The religious fervor surrounding the vaccines is surreal. I'm still trying to understand the psychology and passion which drove so many seemingly intelligent people to become foot soldiers in a crusade on behalf of Pfizer and Moderna.
Circa pre Covid19 era, roughly 1,000 years in twitter time, I often found myself calming down far left friends who were convinced all pharmaceutical companies were evil incarnates of unfettered capitalism, who's few benefit were far outweighed by their greed and corruption. Meanwhile my right leaning friends would be the ones to argue the 'Free Market' kept Pharm in check - mistakes might be made, but The Market would course correct.
Now I feel like we are in The Simpsons dome [1] and the camps immediately ran to the others position.
What is driving this? I understood, or at least, I *thought* I understood The Sunk Cost Fallacy, tribalism, Cognitive Dissonance, and Gestalt processing - and how all of these coalesce into "True Believer Syndrome". I've read When Prophecy Fails and many other accounts and thought "ok well we are too smart for that to happen now outside of a few pockets of loons here or there"...
I'm just stunned how wrong I was. If I could travel back in time just 3 years to explain to past self what will happen.... past self would think future self is absolutely deranged and it wasn't possible that the vast majority of the world would stake their careers, reputations, health, and friendships over the fastest ever to-market drug which at best increases your survival odds from 99.7 to 99.74.
And Paul even in this piece you still might have missed some highlights! [2], [3], [4], [5]
FULL DISCLOSURE: My kids and I are fully up to date on regular vaccines. I used to spend a disproportionate amount of time debating traditional anti-vaxxers. As a rule of thumb though, I generally don't take new products until they've been on the market several years/decades.
The small caveat I would add is that until a few weeks after the rollout began, the medical community was not aware of the problem of the vaccine waning.
For example, that's what Dr Jay Bhattacharya mentioned in this interview (you can watch for 2 minutes)
"The end point of the the trial was it stopped symptomatic disease. I thought how big a leap is it to say that it also stops infections at all. It turns out it was a big leap, and for the first couple of months after you're vaccinated it does reduce infection rates. There's still I think up to like 70% of efficacy against infection rates but by four or five months afterwards it drops very sharply and by about five months the protection against infection is very very small."
But still (as Jay says in the interview), the scientific community had enough information to see the vaccines were not preventing transmission by March 2021. Why governments worldwide still decided to go for vaccine mandates well beyond that stage is a big question.
Apologies if I bungled terminologies somewhere - I don't have any background in biology or medicine.
'Media and government officials were regularly conflating the difference between being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and being infected with COVID-19.'
I've spent almost 3 years spending half of every day reading about all of this. Yet I was unaware of the difference. No doubt most of the public is also. I wish you had explained it in the article — does it have to do with being symptomatic?
The religious fervor surrounding the vaccines is surreal. I'm still trying to understand the psychology and passion which drove so many seemingly intelligent people to become foot soldiers in a crusade on behalf of Pfizer and Moderna.
Circa pre Covid19 era, roughly 1,000 years in twitter time, I often found myself calming down far left friends who were convinced all pharmaceutical companies were evil incarnates of unfettered capitalism, who's few benefit were far outweighed by their greed and corruption. Meanwhile my right leaning friends would be the ones to argue the 'Free Market' kept Pharm in check - mistakes might be made, but The Market would course correct.
Now I feel like we are in The Simpsons dome [1] and the camps immediately ran to the others position.
What is driving this? I understood, or at least, I *thought* I understood The Sunk Cost Fallacy, tribalism, Cognitive Dissonance, and Gestalt processing - and how all of these coalesce into "True Believer Syndrome". I've read When Prophecy Fails and many other accounts and thought "ok well we are too smart for that to happen now outside of a few pockets of loons here or there"...
I'm just stunned how wrong I was. If I could travel back in time just 3 years to explain to past self what will happen.... past self would think future self is absolutely deranged and it wasn't possible that the vast majority of the world would stake their careers, reputations, health, and friendships over the fastest ever to-market drug which at best increases your survival odds from 99.7 to 99.74.
And Paul even in this piece you still might have missed some highlights! [2], [3], [4], [5]
FULL DISCLOSURE: My kids and I are fully up to date on regular vaccines. I used to spend a disproportionate amount of time debating traditional anti-vaxxers. As a rule of thumb though, I generally don't take new products until they've been on the market several years/decades.
___________________
[1] Simpsons Bar-to-church swap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPiQiToZn6s&t=10s
[2] Bourla's hilarious "It stopped transmission in South Africa" tweet https://twitter.com/albertbourla/status/1377618480527257606
[3] Rachel Maddow, for some reason I can't find direct clip on YouTube from her channel anymore... https://twitter.com/aginnt/status/1475193955704881152 where were the fact checkers?
[4] Can't leave out the Vax Scene dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSkFyNVtNh8
[5] This CDC infographic went all over my social media showing how those fully vaccinated were "90% less likely to get infected" https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm?s_cid=mm7013e3_w
The level of dishonesty is simply unbelievable. You know this conceptually when you hear it, but seeing it collectively in one place is staggering.
The small caveat I would add is that until a few weeks after the rollout began, the medical community was not aware of the problem of the vaccine waning.
For example, that's what Dr Jay Bhattacharya mentioned in this interview (you can watch for 2 minutes)
https://youtu.be/S5Fxxrudk70?t=4287
Copy/pasting edited transcript:
"The end point of the the trial was it stopped symptomatic disease. I thought how big a leap is it to say that it also stops infections at all. It turns out it was a big leap, and for the first couple of months after you're vaccinated it does reduce infection rates. There's still I think up to like 70% of efficacy against infection rates but by four or five months afterwards it drops very sharply and by about five months the protection against infection is very very small."
But still (as Jay says in the interview), the scientific community had enough information to see the vaccines were not preventing transmission by March 2021. Why governments worldwide still decided to go for vaccine mandates well beyond that stage is a big question.
Apologies if I bungled terminologies somewhere - I don't have any background in biology or medicine.
'Media and government officials were regularly conflating the difference between being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and being infected with COVID-19.'
I've spent almost 3 years spending half of every day reading about all of this. Yet I was unaware of the difference. No doubt most of the public is also. I wish you had explained it in the article — does it have to do with being symptomatic?