Anti-Vaccine Propaganda

People often miss the important difference between having a right to do something and that something being a right or reasonable thing to do. People have a right not to get vaccinated for covid. It’s a free country. Adults refusing vaccination do not create serious risks except for each other. (Those of us who are vaccinated are either immune to the disease or well enough protected that if one of us gets infected, he probably either will never know it or will have only the equivalent of a mild head cold. Kids under twelve are at  very little risk of getting really sick and should become eligible for vaccination in a few months. Also as another aside, I mean to exclude from consideration here people who have already had the disease because I do not know whether or not their acquired immunity is robust and long lasting enough to make vaccination unnecessary.) But what they have decided is wrong. I feel sorry for many of them who have been conned, manipulated, or just plain frightened into making a bad decision. 

I have no sympathy for the politicians and people in mainly the conservative media who are doing the conning, manipulating, and frightening. They have a right to do what they are doing, but what they are doing is wrong – cruelly, foolishly, yahooishly wrong.  Not everything in life should be political. Conservatives are supposed to know that. The decision to or not to be vaccinated should be a reasoned, pragmatic, medical one, not a political statement.  The fact that some authoritarian Democrat governors and other officials have gone too far too gleefully in bossing people around during the epidemic is irrelevant to the question. So are the absurd things coming from the teachers’ unions and the misrepresentations, lies, and panic mongering  coming from people in the traditional media. So are the political biases of Tony Fauci and the character and policies of Biden and Harris. Yet some conservative politicians and media people behave as though they were, and that getting vaccinated is somehow caving in to the Dems and their flacks in the media while going unvaccinated is standing up against them. They also make light of the epidemic itself - treating the new, more contagious version of the disease and even the present increases in serious infections as something of a joke. Some of them spread scare stories about harmful side effects of the vaccines while neglecting to mention how rarely they happen and even repeat silly monster movie stuff such as stories claiming the vaccines alter people’s DNA.

They should know better, and they surely should think about the harm they are doing. For old and already very sick people, getting vaccinated can be a matter of life or death. For the young and healthy vaccination can be both a way to feel and be safer and to help get their lives back to normal. For kids  vaccinating enough teens and adults (and soon the kids themselves) can be a way allow them to ditch the masks  and return to a normal childhood. It is hard to excuse preaching against it to make trivial political points.

People Not Getting Vaccinated

 My wife and I took the Moderna vaccine for covid as soon as we could and were delighted to do so.  We saw and still see getting vaccinated as an obviously sensible and prudent thing to do. Since getting the shots in January I have encouraged others I know, particularly others over fifty,  to do the same. Some have, and some have decided they won’t. The ones deciding not to get vaccinated are not fools or paranoiacs. They are not against vaccines in general. They do not think the shots contain a secret microchip which will allow Bill Gates to track their movements. They just plan to pass on this one.    According to the news there are millions of Americans who have made the same decision. Rather than insulting them, it is worth thinking about what might have contributed to their decision.

The first thing that comes to mind is simple fear. These days people are easy to scare.  They have been indoctrinated to be so. Through about the first  two thirds of the 20^th Century there was a general impression among the public and in journalism that advances in science and technology were good things which made people’s lives better. Many people still think so, but in the last fifty or so years fear mongering politicians and people in media have created a counter trend of unreasonable fear of everything from being poisoned by eating apples to causing the end of the world by having a hamburger, and especially  of anything to do with “chemicals”. The vaccines are made of chemical compounds, and they were created by corporations. The same people who have spent decades portraying anything chemical as dangerous and pharmaceutical companies as evil now seem surprised that people are wary of new chemicals developed by pharmaceutical companies. The environment is right for claims that the vaccines alter people’s  DNA or give them cancer or corrupt the purity and essence of their precious bodily fluids to be taken seriously.

There is also mistrust of government. Lying, bumbling, and covering up are standard features and practices of the government, and people can see that irrespective of their political preferences. (I doubt if very many people would consider both Barack Obama and Donald Trump to be competent, effective, straight shooters who did their jobs well and honestly.) People do not trust the government and its public relations people in the media because they are not trustworthy.  They have earned their “credibility problem”.

What should people in government do to make more people willing to be vaccinated? What they are doing now is not working well, and I doubt if sending evangelists door to door will do much good either. I would suggest that they change their marketing approach and try something very unusual for them. They should treat skeptics as reasoning adults, admit that their statements, demands, and actions on the epidemic in the past have sometimes been wrong, heavy handed,  and unnecessary, agree that all vaccines carry risks and that these were developed very rapidly while offering evidence they have worked out well, concede that young adults have little to worry about from the virus, resist the temptation to bring up race, gender, or Trump in the pitch, and ask, not order, people to get vaccinated to make things safer for everyone and get this thing over with. They also might consider finding a better salesman than a shifty, pompous old man so arrogant that he equates questioning his opinions to an attack on science itself.

A Journal of the Plague Year

 

While not everyone can be Isaac Newton and use his time while cooped up due to an epidemic to discover some of the basic laws of the universe, people spending more time at home than usual can use their time well by reading more. It beats watching network TV, and it beats the heck out of paying more attention than is necessary to the present political scene.

One book I recommend is  Daniel Defoe’s A  Journal of the Plague Year. Defoe was a good writer. He wrote Robinson Crusoe.  A Journal of the Plague year is written as a first person account of a man who stayed in London during  the time of the plague of 1664-66. It is said to be based on the journal of an older relative of Defoe’s who lived in London during the plague, though the prose is Defoe’s, and scholars believe some of the events described in the book are fictional.

The book tells a fascinating story on its own, but it is also interesting to compare its story to what is going on here and now with the Covid epidemic.  (Of course the plague in London was far worse than the present epidemic. According to the official bills of mortality the plague killed over 70,000 people in London from 1664 to 1666, around fifteen percent of the population. Historians  have conjectured that many more deaths which were listed as due to spotted fever or other causes were also due to the plague. The plague struck and killed people of all ages.  So far in the United States  around five  one hundredths of one percent of the population has been listed as dying from or while infected with Covid-19, almost all of whom  were over forty and had serious medical conditions before becoming infected. People in London knew the plague was contagious but had no idea of its cause, while the cause of the present epidemic is well known and treatments and vaccines for it are being developed and tested.)

The plague began slowly with a few cases in a few locations before spreading  across London. Many people with property or friends outside  the city left to avoid the disease, but many who could have left decided to remain and ride it out.  The mayor ordered lockdowns which were often ignored or disobeyed and which many thought were unnecessary and ineffective. Trade slowed as ships did not want to dock at London, but farmers and merchants from the countryside continued to bring food  to the city.  As the number of sick and dying people increased, some towns outside London refused to accept people leaving the city unless they could give evidence they were not carrying the disease.   Unemployed tradesmen who ran out of money and the city’s poor were supported with charity from more prosperous people and welfare from the mayor and the crown.  There were numerous charlatans,  conjurers, prophets, and con artists working the gullible with charms, spurious cures, fake preventatives, and predictions.   When conditions improved people of the lower and less educated classes hurried into the streets and resumed normal life, causing  a flare up of the disease.  

 

 

Victims and Victims

Whatever one thinks about the appropriateness of the lock downs over  the epidemic, it is indisputable that they produced real victims – people whose businesses or livelihoods  were damaged or ruined,  dying people in nursing homes who spent their last days alone because they were locked away from their family and friends, sick people left to suffer because the surgery they needed was banned as elective, children  who coped  poorly with the disruption of their lives’ routines, and many others.

There are also phony victims – officials responsible for shutdowns with sad tales of being triggered by “hateful” criticism from unruly subjects rude enough not to like being pushed around.  As one example a transsexual official in Pennsylvania has made national news and gained sympathetic attention in the traditional media by whining that some people who don’t like the way the lock down has gone in that state have been mean by failing to respect that fact that he prefers to be seen as a woman, even going so far as to ridicule his pretense and call him “sir”.  That may have been bad manners.  It may have been rude, counterproductive, and beside the point of opposing  the lock down.  But that is all it was.  It did not make him a victim, any more than being called a fat lunatic makes Trump a victim.

I will save my sympathy for the real victims, and let the thin skinned politicians and bureaucrats suffer as they may.  It is healthy for the country for people to treat politicians and bureaucrats  as a class as objects of ridicule.  Besides Truman was right about heat and kitchens.

Foxholes and Pandemics

There is a variation on the old  and false saying that there are no atheists in foxholes going around among leftists that there are no libertarians in pandemics. It is of course nonsense. Most libertarians are not anarchists. They realize that there are enough irrational and unethical people and behavior in the world to make a government desirable.  However they also know that history’s worst  crimes and atrocities have been committed  by governments, that governments are usually inept and grossly inefficient and often harmful and repulsively corrupt, that officials and bureaucrats have perverse incentives and tend to be avaricious and power hungry, that governments fund themselves by extortion, and that no government can be fully trusted to respect people’s rights, and many cannot be trusted at all. While accepting a need for government, libertarians favor having the smallest and least powerful governments and the largest amount of individual freedom possible within a given context.

In normal times officials have no right and should have no power to tell people where they can go, with what sort and number of people they can meet, or when or whether to keep their businesses open. However none of us has a right to be a Typhoid Mary in a restaurant kitchen.  In a major epidemic of a dangerous, very contagious disease, particularly a new dangerous disease  the severity and course of which are unknown, it is not inconsistent with libertarian principles for governments to impose temporary restrictions on people’s behavior to fight it while being as respectful of people’s rights as the situation allows.

Of course governments can and do go overboard and fail to hit the right balance.  Once this epidemic is over, people should look at the facts and decide if what was done was excessive. If it was, laws and policies should be changed to make it harder for the government to do it next time.  For now it makes sense to go along.

Laying Low

This is for my conservative friends, especially my older conservative friends. My libertarian friends tend to take a rational and scientific view of things. My Democrat friends tend to believe what they hear from the government - at least from the public health side of the government. Friends from both groups probably are taking the epidemic seriously. It is some of my Republican/conservative friends that I am a little worried about.

I am  following the recommendations for older people during the epidemic. We made our last trip to a restaurant three weeks ago. Since then I have been to the grocery store, the post office once to mail our tax return,  a Home Depot and a local lumberyard for things for a couple of things I am doing in our backyard, and  the ATM at our bank’s closest branch. Otherwise we have stayed away from people. We are doing the "social distancing" (a term surely coined by someone fluent in bureaucratese), washing our hands more often and especially vigorously after going out, and following other recommendations.   We will obey  a directive for complete isolation if it comes to that in our town. 

I understand why some  conservatives  are or have been skeptical.  The federal government is generally incompetent and untrustworthy.  Many people in the traditional media are liars, ignoramuses, or both and blatant public relations flacks for the left to boot. There was an attempt to use the epidemic as a way to damage Trump as was done with poor old Bush with Katrina. Officials do manufacture crises and exaggerate  problems in hopes of scaring people into giving them more power and authority. They also  have strong incentives to overreact to dangers and difficulties so as not to be seen as behaving like poor old Bush at the time of Katrina.  Some Democrats are hoping to use the epidemic as a means to damage the economy in time for the coming election. People have been told falsely a lot of times about a lot of different things that the sky is falling in or would be by date x, only to have x pass with nothing much happening.

However none of that changes the facts and the unknowns.  From the time the disease spread from China to other places, serious, objective experts in public health have seen reasons to worry that things could go bad quickly. Covid 19 is a new virus, and so there are  no historical data on its behavior or course in populations.   People do die from it, and old people die more frequently than younger ones.  It is very contagious.  It would be useful to know if being old per se makes one’s risk of real trouble higher, or if higher percentages of old people get really sick because higher percentages of old people are already in poor health. I have seen no data on that.  Given all that, following the recommendations seems the reasonable thing for older people to do. It is a good idea for younger people too, though they are not in as much danger.

Conservatives who are not taking this seriously, may be making the sort of mistake some of George W. Bush’s people are said to have made before invading Iraq.  Authors have written that they disregarded advice from career people in the State Department not to invade  because of their contempt for the diplomats having been wrong  about the chances of winning the Cold War. Well on Iraq  the wimps were right, and the tough guys were wrong. The past behavior and reliability of those  making an assertion of course matter, but one should  look at the facts instead of dismissing  things automatically. The facts as now known point toward being careful and following the recommendations of the experts in public health and the rules from various governments.