Vaxxes and the 'Vid

One of my morning email subscriptions is the Wall Street Journal's 10-Point, a daily synopsis of (yes, 10) news stories of interest. At the tail end of the email is a reader comment section titled "Today’s Question and Answer." The June 1 question, with three selected answers to be shared in a future 10-Point, was:

Did the Covid-19 pandemic affect your overall willingness to get vaccines? Why or why not?

This brought to mind a recent Facebook conversation I had, in response to this post (screencapped at the head of this article) by environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg.

Lomborg, who made his bones with his Copenhagen Consensus (which highlights many global problems more pressing than global warming, and urges their prioritization in terms of resource allocation), offered:

Vaccinating kids offers remarkable benefits for our societies.

If we were to increase childhood vaccination (e.g. against measles, rubella, rotavirus etc) just slightly, over the next eight years from 2023 to 2030, we could save an additional 4.1 million lives. Each dollar spent will generate $101 of social benefits. Achieving a 100-to-1 value for money is an absolutely phenomenal return on a policy to increase global vaccination.

That conversation invited my opinion on vaccines and vaccinating.

A preface. I've been a severe critic of the anti-vaxx movement ever since I first heard about it (this is all way pre-COVID). That movement, born of a self-serving "study" written by now-disgraced-and-defrocked Dr. Andrew Wakefield, alleged a causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The study was subsequently found to be so flawed (Wakefield's methodology was garbage, his sample size was miniscule, and he was hawking his own alternative vaccine protocol) that it was withdrawn from the journal that published it. Wakefield subsequently lost his medical license.

Conspiracists might be apt to take those corrective actions as "proof" of a giant vaccine conspiracy, but such folks, being highly immune to facts, aren't worth heeding. Fact is, vaccines have saved countless millions of lives since Dr. Edward Jenner invented the smallpox vaccine in 1796. Many, many efforts to validate Wakefield's "findings" have failed, and none (no honest ones, at least) have affirmed his allegation.

The vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaxx movement born of Wakefield's humanity-destroying self-service persists, unfortunately, with tragic results. Wakefield's enduring legacy is the "explanation" he offered to parents desperately seeking answers for their children's suffering. Since humans are pattern-seeking creatures by nature, having an answer, no matter how fraudulently produced, is better than having none.

Now, onto COVID and the "vaccines."

I'm scare-quoting "vaccines" here because, as the title signals, the various forms of protection against the virus being offered aren't quite what we've come to understand vaccines to be.

My scare-quoting is, however, unfair.

The first COVID vaccines were touted as having 90-94% effectiveness against infection, and near-100% utility in reducing severity of infection. Those numbers, at least from my cursory look, were pretty accurate. The problem lies in the fact that COVID was the first big new "kill you" disease that the world had seen in a long time. In the decades since smallpox, polio, diphtheria, measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, and more have been brought to heel by vaccines, we've grown accustomed to the notion that vaccines are sure-fire preventers.

As I just learned in researching this bit, smallpox vaccine is also “only” 95% effective against infection, with the similar near-100% reduction in symptoms. The MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella), offers 90% against rubella after a single dose, and 95% mumps/99% measles after two doses. Polio gets you 90% after two doses, 99-100% after three.

Why are these diseases gone from our landscape, despite the vaccines not being 100% sure-fire? Herd immunity. Reduce the communication rate of infectious diseases by enough, and they'll fade away after time from lack of propagation.

Here's where things get a bit more complicated.

Every year, we are offered a vaccine against influenza. Since there are multiple types, sub-types, groups, and sub-groups of influenza virus, the vaccine community has to "guess" which version(s) of the flu is most likely to be prevalent each season, and cooks up a corresponding vaccine. That vaccine is only touted at 40-60% effectiveness, but even that helps dramatically in reducing communication if a substantial percentage of the population gets the jab.

COVID, unfortunately for us, has been following the influenza playbook, with an added bonus. We have new variants emerging, and the original vaccines' effectiveness is significantly less (40-60%, per one source). Moreso, the duration of protection doesn't appear anywhere close to that of "traditional" vaccines. Nevertheless, there is benefit.

No, I add to the stew.

From the outset, COVID was recognized as being a threat primarily to the elderly and those with significant comorbidity. It was as much of a risk as the flu (i.e. very, very little) to the young and healthy, a fact that was recognized and acted upon accordingly by some (cough, cough, Florida governor Ron DeSantis), and ignored by others (cough, cough, cough, cough New York Governor Andrew Cuomo).

Unfortunately for us, the legacy press embraced a paranoiac-hypochondriac attitude toward all things COVID. Understandable in the early days, when there was little data and therefore much uncertainty, but inexcusable once we started learning about the bug's behavior. Cuomo, in particular, was beatified for his handling of the pandemic, based mostly on his daily press briefings (which, in retrospect, seem to have been more about groundwork for his book than about his doing the right things). Cuomo, forced out of office for being a creep toward women, still has neither taken responsibility nor been called on the carpet for his murderous decision to require nursing homes to accept "medically stable" COVID patients, resulting in thousands of extra deaths among the old and infirm of New York State. Or for undercounting those deaths.

The Cuomo scandal is only one of many examples of government misadventure (I could fill pages listing them all). At the core of all was and continues to be a particular Best-and-Brightest contempt for the unwashed masses. We have the inestimably brilliant (/sarc) Dr. Anthony Fauci smug-barking at Rand Paul while denying what has since been affirmed, i.e. American funding of Chinese gain-of-function research. We have "masks are useless (well, they work but we don't want you hoarding them)" followed by "masks are so useful they must be mandatory" followed by "OK, you can stop wearing masks now, well* after we figured out that they are indeed ineffective" proclamations. We have misrepresentations of vaccination, the up-playing of effectiveness, the down-playing of potential side-effects, and the coercion of those at no significant risk, all on an already-unlikely premise that the jabs reduce transmission. And, just because they think people are stupid, assertions that natural immunity doesn't exist, that herd immunity is not on the radar, and therefore everyone must comply with jabs, lockdowns, masks, social distancing, and all the other measures that were understandable early on when we knew little but proved ineffective and harmful as we learned. On and on.

The real problem isn't that the jabs don't work. By most accounts, they do. It's the broken trust, the myriad self-inflicted wounds that caused skepticism to metastasize from the government to vaccines and modern medicine in general. The continued failure to mea culpa is making things worse. The perpetual political ping pong of modern politics, where every issue is turned into a binary, party-lines yes/no, has people basing their vaccine views based on party affiliation. Worse, they assume their counterparts' views to be contrary, based simply on party affiliation.

And the kooks came back in full force. The COVID jab could alter your DNA. It was a useless or harmful thing concocted solely to make Big Pharma rich. GMOs caused the pandemic. The “Plandemic” was a preplanned Bill Gates scheme to implant microchips in us all. 5G causes COVID. The vaccine can be “caught” by standing near some who got the jab. Anti-vaxx loon Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is actually drawing significant interest as an alternative to Biden for the 2024 election. And memes like this are popping up.

The pandemic did enormous harm to the relationship between government and the people it serves. And, as well, between many (formerly) esteemed institutions and the public. Seen, much as global warming, as a useful excuse to manage, dominate, control, and coerce the populace by many of our Best-and-Brightest, with actual service and protection of the populace taking a back seat, the COVID episode will have a long-reverberating legacy in America.

The broken trust will almost certainly make any future pandemic worse, both in manageability and in body count, and the lingering effects - on two generations of schoolchildren unnecessarily locked out of classrooms, on those who've had so much fear inculcated that they wear masks alone in their cars, and on people who now have a distrust of much more than the government's COVID guidance, will last for decades.

The real problems were all born of the various lies and coercions. Americans are very accommodating when asked, and as recalcitrant when commanded. And, when the commands fly against common sense, or persist well past new information that obviates them, we get even more cranky. From the outset, I took the libertarian position of opposing mandates, even as I encouraged voluntary compliance. The latter is my personal opinion that evolved with time and new information, the former is a principle that needs be perpetually defended against people who don't respect their fellow citizens. And, as I learned more, as society learned more, I adjusted, and people other than the coercers adjusted.

Government didn’t, unfortunately. Or chose to ignore what it learned. The end-goal shifted from public health to public compliance, along with a bending of the knee to various special interest groups (the teachers’ unions heading that list). Getting the people who rejected the government’s “wisdom” to relent, by force if necessary, became more important than anything else, and when things started breaking along party lines, it became a useful wedge issue. The vaccine itself became a football, with teams switching end zones after the 2020 elections. Trump did well in rushing the vaccine development, and while he was President, the Left made tons of noise about rejecting the “Trump Vaccine.” Seemingly the moment Biden became President, the Right became the jab-rejectors.

As to that vaccine hesitancy, born of all these government lies and mismanagement, it behooves us to separate reality from political stupidity, and not allow the latter to taint the former. Being simply contrary does no one any good. Do as you wish, but do please be honest in your internal reasoning, and don't let the Faucis of our government prompt you to an ill-advised opposition to good ideas.

A final note: Individuals can and have had adverse reactions to vaccines, and I'm not just talking about COVID. The peril here is what's called a "nirvana fallacy," the comparison of the probability of such an adverse reaction to the perfect world where neither disease nor reaction ever occur. Vaccines are a probability gambit - you take a jab because the risk from a disease is many, many times the risk from its vaccine. This is germane for COVID (and for the flu) because there are people (the young and healthy) who are at near-negligible risk from those bugs, and with the vaccines being so "young," it's fair to balance the low personal risk of COVID or the flu against the low but not fully assessed personal risk of the jab. You don't need to be an anti-vaxxer to make a rational assessment for those particular bugs and shots based on your own circumstances.

And, some bonus: This, from B.C. (Before COVID), on the perils of "luxury beliefs:"