Stringency without efficiency is not adequate to combat pandemics

Why during pandemics some countries successfully cope with anti-vaccination sentiment while some others do not is partially because people rarely change their minds, since their views are commonly based not on facts and science, but on our feelings and group affiliations. Here, taking the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) as a proxy for the government's incompetence to combat pandemics, for EU countries we report a finding relevant for policymakers that the higher the country's corruption, the higher the number of COVID deaths alongside the fraction of anti-vaxxers, i.e. people who oppose the vaccination. On average, for a given value of the Stringency Index, which is an indicator serving to estimate the strictness of ‘lockdown style’ policies, we report that the numbers of death cases recorded in relatively more corrupt EU countries are higher than the numbers recorded in relatively less corrupt EU countries. We find no significant trend between the Stringency Index and the number of deaths for the entire set of EU countries, but when less and more corrupt countries are separately analysed, for the former group the higher stringency is positively correlated with the number of deaths, while for the later the trend is surprisingly negatively correlated. We propose a model characterised by a phase transition between poorly and fully vaccinated population, where the government effort to vaccinate the entire population triggers the anti-vaccination sentiment and strong linkage between anti-vaxxers suppressing as a feedback mechanism the government's efforts to accomplish a fully vaccinated population. The longer the anti-vaxxers connections last, the harder the government will change their mind.