At this point, between widespread vaccination and natural immunity, Biden’s efforts hurt more than they help.
At this point, between widespread vaccination and natural immunity, Biden’s efforts hurt more than they help.
D onald Rumsfeld said once that “you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” This is true. And it’s one reason why it’s a good idea to keep the army prepared to fight.
Pandemic response is also, in its own way, a war. The government goes to pandemic war with the public it has, not the public it wishes it had. The American public includes a wide spectrum of people in vastly different circumstances and with vastly different attitudes toward their health.
In a long pandemic, leaders should try to maintain the confidence of all these different cohorts of people. So far in this pandemic, the authorities have done a lousy job of that. Now they are risking the credibility of the vaccination campaign, and perhaps of public health in general, by a coercive, federal-government-spearheaded national-vaccine-mandate policy that ignores the equities of a great number of conscientious Americans.
The vaccine-resistant are a diverse bunch. Some are objecting for religious or political reasons. Some have bought into extreme claims about the dangers associated with the vaccine. But there are also millions of Americans whose reluctance to get vaccinated reflects a sensible balancing of risk based on their age, health, and previous experience with COVID-19.
To be clear, I believe Operation Warp Speed and the vaccines it produced are the one real success story of the pandemic response. I would have bet good money that the government could not develop, test, and produce a vaccine inside of a year at the earliest. Operation Warp Speed succeeded in about ten months.
Moreover, I think the vaccines are safe and effective — or at least, safe and effective enough. Unfortunately, the vaccines don’t eliminate the risk of getting or spreading the disease. But they very substantially reduce the danger of serious illness or death (witness the drastically reduced death tolls from the coronavirus that have come courtesy of widespread vaccination), to the point that even those at high risk from COVID-19 can, if vaccinated, treat the virus more or less as if it were no more serious than a typical seasonal flu.
The decision to get vaccinated was not close for me. I’m 65 years old — and in robust good health, as far as I know — but the risk of serious illness from the virus, though not especially great for people my age, is certainly far greater than the danger of side effects from the vaccine.
For the very elderly, the vaccines were a godsend. My mother-in-law, who is 91, lined up outside the local pharmacy waiting for her jab (actually, she didn’t, but she would have had it been necessary) because within several weeks after getting vaccinated she was able to resume the priority activities of her social life: exercising at the community pool, lunching with friends, and playing mah-jongg with whomever she can inveigle into a game.
But not everyone is in our position, or close to it. America is aging, but most Americans are not yet in their 60s, much less their 90s, and the younger and more fit you are, the closer the vaccine decision becomes.
Risk in this context as in most contexts is relative. COVID-19 is a dangerous virus, but it is orders of magnitude more dangerous for the elderly than it is for the young and healthy.
Similarly, the vaccines are safe, but they are not absolutely safe. There are known risks associated with them, and, because they have been in use for only a short time, unknown risks as well. The biggest known danger — myocarditis — seems to afflict mostly young people, and the unknown risks are more likely to affect the young than the old, for the obvious reason that the young have a longer life expectancy in which to experience them.
In short, the risk of the disease is without doubt directly related to age, while the risk of the vaccine is probably inversely related to it. A healthy young person might well decide that while both risks are very low, the danger of taking the vaccine outweighs the danger of not taking it. And since any adult who wants the vaccine can get it, and the vaccine is highly effective protection against severity but not infection, young people might also reasonably decide that there is little purpose in getting vaccinated to protect their older relatives and friends.
Think of it as two opposing escalators of age. The risk of the disease goes down on one side; the risk of the vaccine goes up on the other. At some point, the two meet. Nobody is sure where, but you don’t have to be a raging libertarian to believe that people ought to be able to decide that question for themselves without losing their livelihood or their right to move freely in society. In fact, that was President Biden’s position until a few months ago.
In other contexts, the government itself recognizes that the risk profile is different for the young. It is one reason the FDA’s advisory panel declined to recommend booster shots for younger people who have taken the vaccine. It is the major reason why public-health authorities around the world have resisted the idea of authorizing the vaccine for children under twelve. The danger of the disease to young children is hardly even cognizable, whereas if there are longer-term, negative side effects from the vaccine, it’s precisely those children who are at the greatest risk from them.
What I have said so far does not even take into account the factor of natural immunity. For some mystifying reason, the government’s policies — not just regarding vaccines but throughout the pandemic — have ignored the basic reality that someone who contracts and recovers from a coronavirus, including COVID-19, has immunity from the disease, at least for a season.
There is nothing controversial or questionable about natural immunity. Its existence is an axiom of virology, so no one should be surprised that study after study after study has confirmed it where COVID-19 is concerned.
While natural immunity isn’t bulletproof, the evidence strongly suggests it is at least as good as vaccinated immunity, and quite possibly better. And recognizing the existence of natural immunity isn’t the same thing as advocating that people ought to go out and try to get infected with COVID or any other virus.
The issue with natural immunity, as with vaccinated immunity, is not whether it exists but how long it lasts. You would have thought the federal authorities would have formed an educated guess on that question by now, but according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the agency hasn’t really even gotten around to discussing it. Until it does, the logical thing would be to follow the example of other governments and allow some exemption from vaccine requirements for those who have recently recovered from a COVID infection.
But our government isn’t being logical in either its policies or its messaging. It is, plainly, ignoring certain facts and distorting others. When that happens on subjects Americans care about personally — and they care about their health — people stop listening to authority and start reaching their own conclusions.
Anyone who doubts that should listen to this young basketball star explain why he doesn’t want to get vaccinated. In five minutes, Jonathan Isaacs showed more good sense, and, by the way, more goodwill, than I’ve heard from the government in the past five months.
So we are left with millions of Americans for whom vaccination is a close call, and millions of others who don’t understand why they need vaccinated immunity when they already have natural immunity. These people no longer trust what the government says, for the very good reason that the government has not in fact been trustworthy.
President Biden may not really have meant it when he said that he was losing patience with this part of our vast and diverse American public, but I am fairly certain that they are losing patience with him.
Most eligible Americans have already been vaccinated, either because they really wanted the vaccine or because they didn’t care enough one way or the other to resist the pressure from those at the commanding heights of the culture. But the minority who are holding out obviously do care. Whether their reasons are good or bad, the fact that they have resisted for this long strongly suggests that many of them have the inclination and ability to stand their ground.
If that is true, the mandates and coercion may produce a lot fewer vaccinations than the government wants, and a lot more trouble than it has bargained for. The people with whom the president has lost patience perform some mighty essential services for the rest of us, and the economy, including the health sector, is already desperately short of workers. Antagonizing a large segment of those who remain might not turn out to be the smartest thing in the world.