When it comes to COVID and the reactions to it, we have truly entered the twilight zone. Before COVID, anti-vaxxers were a small minority mainly associated with the political left with marginal influence on policy. A pandemic and a Trump administration later, everything is different.
Now the loudest vaccine skeptics are on the right. Even the Republican party’s rising star, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, is pandering to this growing faction. Their natural skepticism towards government has been laundered into opposition to anything the Biden administration does or encourages. If Biden came out in favor of breathing oxygen, half the country would suffocate.
We have to oppose mandates, never mind that American citizens were never required to vaccinate outside of job requirements, only strongly encouraged. We have to oppose lockdowns, even though most “lockdowns” only occurred from March through May when no one knew how to handle the disease. In hindsight, all those actions look excessive, unless you ignore what the virus was doing.
But with vaccines now thoroughly politicized, the anti-vax nonsense is completely out of control, and diseases that were vanquished are returning. Now we’ve seen an outbreak of measles in Ohio, and the return of polio in New York. Vaccination rates are falling below herd immunity for diseases such as mumps, rubella, and chickenpox.
This is serious stuff, a fact that is not widely recognized because we have so little experience with these diseases. For example, one to three in one thousand children who contract measles die from it. Vaccines, one of the greatest innovations in human history that have saved millions from needless suffering and death, are being rejected.
Now over a third of parents think vaccines should not be mandated for children to attend school. The purpose of such mandates is to achieve herd immunity, a public good so great that it justifies curtailment of freedom of choice in just that narrow area. This is because it’s a situation that can not be isolated to an individual; individual action can cause harm to the general public.
It’s similar to the justification for banning the dumping of toxic waste into water supplies. Even if it’s just being dumped on private property, there are downstream effects that compromise the health of others who had no choice in the matter. Pandemics and wars are two areas where, historically, the government has by necessity acted with a heavy hand. Even George Washington mandated smallpox vaccines for the colonial army.
We aren’t used to thinking about rights in this way. But that is simply because of human progress eliminating the need for those tradeoffs. Used to, individual freedom as we know it was not possible, as scarcity and disease meant individual rights could not exist, as that would conflict with survival. We do not live in such a world now, but in an ironic twist, these very rights have conditioned us to act in ways that can make them harder to maintain. They sow the seeds for their destruction.
Dispensing with philosophy and moving on to science, vaccine skeptics appear to have a limited understanding of the scientific method. Their biggest fallacy is equating the existence of a hypothesis with a scientific fact that must be covered as such or censorship is to blame.
Yes, there is a statistically significant correlation between the vaccine and heart abnormalities. Further study has shown that the only true correlation, out of four potential correlations, was for blood clotting. That does not mean vaccines cause them and could be explained by multiple things, possibly that people in poorer health will tend to prioritize vaccination.
It could also mean it’s just statistical noise, and the presence of these abnormalities among the vaccinated population is not much greater than in the general population. Larger sample sizes and more in-depth analysis will reveal this. It appears right now, though, that the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the drawbacks.
In one analysis of 2.9 million recipients of the second dose of the Dovid vaccine in Southern California, only 26 were hospitalized with myocarditis, and possibly not all of those cases were due to the vaccine. That is less than a thousandth of a percent. The numbers are of a similar order of magnitude in other studies. It could be noise, it could be a very unlikely side-effect; we just don’t know for sure.
The side effects of any vaccine are, for the most part, vastly outweighed by health benefits. So, officials and politicians will promote them. That is not a conspiracy to suppress viewpoints, it’s a necessary cost-benefit analysis. No one would support absolutely no response with everyone left on their own to determine the truth for themselves. In this instance, that’s a recipe for utter confusion and disaster.
Naturally, a cardiologist would be extremely concerned about the potential cardiac side effects of a vaccine. But he is not the only voice with a stake in this. A multitude of scientists and physicians with different specialties will have other concerns. Epidemiologists, for example, will be more concerned with the effects of a particular virus than with the side effects of any individual treatment. In a pandemic with disease symptoms causing enormous social disruptions and killing a significant number of those infected, the epidemiologist will rule the day.
Public health is not a matter of pure science, it involves trade-offs and officials making the best decisions they can about what is best for the health of the general public. In this sense, these are political decisions, requiring a weighing of the public’s capacity for inconvenience and the suffering caused by mitigation measures with the virus itself. If a virus promises to kill 1% of those infected (which adds up to over 3 million people in the United States if everyone gets infected), but vaccine side-effects will compromise the health of 1% and hospitalize less than 0.001% of the population, you encourage vaccination.
This is an uncomfortable discussion to have, but these are the decisions that public health experts like Dr. Fauci were faced with. You can’t simply say they are evil because their decisions resulted in bad things if the alternative situation would have resulted in worse things. That is just childish black-and-white thinking from people with limited experience thinking critically about ethics or science.
This behavior represents a massive failure of our educational system and is also symptomatic of the fact that uncredentialed non-experts who brushed up on their knowledge of epidemiology on Facebook and YouTube are now allowed to opine and build followings from the similarly uninformed and make money doing so.
Unfortunately, one must follow the money for this emerging cottage industry. Many people make a lot of money by making sensational claims of censorship and promoting a conspiratorial mindset. Simply say something outrageous that appears to defy authority, and people of a contrarian mindset will shower you with attention, subscriptions, and clicks, which converts into advertising revenue, product sales, and self-promotion. Don’t expect this approach to go away soon, regardless of the consequences.
We are again seeing the continued disruption of policy discussions at the hands of the internet’s democratizing force without the habits and education to make that tenable short-term. We will continue to see in the meantime the return of diseases that were supposedly vanquished, the silencing of public health officials out of fear of retaliation, political or otherwise, and a national decline in health outcomes that has already been accelerated by the pandemic.
This will continue until we slowly but surely establish new governing mechanisms that are more effective for policing these new technologies, similar to how representative governance evolved with communication technologies such as the printing press. But, in the short term, they caused needless suffering and hardship. Eventually, we will re-learn a lesson that future generations will implement: you cannot sacrifice truth and knowledge on the altar of mob rule.