Study: Unvaccinated drivers are more likely to crash

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Could COVID-19 vaccinations be related to traffic safety? While the dots definitely haven’t been connected directly between those two, a new study suggests that people unwilling to get vaccinated may be more at risk of a serious traffic crash.

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The study, published in the American Journal of Medicine, was written by three Toronto-based researchers and doctors. They studied records on more than 11.2 million Ontario residents — and of those, 84 per cent had received a COVID-19 vaccine, while 16 per cent had not. All of them combined accounted for 6,682 traffic crashes requiring emergency medical care for drivers, passengers, or pedestrians. Of those crashes, 25 per cent involved unvaccinated individuals.

The researchers extrapolated that those who hadn’t been vaccinated had a 72 per cent increased relative risk versus those who had been. That’s about equal to the traffic risks of people who suffer from sleep apnea. The study looked at those 18 and older, ensuring they were eligible for both a driver’s licence and a vaccine. It did not look at such factors as driver skill, personality traits, traffic infractions, political affiliation, or self-identified ethnicity, the study confirmed.

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Now, to be fair, those are the numbers the researchers crunched, but they’re not saying that the vaccine itself determines whether you’re going to make it to your destination without incident. Rather, it’s whether people who have vaccine hesitancy – defined by the World Health Organization as refusing a vaccine, or delaying acceptance of it, despite there being an adequate supply, access and awareness of the vaccine – may also be the type to engage in behaviours shown as the primary causes of most crashes, including speeding, inattention, tailgating, disobeying signals, passing improperly or failing to yield right-of-way, or driving while impaired.

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Simply getting vaccinated “has no direct effect on traffic behaviour or the risk of a motor vehicle crash,” the researchers said. “Instead, we theorized that individual adults who tend to resist public health recommendations might also neglect basic road safety guidelines.”

The study found that those who hadn’t received a vaccine were more likely to be younger, living in a rural area, and in the lower fifth overall for income. Unvaccinated individuals were also more likely to be diagnosed with alcohol misuse or depression, and with untreated sleep apnea, diabetes, cancer, or dementia.

But that said, the researchers also suggested that since unvaccinated patients “are overrepresented in the aftermath of a traffic crash,” that “the observed risks might also justify changes to driver insurance policies in the future.” Most people agree that insurance companies will jump on just about any tidbit to raise your rates or deny a claim — and perhaps your status with the vaccination clinic could result in some nasty surprises when it’s time to renew your policy.