The struggle to come to terms with what was happening when COVID-19 emerged out of China was real. Earth had been faced with the possibility of pandemics before… swine flu, bird flu and Ebola. All of which diminished and the idea that global outbreaks of disease are an impossibility was solidified in everyone’s mind, including mine. I would say to my peers, my friends and my family, “Of course there will be a disease than will hit us hard, we have a hugely connected planet with pathogens that are constantly evolving… we are only a few mutations away from a lethal pandemic” yet I didn’t believe it would actually happen. Inevitability was battling inside my head against experience, or more accurately, naivety – not in my lifetime.
Yet the pandemic happened and continued to happen. A vaccine was produced and introduced at lightning speed with the first administration in the population to 90-year-old Margaret Keenan in the UK by nurse May Parsons. This was phenomenal. It was the first implementation of a mRNA vaccine in humans, something that hadn’t been achieved before for other diseases. As an Immunologist and Phd student this is the sort of thing I get thrills from… yet I understand these things.
For most people in the UK it will be the first time they have heard of RNA, let alone mRNA? What is it? How did it get approved so quickly? What are the long-term effects? Even worse, this vaccine induces the killing and destruction on your own cells? Then the rumours started… infertility, your DNA will be altered, they contain microchips for tracking you, vaccination will lead to shedding of the virus, it’s not safe, it causes blood clots, and it will lead to immune cells targeting healthy cells. Some of these you can easily dismiss with a little common sense while others in the early days even I and some of my peers struggled to do.
The vaccine had been authorised quickly and we didn’t know the long-term effects of this type of vaccine, we had never utilised this type before? It looks like the vaccine did have some adverse effects yet was safer than getting the virus, at least for most. We are comparing all these unknowns of a vaccine against some knowns and many unknowns of having COVID-19.
This put me in a tricky situation. I was ‘an expert’ in the eyes of a lay person but I didn’t know everything or much at all. People were asking me questions on a topic that no one was a real expert on yet. How do I advise my family and the people I care about on a topic I’m as lost as they are? I was on the fence as they were in the early days, but I had to trust science.
In this series of images, I set out to explore the other side of the fence. Those individuals set on not accepting the vaccine and the restrictions implemented by our government. I visited protests, entered debates at speakers corner and chatted to individuals to gain and idea of where this refusal came from. I found it was distrust in our leaders, fear of the unknown, putting two and two together and making 3 or protesting the forced implementation of it and the restriction. Some of these I had no defence and to some I said you have to just trust the little science we have. I hope you enjoy the images, it was an enlightening process taking them.