The following distills the essence of my responses to questions from a vaccine (and Covid) skeptical friend. I share it in case it’s useful for others (and because it updates a few things I’ve written before on the topic). I’m not an epidemiologist and the comments on the science of the pandemic are those of an informed lay person. The comments on media, politics, and the culture of science are more directly connected to my research areas.
Why such a draconian response to this virus? Aren’t mortality rates from Covid-19 much lower (less than 3%) than for so many other infectious diseases?
It’s true that Covid-19 mortality rates are much lower than some epidemics have had, but there are many factors that play into mortality rates, including treatment, societal responses, general hygiene and immunity levels, and the like. There have been many viral pandemics in the past, some of them killing millions of people. Covid is out of the ordinary mostly in its rapid spread and highly contagious nature, and in the lack of a vaccine against it. Given the conditions for the emergence of zoonotic viruses — the last pockets of wild animal refuges being decimated around the world, climate change setting off more movements of refugee human and animal populations — we can expect more viruses like it to emerge, so whatever we learn from this encounter will be valuable moving forward. The only large-scale protections we have against the worst of these virueses are (1) living healthy, immuno-protective lives (which we should all be trying to do) and (2) developing vaccines (which modern science does better than any traditional medicine did).
We’ve managed to keep the Covid death rate fairly low, with only a little over half a million U.S. deaths, through social distancing, masking, hospitalization, and now vaccination. Some countries have done much better than the U.S.; a few (like Brazil) have done worse. Most have been “up and down” in varying degrees over time. (And the fact that all countries in the world have had to deal with this is the most clear signal that it’s not a hoax being perpetrated on us by our government.)
Still, the latest figures seem to be that over 10% and possibly as many as 30% of those who get Covid (even seemingly asymptomatic cases) get long-term effects, or what’s being called “long Covid.” This is nothing to be sneezed at. We’re finding out more about kids who get long-term effects as well, though there are many unknowns around that.
The production of vaccines has been so rushed. Why should we trust the vaccine makers, i.e., Big Pharma, who stand to benefit financially from all of this? And what do we really know about the long-term effects of these new vaccines?
Big Pharma should not be “trusted.” Their goal is to respond to incentives, including financial incentives, in ways that allow them to continue to do their work. Their record is not stellar and, like any industry in a capitalist economy, they need to be kept on a leash by regulators and oversight agencies, whose job it is to account for how the industry is meeting real human needs and not, for instance, manufacturing new ones. But the infrastructure within which Big Pharma is doing that work can, to some extent, be trusted, and should certainly be monitored.
There are many uncertainties with the vaccines. But while their production has been rushed, they haven’t cut corners with testing protocols, in part because these processes have all being watched carefully, with the different vaccine makers, as well as their geopolitical supporters, scrutinizing each other. (It’s looking like the Chinese and Russian vaccines really have not been testing nearly as well as the North American and European manufacturers like Pfizer, Moderna, et al.) Of course there may be long-term effects of the vaccines that we aren’t aware of, but probably not anything like what the vaccine alarmists say. Other vaccines have helped to mostly eliminate diseases (measles, polio, smallpox, et al) and the science behind them is well established.
The effort to create vaccines for Covid has been, in my view, an example of Big Science doing its best (and not just Big Pharma, since there’s a lot more to the effort than pharmaceutical development, and since public health tends to be government-supported rather than profit-driven). All else being equal, I prefer “small” and decentralized science and medicine — including “traditional” methods of staying and keeping healthy (living and eating well, exercising, using herbs and natural healing methods, etc., though those have also become full of opportunists, with little quality control). But with infectious diseases, we really can’t do without large-scale sanitation and interventionary medicine, which are both products of the industrial modernity that I am quite prepared to critique when it’s warranted.
I don’t trust what the media are feeding us about this. There’s something about it that just doesn’t add up.
On the issue of “the media” “feeding us” things: if there’s anything we can say about media in the last two decades, it’s that they have become much more diversified and people have become much more active consumers of them. That doesn’t mean that people have become better informed or more critical consumers. The internet and especially social media have made it much easier for people to consume media emotionally – to find what they want to find and ignore what doesn’t fit that.
When the only information we have is from the internet, then things will not “add up” of their own accord. This is something that’s new in the world: access to a practically infinite, largely unregulated world of information that, on its own, “does not add up.” The only way to make it “add up” is by finding trustworthy mediators who help make sense of it for us. That’s where social media have become a kind of “wild west,” with “influencers” jostling around in a free-for-all for followers and audiences. This doesn’t mean that reliable media sources can’t be found; it just means we need some guidance. I’ve written about all this and don’t want to repeat myself; see this piece and some of the articles listed at the bottom of it.
That’s why it is so important to pay attention to what the global research community is saying about this. I use this term “global research community” knowing that it’s an overgeneralization referring to something that is very complex (there are different types of research, reliant on different levels of government sponsorship, corporate involvement, and so on) and that is not necessarily unified. But it is more unified around Covid than it is around many things.
Most people have little clue about all of that except for what they hear in the news. (And for the most part that’s inevitable as long as the primary research literature remains paywalled, which is why the open access movement is so important.) The news that filters that for us used to be much more unified than it is now, and in the U.S. and some other countries, every controversy has become an opportunity to deepen political polarization — so we get two very different narratives which don’t meet on a common ground the way they might have back in the days of Walter Cronkite. One of them (the left-liberal story) has tended to be more respectful of organized science than the other (the right-wing echo chamber). But that doesn’t account for all the differences.
I don’t buy this idea of a left wing-right wing split. There are so many informative voices out there saying we should be skeptical about the pandemic.
There will always be dissenting voices, even in science. But it’s important to be able to gauge how much of a “dissenting view” is supported by the global research community surrounding a particular topic (whether it be Covid-19 or the science of climate change), and how much of it is supported by political actors, agenda-driven think tanks, and others who may stand to benefit from questioning the policies of a particular political party or leader.
I’ve looked into some of the skeptical voices and for the most part don’t find them informative and helpful. But some degree of caution is always warranted. Maybe the best version of the “skeptical” argument I’ve seen is this long and somewhat rambling piece by Canadian media producer David Cayley. The piece makes a lot of valid points, things that I might generally agree with (to some extent at least): about science and “scientism,” big money, media groupthink, corrupt or spineless politicians, and about the people being “thrown under the bus” — artists and performers, people laid off from work, and so on. But the general thrust of his argument seems off the mark, as if the author doesn’t realize he’s been living next to a country dominated, for the last four years and in some ways for the last four decades, by lobby-driven climate denialists who hide their economic interests behind a veneer of “skepticism.”
The response to climate science runs largely in parallel to the response to Covid science. That doesn’t mean that the parallel is exact (it isn’t) or that the truth is found on only one “side” of these issues. But it does mean that one should ask whose interests are fueling these agendas; and then make some decisions about which “science” and which “skepticism” deserves our trust, and which doesn’t.
Aren’t the impacts of lockdowns — closed businesses, a huge rise in suicides, and so on — much worse than the benefits?
Economic contraction is of course a bad thing for many people, which is why we should pay attention to how our governments restart our economies as we get out of the pandemic. (Funny how the people who complained most about the economic impact of lockdowns are mostly the same people now complaining about how much money is being pushed into restarting the economy. Did someone say: corporate taxes?)
But the “huge rise in suicides” — a strong talking point for a while now, especially on the political Right — has not been proven. The latest evidence suggests that suicides rates aren’t worse than usual.
This whole Covid crisis feels like an artificial, pre-planned effort to stoke fear in order for the world’s elites (big government, big tech, big pharma) to take control over us.
Pandemics are fear inducing. So are many other things — climate change, war, police violence against members of one’s racial group, et al. But fear is just as easily stoked by conspiracy theories about how “they” (governments, media, the medical and science establishment, an emerging “world government”) are trying to control “us.” In this sense, conspiratorialist propaganda (including vaccine alarmism) can be a greater threat than mass vaccination. Fear is lessened when we have more, reliable knowledge and a more effective response to challenges.
I honestly believe we have much more serious things to worry about than global elites taking control over us through a program of mass vaccination. For one thing, the people who would control us (in this way) are far from unified: corporations and their national/ geopolitical sponsors are in competition with each other. Unregulated digital media, on the other hand, with its surveillance capitalism model of economic growth, is a worse threat. As is the long running threat of climate change. If you think Covid is fear inducing, just wait for what’s to come.
Are there any silver linings to any of this?
I see two: one in the pandemic response itself, and one “quasi” silver lining if we fail to respond adequately.
The first has to do with what the pandemic response has shown us about our collective capacities. As I believe Bruno Latour put it (though I don’t remember exactly where), no one knew there was an “emergency brake” on the train called civilization. If the scientific and scholarly community’s consensus conviction about climate change and its associated risks are to be believed, then Covid is just a prelude to worse things to come. It’s good to know where the emergency brake is, because we will need it.
The second silver lining is only fake silver. It’s that a series of rolling pandemics — which non-vaccination would likely lead to — would be an effective way of bringing down the human population to a more “Earth friendly” number. I’d rather not go there. Too messy, too bloody, and not at all just in its distribution of risks. If we can manage the first of these silver lining strategies and avoid the second, let’s do that.
Further reading
- Meghan O’Rourke, Unlocking the Mysteries of Long COVID, The Atlantic, March 8, 2021
- Jerome Groopman, The Politics of Stopping Pandemics, The New Yorker, March 29 2021
good post