One of the most vexed issues of the Covid pandemic has been vaccinations. The great pity of this all is that the political wagon-circling has hopelessly obscured any possibility of a dispassionate evaluation of the efficacy or otherwise of one of the biggest vaccinations roll-outs in history.
If anything is the signature controversy of the pandemic, it’s vaccines. Because, above all else, Covid has been a political pandemic. On almost every facet of the disease, someone’s response could be predicted with almost laser-like precision by their political allegiance. Especially vaccines.
In the early days of the pandemic, with then-President Trump extolling the virtue of Operation Warp Speed, the political left adopted the stance of now-Vice President Kamala Harris: “if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it — then I’m not taking it”. That stance was echoed by the “experts”, too, cheered on by the likes of CNN. “Vaccine experts are warning the federal government against rushing out a coronavirus vaccine,” squealed CNN. “Decades of history show why they’re right.”
One of the “experts” in question, Dr Howard Markel, declared that Operation Warp Speed was, “one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard this administration say”.
Note: this administration. In other words, the Bad Orange Man. But that was in 2020. Six months later, the Biden administration was in office, and Markel was singing the praises of the vaccines and especially imposing vaccine mandates. “It’s a non-issue and those who say otherwise are making controversy where none should exist.”
Yet, these were the same vaccines, under the same emergency approval. The only thing that changed was who was in the White House.
But Markel is far from the only person to change their minds on vaccines subject to political affiliation. Just as Harris refused to take a “Trump” vaccine, a great many on the right have refused a “Biden” vaccine. And so it goes.
In all of this bomb-throwing, some essential questions are completely beyond being answered with any degree of impartiality.
For almost two years, it has been an article of faith that the only way out of this Covid pandemic is mass vaccination.
On the surface, this has looked to be a plausible claim. It has been repeatedly and forcefully endorsed by public health officials and medical experts. Most people have been happy to go along with it, if not positively embrace it. Unsurprisingly, the result was the creation of an unvaccinated minority who have been subjected to accusations of selfishness, ‘anti-scientism’, and ostracised from society to varying degrees […]
The unvaccinated, in turn, haven’t held back from judging those who have judged them. They are genuinely bewildered as to how erstwhile sceptics of both Big Pharma and government integrity have been so eager to be injected with the former’s rushed product on the say-so of the latter. This led the unvaccinated to parody their accusers as sheep (‘sheeple’), blindly following authority to the Orwellian stage where they hold two contradictory beliefs: the vaccines are ‘safe and effective’ and the unvaccinated pose a life and death risk to the vaccinated.
As paediatrician Dr Robert M. Rennebohm puts it, one reason for the mutually hostile impasse is that “it depends on scientific questions which are beyond most of us”. And beyond a great many hack scientists, too, it must be admitted. No matter how much they dress up in lab coats for social media posts where they pose as “experts”, it’s simply the case that these jumped-up lab techs have little better grasp of the technical intricacies than any reasonably educated layman.
The two sides are talking past each other, both failing to address the core issue.
The core issue is whether mass vaccination was (and is) the ‘only way’ out of the pandemic. It is a fundamental question because the extent to which mass vaccination is for the greater good is the extent to which there is a case for weakening human rights and accepting the risks of vaccination. But this is a question of virology and immunology that can’t be addressed without a basic grasp of the relevant science. Rennebohm’s ‘Open Letter’ enables this bridge to be crossed by comparing the scientific support for the official policy with that for a significant dissenting view.
This is where things could become confronting for adherents to the mainstream, as they did for Rennebohm himself when he delved more deeply into the science.
As Rennebohm finds, there is a strong argument that mass vaccination with “imperfect vaccines”, in the middle of a pandemic, was and still is, disastrous. (By “imperfect”, he means that the Covid vaccines, as for most flu-like respiratory viruses, do far less to contain the spread than vaccines for other diseases, and mostly serve only as an ameliorative for the individual.)
The strategy is counterproductive, both for individuals and for the course of the pandemic – for individuals because it erodes natural immunity, and for the evolution of the pandemic because it enables the continual selection of variants that escape the vaccine. Moreover, the two factors compound each other. Mass vaccination, he maintains, makes the situation immeasurably worse.
On the face of it, there is some possible evidence for this. Despite falling largely off the media-political narrative, the latest Covid variants are surging past anything seen previously, despite up to four rounds of vaccination. Unlike previous similar pandemics, too, the Covid pandemic (as measured by “cases”) is being prolonged into a third year, with little sign of slowing down.
Of course, it must always be borne in mind that “cases” means “positive test results”, not “sick” or “hospitalised”. Indeed, the evidence strongly suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is finally following the path of previous pandemics, and mutating into a virulent but largely harmless seasonal bug. (The virus responsible for the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, for instance, is still very much with us.)
The implication is clear. Far from the world having experienced a pandemic of the unvaccinated, the reverse is the case – the pandemic has been prolonged by mass vaccination, and the overall health of the population would have been better served had a significant majority remained unvaccinated. The demonisation of the unvaccinated as socially irresponsible has no scientific basis.
Spectator Australia
Still, it must also be borne in mind that correlation is not causation. The unusual longevity of the Covid pandemic may have nothing to do with the mass vaccination of the West. But we won’t know unless we have wide-ranging, non-partisan inquiries into every aspect of the pandemic, from its origins to the supposed “scientific evidence” for the so-often-disastrous public policy responses.
Above all, it means everyone, on both sides, laying down their ideological arms and asking honestly, “What if we were wrong?”
