Is Vaccine Hesitancy Really as Bad as Smoking?

In a recent article for the Atlantic “COVID Won’t End Up Like The Flu. It Will Be Like Smoking”, physician Benjamin Mazer suggests a different analogy for understanding the current pandemic. He writes: “The ‘new normal’ will arrive when we acknowledge that COVID’s risks have become more in line with those of smoking cigarettes – and that many COVID deaths, like many smoking-related deaths, could be prevented with a single intervention.” That intervention, of course, is to get vaccinated. I’m personally disappointed by Mazer’s views on this occasion. He generally writes well, he's often punchy and persuasive. This specific article, however, is naïve and possibly even damaging.  

As we try to build bridges between unvaccinated folk and policy makers, making our unvaccinated patients and even family members and friends feel they are as negligent or irresponsible as smokers is not a helpful analogy. How many infections have been stopped by vaccination? The U.K. has an incredible vaccination uptake and yet that has not stopped wave after wave of new COVID variants spreading through the population. Such reality in the minds of the populace causes cognitive dissonance with those we most need to persuade. Quitting smoking is simply not the same as getting jabbed. The addiction economy is massive - underpinned by a powerful industrial lobby. We should ask their behavioural scientists how they get folk hooked on stuff and see if we can do the same for getting people hooked on pandemic social responsibility.