Luc Montagnier, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize for medicine for co-discovering the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (the virus that caused AIDS) believes that vaccine mandates are useless. See,
"Their beliefs are predicated upon false assumptions and when they are not, they are characterized by failures of inference. Examples of false assumptions: The vaccines will change your DNA. The vaccines will cause magnets to stick to you. The vaccines have killed more people than the pandemic. Examples of failures of inference: Vaccines may cause myocarditis, therefore you can reduce your risk of myocarditis by not being vaccinated.¹"
Claire,
I’m vaxxed and boosted. I think there is difference between the true anti-vaxxers, a small but very active and vocal minority which you describe above, and the larger group of people who aren’t against vaccines, but believe the vaccine provides them little benefit. I would put the former group in the crazy area, but not necessarily the latter group.
I’m 70 and in good shape. I don’t really have to worry about long term affects the same way a 20-year-old would. Also, the covid vaccines are really a premedication to prepare the body to more effectively fight inevitable infection. They don’t prevent infection the way the polio vaccine prevents polio.
The data is making it clear that both the vaxxed and unvaxxed are going to be infected with and passing these viruses around forever, the same way we all pass around the common cold.
Eventual infection is unavoidable without living in isolation. New Zealand and Australia are living this way, but as soon as they end their isolation, everyone in those countries will get a version of Covid within a year or two, regardless of vaccination status.
The idea that my vaccination is protecting anyone other than myself has turned out to be false. I can spread the virus as easily as an un-vaxxed person. Maybe more so since I am more likely to be asymptomatic and unaware I am infected.
The only reason to get vaccinated is to premedicate oneself against the unavoidable exposures that we all will experience. If I get symptoms and test positive, I will work with my doctor to select one of the new therapeutics best suited to help me recover.
I do think that mass vaccination of the population under 25 doesn’t make sense because the data shows that the effectiveness of the vaccines declines over time. The vaccine a 20-year-old receives today will have completely lost its effectiveness by the time they reach 50 or 60 where the personal risk from covid is much greater.
There are reasons why we require children to take vaccines for childhood diseases that are dangerous to children. There are reasons we don’t normally recommend the Shingles vaccine for those younger than 50.
Covid is dangerous for the old and those with comorbidities. That is where we should focus our vaccine attention. Mandates only create resistance. Persuasion with arguments that make sense to people is more effective. The politicians, CDC and NIH are not presenting persuasive arguments in support of the mandates, especially for the young.
The one argument that was persuasive was the “don’t overwhelm the hospitals” argument. That argument was persuasive until recently, but the facts have changed. With the new therapeutic pills, we can now prevent most hospitalizations. A Warp Speed program to get those medications in the offices of every doctor should be a top priority for our government. Combining vaccine availability, persuasion and the new therapeutics will be more effective than one size fits all mandates, especially for the young.
2. "The data is making it clear that both the vaxxed and unvaxxed are going to be infected with and passing these viruses around forever." No, it's not. The vaxxed are not getting infected at the rate of the unvaxxed, and we don't know about the long-term immunity conferred by infection or vaccination yet. What's more, we're going to have better (pan-corona) vaccines pretty soon.
3. "The idea that my vaccination is protecting anyone other than myself has turned out to be false." No, it hasn't. While breakthrough cases are common, you're less likely to get one if vaccinated (quite a bit less likely), and more likely to have a mild case that resolves quickly, with a lower viral load--which means you're less likely to pass it on. Very few things in medicine have a zero percent chance of happening. But if someone is fully vaccinated and not immunocompromised, they're much less likely to transmit the virus if they become infected. Since Omicron's R-nought looks to be about 11--that's to say, everyone who gets it passes it on to 11 people--anything someone can do to reduce that number is apt to save a lot of lives. Also, don't forget the issue of hospital emergency rooms. Because people who are severely ill with Covid require so many weeks and months of ICU care, a raging epidemic makes it impossible for other people--your standard heart attack and your car accident--to be treated, which is a public health catastrophe in its own right. (See below.)
5. "Mandates only create resistance. Persuasion with arguments that make sense to people is more effective." Mandates create resistance, but they also create vaccination. More people get vaccinated when it's mandated. You see this everywhere mandates are in effect.
7. "With the new therapeutic pills, we can now prevent most hospitalizations." I hope that Paxlovid will live up to its promise. But don't forget Paxlovid is *every bit as experimental* as the vaccines. Anyone worried about the long-term effect of the vaccines has equally good reason to be worried about Paxlovid. (More, actually, for reasons I can explain if you want.) Molnupiravir shouldn't be authorized, IMO. It's too likely to give rise to dangerous variants. You never want to be treated for this disease if you can prevent it, if possible. We have no idea what the long-term effects of infection will be, and they may well be lifelong. I do agree that there should be a Warp Speed program to get Paxlovid into the hands of every doctor. There should also be vaccine mandates, for everyone, just as there have been for every other infectious disease we've had the blessed fortune to defeat.
1. I don’t disagree with the article on Polio. There are differences in the diseases. If polio infects other mammals, they would be killed outright or crippled and become easy prey. If the predators are infected, they suffer the same fate. With little natural reservoir, Polio is a disease that can be almost universally eradicated by vaccine.
Based on the study of deer in Ohio, it appears wild mammals are going to keep this virus alive and well and mutating forever. Therefore, we cannot achieve the same success with covid vaccines https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/12/211223113202.htm
2. I agree the vaxxed have lower symptomatic infection, but we will never know how many are infected without symptoms. I agree the vaxxed shed lower viral loads, but it is quite possible that advantage is offset by the greater number of those vaxxed asymptomatic shedders who believe they are immune.
I still think those at risk should be vaccinated to protect themselves and reduce their risk of hospitalization. I don’t think the verdict is in on the vaccination of those not at-risk protecting others, particularly for otherwise healthy children who already shed low viral loads and are rarely hospitalize because of covid. I know it is what a lot of people want to believe, but it will be a while before we have enough information to draw any firm conclusions about universal vaccination of the young. It may be more effective to send those vaccines to countries where there are shortages of the vaccine for those at high risk.
3. When the experts say repeatedly that we are going to need frequent boosters because the efficacy of the initial vaccinations is waning, I hear them saying that they don’t believe long term immunity is conferred by the current vaccines.
Of course, new vaccines that confer longer term immunity and better therapeutics will make our disagreement here a moot point.
4. Here I think we have an issue with inconsistent statistical reporting. Children who enter hospitals with cancer or because of accidents and then test positive for covid and then die, are often included in the covid death counts. There are some children, particularly with comorbidities that are primarily a result of being way overweight, dying of covid. Those children should be vaccinated. I suspect the number of otherwise healthy fit children dying primarily of covid is a lot smaller than what is these reports.
5. I agree that mandates cause more to vaccinate, but they also create fiercer opposition, particularly when the reasons given are inconsistent and appear arbitrary.
6. Part of reason some hospitals being overcapacity, in those places that have that problem, is that hospitals were shut down for the care of many other diseases for so long. Some were overwhelmed by covid and in other areas clinics and hospital wings that weren’t setup for covid were shut down. The economics of medicine pre-pandemic necessitated hospitals to be setup to be constantly above 80% capacity. That delicate balance of matching the supply of medical services to the demand for medical services was disrupted by covid and the reaction to covid. It will take time to reestablish that balance, especially with all the cancer, diabetic and cardio patients whose health deteriorated while they were shut out of the hospitals are now coming back in worse shape in large numbers.
Firing medical workers who got covid while doing their jobs pre-vaccine and have natural immunity because they won’t comply with the mandate is irrational and only making this issue worse.
7. People may be hesitant about the therapeutics for the same reasons they are hesitant about the vaccines. The difference would be that with symptoms and a positive test, I suspect most will fill the doctors Rx and take the pills. All of the same cost benefit analysis of possible long term negative effects from covid, vaccines and therapeutics will have to be made by each of us. We will have to do so with very incomplete and constantly changing information. In that scenario, no one should be surprised that many different conclusions will be reached by rational people.
I'm noticing more reporting on the problems with the covid statistical reporting. Here is an article that has several links to recent studies on the subject.
I think the feds should contract with a tech company to build a national database for compiling health statistics. The Federal and many of the state bureaucracies are incapable of doing this. The agencies have had billions of dollars and years to accomplish this, and they have failed. Without accurate, transparent, accessible and consistent health data, it is really difficult for anyone to make good health related decisions on the personal or the government levels.
It's going to be very hard to compile solid statistics outside of a formal study because so many people get Covid and don't report it to anyone. Also, a significant portion will get Covid and fail to connect this to any subsequent illness down the line, so that too won't be studied when we track the long-term effects. (Also true of vaccines, though I don't worry about this because I see no physical mechanism by which vaccines could have long-term effects, and we have no examples of this in all of medicine.) I don't think it could hurt for the Feds to build such a database, but it won't result in the kind of statistical solidity we'd like. This is the problem studying many epidemiological questions. It's why it's so hard to answer the question, "What diet is healthiest for humans?" It's why it took us so long to figure out that smoking is bad for you. The best way to look at this is to look at a well-controlled study, with good follow-up (check the methodology very carefully and see what they did to follow up on the subjects--if they lose a large portion of the people they're studying, there may be a reason, and that reason may call the results of the study into question). Then extrapolate from that to the size of our population and check the results against the so-called national statistics. If there's a big disjunct, one or the other is, obviously, flawed. It's more likely to be the national statistics.
Jan 9, 2022·edited Jan 9, 2022Liked by Claire Berlinski
Excellent point about all the non-reported cases.
I still think better data gathering about all the cases the medical community is aware of through treatment or testing for all diseases and conditions would be of value as a baseline and to have a better system in place when the next disease comes along.
Systems built over time, especially by large organizations, tend retain a lot of non-functional orphan parts as they grow over time. Modules are added on that have adverse effects on some other part of the system and no one notices because the system is so complex and big that no one person sees the whole system. I have been personally involved in this process with complex software.
Parts of the system that used to have a purpose live on because no one steps back, looks at the big picture and points out that part of the system no longer serves any purpose, is redundant or is now adversely affecting the whole system.
That is why it is valuable to every so often rewrite the system from scratch. Government will never do that. All the fiefdoms will resist or sabotage the effort for all the obvious self-serving reasons. It is best done by an outside entity.
I agree that well controlled studies are important to verify that what people believe they perceive in the data is true. I just wish our peer review system had not become so corrupt and incompetent that over 50% of peer reviewed published studies turn out to be fatally flawed or fraudulent. When I see news about a scientific discovery or finding, I say to myself: "50% chance that will be retracted soon". A sad state of affairs.
I don’t question the science- as I lack specific expertise, dedicated time and resources. I trust the vaccines are effective. I hear that Moderna and Phizer are top of the list in effectiveness (surpassing effectiveness score of childhood vaccines). But do not quote me on last sentence. Good news is that Trump is on video interview (Dec 31, 2021), said that he has been vaccinated and so should everyone else. I immediately informed a Trump voting friend- only because this person is unvaccinated. My friend still says “no”.
Thank you to those among us who separate politics from Covid. I have a few personal liberal friends who have always been anti-Trump and also anti-all vaccine. These people succeeded at crossing the political aisle to connect to the anti-Covid vaccine crowd among some Republicans. I am trying to mimic this success of “bi-partisan unity” among us who are pro-Covid vaccine. In early 2020, when Trump suggested banning flights from China- he was condemned as “zenophobe”. In early 2020, my local politician Pelosi publicly encouraged us to go to Chinatown- which is near my apartment. Independent of the two previous sentences - I believe that Trump’s decisions during the early days of Covid (Nov 2019-Mar 2020) when the President has access to special information- were influenced by a personal desire to increase or maintain “hero” status. But, do not quote me. Then, months later before we had yet discovered that Covid prefers in-doors, we liberals announced that “Covid won’t get you if you are protesting for social justice with several thousand of your closest friends”. But - in the previous sentence, I am definitely not included among the “we”.
Three days ago, I told a lifelong friend MD that I know of a few liberals who are anti-vax. Within 2 seconds, she shot back, “Well it’s mostly conservatives”. It would have been nice if instead she would have offered to call my liberal anti-vax friends on the phone. She showed zero interest in them. That is a problem. Finally- the MSM that politicizes everything is doing nobody any good.
Shadi is right, Claire is not. Here’s the reason; vaccine hesitancy is as old as the hills. To overcome it requires comity and even a marginal sense of comity in our country has been destroyed by the repugnant behavior exhibited by the class of people who developed the vaccine. It’s the same class of people that Claire and her journalist friends belong to. It’s also the same class that I belong to and, I suspect, most of Claire’s readers and subscribers.
The expert class has spent decades setting up society in a way that has literally destroyed the lives, livelihood and families of many of the people who happen to be vaccine skeptics.
The expert class has shipped the jobs of working people to places like China where the work they used to do is now performed by slave labor. The expert class has imported tens of millions of immigrants (often illegally) to lower the wages of the jobs not yet shipped overseas. The expert class created a bloated and remarkably expensive system of higher education that makes it next to impossible for anyone not in the upper middle class to obtain a college education without emerging with mountains of debt. The expert class has adopted an economic model that allows people with sufficient assets to invest in a stock market that offers double digit returns while working people have little alternative then to park their modest savings in bank accounts offering annual interest rates that typically pay less than one percent. The list of outrages perpetrated by the perfidious expert class is too long to fully enumerate.
Yet Claire can’t fathom why, when the experts tell the vaccine hesitant that their concerns are but one more example of their stupidity, that these experts aren’t viewed as credible advocates.
And let’s remember, when it comes to mass psychosis, the expert class is as vulnerable as the folks that Claire tells us have deplorable views.
The entire membership of the Biden Administration believes in vaccines; they’re right about that. But many if not most of them also believe that gender has nothing to do with biology. They believe that males can get pregnant and that biological male prisoners who claim to be female should be housed with female inmates. They believe biological males who’ve decided that they’re female can compete against biologically female athletes without having any advantage.
During the last Presidential campaign, then candidate Biden was asked by a reporter from some right wing website how many genders there are. After becoming momentarily flummoxed, Biden responded “well, there are at least three.”
Claire, my question to you is whether you think that Biden’s answer to that reporters question is evidence of psychosis in every bit the same way that vaccine hesitancy is.
It appears to me that the expert class, especially those profess to believe only in "reason", is more vulnerable to mass psychosis than the more grounded everyman. The climate hysteria of that class is a perfect example. Who was it that said something to that effect that: He who lacks belief in anything being certain is more likely to fervently believe anything if it "sounds about right".
Yes, I think they're exactly the same phenomenon, and should probably be discussed together, analytically. But one is a much more deadly delusion than the other.
Beyond that, I don't understand your argument. It seems to be, "The expert class has been wrong about many things; therefore, even though they're *not* wrong about this, people are right to believe crazy things about vaccination." This is an amazingly condescending view of the non-expert class: Do you really think the average person is so dumb that he's incapable of thinking this problem through and just has to take it on trust that vaccines work? Understanding vaccines and risk doesn't require a PhD in molecular biology. It just requires not being crazy.
Non experts have agency just as experts do. There are very few good reasons not to get vaccinated. Some of the cell lines used in the development of the vaccines were derived from fetal tissue; the especially devout might find that objectionable.
A substantial number of African Americans are unvaccinated, especially in places like New York. Given the history of this community with the medical establishment, especially concerning clinical trials, this hesitancy is understandable.
Then there are those with legitimate health reasons to avoid the jab. For example, there really are people who have anaphylactic reactions to polysorbate, a preservative used in all of the vaccines.
Beyond that there are no good excuses, none at all. What I think Shadi gets that you don’t, Claire, is that calling out people’s stupidity for failing to get vaccinated is not only ineffective, it’s counterproductive.
There’s a good argument to be made that even if people aren’t afraid of COVID themselves, they have a responsibility to the community not to become vectors for the virus, especially if they’re around the highly vulnerable. Why don’t the vaccine hesitant feel that responsibility; I think it’s because of decades of horrific mistreatment by America’s expert class that has, in many cases, literally ruined their lives. It’s hard to generate any community spirit from those who have watched their jobs disappear, their towns fall into poverty and their kids succumb to opioids because of policies perpetrated by people who live in Newton, MA, Scarsdale, NY or Mountainview, CA.
One other thing, Claire, I agree with you that the delusion of vaccine hesitancy is deadly while delusions about gender are not, but it’s less prevalent. Even in towns, cities and states where vaccine hesitancy is common, close to 50 percent of the population has decided to get the jab. Poll the faculty and students of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Oberlin or Smith and ask whether they believe gender is a social construct. You will find near unanimity that it is. In the short run vaccine hesitancy is more dangerous. Which do you think is more dangerous in the long run?
Perfectly reasonable to rail against anti-vax types, but you doth protest too much against the unreason 'on the other side.' Anyone under the age of, say, 65 without significant immunosuppression and who is triple-vaccinated, who's running around with a mask out-of-doors out of fear of catching Omicron and suffering serious health risks as a result, is nuts. Is he *as* nuts as someone who claims the vaccinations don't work? I dunno, is Ilhan Omar *as* stupid as Marjorie Taylor Greene? Is left anti-Semitism *as* innately evil as right anti-Semitism? Take out your *nuts* or *stupid* or *evil* ruler and you can probably get to 'no' for all three, but weighing each against the other by a single pure cognitive parameter becomes almost an aesthetic exercise. 'Your loonies are crazier than my loonies.' Or something.
The world and its dangers are too complex to play that game. In the case of COVID, we need to pay attention to the irrationality that drives over-cautiousness about the virus, too. It's not as if lockdowns and school closures carry no public health costs. And even vaccine risk-benefit ratios themselves are not such a slam-dunk when you parse different age groups (e.g. the FDA going ahead with a vaccine recommendation for teens against the advice of its own advisory panel).
Anti-vax sentiment in general is pretty dumb. But there's plenty of dumb to go around.
There's plenty of dumb to go around. I agree that your person under the age of, "say, 65 without significant immunosuppression, etc." isn't rational at all. But he's also not harming anyone. I firmly believe that people should be allowed to do whatever they want, however crazy, so long as it doesn't harm anyone else. (There are some exceptions to my libertarian instincts, but this isn't one of them.) Also, wearing a mask outdoors isn't a "serious health risk." It's just uncomfortable. I agree that lockdowns and school closures carry health risks that should be weighed against the risk of vaccines. The vaccine risk-benefit ratio is *arguably* not a slam dunk for males 18-24 with no comorbidities; apart from that group, it's a slam dunk. But given the risk of long Covid--an affliction that I've seen firsthand because my brother has had it now for a year (and trust me: it's not psychosomatic)--I know what I'd choose if I were an 18-year-old male.
I'm sorry to hear about your brother. I hope he gets well.
Risk of long COVID is correlated with severity of disease. Therefore, the risk for a vaccinated young person without significant immunosuppression, especially from Omicron, & especially out of doors (!), is remote in the extreme.
Also, like I say, take out your ruler. Fine. That person with nearly no risk with the mask isn't hurting himself or others directly (although if he is harassing people in public without masks, as my son was harassed a couple of months ago, he is certainly being annoying). But in aggregate, that over-cautiousness drives political decisions that result in damaging policy decisions such as school closures.
I think a willingness to broaden your criticism of unreason wouldn't harm your argument at all. And a mind or two (not many more than that, I grant you, lol) might change if they saw the criticism framed more ecumenically.
Thank you Evan for comment and for actually saying that we have antisemitism on the left. Both BLM and equity are antisemetic as are millions of liberals at institutions across the nation that pretend that all the untruthful sentences are true.
The purpose of wearing a mask is to ensure that even asymptomatic people (the triple vaxxed, for eg) who have covid don’t infect others. The mask doesn’t protect the person who’s wearing it.
We don't have much evidence of outdoor transmission. Common sense says, however, that if you're in a crowded outdoor environment (a packed outdoor concert, say), it wouldn't be a bad idea.
I think that both sides in the debate—if that is the word—over COVID vaccines & etc. have left logic and common sense behind.
For example, we know that while COVID-19 is dangerous for older people and those with certain preexisting conditions such as obesity, it's far less dangerous for younger people and children. Despite this, we continue to pretend that children are plague carriers, and we inflict multiple tortures on them in the name of COVID-zero safety. Schools are safe—but people who know better go on pretending that the slightest whiff of COVID demands a return to—oxymoron alert— remote learning This absurdity is inflicting enormous damage on children and their families—and the charge is being led by the public education establishment, teachers unions in particular. Everybody knows that the unions' hand-wringing over "safety" is nothing more than a cover for self-interest. For teachers, the pandemic has meant full pay and benefits for about one third of the work usually done. Such a deal! And now, using the Omicron variant as their excuse, they're once more agitating for remote learning. This is, or ought to be, a national scandal.
Then there's the business of mandated vaccination. Now personally if I were going to embark on such a policy, I wouldn't start by making vaccines a political issue, with their efficacy dependent on who happens to be in occupation of the White House. But that's exactly what happened and it's clear for that reason that whatever one thinks of the illogic or insanity of vaccine skeptics, vaccination mandates will fail. Instead of continuing a futile argument, I would therefore suggest that we move on. People who refuse the vaccines are responsible for the consequences, which will fall on them, not on those of us who have done the responsible, logical thing. So let's stop pursuing an argument that has become futile and deal with the existing situation.
There are encouraging signs that some former hysterical ninnies are beginning to come to their senses, realizing that we're reached a point at which the cure is worse than the disease. Perhaps the prospect of an electoral wipeout in 2022 has concentrated the minds of some on the liberal-progressive side. Still, I'm none too hopeful. Large numbers of people have internalized the zero-COVID mentality: the belief that as long as the virus is around, normal life is unsafe. Since in all probability the virus will always be around, this is a form of illogic or insanity no less glaring than the anti-vaccine position. We can't stop these neurotics from triple-masking in perpetuity, but we can't let them whistle the tune.
See my comments above. Mandates work: When Macron announced the "pass sanitaire," many grumbled (and rioted), but immediately, the vast majority of people here got vaccinated, and now France's vaccination rate is one of the highest in Europe--thus, despite Omicron, French hospitals are not overflowing, French schools are open, public services haven't been disrupted, and the fatality rate has only gone up slightly. Compare to the UK, which has no mandate. You can argue that mandates are *wrong,* if you like; I wouldn't agree, but that's a matter of values. You can't argue that they don't work: They do. We've mandated vaccines in the US since George Washington, which is why our kids don't die of smallpox, polio, measles, whooping cough, etc.
Well, pretty obviously mandates aren’t working in the United States, or we wouldn’t be having this discussion. And now we have a situation in which the vaccines don’t prevent one from contracting and transmitting the virus. All along, our absurd president and most of the media have been demonizing unvaccinated people as plague carriers, a strategy that in other contexts would be seen for the despicable ploy that it is. Now what?
A federal vaccine mandate won’t work here because Biden, his political allies and the public health establishment have made it unworkable. Trying to make it work will do more harm than good at this point. Time to move on.
But the vaccines *do* prevent one from contracting and transmitting the virus--or at least, the mRNA vaccines do; others don't. They don't prevent it 100 percent of the time, but not much in medicine works 100 percent of the time. They're only about half as effective in protecting against Omicron as they were the original Alpha strain, but half is *not* nothing. That's a hugely significant benefit. We thought at first we'd be lucky to have a vaccine this good! It's a big mistake to say, "It doesn't provide perfect protection against infection, therefore it provides no protection."
Unvaccinated people *are* more likely to be carriers of the disease. This isn't demonization; it isn't a metaphor; it's a statement of fact. If people are furious with the anti-vaxxers, it's because their irresponsibility is imposing massive costs on the rest of society. We would all like to move on. We're all *desperate* to move on. That's why people are so frustrated with anti-vaxxers who refuse to do this one, small, easy, safe, free thing that would make it so much more likely that we could move on.
Jan 5, 2022·edited Jan 5, 2022Liked by Claire Berlinski
At this point, there are few Americans who don't know someone, fully vaccinated, who has nevertheless contracted COVID, e.g. my own wife. (She's fine; it was a mild case.) So I'm sorry to say, Claire, that here in the Land of E Pluribus Unum, your position would cut no ice. Now I completely agree with you that the case for vaccination is strong. As a polio survivor I could never be an anti-vaxxer. I only wish the Sauk vaccine had made its appearance a little earlier—it would have same me and my family considerable pain and heartache. So yeah, I got vaccinated against COVID as soon as I could.
Having said that, I disagree with you that unvaccinated people are the ones who have caused so much societal disruption. There's no particular evidence for that, really. When COVID first hit, there were no vaccines at all. and at this point the disruptions are mainly the result of the response to the pandemic by politicians, the public health sector, the media, and various bad actors like the teachers unions.
In the early days, when much less was known about COVID, lockdowns and draconian mask mandates were understandable, even prudent. But somehow, despite the growth of knowledge about this virus, the attitudes of most of the groups I listed above have not changed. Take mask mandates. They're practically useless since the cloth masks most people use are ineffective in blocking an airborne virus. But mandatory masking persists, e.g. in schools. Why? It makes no sense.
In Chicago, the heinous teachers union has demanded, and the membership has voted in favor of, a return to remote learning because of Omicron—this despite ample evidence that schools are among the least dangerous venues, COVID-wise. I won't append a rhetorical Why? in this case because we all know why.
American colleges and universities have lost their institutional minds over COVID, imposing draconian restrictions on students and staff. You can read about that here:
I'll just excerpt one paragraph from this article to give the flavor of the whole:
"At Amherst, students must double mask if they don’t use a KN95. In nearby Boston, at Emerson College, students are tested twice a week and have stay-in-room orders. The college instructs students to 'only leave their residence halls or place of residence for testing, meals, medical appointments, necessary employment, or to get mail.' Seriously."
Thanks to this nonsense of this kind, we now face a public health crisis much worse than COVID that will have dire long-term consequences. Among young people suicide, depression, substance abuse and general despair are all on the rise. The lives of millions of young children have been blighted, perhaps permanently, by prolonged school closures and mask mandates that were utterly futile.
On the economic front, countless small businesses in America are being driven to the brink of ruin by vaccine and other mandates that impose on them the costs of policing the recalcitrant. Over the holidays, thousands of commercial airline flights were abruptly cancelled, causing chaos—and for no good reason.
In the face of all this, what does the federal government do? Aside from demonstrating its general incompetence, it continues to push a national vaccine mandate that's unenforceable and probably illegal. The Biden Administration's messaging on the pandemic has been a pig's breakfast of contradictions, half-truths and the occasional noble lie. This, to put it as kindly as possible, hasn't helped.
Forget about the science for a moment, ponder the politics of the pandemic, and you may see what I mean.
And one more on the efficacy of masks: I thought this study was as good as we'll have, and it looks airtight to me. Some of the physics is too hard for me (or, I don't want to spend the time it would take me to learn it), but I doubt five accomplished physicists would make a significant mistake in what's clearly an elementary exercise in fluid dynamics. You never know, but that just seems unlikely to me. If there's a good physicist on this thread, you can review it and tell me. In any event: Assume two people, one infected (with a typical Delta viral load) and the other not. They're in a room, no more than 10 feet apart from each other. If both parties are wearing a well-fitted FFP2 mask, the odds of infection over the course of several minutes declines from an astonishingly high 90 percent to an astonishingly low 0.4 percent. https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2110117118. Even a poorly-fitting surgical mask works: it gets you down to 30 percent. So actually, masks work *extremely* well, even to the point that if used diligently, they meet my "reasonable precaution" standard *without* vaccination. I wear FFP2 masks and they're no more onerous than cloth masks, so I don't know why they freak Bari Weiss's correspondent out so much.
The highly transmissible Omicron variant is spreading like wildfire in cities where more or less stringent mask mandates are still in place, so it would seem that masking isn't much use after all. The trouble, perhaps, is that the claimed effectiveness of masks rests on the ideal situation, such as the one you describe above. In real life, no such ideal situations exist. If everybody wore masks—and wore them properly—all the time, wherever the risk of transmission existed, that would be one thing. But they don't, and there's no way to police them, and that's that.
Moreover, there's no point to mask mandates where there's little or no risk. That, for example, is the situation on college campuses where practically everyone is vaccinated. Either the vaccine offers highly effective protection or it doesn't. If it does, masking makes no sense. If it doesn't, vaccination mandates make no sense. You can't have it both ways. Increasingly here in America, people won't let you have it both ways.
"A public health crisis much worse than COVID?" I'd like to see the numbers on this, including the cost of caring for those who have been disabled by Covid. Break it down by morbidity and mortality, and show me the numbers. I'm open to reason.
But I'll interject a few points here.
1) Your calculation must include *morbidity,* not just mortality. Too many people leave out the former when they think about this. So factor in the cost of disability in the case of people whose lungs are destroyed, whose limbs are amputated, etc. And that's only the beginning; we're beginning to suspect that Long Covid doesn't go away--and may affect as many as 30 percent of people who are infected. This is a very serious disease, even if you don't die from it. It's not the flu.
2. We now have ample evidence that non-pharmaceutical interventions were not as harmful as initial predictions suggested. It's just not correct at this point to argue that lockdowns caused enormous death tolls. So your argument needs to rest on a projection of future harm, not past harm: https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/8/e006653.abstract. We might expect that at some point in the future places that lock down will do worse on some metrics, but based on evidence we also might not. It's very uncertain, because large COVID-19 outbreaks also cause massive harm. The most plausible thing to say is that some interventions work well, others not so much, and the best policy mix is probably variable.
Better ones work better. If you put 20+ children in a crowded room without ventilation, wearing masks, the room will fill up with aerosolized virus and become a viral nightmare--and no, masks alone won't stop it. If you crack open the windows or use HEPA filters, the risk in that environment drops by orders of magnitude. But masks are effective at preventing vapor, another major transmission route. If you have ventilation *and* masks, you get a pretty safe environment, especially if you add distancing (though that's not realistic in a school), daily rapid testing, and, of course, vaccination. If these measures are implemented, there's no reasonable argument for keeping schools closed, IMO. So I agree with you: Schools should be open. We know enough now to do this safely. But mask mandates aren't useless at all. (I think this should be decided by local school boards, depending how much risk parents are comfortable taking.) These measures aren't all-or-nothing; you have to use them together to reduce the risk to acceptable levels.
On the cancellation of flights: As far as I understand, they were mostly cancelled because of snow, right? But as for flights cancelled because of Omicron--I imagine that means they were cancelled because staff were sick! The planes can't fly without pilots and flight attendants, right? (We wouldn't want them to, certainly.)
But this is the thing--if that kind of disruption bothers you, you want people to vaccinate and mask up. Also, I don't believe small businesses are being driven to ruin by vaccine mandates. If they're losing staff who won't get vaccinated, don't blame the mandate--blame the anti-vaxxers. It's like arguing that restaurants are being "driven to ruin" by the requirement that people who handle food wash their hands after using the toilet. If you're running a restaurant that's ruined by this requirement, your problem isn't the requirement, if you see what I mean.
I agree the pandemic messaging has been confusing to the public--I have to agree, because the public is very confused. I think the Biden Administration has done a lousy job of providing an adequate number of tests. I don't think a national vaccine mandate would be unenforceable or illegal. But no such thing is proposed, is it. I would support one, but sadly, that's not in the cards.
Oh, as for the article on Bari Weiss's Substack: It's a mix of reasonable points and completely unreasonable ones. She's against infected students quarantining? That's nuts. It's not just other, healthy students they're (sure) to infect, it's their teachers, university staff, students with disabilities ... of course they should be isolated. (She later contradicts herself by saying it's common sense that "If you’re sick, stay home.")
She's cherry picking her studies, too. Why would she choose to look at a 15-month period in Germany rather than looking at the more relevant statistics--American ones? I don't know why she thinks N95 or KN95 are particularly cumbersome.
As for "current data actually [tipping] the risk to benefit analysis in favor of not boosting young healthy people," no, I don't think it does. Again, she's considering only mortality, not morbidity, and we know *for sure* that morbidity from this disease is extensive.
Finally, if we're seeing deterioration in students' mental health, we can't assume this is because of pandemic restrictions. It might be. But it might also be because an unprecedented number of young people have prematurely lost parents, grandparents, and other people who are significant to them. It might be because worrying about their parents' health is extremely stressful. It might be because when a pandemic kills 850,000 of your fellow citizens, it is *extremely upsetting.* Frankly, I don't understand anyone whose mental health *isn't* disturbed when they consider the amount of suffering, loss, and grief we've experienced. You'd have to be a sociopath to be unaffected by it. So ... yes, it's fully possible the pandemic restrictions are causing students' mental health to decline. But it's just as possible it's the pandemic itself.
Jan 4, 2022Liked by Claire Berlinski, Rachel motte
Let me tell you a story. It involves my wife, two dear friends of ours, and their children. My wife works at a Native American clinic, and help administer the regular COVID vaccine clinics they've held for the past year. My wife got her first shot in December 2020, I received mine the following February. We were lucky to get our jabs early on. We were both vaccine-skeptics early on but as the data came out, began to change our minds. I personally have read many studies about covid vaccine testing, Ivermectin, HCQ, and other therapeutics. I don't think there is anyone I know who is personally responsible for getting more people, in particularly the vaccine hesitant, vaccinated than my wife, outside the people actually administering vaccines (which she does not). The story is about an older couple who refused to get the vaccine, for several reasons. They one child screamed at them to get the vaccines. The other child screamed at them to not get vaccinated. They were confused and unsure. My wife sat down with them, and explained why she was hesitant at first. She explained that she understood their concern. You know what she didn't do? She didn't call them crazy. She didn't call them stupid. She didn't blame them for prolonging the pandemic. To be sure, their fears were irrational by this time. The data was all available. Unless they had some underlying health condition that made the vaccine dangerous, it was safe and smart to get it. She didn't lay all that on them. She just patiently explained why she was skeptical at first, what she'd read, that she'd gotten the vaccine. And guess what? They both got vaccinated. Now you can keep calling these people crazy, and stupid. You can do as one person I read recently did: invoke Martin Luther to call them murderers. You can do that if you want. But guess what: it isn't helping. If all of the smart people who participate in the CosmoGlob did what my wife did, which is spend time with people and explain it, we'd probably do some good. Just sayin'...
Unquestionably your wife has done a great mitzvah, and when I'm not fulminating about the anti-vaxxers, I am, like your wife, gently and patiently explaining this to anyone who will listen to me. I think I've managed to convince a few people this way. But there's a profound rot among a subset of influential people who are the source of much of this nonsense, and it's to them, really, that this is addressed. The Bret Weinsteins of this world shouldn't be reinforced in their efforts to spread death and misery by the Shadi Hamids.
That doesn't seem to be your aim when you refer to cultural markers. Shadi Hamid is right as rain on that score. The left respond to the vaccine hesitant the way you have, calling it "stark raving mad". This doesn't seem aimed at the talking head, influencers. It seems aimed at the people who refuse to get the vaccine. Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against the vaccine here. I'm arguing in favor of treating people with respect, even those who seem to make nutty decisions. Mandates, passports, and the shrill of the anti-anti-vaxxer just makes the problem worse.
Luc Montagnier, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize for medicine for co-discovering the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (the virus that caused AIDS) believes that vaccine mandates are useless. See,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-makes-bidens-vaccine-mandates-obsolete-covid-healthcare-osha-evidence-supreme-court-11641760009?mod=mhp
"Their beliefs are predicated upon false assumptions and when they are not, they are characterized by failures of inference. Examples of false assumptions: The vaccines will change your DNA. The vaccines will cause magnets to stick to you. The vaccines have killed more people than the pandemic. Examples of failures of inference: Vaccines may cause myocarditis, therefore you can reduce your risk of myocarditis by not being vaccinated.¹"
Claire,
I’m vaxxed and boosted. I think there is difference between the true anti-vaxxers, a small but very active and vocal minority which you describe above, and the larger group of people who aren’t against vaccines, but believe the vaccine provides them little benefit. I would put the former group in the crazy area, but not necessarily the latter group.
I’m 70 and in good shape. I don’t really have to worry about long term affects the same way a 20-year-old would. Also, the covid vaccines are really a premedication to prepare the body to more effectively fight inevitable infection. They don’t prevent infection the way the polio vaccine prevents polio.
The data is making it clear that both the vaxxed and unvaxxed are going to be infected with and passing these viruses around forever, the same way we all pass around the common cold.
Eventual infection is unavoidable without living in isolation. New Zealand and Australia are living this way, but as soon as they end their isolation, everyone in those countries will get a version of Covid within a year or two, regardless of vaccination status.
The idea that my vaccination is protecting anyone other than myself has turned out to be false. I can spread the virus as easily as an un-vaxxed person. Maybe more so since I am more likely to be asymptomatic and unaware I am infected.
The only reason to get vaccinated is to premedicate oneself against the unavoidable exposures that we all will experience. If I get symptoms and test positive, I will work with my doctor to select one of the new therapeutics best suited to help me recover.
I do think that mass vaccination of the population under 25 doesn’t make sense because the data shows that the effectiveness of the vaccines declines over time. The vaccine a 20-year-old receives today will have completely lost its effectiveness by the time they reach 50 or 60 where the personal risk from covid is much greater.
There are reasons why we require children to take vaccines for childhood diseases that are dangerous to children. There are reasons we don’t normally recommend the Shingles vaccine for those younger than 50.
Covid is dangerous for the old and those with comorbidities. That is where we should focus our vaccine attention. Mandates only create resistance. Persuasion with arguments that make sense to people is more effective. The politicians, CDC and NIH are not presenting persuasive arguments in support of the mandates, especially for the young.
The one argument that was persuasive was the “don’t overwhelm the hospitals” argument. That argument was persuasive until recently, but the facts have changed. With the new therapeutic pills, we can now prevent most hospitalizations. A Warp Speed program to get those medications in the offices of every doctor should be a top priority for our government. Combining vaccine availability, persuasion and the new therapeutics will be more effective than one size fits all mandates, especially for the young.
Ken
Hi Ken, a lot of untrue beliefs here. All of the following are false:
1. "They don’t prevent infection the way the polio vaccine prevents polio." Actually, they do. (See: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1957/02/how-good-is-the-polio-vaccine/303946/)
2. "The data is making it clear that both the vaxxed and unvaxxed are going to be infected with and passing these viruses around forever." No, it's not. The vaxxed are not getting infected at the rate of the unvaxxed, and we don't know about the long-term immunity conferred by infection or vaccination yet. What's more, we're going to have better (pan-corona) vaccines pretty soon.
3. "The idea that my vaccination is protecting anyone other than myself has turned out to be false." No, it hasn't. While breakthrough cases are common, you're less likely to get one if vaccinated (quite a bit less likely), and more likely to have a mild case that resolves quickly, with a lower viral load--which means you're less likely to pass it on. Very few things in medicine have a zero percent chance of happening. But if someone is fully vaccinated and not immunocompromised, they're much less likely to transmit the virus if they become infected. Since Omicron's R-nought looks to be about 11--that's to say, everyone who gets it passes it on to 11 people--anything someone can do to reduce that number is apt to save a lot of lives. Also, don't forget the issue of hospital emergency rooms. Because people who are severely ill with Covid require so many weeks and months of ICU care, a raging epidemic makes it impossible for other people--your standard heart attack and your car accident--to be treated, which is a public health catastrophe in its own right. (See below.)
4. "Covid is dangerous for the old and those with comorbidities." Covid is dangerous enough to children to have become one of the top causes of childhood mortality in the US: https://www.wistv.com/2021/11/03/covid-now-6th-leading-cause-death-kids-5-11-sc-health-dept-says/. Certainly, it is more dangerous to children right now than any of the other diseases against which we regularly vaccinate children. (Obviously, this would change if we didn't vaccinate children against those diseases.) Also, long Covid is a very serious risk among children, and may well be a source of lifelong disability. And don't forget that mortality isn't the only thing to look at. Morbidity matters, too. For example, this child survived, but that doesn't mean he was fine: https://www.actionnewsjax.com/news/trending/10-year-old-boy-has-hands-legs-amputated-after-mis-c-covid-19-diagnosis/2A7Q2NUKHVBBNBXETE5IOLOG2I/
5. "Mandates only create resistance. Persuasion with arguments that make sense to people is more effective." Mandates create resistance, but they also create vaccination. More people get vaccinated when it's mandated. You see this everywhere mandates are in effect.
6. "The one argument that was persuasive was the “don’t overwhelm the hospitals” argument. That argument was persuasive until recently, but the facts have changed." No, they haven't; our hospitals are overwhelmed. https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/local-hospitals-overwhelmed-covid-patients-staff-shortages/509-342d0a47-3010-4d06-865e-49f5dcb3a9c2. Now is a very bad time to have a heart attack or a blood clot: https://www.channel3000.com/shes-going-to-die-a-woman-needs-a-critical-surgery-at-uw-health-her-family-says-theres-no-beds/
7. "With the new therapeutic pills, we can now prevent most hospitalizations." I hope that Paxlovid will live up to its promise. But don't forget Paxlovid is *every bit as experimental* as the vaccines. Anyone worried about the long-term effect of the vaccines has equally good reason to be worried about Paxlovid. (More, actually, for reasons I can explain if you want.) Molnupiravir shouldn't be authorized, IMO. It's too likely to give rise to dangerous variants. You never want to be treated for this disease if you can prevent it, if possible. We have no idea what the long-term effects of infection will be, and they may well be lifelong. I do agree that there should be a Warp Speed program to get Paxlovid into the hands of every doctor. There should also be vaccine mandates, for everyone, just as there have been for every other infectious disease we've had the blessed fortune to defeat.
Claire,
1. I don’t disagree with the article on Polio. There are differences in the diseases. If polio infects other mammals, they would be killed outright or crippled and become easy prey. If the predators are infected, they suffer the same fate. With little natural reservoir, Polio is a disease that can be almost universally eradicated by vaccine.
Based on the study of deer in Ohio, it appears wild mammals are going to keep this virus alive and well and mutating forever. Therefore, we cannot achieve the same success with covid vaccines https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/12/211223113202.htm
2. I agree the vaxxed have lower symptomatic infection, but we will never know how many are infected without symptoms. I agree the vaxxed shed lower viral loads, but it is quite possible that advantage is offset by the greater number of those vaxxed asymptomatic shedders who believe they are immune.
I still think those at risk should be vaccinated to protect themselves and reduce their risk of hospitalization. I don’t think the verdict is in on the vaccination of those not at-risk protecting others, particularly for otherwise healthy children who already shed low viral loads and are rarely hospitalize because of covid. I know it is what a lot of people want to believe, but it will be a while before we have enough information to draw any firm conclusions about universal vaccination of the young. It may be more effective to send those vaccines to countries where there are shortages of the vaccine for those at high risk.
3. When the experts say repeatedly that we are going to need frequent boosters because the efficacy of the initial vaccinations is waning, I hear them saying that they don’t believe long term immunity is conferred by the current vaccines.
Of course, new vaccines that confer longer term immunity and better therapeutics will make our disagreement here a moot point.
4. Here I think we have an issue with inconsistent statistical reporting. Children who enter hospitals with cancer or because of accidents and then test positive for covid and then die, are often included in the covid death counts. There are some children, particularly with comorbidities that are primarily a result of being way overweight, dying of covid. Those children should be vaccinated. I suspect the number of otherwise healthy fit children dying primarily of covid is a lot smaller than what is these reports.
5. I agree that mandates cause more to vaccinate, but they also create fiercer opposition, particularly when the reasons given are inconsistent and appear arbitrary.
6. Part of reason some hospitals being overcapacity, in those places that have that problem, is that hospitals were shut down for the care of many other diseases for so long. Some were overwhelmed by covid and in other areas clinics and hospital wings that weren’t setup for covid were shut down. The economics of medicine pre-pandemic necessitated hospitals to be setup to be constantly above 80% capacity. That delicate balance of matching the supply of medical services to the demand for medical services was disrupted by covid and the reaction to covid. It will take time to reestablish that balance, especially with all the cancer, diabetic and cardio patients whose health deteriorated while they were shut out of the hospitals are now coming back in worse shape in large numbers.
Firing medical workers who got covid while doing their jobs pre-vaccine and have natural immunity because they won’t comply with the mandate is irrational and only making this issue worse.
7. People may be hesitant about the therapeutics for the same reasons they are hesitant about the vaccines. The difference would be that with symptoms and a positive test, I suspect most will fill the doctors Rx and take the pills. All of the same cost benefit analysis of possible long term negative effects from covid, vaccines and therapeutics will have to be made by each of us. We will have to do so with very incomplete and constantly changing information. In that scenario, no one should be surprised that many different conclusions will be reached by rational people.
Some good points here that I'd concede, especially that of animal reservoirs of the virus, which worries me quite a bit.
Claire,
I'm noticing more reporting on the problems with the covid statistical reporting. Here is an article that has several links to recent studies on the subject.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2022/01/08/how-bad-is-the-data-on-covid-new-numbers-from-new-york-provide-insight-n1547908
I think the feds should contract with a tech company to build a national database for compiling health statistics. The Federal and many of the state bureaucracies are incapable of doing this. The agencies have had billions of dollars and years to accomplish this, and they have failed. Without accurate, transparent, accessible and consistent health data, it is really difficult for anyone to make good health related decisions on the personal or the government levels.
It's going to be very hard to compile solid statistics outside of a formal study because so many people get Covid and don't report it to anyone. Also, a significant portion will get Covid and fail to connect this to any subsequent illness down the line, so that too won't be studied when we track the long-term effects. (Also true of vaccines, though I don't worry about this because I see no physical mechanism by which vaccines could have long-term effects, and we have no examples of this in all of medicine.) I don't think it could hurt for the Feds to build such a database, but it won't result in the kind of statistical solidity we'd like. This is the problem studying many epidemiological questions. It's why it's so hard to answer the question, "What diet is healthiest for humans?" It's why it took us so long to figure out that smoking is bad for you. The best way to look at this is to look at a well-controlled study, with good follow-up (check the methodology very carefully and see what they did to follow up on the subjects--if they lose a large portion of the people they're studying, there may be a reason, and that reason may call the results of the study into question). Then extrapolate from that to the size of our population and check the results against the so-called national statistics. If there's a big disjunct, one or the other is, obviously, flawed. It's more likely to be the national statistics.
Excellent point about all the non-reported cases.
I still think better data gathering about all the cases the medical community is aware of through treatment or testing for all diseases and conditions would be of value as a baseline and to have a better system in place when the next disease comes along.
Systems built over time, especially by large organizations, tend retain a lot of non-functional orphan parts as they grow over time. Modules are added on that have adverse effects on some other part of the system and no one notices because the system is so complex and big that no one person sees the whole system. I have been personally involved in this process with complex software.
Parts of the system that used to have a purpose live on because no one steps back, looks at the big picture and points out that part of the system no longer serves any purpose, is redundant or is now adversely affecting the whole system.
That is why it is valuable to every so often rewrite the system from scratch. Government will never do that. All the fiefdoms will resist or sabotage the effort for all the obvious self-serving reasons. It is best done by an outside entity.
I agree that well controlled studies are important to verify that what people believe they perceive in the data is true. I just wish our peer review system had not become so corrupt and incompetent that over 50% of peer reviewed published studies turn out to be fatally flawed or fraudulent. When I see news about a scientific discovery or finding, I say to myself: "50% chance that will be retracted soon". A sad state of affairs.
I don’t question the science- as I lack specific expertise, dedicated time and resources. I trust the vaccines are effective. I hear that Moderna and Phizer are top of the list in effectiveness (surpassing effectiveness score of childhood vaccines). But do not quote me on last sentence. Good news is that Trump is on video interview (Dec 31, 2021), said that he has been vaccinated and so should everyone else. I immediately informed a Trump voting friend- only because this person is unvaccinated. My friend still says “no”.
Thank you to those among us who separate politics from Covid. I have a few personal liberal friends who have always been anti-Trump and also anti-all vaccine. These people succeeded at crossing the political aisle to connect to the anti-Covid vaccine crowd among some Republicans. I am trying to mimic this success of “bi-partisan unity” among us who are pro-Covid vaccine. In early 2020, when Trump suggested banning flights from China- he was condemned as “zenophobe”. In early 2020, my local politician Pelosi publicly encouraged us to go to Chinatown- which is near my apartment. Independent of the two previous sentences - I believe that Trump’s decisions during the early days of Covid (Nov 2019-Mar 2020) when the President has access to special information- were influenced by a personal desire to increase or maintain “hero” status. But, do not quote me. Then, months later before we had yet discovered that Covid prefers in-doors, we liberals announced that “Covid won’t get you if you are protesting for social justice with several thousand of your closest friends”. But - in the previous sentence, I am definitely not included among the “we”.
Three days ago, I told a lifelong friend MD that I know of a few liberals who are anti-vax. Within 2 seconds, she shot back, “Well it’s mostly conservatives”. It would have been nice if instead she would have offered to call my liberal anti-vax friends on the phone. She showed zero interest in them. That is a problem. Finally- the MSM that politicizes everything is doing nobody any good.
Shadi is right, Claire is not. Here’s the reason; vaccine hesitancy is as old as the hills. To overcome it requires comity and even a marginal sense of comity in our country has been destroyed by the repugnant behavior exhibited by the class of people who developed the vaccine. It’s the same class of people that Claire and her journalist friends belong to. It’s also the same class that I belong to and, I suspect, most of Claire’s readers and subscribers.
The expert class has spent decades setting up society in a way that has literally destroyed the lives, livelihood and families of many of the people who happen to be vaccine skeptics.
The expert class has shipped the jobs of working people to places like China where the work they used to do is now performed by slave labor. The expert class has imported tens of millions of immigrants (often illegally) to lower the wages of the jobs not yet shipped overseas. The expert class created a bloated and remarkably expensive system of higher education that makes it next to impossible for anyone not in the upper middle class to obtain a college education without emerging with mountains of debt. The expert class has adopted an economic model that allows people with sufficient assets to invest in a stock market that offers double digit returns while working people have little alternative then to park their modest savings in bank accounts offering annual interest rates that typically pay less than one percent. The list of outrages perpetrated by the perfidious expert class is too long to fully enumerate.
Yet Claire can’t fathom why, when the experts tell the vaccine hesitant that their concerns are but one more example of their stupidity, that these experts aren’t viewed as credible advocates.
And let’s remember, when it comes to mass psychosis, the expert class is as vulnerable as the folks that Claire tells us have deplorable views.
The entire membership of the Biden Administration believes in vaccines; they’re right about that. But many if not most of them also believe that gender has nothing to do with biology. They believe that males can get pregnant and that biological male prisoners who claim to be female should be housed with female inmates. They believe biological males who’ve decided that they’re female can compete against biologically female athletes without having any advantage.
During the last Presidential campaign, then candidate Biden was asked by a reporter from some right wing website how many genders there are. After becoming momentarily flummoxed, Biden responded “well, there are at least three.”
Claire, my question to you is whether you think that Biden’s answer to that reporters question is evidence of psychosis in every bit the same way that vaccine hesitancy is.
It appears to me that the expert class, especially those profess to believe only in "reason", is more vulnerable to mass psychosis than the more grounded everyman. The climate hysteria of that class is a perfect example. Who was it that said something to that effect that: He who lacks belief in anything being certain is more likely to fervently believe anything if it "sounds about right".
Yes, I think they're exactly the same phenomenon, and should probably be discussed together, analytically. But one is a much more deadly delusion than the other.
Beyond that, I don't understand your argument. It seems to be, "The expert class has been wrong about many things; therefore, even though they're *not* wrong about this, people are right to believe crazy things about vaccination." This is an amazingly condescending view of the non-expert class: Do you really think the average person is so dumb that he's incapable of thinking this problem through and just has to take it on trust that vaccines work? Understanding vaccines and risk doesn't require a PhD in molecular biology. It just requires not being crazy.
Non experts have agency just as experts do. There are very few good reasons not to get vaccinated. Some of the cell lines used in the development of the vaccines were derived from fetal tissue; the especially devout might find that objectionable.
A substantial number of African Americans are unvaccinated, especially in places like New York. Given the history of this community with the medical establishment, especially concerning clinical trials, this hesitancy is understandable.
Then there are those with legitimate health reasons to avoid the jab. For example, there really are people who have anaphylactic reactions to polysorbate, a preservative used in all of the vaccines.
Beyond that there are no good excuses, none at all. What I think Shadi gets that you don’t, Claire, is that calling out people’s stupidity for failing to get vaccinated is not only ineffective, it’s counterproductive.
There’s a good argument to be made that even if people aren’t afraid of COVID themselves, they have a responsibility to the community not to become vectors for the virus, especially if they’re around the highly vulnerable. Why don’t the vaccine hesitant feel that responsibility; I think it’s because of decades of horrific mistreatment by America’s expert class that has, in many cases, literally ruined their lives. It’s hard to generate any community spirit from those who have watched their jobs disappear, their towns fall into poverty and their kids succumb to opioids because of policies perpetrated by people who live in Newton, MA, Scarsdale, NY or Mountainview, CA.
One other thing, Claire, I agree with you that the delusion of vaccine hesitancy is deadly while delusions about gender are not, but it’s less prevalent. Even in towns, cities and states where vaccine hesitancy is common, close to 50 percent of the population has decided to get the jab. Poll the faculty and students of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Oberlin or Smith and ask whether they believe gender is a social construct. You will find near unanimity that it is. In the short run vaccine hesitancy is more dangerous. Which do you think is more dangerous in the long run?
Perfectly reasonable to rail against anti-vax types, but you doth protest too much against the unreason 'on the other side.' Anyone under the age of, say, 65 without significant immunosuppression and who is triple-vaccinated, who's running around with a mask out-of-doors out of fear of catching Omicron and suffering serious health risks as a result, is nuts. Is he *as* nuts as someone who claims the vaccinations don't work? I dunno, is Ilhan Omar *as* stupid as Marjorie Taylor Greene? Is left anti-Semitism *as* innately evil as right anti-Semitism? Take out your *nuts* or *stupid* or *evil* ruler and you can probably get to 'no' for all three, but weighing each against the other by a single pure cognitive parameter becomes almost an aesthetic exercise. 'Your loonies are crazier than my loonies.' Or something.
The world and its dangers are too complex to play that game. In the case of COVID, we need to pay attention to the irrationality that drives over-cautiousness about the virus, too. It's not as if lockdowns and school closures carry no public health costs. And even vaccine risk-benefit ratios themselves are not such a slam-dunk when you parse different age groups (e.g. the FDA going ahead with a vaccine recommendation for teens against the advice of its own advisory panel).
Anti-vax sentiment in general is pretty dumb. But there's plenty of dumb to go around.
There's plenty of dumb to go around. I agree that your person under the age of, "say, 65 without significant immunosuppression, etc." isn't rational at all. But he's also not harming anyone. I firmly believe that people should be allowed to do whatever they want, however crazy, so long as it doesn't harm anyone else. (There are some exceptions to my libertarian instincts, but this isn't one of them.) Also, wearing a mask outdoors isn't a "serious health risk." It's just uncomfortable. I agree that lockdowns and school closures carry health risks that should be weighed against the risk of vaccines. The vaccine risk-benefit ratio is *arguably* not a slam dunk for males 18-24 with no comorbidities; apart from that group, it's a slam dunk. But given the risk of long Covid--an affliction that I've seen firsthand because my brother has had it now for a year (and trust me: it's not psychosomatic)--I know what I'd choose if I were an 18-year-old male.
A year duration sounds like “long Covid”. Terrifying
I'm sorry to hear about your brother. I hope he gets well.
Risk of long COVID is correlated with severity of disease. Therefore, the risk for a vaccinated young person without significant immunosuppression, especially from Omicron, & especially out of doors (!), is remote in the extreme.
Also, like I say, take out your ruler. Fine. That person with nearly no risk with the mask isn't hurting himself or others directly (although if he is harassing people in public without masks, as my son was harassed a couple of months ago, he is certainly being annoying). But in aggregate, that over-cautiousness drives political decisions that result in damaging policy decisions such as school closures.
I think a willingness to broaden your criticism of unreason wouldn't harm your argument at all. And a mind or two (not many more than that, I grant you, lol) might change if they saw the criticism framed more ecumenically.
I always enjoy your takes, Claire. :)
Thank you Evan for comment and for actually saying that we have antisemitism on the left. Both BLM and equity are antisemetic as are millions of liberals at institutions across the nation that pretend that all the untruthful sentences are true.
The purpose of wearing a mask is to ensure that even asymptomatic people (the triple vaxxed, for eg) who have covid don’t infect others. The mask doesn’t protect the person who’s wearing it.
A good mask does offer some protection to the person wearing it, actually.
My hypothetical specified a different purpose. And it's unnecessary either way out-of-doors.
We don't have much evidence of outdoor transmission. Common sense says, however, that if you're in a crowded outdoor environment (a packed outdoor concert, say), it wouldn't be a bad idea.
I would avoid such a venue altogether. That's not at issue. ;)
I think that both sides in the debate—if that is the word—over COVID vaccines & etc. have left logic and common sense behind.
For example, we know that while COVID-19 is dangerous for older people and those with certain preexisting conditions such as obesity, it's far less dangerous for younger people and children. Despite this, we continue to pretend that children are plague carriers, and we inflict multiple tortures on them in the name of COVID-zero safety. Schools are safe—but people who know better go on pretending that the slightest whiff of COVID demands a return to—oxymoron alert— remote learning This absurdity is inflicting enormous damage on children and their families—and the charge is being led by the public education establishment, teachers unions in particular. Everybody knows that the unions' hand-wringing over "safety" is nothing more than a cover for self-interest. For teachers, the pandemic has meant full pay and benefits for about one third of the work usually done. Such a deal! And now, using the Omicron variant as their excuse, they're once more agitating for remote learning. This is, or ought to be, a national scandal.
Then there's the business of mandated vaccination. Now personally if I were going to embark on such a policy, I wouldn't start by making vaccines a political issue, with their efficacy dependent on who happens to be in occupation of the White House. But that's exactly what happened and it's clear for that reason that whatever one thinks of the illogic or insanity of vaccine skeptics, vaccination mandates will fail. Instead of continuing a futile argument, I would therefore suggest that we move on. People who refuse the vaccines are responsible for the consequences, which will fall on them, not on those of us who have done the responsible, logical thing. So let's stop pursuing an argument that has become futile and deal with the existing situation.
There are encouraging signs that some former hysterical ninnies are beginning to come to their senses, realizing that we're reached a point at which the cure is worse than the disease. Perhaps the prospect of an electoral wipeout in 2022 has concentrated the minds of some on the liberal-progressive side. Still, I'm none too hopeful. Large numbers of people have internalized the zero-COVID mentality: the belief that as long as the virus is around, normal life is unsafe. Since in all probability the virus will always be around, this is a form of illogic or insanity no less glaring than the anti-vaccine position. We can't stop these neurotics from triple-masking in perpetuity, but we can't let them whistle the tune.
See my comments above. Mandates work: When Macron announced the "pass sanitaire," many grumbled (and rioted), but immediately, the vast majority of people here got vaccinated, and now France's vaccination rate is one of the highest in Europe--thus, despite Omicron, French hospitals are not overflowing, French schools are open, public services haven't been disrupted, and the fatality rate has only gone up slightly. Compare to the UK, which has no mandate. You can argue that mandates are *wrong,* if you like; I wouldn't agree, but that's a matter of values. You can't argue that they don't work: They do. We've mandated vaccines in the US since George Washington, which is why our kids don't die of smallpox, polio, measles, whooping cough, etc.
Well, pretty obviously mandates aren’t working in the United States, or we wouldn’t be having this discussion. And now we have a situation in which the vaccines don’t prevent one from contracting and transmitting the virus. All along, our absurd president and most of the media have been demonizing unvaccinated people as plague carriers, a strategy that in other contexts would be seen for the despicable ploy that it is. Now what?
A federal vaccine mandate won’t work here because Biden, his political allies and the public health establishment have made it unworkable. Trying to make it work will do more harm than good at this point. Time to move on.
But the vaccines *do* prevent one from contracting and transmitting the virus--or at least, the mRNA vaccines do; others don't. They don't prevent it 100 percent of the time, but not much in medicine works 100 percent of the time. They're only about half as effective in protecting against Omicron as they were the original Alpha strain, but half is *not* nothing. That's a hugely significant benefit. We thought at first we'd be lucky to have a vaccine this good! It's a big mistake to say, "It doesn't provide perfect protection against infection, therefore it provides no protection."
Unvaccinated people *are* more likely to be carriers of the disease. This isn't demonization; it isn't a metaphor; it's a statement of fact. If people are furious with the anti-vaxxers, it's because their irresponsibility is imposing massive costs on the rest of society. We would all like to move on. We're all *desperate* to move on. That's why people are so frustrated with anti-vaxxers who refuse to do this one, small, easy, safe, free thing that would make it so much more likely that we could move on.
At this point, there are few Americans who don't know someone, fully vaccinated, who has nevertheless contracted COVID, e.g. my own wife. (She's fine; it was a mild case.) So I'm sorry to say, Claire, that here in the Land of E Pluribus Unum, your position would cut no ice. Now I completely agree with you that the case for vaccination is strong. As a polio survivor I could never be an anti-vaxxer. I only wish the Sauk vaccine had made its appearance a little earlier—it would have same me and my family considerable pain and heartache. So yeah, I got vaccinated against COVID as soon as I could.
Having said that, I disagree with you that unvaccinated people are the ones who have caused so much societal disruption. There's no particular evidence for that, really. When COVID first hit, there were no vaccines at all. and at this point the disruptions are mainly the result of the response to the pandemic by politicians, the public health sector, the media, and various bad actors like the teachers unions.
In the early days, when much less was known about COVID, lockdowns and draconian mask mandates were understandable, even prudent. But somehow, despite the growth of knowledge about this virus, the attitudes of most of the groups I listed above have not changed. Take mask mandates. They're practically useless since the cloth masks most people use are ineffective in blocking an airborne virus. But mandatory masking persists, e.g. in schools. Why? It makes no sense.
In Chicago, the heinous teachers union has demanded, and the membership has voted in favor of, a return to remote learning because of Omicron—this despite ample evidence that schools are among the least dangerous venues, COVID-wise. I won't append a rhetorical Why? in this case because we all know why.
American colleges and universities have lost their institutional minds over COVID, imposing draconian restrictions on students and staff. You can read about that here:
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/universities-covid-policies-defy
I'll just excerpt one paragraph from this article to give the flavor of the whole:
"At Amherst, students must double mask if they don’t use a KN95. In nearby Boston, at Emerson College, students are tested twice a week and have stay-in-room orders. The college instructs students to 'only leave their residence halls or place of residence for testing, meals, medical appointments, necessary employment, or to get mail.' Seriously."
Thanks to this nonsense of this kind, we now face a public health crisis much worse than COVID that will have dire long-term consequences. Among young people suicide, depression, substance abuse and general despair are all on the rise. The lives of millions of young children have been blighted, perhaps permanently, by prolonged school closures and mask mandates that were utterly futile.
On the economic front, countless small businesses in America are being driven to the brink of ruin by vaccine and other mandates that impose on them the costs of policing the recalcitrant. Over the holidays, thousands of commercial airline flights were abruptly cancelled, causing chaos—and for no good reason.
In the face of all this, what does the federal government do? Aside from demonstrating its general incompetence, it continues to push a national vaccine mandate that's unenforceable and probably illegal. The Biden Administration's messaging on the pandemic has been a pig's breakfast of contradictions, half-truths and the occasional noble lie. This, to put it as kindly as possible, hasn't helped.
Forget about the science for a moment, ponder the politics of the pandemic, and you may see what I mean.
And one more on the efficacy of masks: I thought this study was as good as we'll have, and it looks airtight to me. Some of the physics is too hard for me (or, I don't want to spend the time it would take me to learn it), but I doubt five accomplished physicists would make a significant mistake in what's clearly an elementary exercise in fluid dynamics. You never know, but that just seems unlikely to me. If there's a good physicist on this thread, you can review it and tell me. In any event: Assume two people, one infected (with a typical Delta viral load) and the other not. They're in a room, no more than 10 feet apart from each other. If both parties are wearing a well-fitted FFP2 mask, the odds of infection over the course of several minutes declines from an astonishingly high 90 percent to an astonishingly low 0.4 percent. https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2110117118. Even a poorly-fitting surgical mask works: it gets you down to 30 percent. So actually, masks work *extremely* well, even to the point that if used diligently, they meet my "reasonable precaution" standard *without* vaccination. I wear FFP2 masks and they're no more onerous than cloth masks, so I don't know why they freak Bari Weiss's correspondent out so much.
The highly transmissible Omicron variant is spreading like wildfire in cities where more or less stringent mask mandates are still in place, so it would seem that masking isn't much use after all. The trouble, perhaps, is that the claimed effectiveness of masks rests on the ideal situation, such as the one you describe above. In real life, no such ideal situations exist. If everybody wore masks—and wore them properly—all the time, wherever the risk of transmission existed, that would be one thing. But they don't, and there's no way to police them, and that's that.
Moreover, there's no point to mask mandates where there's little or no risk. That, for example, is the situation on college campuses where practically everyone is vaccinated. Either the vaccine offers highly effective protection or it doesn't. If it does, masking makes no sense. If it doesn't, vaccination mandates make no sense. You can't have it both ways. Increasingly here in America, people won't let you have it both ways.
"A public health crisis much worse than COVID?" I'd like to see the numbers on this, including the cost of caring for those who have been disabled by Covid. Break it down by morbidity and mortality, and show me the numbers. I'm open to reason.
But I'll interject a few points here.
1) Your calculation must include *morbidity,* not just mortality. Too many people leave out the former when they think about this. So factor in the cost of disability in the case of people whose lungs are destroyed, whose limbs are amputated, etc. And that's only the beginning; we're beginning to suspect that Long Covid doesn't go away--and may affect as many as 30 percent of people who are infected. This is a very serious disease, even if you don't die from it. It's not the flu.
2. We now have ample evidence that non-pharmaceutical interventions were not as harmful as initial predictions suggested. It's just not correct at this point to argue that lockdowns caused enormous death tolls. So your argument needs to rest on a projection of future harm, not past harm: https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/8/e006653.abstract. We might expect that at some point in the future places that lock down will do worse on some metrics, but based on evidence we also might not. It's very uncertain, because large COVID-19 outbreaks also cause massive harm. The most plausible thing to say is that some interventions work well, others not so much, and the best policy mix is probably variable.
3. On masks: They do work. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.17.21262169v1
Actually, this is a really good survey of the literature on this and on the efficacy of other NPIs: https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-021-06357-4
Better ones work better. If you put 20+ children in a crowded room without ventilation, wearing masks, the room will fill up with aerosolized virus and become a viral nightmare--and no, masks alone won't stop it. If you crack open the windows or use HEPA filters, the risk in that environment drops by orders of magnitude. But masks are effective at preventing vapor, another major transmission route. If you have ventilation *and* masks, you get a pretty safe environment, especially if you add distancing (though that's not realistic in a school), daily rapid testing, and, of course, vaccination. If these measures are implemented, there's no reasonable argument for keeping schools closed, IMO. So I agree with you: Schools should be open. We know enough now to do this safely. But mask mandates aren't useless at all. (I think this should be decided by local school boards, depending how much risk parents are comfortable taking.) These measures aren't all-or-nothing; you have to use them together to reduce the risk to acceptable levels.
On the cancellation of flights: As far as I understand, they were mostly cancelled because of snow, right? But as for flights cancelled because of Omicron--I imagine that means they were cancelled because staff were sick! The planes can't fly without pilots and flight attendants, right? (We wouldn't want them to, certainly.)
But this is the thing--if that kind of disruption bothers you, you want people to vaccinate and mask up. Also, I don't believe small businesses are being driven to ruin by vaccine mandates. If they're losing staff who won't get vaccinated, don't blame the mandate--blame the anti-vaxxers. It's like arguing that restaurants are being "driven to ruin" by the requirement that people who handle food wash their hands after using the toilet. If you're running a restaurant that's ruined by this requirement, your problem isn't the requirement, if you see what I mean.
I agree the pandemic messaging has been confusing to the public--I have to agree, because the public is very confused. I think the Biden Administration has done a lousy job of providing an adequate number of tests. I don't think a national vaccine mandate would be unenforceable or illegal. But no such thing is proposed, is it. I would support one, but sadly, that's not in the cards.
Oh, as for the article on Bari Weiss's Substack: It's a mix of reasonable points and completely unreasonable ones. She's against infected students quarantining? That's nuts. It's not just other, healthy students they're (sure) to infect, it's their teachers, university staff, students with disabilities ... of course they should be isolated. (She later contradicts herself by saying it's common sense that "If you’re sick, stay home.")
She's cherry picking her studies, too. Why would she choose to look at a 15-month period in Germany rather than looking at the more relevant statistics--American ones? I don't know why she thinks N95 or KN95 are particularly cumbersome.
As for "current data actually [tipping] the risk to benefit analysis in favor of not boosting young healthy people," no, I don't think it does. Again, she's considering only mortality, not morbidity, and we know *for sure* that morbidity from this disease is extensive.
Finally, if we're seeing deterioration in students' mental health, we can't assume this is because of pandemic restrictions. It might be. But it might also be because an unprecedented number of young people have prematurely lost parents, grandparents, and other people who are significant to them. It might be because worrying about their parents' health is extremely stressful. It might be because when a pandemic kills 850,000 of your fellow citizens, it is *extremely upsetting.* Frankly, I don't understand anyone whose mental health *isn't* disturbed when they consider the amount of suffering, loss, and grief we've experienced. You'd have to be a sociopath to be unaffected by it. So ... yes, it's fully possible the pandemic restrictions are causing students' mental health to decline. But it's just as possible it's the pandemic itself.
Let me tell you a story. It involves my wife, two dear friends of ours, and their children. My wife works at a Native American clinic, and help administer the regular COVID vaccine clinics they've held for the past year. My wife got her first shot in December 2020, I received mine the following February. We were lucky to get our jabs early on. We were both vaccine-skeptics early on but as the data came out, began to change our minds. I personally have read many studies about covid vaccine testing, Ivermectin, HCQ, and other therapeutics. I don't think there is anyone I know who is personally responsible for getting more people, in particularly the vaccine hesitant, vaccinated than my wife, outside the people actually administering vaccines (which she does not). The story is about an older couple who refused to get the vaccine, for several reasons. They one child screamed at them to get the vaccines. The other child screamed at them to not get vaccinated. They were confused and unsure. My wife sat down with them, and explained why she was hesitant at first. She explained that she understood their concern. You know what she didn't do? She didn't call them crazy. She didn't call them stupid. She didn't blame them for prolonging the pandemic. To be sure, their fears were irrational by this time. The data was all available. Unless they had some underlying health condition that made the vaccine dangerous, it was safe and smart to get it. She didn't lay all that on them. She just patiently explained why she was skeptical at first, what she'd read, that she'd gotten the vaccine. And guess what? They both got vaccinated. Now you can keep calling these people crazy, and stupid. You can do as one person I read recently did: invoke Martin Luther to call them murderers. You can do that if you want. But guess what: it isn't helping. If all of the smart people who participate in the CosmoGlob did what my wife did, which is spend time with people and explain it, we'd probably do some good. Just sayin'...
Unquestionably your wife has done a great mitzvah, and when I'm not fulminating about the anti-vaxxers, I am, like your wife, gently and patiently explaining this to anyone who will listen to me. I think I've managed to convince a few people this way. But there's a profound rot among a subset of influential people who are the source of much of this nonsense, and it's to them, really, that this is addressed. The Bret Weinsteins of this world shouldn't be reinforced in their efforts to spread death and misery by the Shadi Hamids.
That doesn't seem to be your aim when you refer to cultural markers. Shadi Hamid is right as rain on that score. The left respond to the vaccine hesitant the way you have, calling it "stark raving mad". This doesn't seem aimed at the talking head, influencers. It seems aimed at the people who refuse to get the vaccine. Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against the vaccine here. I'm arguing in favor of treating people with respect, even those who seem to make nutty decisions. Mandates, passports, and the shrill of the anti-anti-vaxxer just makes the problem worse.
You may be right.
...I may be crazy...but it just may be a lunatic yer lookin' for... (that's Billy Joel)
Glad you found it useful.