The federal government’s emphasis on vaccinations rather than treatment for COVID-19 is largely a function of marketing, according to healthcare attorney and author Harry Nelson.
“The idea of a vaccine generally captures public attention when there's a public health crisis and there's a perception that it will truly solve the whole problem as opposed to treatment, which is more incremental, and means people are still getting the disease,” said Nelson, founder, and managing partner of Nelson Hardiman in Los Angeles.
Nelson authored "From ObamaCare To TrumpCare: Why You Should Care."
“Ultimately, treatment of COVID is for people who are sick enough to need treatment and so if you can offer people something so that they don’t get sick in the first place because you've taken this vaccine, that's much more appealing to people without question,” Nelson told the Southern California Record.
In his book, Nelson discusses how the political polarization of the U.S. healthcare system has contributed to its failures.
“We need to start having an evidence-based conversation about healthcare rather than a political food fight,” he said. “Our nation is in terrible health.”
Focusing exclusively on the coronavirus during the pandemic didn’t help. In fact, Nelson said the health of the nation has sickened despite having 57% of the population vaccinated against the coronavirus.
“By putting all the attention on COVID without paying attention to other ailments, like mental health, obesity, and diabetes, we made America’s health worse,” he said. “During the lockdowns, we did a terrible job of focusing and addressing comprehensively on all healthcare needs. If it wasn't COVID, nobody cared about it for 18 months.”
With the emergence of the Delta variant, Nelson foresees that the state of healthcare could worsen.
“What COVID is showing is that there's a problem with the waning effectiveness of the vaccine against the Delta variant,” he said. “There needs to be additional research to make more effective vaccines rather than just taking the same vaccines that were created against the original alpha variants. The waning effectiveness of the vaccine is going to be a continuing problem. Eventually, we will all be getting a third vaccine shot and annual shots like the flu shot.”
The recent Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of COVID-19 vaccines will make healthcare more difficult to navigate for the unvaccinated, according to Nelson.
“People had a limited right to sue under Emergency Use Authorization because there was potentially more reasons to object to the vaccine but now that it's an approved drug, people are basically out of luck if you are somebody who doesn't want to take it or you are someone who has bad effects from taking it,” he said. “People who don't want to be vaccinated are going to find themselves in many parts of the country really limited in terms of their abilities unless they have the job skills and the financial independence to navigate around mandates. They're going to be in pretty bad shape.”