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Difficulty understanding sentence in The Economist

English Language & Usage Asked by Darren Foong on September 29, 2021

I was reading an article in the latest issue of The Economist and was stumped by the opening of the last paragraph:

That leaves two reasons for passports at home. One is to enforce vaccination when infected people could harm those who have had their jabs in hospitals and care homes, for example—rather as some countries already require proof that those working with vulnerable people have no criminal record. …

First, the ambiguous prepositional phrase "in hospitals and care homes": is it modifying "enforce", "harm", or "have had"? Backtracking the garden path led me to conclude that "enforce"/"harm" were the most reasonable.

The sentence could then be rewritten (although not as succinctly) as:

One reason is to enforce vaccination during times when, in hospitals and care homes, infected people could harm those who have had their jabs.

However, it didn’t make sense to me, because how could "infected people harm those who have had their jabs" (scientific arguments about how the immunity could last for only a few months aside)? And what about those "in hospitals and care homes" who didn’t get a jab? The analogy of "vulnerable people" doesn’t help either.

I enjoy reading the The Economist, but sometimes sentences like these leave me frustrated. How should one interpret this?

One Answer

From a strictly grammatical perspective, you could interpret "in hospitals and care homes" as modifying the phrase "who have had their jabs" and as indicating where (geographically speaking) the "those" who have received their their shots were inoculated. But I think that the author's actual intention was to link "in hospitals and care homes" directly to "those."

Logically, the point that the writer means to emphasize here seems to be the continuing vulnerability of certain people—namely those in hospitals and care homes—despite their having already received vaccines, not the continuing vulnerability of people who happened to receive their injections in a particular setting.

A clearer way to express this idea would be to revise the text as follows:

That leaves two reasons for passports at home. One is to enforce vaccination in places where an infected person could harm people who remain at risk despite their having already had their jabs—in hospitals and care homes, for example. Similar thinking has led some countries to require proof that any person working with vulnerable individuals has no criminal record. ...

This revision improves the clarity of the writing by replacing competing plural entities ("infected people" and "those who have had their jabs") with a singular endangerer ("an infected person") and the plural endangered ("people who remain at risk"). But how to say something more clearly is ultimately a copyediting issue—not, strictly speaking, a question of grammatical correctness.

Correct answer by Sven Yargs on September 29, 2021

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