The commentator Richard Hanania has written an article on his Substack about the Covid vaccines. He and I agree on two major points: the vaccine mandates were a bad idea, and vaccinating the elderly saved lives. However, we disagree on several other points, which I’d like to focus on here.
In his article, Hanania takes aim not only at “pure deniers” but also at “moderate vax sceptics” – people like myself and Martin Kuldorff who questioned whether the vaccine was right for everyone.
He argues that even though “moderate vax sceptics” are “occasionally correct”, their contribution to the debate has been “overwhelmingly negative”. This is because they overemphasised “narrow issues”, thereby distracting people from “the lesson we should take from this experience”, namely that “the public health establishment is too risk averse”.
I don’t necessarily disagree that the public health establishment is too risk averse and the vaccines should have been approved sooner, so long as they weren’t mandated. After all, different groups of people face different risks.
Elderly people and those with certain pre-existing health conditions faced a significant risk of death from Covid, so it would have made sense for them to get vaccinated even before the safety data were in. By contrast, young people without pre-existing health conditions faced little risk of death or serious illness from Covid, so it would have made sense for them to wait slightly longer.
If the vaccines had been approved sooner and had not been mandated, each individual could have decided whether to get vaccinated based on the specific risks he or she faced. Most elderly people would presumably have chosen to get vaccinated straight away; many young people might have preferred to wait for more safety data before doing so.
Where I do disagree with Hanania is on the contribution of “moderate vax sceptics” to the debate. Naturally, I dispute that it is “overwhelmingly negative”. Even if you believe, as I do, that the vaccines saved many lives, the rollout itself was based on safetyism not science. And it was absolutely right that “moderate vax sceptics” called attention to this.
“Getting any vaccine was clearly a good idea for almost any adult,” Hanania claims, “even if they weren’t at a high risk of dying from covid.” I disagree.
Putting aside issues like myocarditis in young men, there was no need for people who’d already had Covid to get vaccinated. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have been allowed to get vaccinated; I’m saying they didn’t need to. Natural immunity provides excellent protection against serious illness and death, and better protection against subsequent infection than the vaccines.
As Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff note, natural immunity to infectious disease has been known about since the Ancient Greeks. Yet its existence in the context of Covid was downplayed or outright denied by large swathes of the public health establishment.
This matters because there’s some evidence that adverse events were more common among vaccinated people who’d already had Covid. In addition, vaccine mandates initially failed to recognise natural immunity, which led to dozens of nurses and other healthcare workers being fired from their jobs – for the sin of being wary of a vaccine they didn’t need.
The situation was particularly egregious given the excellent protection afforded by natural immunity. As Kulldorff wrote in October of 2021: “hospitals should hire, not fire, nurses with natural immunity”.
Hanania claims that the vaccines “do make transmission somewhat less likely”, which means that “health care facilities are reasonable in requiring them for staff”. But the second part simply doesn’t follow.
Vaccine effectiveness against infection wanes to such an extent that several datasets showed evidence of negative effectiveness. (This may be partly attributable to many unvaccinated people having natural immunity, which provides better protection against subsequent infection.) Mandating vaccines for healthcare workers was therefore no guarantee of safety.
In fact, it may have done active harm by leading healthcare workers and their patients to believe there was no risk of transmission. The only surefire way of protecting those patients would have been requiring healthcare workers to take daily tests (which I supported – at least for those dealing with the most vulnerable patients).
As well as overstating vaccine effectiveness against infection, Hanania overstates vaccine effectiveness against death, suggesting that it is “at least 90%”. But this widely touted figure cannot be reconciled with the data from countries like South Korea, which saw large spikes in excess mortality even after vaccinating the vast majority of elderly people.
Studies claiming 90% vaccine effectiveness against death often fail to account for waning or the healthy vaccinee effect. One Hungarian study, which compared death rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated people during epidemic and non-epidemic periods, concluded that the Pfizer vaccine is about 50% effective against death, with the other vaccines being slightly more effective.
However, put all this to one side. Even if Hanania were right that “getting any vaccine was clearly a good idea for almost any adult”, the vaccine rollout would still have been based on safetyism not science.
Why? Any net benefit of getting vaccinated for healthy young adults and those who’d already had Covid will have been marginal at best. So instead of strong-arming those people into getting vaccinated, we could have donated the vaccines to people in poor countries who actually needed them, thereby saving thousands of lives.
Perhaps if the “moderate vax skeptics” had not been side-lined by the public health establishment we could have had a more rational policy that actually took account of the risks and benefits to different individuals.
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What a fantastic essay. Many thanks.
Absolutely. Sums up modern life in general for me.
A brilliant article. Many thanks.
Superb. And timely.
The latter part of that final paragraph – poetry!
As for the Thursday evening clap-for-key-workers ceremony I doubt I’m the only one eerily minded of Orwell’s two-minutes’ hate from 1984.
I’ll be honest- I take part. Originally, I thought it a nice idea, but as it dragged on and it became apparent that there were some people clearly watching to see who was and was not complying it started to feel a little creepy and not a little like an episode from ‘The Prisoner’- especially in a small village. I now take part to save my family from being declared ‘unmutual’…
Wonderful article! Thank you!!
Brilliant. Far-ranging analysis of modern society which goes way beyond just a critique of the lockdown.
The emphasis that the government – or, perhaps better, the state – places on citizens’ emotions and perceptions is a hallmark of dystopian societies: in “1984” Winston must not merely say that 2 + 2 = 5, but actually believe it; in Zamyatin’s “We” the state surgically removes the imagination from the population to reduce them to mere functionaries; and in “Brave New World” people are relentlessly conditioned to identify with the state: “everyone’s happy now”. This of course goes hand-in-hand with our new-found love of censorship – “dangerous” is the new “degenerate” – and the constant appeal to security. The principle of individual autonomy – probably the defining idea of the West – is apparently now the greatest threat. Thanks for the article.
A good essay which eloquently deconstructs the message but fails to name the ‘science’ behind it: Applied Behavioural Psychology (see Edward Bernays et al). Call it spin, call it what you like, governments have been ramping up their use of it for decades and it is now an insidious virus with far more potential for harm than SARS-COV-2.
Susan Michie of Sage, Boris Johnson’s new BF advisor, is one of those (Applied Behavioural Psychologist). An avowed communist to boot. Lordy, Lordy.
Emotion and fear (whether because of a supposed internal or external threat) have always been two of the many tools of government.
This quote from Fahrenheit 451 is pretty apt:
“But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them.”
I think a lot of the lockdown supporters have yet to really understand the extent to which the world blew up around them: the avoidable non-Covid deaths and the massive economic damage which means we’re probably in for another 10 years of so-called “austerity”.
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay, 1852
Been speculating they’ll start waking up when they visit Walmart and can’t find their favorite coffee brand on the shelves. “Oh no! Who ever thought economic devastation could disrupt my creaturely comforts while staying home forever.” Or the coffee will be there and suddenly cost $30 a canister instead of $2.50.
Spot on. The PM is at it again in the Mail on Sunday today, saying he understands our “frustration”. In other news, Spain has said it is planning “one last extension” of the emergency decree imposing restrictions, before “most of the country” returns to normality in June. Note how they need to explicitly extend it, in contrast to ours that is more or less open ended (ministers I believe can extend the Coronavirus Act) and how there is no mention of “new normal” (though I have to admit I don’t follow Spanish news closely so I may simply be ignorant of this). Who would have thought a country that has seen a long running fascist dictatorship in living memory would make our government look like sinister despots. I am placing my hope in two things: The strong drive of the British people to go to the pub and to want to make babies, and the strong drive of the government to look like it knows what it is doing when we are the only country in Europe living a “new normal” and the sky has not fallen in for them.
The Nanny State has Munchausen’s by Proxy.
Almost as bad across the pond.
Things will change (probably not for the better) come November.
Great! Thanks so much for this. If only it could be headline news instead of the lies and scaremongering that has become ‘normal’! Everyone needs to know this.