Vaccine news: The great, the bad and the utterly predictable
By: James Randle
Tags: Covid 19, Lockdown, Media Criticism, Vaccines, Debate

The recent news of various vaccines exceeding all expectations was the best bit of news for a while. Problems with delivery could soon cause those expectations to come crashing back down, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some cause for celebration.

The arrival of a vaccine at any stage other than the first few weeks of this could still not justify the damage caused by months of lockdown, let alone the damage which will be caused by further restrictions until Easter, but it does at least provide an end which even the fiercest supporters of lockdowns would welcome.

Not all perhaps. A few statements on social media from the most fanatical seem to suggest that some form of restrictions will be necessary for years until the virus is totally eliminated from society.

Leaving aside the aggressive levels of delusion which cause a person not to see how disastrous this would be, the idea of continuing this for years is not something which would not be tolerated by the vast majority of people.

There are signs of a creeping, unconscious acknowledgement of this. Media outlets which gave huge prominence to double digit daily death figures in the summer have been oddly reserved when it comes to hundreds of deaths in recent weeks.

They often don’t even mention it apart from including it in a little infographic of doom somewhere on their home page.

But regardless, it doesn’t change the problem that the opposition to the restrictions has been largely blunted by this news. While it will pick up steam again, hopes to remove the restrictions before Easter have probably disappeared.

An awareness of the disproportionate nature of these measures was starting to take hold, but won’t translate into action when an ‘end date’ of a few months is in view. This becomes especially true when like a mirage in the desert, the end date only needs to appear to be a short while away. Any anger at further lengthening can (for now) be quelled with further promises.

The baseless claim that lockdowns save lives is repeated as fact, signs of the damage caused by them are repeatedly diminished or ignored, and evidence that we were explicitly lied to before the latest month of lockdown is treated with a big collective shrug.

Government ministers can repeat that lockdowns work in media interviews and go unchallenged. The latest evidence against this claim from Frontiers in Public Health, Covid-19 Mortality: A Matter of Vulnerability Among Nations Facing Limited Margins of Adaptation, concluded that demographic factors were the determinant of Covid-19 mortality.

When it came to government restrictions “no association was found with the outcome, suggesting that the other studied factors were more important in the Covid-19 mortality than political measures implemented to fight the virus”.

These studies are of no interest to governments suffering from one of the worst cases of Sunk Cost Fallacy in history, and they and their supporters in the media continue with the same assertions. Most of the public, as opinion polls demonstrate, accept these assertions wholeheartedly.

It follows logically from this that to drop the restrictions when a vaccine is in view is equivalent to sacrificing lives. This view will probably dominate either for the duration of the restrictions, or until it is too late to mount an effective campaign against them.

Attempts to point out that lockdowns cost lives (in the long run more than the Covid-19 deaths themselves) have not hit home over the past eight months and are unlikely to make the difference now.

This is partly due to the fact that government financial support, while necessary, has acted as a sort of anaesthetic. Most people have yet to grasp just how much damage has been done by the restrictions even as increasing numbers join the gradually growing minority which is the opposition.

The costs aren’t just economic, with vast numbers of businesses concerned they will never return, and a hidden cost of unemployment which is barely contained even now, but those unquantifiable costs which will be felt for years to come in ways we won’t always be able to directly trace back to the current policy.

That lockdowns kill large numbers is something which ironically may mean that the result of the announcement of a vaccine and the subsequent urge to hold out for a few more months actually results in more deaths.

This won’t be considered even in retrospect. The curious state of mind which elevates Covid-19 deaths above all others is a stubborn thing. Put the facts on lockdown deaths to people, with stories such as cancer patients going terminal due to having surgeries cancelled, and the response is logically inadequate even if adequately sincere. The greatest supporters of lockdowns normally resort to evasion, sometimes even coupled with a deceitful accusation of a desire ‘let the virus rip’.

The best advice I was ever given was to always listen to people I disagreed with. If the point was well made then you can always gain something from listening. I think that this was perhaps the best bit of advice that I ever received, which makes it especially frustrating that I have no idea who gave it to me.

I have tried to do this in almost every case and often try to take it a step further: How could I argue the person’s case if I had to? What is their strongest argument? It is a process which can allow your arguments to be strengthened by exposure to the best, rather than the worst, of the opposition. It can cause you to question what is wrong about your own views, to refine them, or very occasionally change them altogether. At the very least it provides a more generous understanding of those you disagree with.

What has terrified me more than anything about the current crisis is how, after the first few weeks of understandable caution, it became increasingly difficult to make the other side’s case. The inconsistency, denial, and downright dishonesty made it impossible.

I cannot think of any other big issue where this has happened. With the exclusion of bigotry and crank science calling either for genocide or subscribing to flat-earth theories, I have been able to make the case for the other side of every argument I’ve been on.

Religion, war, economics, drugs, capital punishment, abortion, animal rights, and almost everything people argue about in politics — all to a greater or lesser extent have two (or many more) sides to them. To see the other sides to the argument is to truly understand the argument.

In this case, the only reasonable aspect is that of fear and vulnerability which many understandably feel. But this is a feeling to sympathise with and respond to rather than an argument to agree with. Especially when it gives rise to actions which cause so much more damage than the danger they are seeking to prevent.

The downright bizarre nature of what has been going on comes clearer when comparing our reactions to other circumstances.

The desire to save lives at any cost is simply not consistent with many other aspects of the society we live in. We accept deaths in many areas where the costs of preventing them would be a fraction of those caused by the current restrictions.

Take driving: Every year in the UK about 1700 people die in traffic accidents with thousands more injured. The proportion is equally bad in other countries, if not worse. Reducing 70mph speed limits to 50, 50 limits to 30, and 30 limits to 15 with strict and determined enforcement would save hundreds of lives. We don’t do it. We have decided, perhaps unconsciously, that we can live with this (at least those of us who aren’t among the 1700 can live with it) for the sake of our convenience as well as a relatively small amount of GDP.

I am not suggesting necessarily that we do make this change, but it’s clear that even if lockdowns did save lives, our obsessive focus on Covid-19 deaths to the exclusion of all others would be a strange anomaly. Far from being an accepted moral principle, the desire to save lives at all costs is in fact something we routinely go against, for much less significant trade-offs.

It is also glaringly obvious that the current concern for the deaths of the elderly as well as pressure on hospitals are examples of selective concern.

Every year thousands of elderly people die from respiratory diseases and some years have thousands of excess elderly deaths with strains of influenza which don’t even cause a national conversation or campaign for handwashing, let alone restrictions which cause society to grind to a halt.

Then there is the pressure on hospitals. In any areas where Covid-19 cases are concentrated it must feel unbearable to be working on a busy A & E. Yet it is unbearable every year and overall, the numbers of hospital admissions are not excessive for this time of year.

What is unusual for this year is that it is the first year in which most people have been aware enough to actually care. And the first year in which it’s been shamelessly used as a moral cudgel with which to beat away criticisms; a cudgel used by those people incapable of arguments which go beyond repeating mindless platitudes about protecting ‘our’ NHS.

The inconsistencies have mounted and are visible for anyone who wants to see but still they make little impact on the tone of the debate.

These inconsistencies, along with refusal to see just how unusual for society this elevation of one type of death really is, is evident in much of the reporting on Sweden. Sweden have finally imposed some restrictions recently although they are still a long way from most other developed countries. Predictably this was reported as Sweden finally ‘locking down’ as their strategy had failed.

Maybe they will go much further and, in a way, it’s surprising they’ve held out for so long. For the most part however Sweden have done their best not to turn a crisis into a catastrophe, and yet they are routinely framed as reckless by countries that have done the national equivalent of fighting a bug infestation by setting their house on fire.

Sweden has had a little over 6000 deaths in a population of 10 million people. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that these were all preventable deaths: I am genuinely fascinated to meet the person who could make a cogent argument that it would have been worth doing so even if the price was the following: thousands of non-Covid deaths; lower living standards for millions; thousands of businesses ruined; untold damage to the social fabric; an authoritarian approach to governing that will be near-impossible to roll back; steep rises in suicides, domestic abuse, mental breakdowns, alcoholism and drug use; widening inequality and increasing deprivation; children losing almost a year of a proper education; as well as countless tales of human suffering and misery that go unreported.

I say I’d be genuinely fascinated to meet the person who could make this argument, because despite having spent an inordinate (and probably unhealthy) amount of time in the past months reading and studying this topic, I have yet to find anyone who has been able to do so. Their best is to frame it as unavoidable, an argument so evasive and weak that it’s hard to believe that normally intelligent and sensible people could say it without embarrassment.

They wouldn’t do so in many other circumstances. But the absurdities of the past few months are so bad that it is actually growing more unpalatable for us to admit how outrageous the panic has been.

And this leads to perhaps the worst long-term effect of what should simply be great news. The ‘reckoning’ may not come. By this I mean the investigation that properly scrutinises the last few months, and not just an official inquiry, but a full public discussion which is as uncomfortable and difficult as it is thorough and honest.

I wrote a while ago about how the very understandable urge of most people to move on from this is so strong that the relief of it being ‘finished’ will overpower any serious examination of what has happened here.

This is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, because our failure to recognise our limitations and how damaging our behaviour has been leaves us vulnerable to repeating similar mistakes. The cliché that ‘those who don’t read history are doomed to repeat it’ is true, but for a society it requires more than just a few people to read their history books. Otherwise the saying easily becomes ‘those who do read history are doomed to watch helplessly as those who don’t read history, repeat it’.

If society was a person in therapy then any half-decent therapist would see through the inconsistencies and dangerous delusions and gently coax their client to recognise and be aware of such self-destructive habits. There is no therapist for society except when there are enough people willing to submit to an examination of themselves and the society in which they live.

Vaccines signalling the ‘end’ of the restrictions (even if the material difference is not nearly as great as the symbolic difference) are in themselves wonderful news. But soon after this the danger becomes that there will be little willingness to properly analyse what happened. Nobody likes to relive a trauma after all, but failure to do so can lead to more trauma.

Graphs showing technological progress over time might show a line crawling along with a very gradual incline for thousands of years before rapidly shooting up in the past few centuries. A graph capable of measuring cognitive, moral, spiritual and emotional awareness and development may not yet have reached even the lower part of the steep incline.

The combined effect can be highly destabilising and the contrast positively dangerous. It’s relatively easy to spot this danger when barbaric wars are fought with modern weaponry. Yet the less widely recognised dangers are not necessarily any less perilous, such as when unevolved minds have the ability to magnify primitive hysteria and fear with the use of modern communications.

The last few paragraphs will not persuade many, who might respond that it is too abstract to be relevant or even too tenuous to be correct. I think that assessment is dangerously wrong, but I have to accept that.

So here is one final thought on a far more immediate practical concern: What exactly are we going to do if a similar type of virus emerges at the end of 2021 or early 2022? There is a strong enough possibility that such a thing can happen that it seems inexplicable that there hasn’t been a wider discussion as to what we would do if that happened.

If we do not have a full, hard assessment of the past few months which goes much deeper than simply arguing over the mismanagement of care homes and dodgy PPE contracts, then the result could be that just as our shell-shocked selves are beginning to clear away the wreckage, rebuild our lives and repair the damage, we have to do this all over again.

[Of course, the virus that emerges could be far worse than Covid-19; so bad in fact that it actually does warrant some of the measures we’ve recently taken. If so, then our capacity to fight it will be largely spent and the results will be even more dire.]

Is anyone seriously suggesting that if another Covid-like pandemic arose that it would be at all feasible for us to repeat our very recent history again? If so, I would once again be fascinated to meet such an individual.

It seems that there have been two main types of crazy during the last few months. Those who believe this is all a conspiracy by Bill Gates/the Illuminati/Reptilians etc. and those who believe that Covid-19 is a plague on a level with the Black Death, or even the Spanish Flu. Both exhibit paranoid and damaging delusions, but for some reason the latter is not only socially acceptable, but socially approved and encouraged.

I have read the words of educated and intelligent people who subscribe to these views and they are more terrifying than the virus. They point to a desire to see this continued for years until we can completely and utterly eradicate the virus and seemingly conquer death itself — at least for Covid-19. They belong in a weird cult encouraging repentance before doomsday, not influencing public policy.

One good example which is representative of many of these is an extract by a historian who was discussing Covid-19 in the context of Smallpox and how long it took for that vaccine to arrive — the upshot being that these restrictions could be necessary for years. It is worth repeating, partly because it is a good example of this sort of thinking, but also due to its timing (written in August before the vaccine announcements; updated soon after). He ends:

“If you were holding out hope that a year from now this would all be over, I have bad news: That’s pretty damn unlikely. But don’t let this reality cause you to lower your guard. Covid is nasty even if you don’t die. The lingering health complications can be brutal for those who recover. The goal is to never catch it. I repeat: The goal is to never catch it. Keep your guard up. What will things look like a year from now? I don’t know. What about two years from now? I don’t know. Ten? Don’t fucking know. All we can do is remain vigilant (wear a mask!), realize that this is the new normal for the next while, and hope. And if a vaccine becomes available, get it.”

As you can tell from the last sentence, this was written before the vaccine news. So, surely his view is changed now. Surely even such an apocalyptic outlook which was previously contemplating a potential ten-year battle, can be reassured by these victories for science.

No. At least not yet. And he helpfully provided the update:

“Nov 15 update: There is promise with a vaccine from Pfizer, but all of the above remains true. Protect yourself, protect others.”

The injunction to protect others comes from one of the most admirable instincts we have, but when it is inspired as much by fear and dogma as it is by compassion, it is easily misapplied. It’s misapplication in this context has not only failed to effectively protect others, but inflicted damage on a lot of other people.

The passage in italics above was written by a historian, so perhaps there is even more limitation to the notion that an awareness of history is crucial to giving us perspective on present. No amount of studying history can give us that perspective we need to save us from ourselves if we are so stubbornly blind about what we do today.