TCNJ

6 The College of New Jersey Magazine tating prevalence of COVID-19 had an upshot when it came to vaccine trials: it meant researchers were able to gather more data quickly. For an expert like Norvell, this only inspires confidence. But while trust among the scientific community grows, there is also a rising tide of skepticism: In a STAT/Harris poll, one in three hen students and faculty were sent home from their classrooms last March, Amanda Norvell, TCNJ biology professor and interim dean of the School of Science, understood that a vaccine, specifically a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine that would protect against COVID-19, would be an important step in returning to normalcy. And to have that vaccine within a year, she thought, would be "pretty miraculous." Yet, by the close of 2020, pharmaceutical companies Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca reported that their COVID-19 vaccines were not only safe, but effective beyond expectations. Norvell, who teaches classes on the biology of human disease and prevention, was excited: The vaccines were promising in their own right and also were proof of concept. That is, they could elicit an immune response against an invading pathogen — like a virus — training the immune system to fight off that invader in the future. The leading COVID-19 vaccines vary in terms of how they're delivering coronavirus proteins into your immune system, but almost all are targeting the same molecule on the virus, the spike protein, which is found on the outside of the virus. "It's great news that the immune response directed at the spike protein confers protection," Norvell says, adding that it will help with the development of other vaccines in the future. "These pharmaceutical companies are reporting efficacy rates of 90%, which is pretty amazing." Working together, the global research community made this dis- covery in short time. And the devas- P R A I R I E just impact you. It can affect individuals who are non-responders, those who are immunocompromised, and even babies," she says. "As someone with a background in immunology, but also as a patient and a parent, I trust that any vaccines we get have had enough testing to deter- mine safety," Norvell says, adding that adverse effects that remained undiscovered after a trial are a "light- ning strike" of a possibility, too improbable to even consider. But, she says, anti-vaccination groups seize upon and inflate this sense of danger, overshadowing vaccines' well-known benefits of protection. Vaccine skepticism is not new — the first American anti-vaccination activists appeared on the record in the late 1870s — but the movement's reach has gained notable ground since 2016. Norvell speculates that one reason for this growth in anti-vaccine sentiment is social media, which makes it easy to disperse misinformation under the guise of credibility. In her classes, she shows her students how groups with Americans said they would be reluc- tant to get a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as it was available. That could be a big problem in building herd immu- nity, Norvell says. When most of the population is vaccinated against a pathogen, those who aren't vaccinated or whose systems don't respond to the vaccine are unlikely to encounter the disease, and the spread stops, Norvell explains. This pattern is known as herd immunity. "In class, we talk about how your choice to not vaccinate doesn't Biology professor Amanda Norvell

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