A health worker prepares a dose of the Johnson and Johnson Covid-19 vaccine at the Puerto Rico Convention Center during the first mass vaccination event in San Juan, Puerto Rico on March 31, 2021. (Photo by Ricardo ARDUENGO / AFP) (Photo by RICARDO ARDUENGO/AFP via Getty Images)
A research paper published in The Lancet authored by a German professor argued that governments’ stigmatization of unvaccinated individuals is “not justified” because fully vaccinated individuals play a “relevant role” in transmitting COVID-19.
“In the USA and Germany, high-level officials have used the term ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated,’ suggesting that people who have been vaccinated are not relevant in the epidemiology of COVID-19,” wrote Professor Gunter Kampf, of the Institute of Hygiene and Environmental Medicine at the University of Greifswald in Germany.
Using the phrase, Kampf argued, “might have encouraged one scientist to claim that ‘the unvaccinated threaten the vaccinated for COVID-19 … but this view is far too simple.”
While he concluded that individuals who are vaccinated have a lower risk of severe disease, they still make up a relevant part of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In recent months, top officials around the world, including within the federal government, have asserted that the COVID-19 pandemic is primarily being driven by unvaccinated people. However, some countries with high vaccination rates, including Ireland, have seen significant upticks in COVID-19 in recent days.
In the United States, the phrase has been deployed by federal officials alongside vaccine mandates. President Joe Biden on Sept. 8 declared the United States is experiencing a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” while announcing sweeping vaccine rules for private businesses with 100 or more workers, federal contractors and workers, and most healthcare staff.
But there is now “increasing evidence that vaccinated individuals continue to have a relevant role in transmission” in COVID-19, the illness caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, Kampf wrote in his paper, dated Nov. 2o.
A study in July suggested that about 469 new COVID-19 cases were found in Massachusetts in July, with 74 percent of the cases among individuals who were partially or fully vaccinated, which Kampf cited to make his argument. Seventy-nine percent of those were also symptomatic.
“In Germany, 55·4 percent of symptomatic COVID-19 cases in patients aged 60 years or older were in fully vaccinated individuals, and this proportion is increasing each week,” he continued, citing another study.
New cases reported in an outbreak in Munster occurred in 22 percent of 380 people who were fully vaccinated or who had recovered from COVID-19 and who attended a nightclub, he noted, citing a German study.
“Both the USA and Germany have engendered negative experiences by stigmatizing parts of the population for their skin color or religion,” he concluded, possibly referencing the Holocaust and the North American slave trade.
“I call on high-level officials and scientists to stop the inappropriate stigmatization of unvaccinated people, who include our patients, colleagues, and other fellow citizens, and to put extra effort into bringing society together.”
