According to the Department of Health’s current report on vaccination status, in the last six months, only 3.5 per cent of 18-to-64-year-old Australians had received the Covid-19 booster. Our vaccine hesitancy is in line with global trends. Unicef reported last year that public perceptions of the importance of childhood vaccines fell in 52 countries, by as much as 44 per cent in some cases. Vaccination coverage had dipped in 112 countries and 67 million children had missed out on at least one vaccination between 2020 and 2023 because of disruptions caused by the lockdowns and diminished confidence in vaccines, producing ‘the largest sustained backslide in childhood immunisation in 30 years’.

Vaccination rates against measles have fallen in Europe with a 45-fold annual rise in measles cases, according to the World Health Organisation, and also in the UK. While some of this might be the lingering effect of lockdown-era disruptions of immunisation services, in part it also arises from falling trust in public health edicts and institutions that has spilled over into a more generalised vaccine hesitancy. Unicef warns that, ‘the confluence of several factors suggest the threat of vaccine hesitancy may be growing’, including, ‘uncertainty about the response to the pandemic… declining trust in expertise and political polarisation’.

I offer five Covid-management-related policies as likely explanations for the rising vaccine hesitancy.

First, the benefits were over-hyped. In July 2021, President Joe Biden said vaccines will ensure you won’t get Covid; or if infected, you won’t need hospitalisation; and you won’t die. At a 2021 press briefing, referencing CDC director Rochelle Walensky’s statement that Covid had become the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said, ‘99.5 per cent of people who are in the hospital are people who are unvaccinated’. Once a senior Pfizer official admitted that they had never tested Covid vaccines for transmissibility, the entire vaccine passport requirement was shown to have been built on a conspiracy of lies.

The initial belief in the efficacy of vaccines in breaking the links between infections, hospitalisations and deaths was confounded as data accumulated with mass vaccinations that vaccine efficacy was short-lived and very modest indeed against escape variants like Omicron. On 20 June 2023, Stanford Medical School’s Dr Jay Bhattacharya tweeted that emails from Walensky, newly released under freedom of information access, showed that she, head of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins, and Anthony Fauci were all aware a month after the vaccination campaign began, of the reality of breakthrough infections. Yet they continued to push vaccine mandates anyway. Fauci said in a CBS interview in May 2021 that, ‘when you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health… you become a dead end to the virus’.

Second, governments and health bureaucracies went to extraordinary lengths to censor, suppress and deny information about the many serious side-effects of Covid-19 vaccines. Cases of adverse side-effects from Covid-19 vaccines include anaphylaxis, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, myocarditis, pericarditis and thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome. Some doctors have begun to identify vaccines as ‘the leading cause of coincidence’ in deaths. Unsurprisingly, not only has this failed to keep the truth of vaccine injuries hidden, it has in fact created growing distrust of pharmaceutical giants, governments, health authorities and the media that have colluded to hide and disguise the truth.

Third, the durable protective benefits of natural immunity acquired from viral infection, that has been known to physicians since the Athenian plague, was memory-holed for three years with respect to Covid before being rediscovered. Those who issued reminders of the reality and powers of natural immunity were simply ignored. On 30 June 2021, Professor Robert Dingwall, a member of UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said letting children catch Covid would be better than vaccinating them. Their intrinsically low risk from Covid means they may be ‘better protected by natural immunity generated through infection than by asking them to take the “possible” risk of a vaccine.’ A study of almost 900,000 5-to-11-year-old children in North Carolina, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, added to concerns that vaccines don’t merely lose their effectiveness in just a few months; they also destroy natural immunity against reinfection severe enough to put them in hospital. Vaccination should have focused on the uninfected and unvaccinated and natural immunity could and should have been accepted as vaccination-equivalent, but few countries and institutions did this.

Fourth, vaccine mandates came under sustained assault with respect both to medical justification and ethical underpinnings, especially for healthy children, adolescents and young adults. Their risk of seriously bad health outcomes from catching Covid was modest and lower than the risk of serious side-effects from the vaccine. The collateral harms inflicted on school- and university-age pupils made the mandate deeply unethical. Another medical question was the impact of mandates on staffing levels in healthcare institutions at a time when they were already stretched, with accompanying social and economic impacts that extended to the families of those dismissed. By the northern autumn of 2022, with the widespread emergence of Omicron as an escape variant, both the personal protective benefits and reductions in transmission had become insubstantial. A 2022 study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed comparable rates of viral shedding for vaccinated and unvaccinated people with Covid-19. Denying entry into public spaces to the unvaccinated was unethical when vaccination status could not separate those who could spread the disease from those who could not.

Finally, even eminent epidemiologists and medical scientists who voiced responsible cautionary notes about the questionable efficacy being claimed and the harms being ignored were censored and silenced. The difference between conspiracy theories and facts turned out to be six to 12 months. But government officials were never held to the same standard for pro-vaccine claims.

In September 2022, FDA Commissioner Dr Robert Califf tweeted that the updated Bivalent Wuhan-Omicron BA.4/5 booster ‘increases your chances of being in attendance at upcoming gatherings with family and friends’.

Dr Vinay Prasad and Dr Alyson Haslam note wryly, ‘Had the company said this, the FDA could fine them for false and misleading statements’.