Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus by Sarah Gilbert & Catherine Green

Author:Sarah Gilbert & Catherine Green [Gilbert, Sarah & Green, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529369854
Google: 9lM2zgEACAAJ
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2022-02-15T23:46:14.516915+00:00

SARAH

CHAPTER 9

The Prince and the Protestors: Vaccine Acceptance and Hesitancy

Conservative estimate of lives saved due

to vaccination, 2000–2019: 37 million1

We don’t often come into direct contact with anti-vaxxers, although a few did make an appearance on one particularly memorable day in 2020. In June, Andy told me that we’d be meeting a very important visitor the following week. I asked Andy if it was a politician. I was of course extremely grateful for the funding we had received from the UK government, but a little concerned that we would now become a ‘must-visit’ destination for a long line of politicians wanting to drop by for a photo opportunity. ‘You have to promise not to tell anyone – not at work and not at home,’ said Andy. ‘It’s Prince William.’

The visit was exceptionally carefully planned and at 8.30 on the day itself, Andy and I had a briefing call with the university security team to run through the arrangements one last time. Security had received news of a group planning to stage a protest against our vaccine trials that morning, which was a slight concern. The protestors didn’t know about the royal visit of course, and they were planning to target my building, rather than Andy’s or Cath’s, where it was actually due to take place. It seemed they were being led by one person who had staged protests about a variety of things in the past: fracking, the anticoronavirus lockdown and Covid-19 vaccines. Every so often he would announce his intention to stage a protest on his Facebook page and invite others to join him. His previous one had been at another of our clinical trial sites, and had been a slight irritation rather than a security risk. He was apparently asking why we were vaccinating children, even though we weren’t.

Security was not expecting a very large crowd for the protest, and my office looks out over the front of the building, so I suggested that I could just check for any protestors by looking out of the window before setting off to meet the prince. If necessary, we could leave by another exit and walk the long way round. The security team was not entirely happy with that plan, but we agreed to speak if there seemed to be a problem.

When it was time to leave, Tess and I had a good look out of the window. It was a glorious June day – lovely weather for a protest. There was no one directly outside, but a bit further along, a bunch of men in dark jackets were standing around a car looking shifty. Tess pointed out that that was actually the university security team. So we left by the front entrance and headed over to the clinical centre. First stop was the PPE station, where we sanitised our hands and put on surgical masks. It was the first time I had worn a mask. In my building at that point we were relying on social distancing achieved via very

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