becomes easy to have a bias against those countries' vaccines. That's not how science works. Whether a vaccine is good or bad does not depend upon that country's politics of political systems.

In the case of Russia, at least, there was some initial reason for the skepticism. Russia's early approval back in August of its Sputnik vaccine was, in effect, no more than a large-scale Phase 3 clinical trial being rebranded for political purposes. It was right and proper to await further information, but that further information now exists. Current data, which is being considered by regulatory authorities, shows that the vaccine is both safe and highly effective at preventing the spread of the virus. The media, however, has been slow to recognize this.

With China's Sinovac vaccine, there was never any reason for concern. It was important, as with any vaccine anywhere in the world, to await the technical data before having confidence in the vaccine.

The media attempted to find concerns anyway, with the BBC reporting that Sinovac was "just" 50.4 percent effective – barely above the threshold for regulatory approval. The New York Times headline screamed about "disappointing" trial results. That figure was cherry-picked from a very specific clinical trial of high-risk workers who would come into contact with particularly high viral loads. In normal circumstances, the Sinovac vaccine is substantially more effective. That basic, important fact went unreported.

In the end, for regulatory authorities, science will trump prejudice. Their responsibility is to examine the data impartially. Germany's recent positive comments about the Chinese and Russian vaccines indicate a change of approach, recognizing that saving lives must come above political expediency.

The negative stories about Sinovac weren't "fake news" as such, but they clearly presented real data in a misleading way. Whether the reason was political bias, incompetence, or both, is another matter.

The world will need to use all the tools at its disposal to fight this pandemic. We need vaccines from around the world: whether they're Chinese or British, Russian or American. We have an enormous task ahead to vaccinate billions of people in as short a timescale as possible. In order to do that we need to work together and use all of the vaccines at our disposal, without any kind of prejudice based upon the country of origin. We need to listen to science, not spin. Sooner or later, that will inevitably become the dominant view worldwide.

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