More and more in recent years, we have been relentlessly finger-wagged, brow-beaten and lectured by our self-appointed “betters” to just shut up and listen to “the experts”. Concerned that banks are lending too much money to people who can clearly never pay it back? Shut up, the experts have spoken: everything’s fine. Doubtful about Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction? Cram it, you ignorant hick — we’ve got experts to tell you what to believe. Sceptical that a mild fluctuation in the climate is going to turn the planet into a blackened husk? Shut your goddamn mouth — 97% of experts have spoken.
Not sure that rushed Covid vaccines are entirely safe or effective? Damn thee to hell, you, you… SCIENCE DENIER! The experts are your sole source of truth.
In fact, the “experts” have been the problem, not the solution.
The self-professed expert class and many who call themselves journalists dismiss anyone who questions their Covid vaccine orthodoxy as an “anti-vaxxer”—a label as sneering as “climate denier.”
But surveys show that most Americans, including those who didn’t get Covid shots, don’t distrust vaccines in general. Public views on Covid vaccines are more complicated because they are new and haven’t been thoroughly studied.
The experts are responsible for vaccine skepticism because they aren’t honest about the potential risks.
The experts are responsible for vaccine skepticism because they aren’t honest about the potential risks.
Vaccine trials, based on tried and tested technology, usually take about 10 years. The mRNA vaccines, an entirely new technology to combat a novel virus, were rushed to market after just ten months. Why wouldn’t anyone be sceptical that they had been adequately tested, and all side effects properly identified?
Patients had been tracked for only a few months. The trials included too few participants to identify relatively rare adverse effects, especially among those of different age groups or with particular medical conditions. Public-health officials couldn’t conclude with any certainty whether the vaccines cause, for example, neurological symptoms in 1 of every 100,000 recipients or cardiac problems in 1 of every 10,000 young men.
If the initial vaccines were rushed to market, the boosters were never tested in large clinical trials at all. Nor was the government’s vaccine regimen of up to five doses in less than two years.
There was no evidence behind these decisions — only panicked politics. The same people who spent years pontificating about the “precautionary principle” when it came to their hobby horses like climate change, suddenly threw caution to the winds.
Meanwhile, the worrying evidence just kept piling up.
It’s usually impossible to prove a death or adverse event is caused by a vaccine. But when a friend dies unexpectedly soon after getting inoculated, it isn’t irrational to wonder if a vaccine has contributed.
Some tried to sound the warning but were shouted down by the podia of truth.
A healthy young person is at more risk from the vaccine than from Covid? Over-use of boosters substantially diminishes their effectiveness?
The “experts” were having none of it — narrative maintenance trumped evidence-based medicine.
Stanford health-policy professor Michelle Mello—a vocal critic of vaccine misinformation—described her personal angst in the San Francisco Chronicle when her healthy 45-year-old husband suffered a stroke a few days after his second Covid dose. “Even after what one doctor called ‘a million-dollar workup,’ no one can figure out what happened,” she wrote in July 2021.
When she suggested reporting the stroke to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a self-reporting database that tracks events possibly related to vaccines, “the hospital care team shifted uncomfortably,” apparently worried that “anti-vaccination groups are combing those reports looking for tidbits to support their claims that the vaccines are unsafe.”
Maybe the apparent rash of “died suddenly” cases is all just a gigantic case of the Baader-Meinhof effect. Some people are clearly determined to see “vaccine injuries” where there are none (a football player collapsing after a massive blow, full-force impact to the chest doesn’t need a vaccine bogeyman to explain it), but dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of apparent cases of otherwise healthy people suddenly collapsing, often dying, surely merits some sort of investigation beyond, “Shut up, you’re imagining things”.
The biggest problem is that “Shut up, we explained” does nothing to reassure people — in fact, quite the opposite.
The more the experts deny or ignore what people see with their own eyes, or what new evidence and experience show, the more people will ignore their counsel and be open to charlatans who undermine all vaccination.
Wall Street Journal
Arrogant “expertism” has done more damage to science and evidence-based medicine than whole armies of “anti-vaxxers”.
