Isolation Report, Week #39

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

So, lately all the pandemic talk has been focussed on the vaccine(s).  I have to say, I’m a bit irked at the media’s coverage of the vaccines: we seem to have breezed past any discussion of safety and started arguing about who “gets to” get the vaccine first.  I mean, I’m pretty much always irked at the media’s coverage of vaccines, and in particular their attitude that anyone that dares to have any reservations about any vaccine is therefore a crazy person.  But this particular round of vaccine coverage has a whole ‘nother dimension to it that really saddens me.

You see, when Trump was promising a vaccine “very soon now,” the media was very quick to point out that you can’t really rush a vaccine.  The entire concept of vaccination is to infect you with something that will hopefully “fool” your body into thinking it’s sick without actually getting sick, so that it therefore produces antibodies that will protect against the infection before you ever even get infected.  This is actually a very clever idea, and, when it works, it’s pretty amazing.  Unfortunately, when it doesn’t work, it can be pretty devastating: early implementation of the polio managed to cause 40,000 new cases of polio.  That doesn’t mean there was anything wrong with the idea of vaccinating against polio, although I’m sure that some people interpret it that way.  No, the problem was simply a manufacturing error ... if we can describe a situation involving tens of thousands of infections of a paralytic and in some cases fatal disease as being “simply an error.” So taking time to study the vaccines carefully and make sure they’re being developed with all due rigor is pretty damned important.  Before the election, the media seemed to know that.  They considered it quite reasonable that some people—many people, even—would not want to take a vaccine which had been rushed to market to make Trump look good and was certified as “safe” by a government with a vested interest in doing just that.

But, somehow, now that the election is over and Trump has lost, now we’re back to statements like “some people may not want to take the vaccine, because of crazy conspiracy theories or whatever.” Look: I’m obviously no fan of Trump.  The fact that he even exists—that a person can be considered “rich” without demonstrating any actual monetary value, that a person can commit crime after crime without ever facing any consequences, that a person could demonstrate such a flagrant disregard for the truth and even for human life—the fact that there’s anyone like that on the planet, much less in the White House, that offends me on a fundamental level.  I’m also, contrary to the opinions of some, not opposed to vaccines in general.  There are many vaccines—including that for polio, despite the tragedies associated with its initial rollout—which I believe are medically essential for us humans to continue to endure.  But that doesn’t mean that I believe that anything that has the word “vaccine” printed on the side of it is therefore safe and necessary.

Concerns about these vaccines, which were very much rushed, are not crazy, and they’re not a result of believing in conspiracy theories.  Well, perhaps for some they are.  But the media made lots of good points before Trump was defeated, and those points are still valid.  There were very good reasons for rushing these vaccines—I’m not disputing that—but that doesn’t make them any less rushed.  Each one has had a single study done on them, and, despite the fact that those studies appear, by all reports, to be pretty damned thorough studies, a single study can’t conclusively prove anything.  Moreover, the studies were focussed on efficacy (which, again, is perfectly understandable and appopriate, given the circumstances), not on safety.  There simply hasn’t been enough time to figure out if the vaccine is fully safe.  Now, there could be situations where the threat of a disease was so dire, and the consequences so heinous, that the risk of not fully knowing the safety factor of a vaccine would be outweighed by the risk of contracting the disease.  But I believe that this disease doesn’t meet that standard.

Reasonable people can disagree.  After all, death rates are rising, people will point out, and for the first time in recent memory—possibly for the first time in living memory—we experienced a week where heart disease was not the number one cause of death in the United States: it was COVID.  But, let’s be realistic: our death rate isn’t so high because this disease is so dangerous.  Our death rate is so high because we’ve been remarkably stupid in handling it.  People refuse to wear masks.  People were explicitly told not to travel for the holidays, but they did it anyway.  This week we’ve heard about a rash of politicians telling their constituents to stay home and avoid gatherings while they themselves were doing the opposite, including the remarkable case of the mayor of Austin telling people to avoid travel from his hotel room in Mexico.  It’s silly to imagine that these things aren’t all connected.  And, anyway, the proof is simple: while the whole world may be experiencing a resurgence of the disease, only our country has numbers like this.

And I’m certainly not saying that staying home and wearing masks guarantees that you won’t get the disease.  Recently I received the unpleasant news that one of my coworkers, who by all descriptions was far more paranoid about being exposed to the disease than I or my family have been, contracted it.  It sounds like he and his girlfriend are going to recover, but it’s still a chilling reminder that nothing is 100%.  Of course, the vaccines are not 100% either.  If the initial efficacy numbers hold water, you’ve still got a 5% chance of catching COVID after you’ve been vaccinated with one of the current candidates, and we simply don’t know what the chances of any potential side-effects are yet.  Given that, and given how good our chances are for not catching the disease by simply continuing to observe the same best practices that we’ve all been doing for close to year now, it still makes sense to me to wait a bit and see how these vaccine fare in the real world before committing to anything.  Oh, I will be getting this vaccine eventually.  But I’m not in a hurry.

The thing that disturbs the most about the media coverage, though, is the hypocrisy.  When it was “Trump’s vaccine,” we shouldn’t trust it.  Now that Trump is on the way out, mistrusting a vaccine is a crazy conspiracy theory.  I’m sorry, but there’s no conspiracy theory, nor any sort of crazy, required.  The media made some great points about the dangers of a rushed vaccine, and Trump being defeated doesn’t change any of those points.  There are essentially two options here for what’s going on.  The first is that the media was just saying that we should be suspicious of a vaccine produced under Trump, for political expediency.  But that’s exactly what Trump was accusing them of: remember how he claimed that, once the election was over, we’d never hear about COVID again?  Obviously that was crazy, and also stupid.  But somewhow we immediately stopped hearing about the possibility that the vaccine might not be all rainbows and sunshine.  That means that Trump was essentially right—in the abstract, if not in the details—and that possibility makes me really sad.  Also the concept of Trump being right about anything upsets my grasp on reality.

But the other possible explanation isn’t any more comforting: that, rather than being insincere in their claims then, they’re insincere in their claims now.  That they know perfectly well that there could be consequences and ramifications to just shoving this vaccine into everyone’s veins ... and they just don’t care.  Or, to be more generous, that they believe that the number of people who will be hurt or maybe even killed will be low enough not to matter.  But, here again: that’s been the attitude of the Trump camp.  I don’t want to see that blossoming on the other side of the political divide as well.

One more particularly relevant analogy that I’ll give.  Last month, “Dr.” Scott Atlas, a “medical” advisor to Trump, was ridiculed extensively for talking about “herd immunity.” In one example story, ABC called herd immunity “a concept lambasted by public health experts as ‘dangerous’ and called ‘ridiculous’ by the federal government’s foremost infectious disease official, Dr. Anthony Fauci.” I specifically remember thinking at the time, “man, they better be careful how they disparage herd immunity, because that’s central precept of vaccination policy.” I was really curious to see how they’d handle it when it was time to actually push for herd immunity using the newly created vaccines.

And now the time has come, and, you know what?  They just all pretend like they never said that.  Now herd immunity is all good, and we all need to be concerned about whether we can achieve it, becauase of all those crazy conspiracy theory nutjobs, you know.  They’re essentially saying exactly the opposite of what they said before and not acknowledging that anything is different.  But, here’s the thing: that’s what Trump does. And, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t make it okay when it’s “my side” doing it.  It’s still wrong, and vaguely nauseating.  Have we had to turn into Trump in order to defeat him?

Let’s hope not.  Because that’s not okay.