You may have seen the story that Ph.D’s are especially vaccine-hesitant. This reminded a reader of an essay I wrote years ago about two strategies for avoiding truth.
The great mass of people form their political beliefs with little regard for facts or logic. However, the elites also have a strategy for avoiding truth. Elites form their political beliefs dogmatically, using their cleverness to organize facts to fit preconceived prejudices. The masses’ strategy for avoiding truth is to make a low investment in understanding; the elites’ strategy is to make a large investment in selectively choosing which facts and arguments to emphasize or ignore.
The Ph.D’s who hesitate to take vaccines may be harder to talk out of their stance than the stereotypical Trump supporters.
Update: See Michael Shermer’s piece on vaccine hesitancy.
I assume you would say that private companies should have the option to mandate vaccination for their employees. Do you think state, federal and local governments should be allowed to mandate vaccinations for their own employees?
I’m not Arnold but no. They are still the government and it’s always a travesty than the courts let them pretend they aren’t in an employment context. Employers always have to balance their bad decisions against staying in business, the USG as an employer doesn’t.
When there is no attempt to understand why someone is vaccine hesitant, (as is the case across the board for politicians) it will be impossible to talk vaccine hesitant people out of their stance. Vaccine hesitant people believe they have logic and facts and their personal situation on their side (and in many cases they do), so threatening them with various mandates and repercussions for not getting vaccinated sounds like illogical, unscientific authoritarianism.
Sincerely, an unvaxxed PhD.
The notion that “it’s such a good idea, we have to force you to do it” can certainly seem self-contradictory.
Right. If, say, murder is such a bad idea, why does the government need to force us to not do it? Obviously, if something is a good idea and good for society / bad idea and bad for society, there would be no reason to use force to stop / require it. (I guess if you’re an an-cap, you can interpret this comment as being non-sarcastic, but I’m guessing you aren’t).
Sigh…….not murdering people is a self-evidently good thing for the individual and society, Mark. This vaccine isn’t so self-evidently good.
You need the government to force you not to murder?
Well over 90% of the U.S. population are not murderers, or even violent offenders, so yea, pretty obviously had.
I’m not sure I understand your point. Are you saying that because most people aren’t murderers that’s proof that outlawing it was effective? Or did you mean something else?
To be clear I wasn’t saying that people can’t or shouldn’t be forced to do or not do things, only that when something new and/or controversial is forced it can increase resistance in some people.
The government doesn’t force people to not murder. In fact, the government has little effect, if any, on whether or not people do or don’t commit murder.
The government punishes people for murdering, but that’s not at all the same thing.
The most illogical thing about vaccine mandates is that they assume vaccine-hesitant people are rational and self-interested, and that tilting the incentives toward vaccination; I think that’s largely true, but there’s certainly some fraction that’s just intractably irrational, and won’t respond to incentives.
As we’ve yet to offer anything resembling an effective reward, say $1000, my going assumption is that people pushing for vaccine mandates don’t want people to get the vaccine. The purpose is to have a scapegoat group for political reasons.
If nearly everyone did get the vaccine, I wonder if these mandates will start to include being up to date on the latest booster, as is the case with two European countries that are already putting a 270 day expiration date on vaccination status.
+1. In the media and the various health department data releases, people with only two doses of a vaccine are starting to be described as partially vaccinated. It won’t be too much longer before people without 3 doses or more will be described as mostly unvaccinated.
Israel is convinced two shots is not enough, and has already started giving people their third shot of the Pfizer vaccine – about a million “second boosts” so far.
The preliminary data shows that two-shotters are 6.3 times more likely to get infected than three-shotters.
So it’s pretty clear that “fully vaccinated” status will be declared to be three-shots soon, and we’ll start to offer everybody third shots, my rough hunch is a few weeks from now.
Who knows what we’ll do with the population who got the J&J vaccine. There seems to be a lot of hesitancy to allow mix-and-match vaccination boosters.
An effective reward for me is, “You don’t have to wear a mask, anywhere.”
That reward is actually being taken away in many places around here.
FWIW, I got vaccinated the first chance I got.
I don’t think it’s intractable irrationality that’s to blame.
It’s a lack of trust in the authorities, which is largely the fault of said authorities for trading that trust for short-term gain.
99.999% of Americans will never have the intelligence, knowledge, data access, etc. to be able to evaluate the vaccines from a scientific/medical perspective. They have to trust other people to do it. If those people are untrustworthy, then there’s a larger chance they might listen to the warnings of randos on the internet instead.
There’s also inherent uncertainty surrounding the fact that the vaccines are new, use this new mRNA tech, etc.
It’s tempting to reduce everything you don’t agree with to “it’s irrational”. Convenient, too, since it saves one the hassle of making an effort to understand anyone outside one’s pre-existing assumptions and beliefs.
Possibly related:
“In the U.S. and Côte d’Ivoire, highly educated people make decisions that are less consistent with the rational model while low-income respondents make decisions more consistent with the rational model. The degree to which people are irrational thus is contextual, possibly western, and not nearly as universal as has been concluded.”
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/08/who-are-the-most-rational-people.html
To be fair, all the vaccines out there still don’t have normal full approval of safety and efficacy, and are only available via emergency authorization. Not like some official authority sanctifying them and blessing off on it makes and difference in terms of actual evidence, but we don’t even have that fake blessing off. Even with a sanctification, people who don’t much trust the FDA might be leery, but how much can a doubter trust them when they won’t even go through the motions of sanctifying?
The vaccines have not been cleared at all yet, even on an emergency basis, even after nearly a year and a half, for children under 12. Some vaccines, like AstraZeneca, are suspected of causing some rare side effects and aren’t authorized at all in many countries.
It is confusing when the experts simultaneously say that something is not really fully approved because there is insufficient evidence of safety and efficacy, but at the same time, people who are hesitant about it for safety reasons are being stubbornly irrational. And also, the reason the entire elite chorus is dumping on unvaccinated people right now and escalating mask policies again and every barely-legal measure they can think of to nudge people to get vaccinated is precisely because we are getting a new wave of the pandemic because of all these ‘breakthrough’ infections … because the vaccines are also not effective – at least – not nearly as much as we thought and hoped against the now-dominant variant.
R0 is now >1 not because of unvaccinated adults, because the number of previously-infected or vaccinated adults is higher than the herd immunity threshold. R0 is > 1 because that acquired immunity is *no longer effective* in preventing infection, spread, and transmission among such people (though it keeps many of them much healthier), which is why we are getting a new wave.
Pfizer has already started trials of an updated mRNA vaccine that has the new genetic code from the Indian Delta variant, and so, we can hope, that will restore the effectiveness levels back above 90%. That might bring R0 < 1 without the need for masks and lockdowns, if a hundred million people were to get a booster with that new version in the next few months. But do you think the FDA is going to approve that anytime soon?
Despite what the “I %&@& love science” crowd likes to think, nearly all of our beliefs are held on the basis of trusted authority.
Almost no one who accepts evolution, for example, has actually personally examined any of the evidence themselves, and probably has never met anyone personally who has. This is necessary for most things, as we have little capacity to independently investigate the sum total of human knowledge for ourselves. Seasons are caused by the tilt of the Earth’s axis? Yeah that seems reasonable – and I’ll trust the authorities saying so.
The government and public health authorities have lost substantial amount of public trust, and have only themselves to blame for it.
It would be interesting to have a survey from PhDs to find out why they are vaccine hesitant. There probably aren’t that many right wing PhDs out there, but loss of trust i public health authorities could play a role. It could be that PhDs might have a better sense of the relative risk than the general public (i.e. most PhDs under 45 might rationally believe that they have a very small chance of dying personally). On the more progressive side, there may be moral concerns about equity. It’s probably a more complicated story than the IQ memes floating around online would suggest.
The Appeal To Authority Fallacy and the Fallacy Fallacy have done a lot of damage to humanity’s ability to think.
One wonders how many of the “vaccine hesitant” already acquired natural immunity through earlier bouts with the disease, such as in the case of the justly celebrated case of the great Todd Zywicki and his victory over the anti-science troglodytes at GMU.
“Zywicki said he is pleased with the outcome.
“I am gratified that George Mason has given me a medical exemption to allow me to fulfill my duties this fall semester in light of unprecedented circumstances,” he said in a news release.
He added his lawsuit helped elevate the national conversation that “vaccinating the naturally immune is medically unnecessary and presents an elevated risk of harm to Covid-19 survivors.”
“I speak for tens of millions of Americans in the same circumstances I am in, and I call on leaders across the country to develop humane and science-based approaches as opposed to one-size-fits-all policies,” he said.
In fact, Zywicki’s attorneys with the New Civil Liberties Alliance seek more litigants.
“Strangely, despite solid scientific evidence, GMU continues to refuse to recognize that Covid-19 vaccination is medically unnecessary for ALL students, faculty, and staff with naturally acquired immunity demonstrated with antibody testing,” the alliance said in a news release.
“At times GMU officials have appeared to deny that such a thing as naturally acquired immunity exists. This refusal is particularly odd, as the efficacy of the very vaccines GMU wishes to mandate are measured against levels of natural immunity acquired by those who have recovered from Covid-19,” it stated.”
https://www.thecollegefix.com/after-lawsuit-george-mason-university-grants-vaccine-exemption-to-professor/
There was a kind of complicated con-law backstory here, as you might expect with a world-class constitutional law professor like Zywicki. I doubt you would ever see Todd come out and admit it – that’s like a faux pas in the legal world – but I suspect his motivations were split 50/50 between the merits of this particular case, and the bigger picture.
The bigger picture is that, since Roe v. Wade, there has been a massive inconsistency in the law as regards rights of bodily integrity and choice, with one kind of extremely strict and state-restricting logic applied to abortion, and another very loose and state-permissive logic applied to (nearly) everything else, including a bunch of things that are kind of long-term projects in the legal-libertarian scene, especially as regards regulation of drugs, whether recreational, experimental, and/or medicinal. These long-term efforts actually got a little progress in terms of the “Right to Try” Act pushed through by Senator Johnson and the Trump administration three years ago.
One might say, ‘abortion is different’, which of course it is. But the Constitution doesn’t say that, and so, in any proper jurisprudence, since we start with the same words, then we should end with the same rules applying to all these questions of personal autonomy as regards bodily integrity. There are alternative ‘activist’ / ‘living’ theories of jurisprudence which say that judges should indeed get to pick and choose when they have to apply the rules and when they don’t, but whether that is ‘proper’ jurisprudence is a controversial matter, to say the least. I say it’s not proper.
At any rate, a public institution ordering people to do things to their bodies against their will and without extremely compelling evidence and necessity is right in the general ballpark of these issues, and provides a legal opportunity to either (1) erode some of the basis for the ban on states regulating abortion, or (2) expand the ‘right to try’ thin edge of the wedge which makes these individual possibilities into something more – actual constitutional rights not dependent on statute or who happens to be in power at the moment, and which could apply not just to vaccinations, but drugs, and all kinds of other things.
So, I imagine Todd’s early victory was at least a little premature and bittersweet in this regard. Better luck next pandemic.
In his essay that he links to in this post, Kling wisely points to the weakness of correction mechanisms in political systems, although I would argue that in many advanced modern nations democracy itself does play a corrective role. I particularly admire Zywicki for making a similar argument with respect to the lack of restraint on common law judges. See: https://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/publications/working_papers/1043CommonLawandEconomicEfficiency.pdf
Members of the legal guild are typically as self-serving in their devotion to the practice of making up the law as you go as they are short on supporting evidence.
One suspects that Zywicki might be sympathetic to the view that con law is even more corrupted by the absence of error correction mechanisms and restraint on supreme court justices. The uniformed military leadership is also increasingly remote from any control with an increased likelihood of a full scale military coup.
Given the long pattern of whiplash jurisprudence in supreme court appointees, nominees exhibiting careers of moderation only to go wild seeking fame and their names in the casebooks, one can easily imagine Roberts, Coney Barrett, and Kavanaugh finding a case with which to join the openly Democratic justices to impose national mandatory prenatal screening and mandatory abortion for failed screenings or possibly on the basis of race “on a temporary basis.”
That is just how the US works in reality. Everything is its opposite. “Liberal” is illiberal, “progressive” is stagnant, “conservative” is anti-conservative, antifa is fascist, and “diversity, equity, and inclusion “ is prejudice, inequity before the law, and exclusion in zero sum situations like employment and college admissions.
At this point the only hope is for an Article V constitutional convention to start over from scratch or a military conquest by a foreign power. The latter is probably much more likely.
What explains this hesitancy to admit that such a thing as naturally acquired immunity exists?
It’s not just university officials who deny that naturally acquired immunity exists.
There are pundits and authorities for whom the vaccine is an end in itself. And they never have to explain themselves. Nobody puts the question to them. And yet antibodies are real. And herd immunity is real. And the earth really does circle the sun.
The idea took hold, among the world’s officials, that artificial immunity, alone, counts as immunity. But there’s no explanation for their hesitancy to acknowledge it.
The breadth and duration of protection provided by vaccine-generated immunity compared to infection-generated immunity is not settled. There is also some evidence that vaccination post-infection may offer meaningful incremental benefit.
A bit of epistemic humility is in order, all around.
I believe that to fall for some scams one has to have a certain level of education. Organic food being the one that comes easiest to mind so though this is surprising to me I can believe it. It could also be a data problem.
Shouldn’t we be at least a bit worried the PhDs are right?
Arnold, you were once skeptical of vaccine effectiveness, and posted about it numerous times. I wonder what odds you would take on a bet like:
“By the end of 2022, there will be a consensus understanding that mass use of the currently existing vaccines was a mistake.” (For any reason)
I’d probably take 20 to 1 against, but not 100 to 1. Lots of people posting like they would take much higher are probably just signalling.
Are Trump-voting PhDs more vaccine-hesitant than non-Trump voting PhDs? Are Trump-voting non-PhDs more vaccine-hesitant than non-Trump-voting non-PhD? If the answer to both questions is yes (as it probably is), the last sentence is misleading at best. If you want argue that education status has a larger coefficient than political affiliation, that’s one claim. But it doesn’t suggest that the sign on the coefficient for politics is actually in the opposite direction. You seem to be trying to deploy Simpson’s paradox to make Trump-voters look better re vaccine-hesitancy.
I am a PhD that worked in drug discovery for 20 years.
Compare these vaccines to all other new vaccines developed and approved to full market access over the last half century- none have made it to mass market in less time than these vaccines. Just to give an example- Gardisil, the vaccine for human papillomavirus, took 7 years just to design and test through the initial stage of the Phase III trials. Those Phase III trials only actually ended after 12 years, though the vaccine was filed for approval after the trials had been ongoing for 25 months. There is still extensive post-market surveillance for both Gardisil and its competitor vaccine from Glaxo (the name escapes me at the moment).
2 years of a Phase III study is already kind of short for a vaccine against a novel target. The Phase III studies for these new COVID vaccines are ongoing as I write this minus their placebo arms, and the Phase III study now includes a few hundred million people with more being coerced into it every day.
Here is how I made my decision to not get the vaccines: these Phase III studies are simply too short still to determine both the long range benefits and side effect profiles, and the short term side effect profiles already look worse than any vaccine ever brought to market in history. Worse, it is becoming apparent that the vaccines for COVID don’t do any more to stop COVID than the typical flu vaccines have stopped influenza, and may be even less effective. As a very healthy 55 year old, my risk from COVID is minimal- I am more likely to die in a car accident in the next 10 years than I am to die of a COVID related illness, so the risk reward for me personally just isn’t there. Now, if the vaccines kept me from getting infected at all and spreading the virus, I would probably calculate my personal benefit as a good citizen to be higher and take the vaccine, but as we are learning that the vaccinated can get infected and spread the virus just months after receiving 2 full doses, I don’t see the good citizen part being all that weighty, and if it leads to higher spread rates due ot asymptomatic spread, then the equation actually runs the other way- I want to have symptoms so that I know not mingle with uninfected people.
I am not anti-vaccine, but these vaccines are too great an unknown still unless ones risk of dying after infection goes up at least 1%, and probably needs to be higher than that to balance the risk/reward. We are being coerced into buying a pig in a poke.
+1
1) The novelty of the disease and the vaccines mean there is no understanding of long-term outcomes. Just for example, how will those who receive the shots fare in subsequent seasons of influenza outbreaks?
2) There is common knowledge the shots have unpleasant side-effects. The word among my coworkers was to expect to take a day off from work after the second shot. One coworker had lingering impairments that lasted a month.
3) There is substantial data indicating the risk of Covid to healthy individuals is very low
4) There is consensus that the vaccines do not block transmission and may in fact increase the risk of asymptomatic spread. Oxford University just reported on this, with a researcher stating:
“The vaccines are better at preventing severe disease and are less effective at preventing transmission.”
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-delta-variant-can-still-be-transmitted-by-people-who-are-double-jabbed-but-protection-against-illness-and-death-is-high-12384933
Seeing that the vaccines do not stop transmission, the decision to be vaccinated is personal. There are reasons to choose the shots, there are reasons not to. The political and social pressure to get vaccinated infers a public benefit to vaccination that simply does not exist. So why the unprecedented push and penalties? An intelligent person should wonder about that.
+1
“The political and social pressure to get vaccinated infers a public benefit to vaccination that simply does not exist. So why the unprecedented push and penalties?”
Because the Elites demand it, irrespective of *any* evidence.
This, possibly/ likely, because they expect it to help them consolidate Totalitarian power.
Here’s a scenario. A woman gets the vaccine but pretends she didn’t. Polling companies phone her and she does what she always does with pollsters, messing with them.
Because lying isn’t just for Governor Newsom now. Mayor Bowser imposes rules that she doesn’t personally believe in. She says you can’t party maskless with Dave Chapelle, but she demonstrates, by her actions, that she doesn’t believe her rules are necessary or justified. She just says these things in public.
Soldiers don’t get a lot of opportunities to talk back and say no. Likewise in a regimented society, where the propaganda is constant and the authorities are never held to account, you don’t get a lot of chances to irritate the people who have always done the irritating so far. It drives them nuts.
It’s like Dostoevsky or Lindsey Troy: “Stranger in the bar tells me to smile more I look at him and I ask what for? I am happily unhappy, man.”
Arnold, I read your article years ago, maybe 2006 – but it says 05 Jan 2021.
You’re very right and phrase it well:
“the elites’ strategy is to make a large investment in selectively choosing which facts and arguments to emphasize or ignore.”
Tho in describing this rationalization process well, what is not quite articulated is where the heart/ emotion-determined belief comes from.
Today, with especially Afghanistan but also with Covid-19, our society is moving towards acceptance of lies. Steve Sailor describes it:
https://www.takimag.com/article/our-culture-of-lying/
“To climb the career ladder in modern America, you are expected to lie: about race, about crime, about men in dresses.”
Steve notes Gen. Milley lying about Afghan effectiveness even in 2013, and a fine conclusion:
Colonel Bob Crowley reported in the Afghan Papers:
Truth was rarely welcome…so bad news was often stifled. There was more freedom to share bad news if it was small—we’re running over kids with our MRAPs—because those things could be changed with policy directives. But when we tried to air larger strategic concerns about the willingness, capacity or corruption of the Afghan government, it was clear it wasn’t welcome and the boss wouldn’t like it.
Lying isn’t just bad for the soul, it’s bad for effectiveness at dealing with reality.
Most pundits, including Arnold, don’t like Steve’s willingness to face the truth when they don’t like those particular truths (Races are different, sexes are different). I’m also not a fan of Steve’s excess snark.
Michael Shermer’s article is fine. It’s a great pro-Vax note, and the 2020 comparison of 34,000 auto deaths to 346,000 Covid-19 deaths shows the order of magnitude greater risk.
Especially if you believe the numbers on Covid.
Like the generals “believed” the numbers on Afghanistan.
But, for Afghanistan said but true for Covid: If there’s anything we’ve learned about the deep state from this episode, it’s that it’s real…and it’s inept.
If the country was full of Steve Sailers, would we have had an Afghanistan? Would people have sheepishly complied with this COVID nonsense? Would they be telling kindergarteners they are white supremicists? Would they be mutilating teenagers genitals?
It reminds my of Richard Haniania simultaneously begging people engage in massive resistance to masking but also wanting the lives of anyone unvaccinated to be completely and utterly destroyed. Here’s a hint, the kind of people that are willing to make big personal sacrifices to fight mask bullshit (you know more than complain the the internet) have a much bigger Venn diagram intersection with the unvaccinated than the vaccinated.
You people keep looking for a unicorn. The perfect resistor that resists in exactly the right way to exactly what you want resisted, and not one damn thing more.
It doesn’t work that way. People who do one thing you like often do something else you don’t like. People who have a fuck you attitude towards masks often have a fuck you attitude towards vaccines. People who resist CRT struggle sessions at work also get snarky about it.
Every single movement that has ever accomplished anything has had to have a tent big enough to accept this.
Let’s take this reply to a Steve Sailer thread that he retweeted for instance. Steve lays out the data showing massive support for Sharia in Afghanistan, but someone just blurts out the obvious.
https://twitter.com/DosXXMachina/status/1427973726658772994
—-
Can you imagine if an hbd-minded policymaker, or POTUS for that matter, had just told everyone around him, “Guys look, this country is full of sub-85s, it’s just not going to work,” so that all that blood and treasure would still be with us?
—
Its snarky and hurtful…and would have saved 2,500 lives, 20,000 injuries, and $2 trillion dollars.
+1
I think PhD are more likely to have to not go to work if they are not vaccinated. So they are “hesitant.”
Does anyone know if the researchers did anything to vet the responses to the survey? The research claims ~5 million responses, and ~11 thousand have PhDs. If 0.05% of those surveyed lied and said they had a PhD and we’re vaccine hesitant, that would be 25% of the PhDs.