A reader writes:
What prompts this e-mail is your post:
Long story short, I think you have the wrong attitude about vaccine mandates. For clarity, I’m vaccinated and boosted and I encourage others to get vaccinated. At the same time, I’m against vaccine mandates. And I think you should be too.
The first point I’d like to make is to agree with you that there’s a lot of ridiculous attitudes about the vaccine and ridiculous hyperbole in online discussions on the matter. I have very little sympathy for the conspiracies from the actual anti-vax cult. (To use your language.) But that’s not in and of itself an argument for mandates. I’m not part of the cult nor are millions of Americans who are vaccinated and oppose mandates. It’s important we don’t conflate the two issues. There are many things that are either good or bad for people for which we don’t either mandate or prohibit and with good reason.
In the case of public health, the criteria for a quarantine or a mandate *MUST* be wide-spread public health issues for which the policy actually has a meaningful effect. And the COVID vaccine fails this test. Now, again, to be clear, I’m vaccinated and boosted and encourage others to do so. But the question is whether my having taken the vaccine is meaningful helping the public.
The data at this point is unambiguously clear. Vaccination does not prevent infection nor transmission. (Including boostering.) The current Omicron wave has rates of spread many times higher than any wave before it, including before we had the vaccine. This wouldn’t be possible if the vaccine (which 85% of adults have had at least one dose) actually significantly reduced transmission. That alone is evidence enough. But there are dozens of studies that confirm this.
I am glad you are vaccinated, but we disagree about mandates. A disease that has killed a million people in just a couple of years is a big enough public health threat that mandates are perfectly sane and just and opposition to them is folly. I passed your claim that vaccination does not prevent transmission by a friend who is an expert in immunology (he actually teaches it and is a working physician). Here is his reply:
Vaccination prevents transmission.
Information we have seen since early 2021.
Here is a review in summer 2021 assessing early data rigorously and concluding that, yes, vaccination reduces transmission.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/fully-vaccinated-people.html
Here is a Dec 2021 article from Israel demonstrating more rigorously the same:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.13.21260393v2
As I said, to say vaccinated people can transmit covid compared to unvaccinated people is to say that I can play tennis in the way that Serena Williams can play tennis. Its just so obvious that it could be measured in the months after vaccination began.
If you want to argue that vaccinations don’t prevent all transmissions then sure. But no vaccine does that. It would be folly to have dealt with polio that way.
This is why last summer, mask mandates were re-introduced, even for the vaccinated. Why? If vaccinated people weren’t a statistical risk of transmission, why would mask mandates apply to them? (Answer: Because they knew then that vaccination didn’t prevent transmission… although they still had hope at that time it might significantly reduce it… but obviously not enough to not insist on mask wearing for them.)
Because the claim was never that vaccines prevent all transmissions. But they still strike a huge blow, as my friend demonstrates.
As such, vaccination is not meaningfully protecting the public. It’s protecting ourselves.
You are simply wrong, as my friend documents.
People should get vaccinated because they care for themselves and they care about the burden they would be on their family and society if they got seriously ill (which is what the vaccine actually meaningfully protects against). There is no need to force people to get vaccinated as it does very little to protect society. And in fact, I would add that it’s counter-productive. People dig in their heels when the state says they “must”. If every bit of effort that has been put in to making vaccines compulsory had instead been put into making vaccination easier (going into workplaces and schools to offer them, etc.) we’d have more people vaccinated than we do right now.
Getting vaccinated is incredibly easy, so I’m not sure what this means.
And this for me is the clincher. I remember when you used to sarcastically say “Sure it works in practice, but will it work in *theory*!” It is a great point and speaks to so much societal dysfunction. And along these lines, vaccine mandates are counter-productive. We’ll get far more people on board by encouraging and making it *really* easy than by making it a culture-war political mandate issue. Between “it’s not working to get more people vaccinated” and “it’s not helping to slow the spread of the virus”, it’s time to give up on covid vaccine mandates.
We made it easy and mandated (in some places) and it worked, as the results show–in places where people paid attention to the science and not to GOP culture war dogmas of spite. That is why Democrats have a lower incidence of COVID and Republicans are killing themselves and their friends and loved ones. Here is an NBC article that bends over backward to be “fair and balanced” to the insanity of the MAGA antivax cult, but at the end of the day, the supposed “puzzle” comes down to the fact that Dems did the right and smart thing and got vaxed and obeyed simply protocols like masking while MAGA idiots defiantly refused (for freedumm) and so sickened and died at higher rates. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-death-rates-higher-republicans-democrats-why-rcna50883 It was a triumph of stupid selfishness and childishness, because the main motivator for the MAGA cult is mindless, self-destructive spite.
Instead, our focus should be on minimizing large indoor gatherings irrelevant of vaccination status, getting everyone to wear more effective masks (studies now show cloth masks are effectively worthless) when in in-door public settings, and a robust testing and quarantine plan (the availability of at-home tests is a step in the right direction).
All these things are good when the next surge comes. But the main thing–as my friend the expert demonstrates–is getting vaxxed. I’m glad you did. I hope you will abandon the false information that vaxxing does not reduce transmission. It does.
Best wishes!
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15 Responses
Mark, how long ago did your friend send you that email, I don’t think any experts believe it slows the spread anymore, do you know anyone that is vaxed and boosted that hasn’t gotten Covid eventually, that’s the problem with demonizing people too early because what we know changes rapidly in a pandemic, I’m all for getting vax, and did because I thought it would reduce symptoms, which I’m confident it worked for that, but when your entire family is vaxed and boosted, and everyone still gets Covid, I’ll believe my eyes over an expert anyday
Mark, I’m disappointed that you didn’t include my reply to your reply, which was sent to you many weeks ago. I put it here for others to see:
(start reply)
Mark, re-reading my words, I think I wrote poorly with the statement “significantly reduced transmission”. The key word is “significant”. One man’s significant is another man’s trivial. And unfortunately by lacking in precision I opened myself to a rebuttal that doesn’t rebut what I was intending to say. So I’d like to clarify…
Yes, obviously the vaccines have a transmission impact. Current data from the state of California (for August 2022) suggests that a vaccinated person is about 3 times less likely to catch COVID than someone who isn’t vaccinated. (And I recognized that catch and transmit are not the same thing, but it’s the closest thing we have to current data due to the difficulty of doing transmission studies). And from a certain perspective, it’s hard to argue against 3x being “significant”.
Yet at the same I find your expert friend’s tennis argument very unpersuasive because his reply is riddled with similar false comparisons. The Polio vaccine? Seriously? The efficacy rate and break-through rate of the Polio vaccine is so much better than that of the COVID vaccine that it strains credibility to casually mention it as a comparison point. According to the CDC it is 99% effective. And frankly, if the COVID vaccine was that good, I’d be far more persuaded to support mandates.
And that’s the main point I was trying to make and what I meant by “significant”. When compared to most vaccines, it isn’t even in the same ballpark.
When we talk about what a near 100% vaccination rate means for most vaccines (like Polio) it generally means:
* People who are vaccinated are very unlikely to have a break-through infection at any point in their life (in some cases boosters are eventually needed to maintain that)
* Even those who aren’t vaccinated are unlikely to get it due to herd immunity
* In many cases we can completely irradiate the disease with sufficient vaccination penetration around the world
But with the COVID vaccine, every expert acknowledges (and I’m sure you expert friend will agree):
* People with the vaccine are very likely to get COVID at some point in the future, even with an on-going booster regime. Sure, at a slower rate. (looks like about 3x) But most people, even the vaccinated are going to get it multiple times in their life. (I’ve had it twice and the vast majority of people I know who is vaccinated has had it at least once.)
* Even with a near 100% vaccination rate, herd immunity wouldn’t protect those who can’t be vaccinated from getting COVID. Perhaps it will slow it down, but again, they are very likely to get it even if *everyone* around them is vaccinated.
* COVID will remain endemic and with us for hundreds of years even if we get a near 100% vaccination rate and there’s no reason to hope we can eradicate it (without a yet-unforeseen medical breakthrough) anytime in the next few centuries.
Again, I admit I wrote poorly and that “significant” was a poor choice of a word. I probably should have said it the other way around, that the COVID vaccine has too high of a break-through infection rate to prevent COVID from becoming endemic and thus prevent most people from getting COVID at some point in the future. May the rates be lower? Yes. But lower is not never. I don’t anticipate I might get Measles or Polio or Rubella or Small Pox at any point in my life. I’m vaccinated and protected by herd immunity. However, I do expect that I will get COVID again and I expect that would be true even if mandates were rigorously enforced on the entire population.
With that appropriate context setting of the level of significance, I hope my e-mail makes more sense. The level of impact a mandate will have as far as helping to prevent people from getting the disease is not sufficient to warrant a mandate in my opinion and it is counter-productive as Americans irrationally *hate* to be told to do anything, particularly by the government. I’d encourage you to re-read my comments with that proper context.
(end reply)
Re-reading things yet again, I’d go a bit further to say that I feel you held my words to a standard that you are not holding people on the other side of the mandate debate to. Your friend starkly says “Vaccination prevents transmission”. That is just factually not true. If we were to put on a spectrum phrases one might use on this subject, it would go something like this:
1. Vaccination prevents all transmission (which would suggest that there’s never a break-through transmission)
2. Vaccination prevents transmission (which would suggest that the number of break-throughs are small enough that one can overlook them as an exception that can generally be ignored)
3. Vaccination significantly reduces transmission
4. Vaccination reduces transmission
5. Vaccination does not significantly reduce transmission
6. Vaccination does not reduce transmission (which would be the inverse of #2, in that any transmission reduction is so small that one can ignore it)
Answers 1, 2, and 6 are all factually inaccurate. There’s just too much data at this point to argue that any of those three are accurate. The studies your friend links to do not claim #1 or #2. They claim it *reduces* transmission. And the rates they claim are low enough that it is a pretty massive overstatement to state #2. To that end, I just looked at about 10 pages on the CDC website and never are phrases like 1 or 2 used. They’ll indicate it prevents severe disease. They’ll state it reduces transmission. But never do they say it prevents transmission.
At the same time, depending on context, 3, 4 or 5 can each be argued as accurate depending on what one means by significant. I’ve already conceded that #5 (the one I used in my original e-mail) is not the wisest choice of words unless one is very careful to put the appropriate context around it. I’ve also conceded and apologized that I didn’t do that in my first e-mail and did my best to better supply the context for what I meant but failed to originally supply.
But yet, not only do you do me the disservice of not including that subsequently provided context, you are willing to overlook, not just poor context, but factually inaccurate words on the other side of the realm of possibilities.
I find that very disappointing.
>The level of impact a mandate will have as far as helping to prevent people from getting the disease is not sufficient to warrant a mandate in my opinion and it is counter-productive as Americans irrationally *hate* to be told to do anything, particularly by the government. I’d encourage you to re-read my comments with that proper context.
Monday morning quarterbacking is a beauty to behold.
You can say that today, having hindsight. A year ago, when people were drying in droves, not having enough hospital beds or effective treatment, mandatory vaccine was the better policy.
The people who objected had spurious motives, including it being anti-life, 5G trackers, falling dead and conspiracies.
You can claim all this that today, basking in the outcome of facts created by the very policy you speak against. Without considering the alternative of how the disease would have evolved in a population, without the margin of added protection that mandatory vaccination/masking achieved over optional vaccination.
It was the same throughout – mandatory masking was an absolute good, at a time before vaccines and pavlovid. And even there there the anti-everything crowd was against masks, quarantines and pushing horse medicine . (Sweden went all out on herd immunity by infection, and the same anti-everything crowd was proclaiming its virtues from the rooftops, until it became clear that Sweden killed more people that way)
What I see on the anti-vax anti-mask pro-horse medicine side is charlatans and megalomaniacs – unless someone is claiming powers of divine prophesy and a magical ability to see the future.
None of these possible insights you have today – which insights are in turn an outcome of facts generated by a mandatory vaccine/masking policy – bring anything against the sound decisions made with appropriate reasoning and available knowledge a year ago.
Comments like yours are why I so frequently avoid online discussions. False assumptions and accusations abound. Monday morning quarterbacking? I wrote my original e-mail to Mark on January 26th, 2022. We could say this stuff a year ago. (or more)
The motives of people are far less important than what is true and factual. It doesn’t matter that conspiracy theorists and people of bad faith were the first ones to shout these ideas from the rooftop. What matters is whether it is true that the vaccine is incapable of preventing COVID from becoming endemic and whether it is incapable of helping us achieve herd immunity. The disappointing effectiveness at preventing mild illness and transmission (while being very effective at preventing severe infection) was well known by fall 2021 and suspected by many well respected scientists (not conspiracy theorists) early in 2021.
Finally, you seem to be implying that the mandates changed the trajectory of the disease, although I’m not absolutely sure as you’ve grouped a number of things together (masking, treatments, vaccines, etc.). Assuming I’ve read you correctly, it’s a false assumption that vaccine mandates meaningfully increased the number of people who have become vaccinated (and thus perhaps changed the trajectory of the disease) for two reasons:
#1: I don’t believe there were any studies that attempted to ascertain how many people who got vaccinated only did so because there was a mandate. (I never saw one.) Best I can tell, most people I know who got vaccinated did so voluntarily. I know this is anecdotal, but everyone I know who was anti-vax was very determined not to and found a way to not comply (quit their job, moved, etc.). I don’t know of a single person who was planning not to get the vaccine until they were mandated to.
#2: Even if one could determine the number for point #1, there are other ways we could have encouraged people to get vaccinated besides mandates. As I said in my first e-mail to Mark (and he brushes off without seriously considering) we could have done much more to get more people vaccinated. Yes, it wasn’t “hard” to get vaccinated. But we still could have done a lot more (going to more worksites, etc.) and I think that would have been more effective than the patchwork of mandates were.
We are both agreeing that Vax is a good, especially if it reduces severe disease. But mandates only work if it stops you from getting Covid, which it clearly didn’t, I was fully vaxed for over 60 days when my whole house got Covid in June 21, people have known for a while that it wouldn’t stop Covid.
When I got Covid the first time in fall of 20, before there was a vaccine, I was flat on my back with fatigue and recurring fever for two full weeks and lost my sense of smell and taste so completely that I couldn’t tell dog food from a $80 steak. And I was far better off than most.
After getting all the vaccines, I’ve had it at least once again. These days when I “get Covid”, that means I feel wiped out on a Wednesday night, sleep 10 hours, have a slow Thursday and then back to 100% by Friday lunch.
If that’s what a “vaccine failure” looks like, I’ll happily keep getting back in line for the reconfigured booster every year or two.
>The disappointing effectiveness at preventing mild illness and transmission (while being very effective at preventing severe infection) was well known by fall 2021 and suspected by many well respected scientists (not conspiracy theorists) early in 2021.
Like those respected scientist in Sweden and UK who advocated herd immunity by infection? I am willing to entertain the possibility that they could have turned out to be right. Herd immunity by infection could have turned out to be better, and quarantining and masking would have been a bad policy. I am not willing to entertain the fact that that knowing what we knew then, going ahead with a policy that would kill people and get herd immunity was the good choice even if it turned out to be right after the fact.
“I will do certain evil, on my speculation that it __could be__ a better choice”, is not something I am comfortable with, even if that turns out to be right in hindsight.
>I wrote my original e-mail to Mark on January 26th, 2022. We could say this stuff a year ago. (or more)
Speculation.
>Assuming I’ve read you correctly, it’s a false assumption that vaccine mandates meaningfully increased the number of people who have become vaccinated (and thus perhaps changed the trajectory of the disease) for two reasons:
And you **know** this when? Before the policy was rolled out and executed and in effect for some time?
Covid turned out to be flu, and not polio. Exaggerating a bit, no one thought covid is polio – but the exaggeration is to make a point. What choices do you make if you don’t know what kind of malady covid will turn out to be ? How do you act and decide, what guides you, when you don’t have perfect knowledge?.
Without hindsight, you are just speculating. That some speculations turned out to be right today, does not prove it was the right or moral choice in the past. In times of imperfect knowledge, many hypotheses are put forward and some will turn out to be right, and some will turn out to be wrong. What matters is that a good process is followed to make the best choice in the light of available knowledge. And the goodness and intention, and available knowledge guide those choices.
It’s clear that you cant cite objections on those grounds. That is why you have to lean on using after the fact outcomes to make a claim that those speculative choices were the right ones. Try making those choices when they are speculations without knowledge.
Catholics who are (or should be ) well educated in moral theology should not be doing this kind of analyses.
You are leaning on one central point that is just not sustainable… that all off this was just speculation until very recently. And it’s just not true. It may be that you’ve only recently discovered this information, but it has been known for a long time.
I gave a talk at my parish in the fall of 2021, when the anti-vax crowd was really ramping up and making errant claims about the immorality of the vaccines because of fetal tissue testing. I explained in great detail why it was moral to take vaccine going into the nuances of the different types of cooperation with evil (that being the evil of using fetal tissue for testing) and why because it was remote material cooperation it was OK to take the vaccine and the good of getting the vaccine outweighed the remote material cooperation.
I took their heat and questions for two full hours and stood strong and as patient as I could, doing my best to rebut their bad faith attacks with a charitable defense of why they should get the vaccine. You can watch the live-stream of it if you want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7vYkr-K9yM
I tell you this because I think that demonstrates that I’m not some anti-vaxer or even some anti-vax adjacent person. I wore my mask faithfully and upgraded to better masks when it became clear that the cloth masks weren’t as good as we hoped.
And I didn’t blame anyone for not knowing that the cloth masks weren’t as good as we thought. In that we’re on the same page: We learn as we go and we don’t always know stuff as early as we’d like.
I’m someone who does my best to follow the data where ever it leads. I was optimistic early in the vaccine rollout and got my shots as soon as they would let me (being on the younger side I was relatively late in line, I think May of 2021). But as the summer progressed and lots of vaccinated people were still getting infected and passing it along, it became clear it wasn’t as good as we all hoped. By January of 2022 when I sent the e-mail to Mark, the data was clear and had been for a number of months (if not more). It wasn’t speculation at that point.
Try to remember that when the vaccine was in development, we considered a 50% success rate to be good enough for approval. It did way better than that initially and even after the strains mutated and immunity waned, still kept most people from croaking.
When you consider that came out of a first try effort that compressed a 10 years of R&D into 10 months, that’s not a letdown. It’s a smashing success. That’s as if a 50 year old fat guy strapped on running shoes for the first time, made it to the Olympics that summer and then complained that fitness is bunk because he “only” took bronze at the 400 meter hurdles.
I don’t disagree with Mark on any of this. I try as much as possible to live by science and on the side of caution, and I’m grateful to my parents for the benefit of being raised with good sense the ability to think critically, and an excellent education.
At the same time, I’m more than a little worn out trying to argue with the anti-vaxx crowd. For the better part of two years, I went into every forum I came across and offered every point and counterpoint I could muster. Tried to debunk, with hard evidence, all of the misinformation and the appalling visible-from-high-orbit ignorance of the most basic aspects of biology and chemistry. I don’t think I changed a single mind.
You won’t ever reach them, because it’s like trying to reason with someone in the full throes of a cult. They have a 40 foot thick hardened steel firewall against any contrary idea, and the cognitive circuits that would allow even the briefest consideration of different data, if they ever had such a circuit, have been taken offline completely. Arguing with them is not only a waste of breath. It very often even deepens their resolve to the Crazy, and creates and feeds a bizarre sort of victim/martyr complex within them.
Unfortunately, sometimes you just have to let natural selection do it’s work. Of course it’s not only the cult members who suffer and die as a result of that, but I believe natural selection also operates at the level of entire societies. We have more access to information and education than any previous generation who ever lived, but a population which is largely, and by choice, no more scientifically literate than a 13th Century peasant. No one can save them from the inevitable outcomes of that choice.
I think what is most frustrating to me is how so many people make this a binary thing: vax vs. anti-vax. You’ve replied to both Tony and I as if we are against the vaccine. I don’t know Tony but based on his words here, I don’t think he’s anti-vax. He and his family got the vaccine and he hasn’t argued here that they shouldn’t have.
As for me, I encourage everyone to get the vaccine and I do think it was successful and valuable. I agree with you that COVID is so much more mild for most people today because they got the vaccine. And I’ve made that quite clear in all the above text. But just because something is valuable and successful doesn’t mean there can’t be aspects of it that aren’t everything we hoped and those things can make it so the correct policy for it are different.
As such, in this case, I’m for getting the vaccine because it prevents severe disease for those who get it but against a government mandate for it because its ability to prevent the disease from spreading through society is insufficient to warrant such a policy.
Most people were never under a government mandate, other than government workers. Whether that was or is a wise policy for all employees I don’t know, but I have no problem with having a mandate for health care workers and others who will be working with the most medically vulnerable populations. To me, the point that the vaccine doesn’t stop everyone from getting or transmitting it is not enough to overcome the presumption that best efforts should be made to protect patients.
What blew my mind were the people in forums who claimed to have thrown away very good jobs to avoid the “jab”, put themselves and their families on the road to poverty and homelessness, and talked like they had done something virtuous.
> You are leaning on one central point that is just not sustainable… that all off this was just speculation until very recently.
All hypotheses are speculation. As we gain knowledge and science advances, some of those hypotheses will get stronger and settled and considered true, some will not. With sparse data, many things will look right, which will get overturned as more data gets available. This is especially the case with epidemiology, where experimentation to generate data is simply unethical, and additional data comes only from the future as it unfolds.
> And it’s just not true. It may be that you’ve only recently discovered this information, but it has been known for a long time.
What’s you definition of “known”? You can confidently make this claim today, because things turned out the way it has. You just cannot imagine a world, where today it would have turned out otherwise. That’s why I keep repeating – this is hindsight.
>I’m someone who does my best to follow the data where ever it leads. I was optimistic early in the vaccine rollout ..vaccinated people were still getting infected and passing it along, …not good as we all hoped. By January of 2022 when I sent the e-mail to Mark, the data was clear and had been for a number of months (if not more). It wasn’t speculation at that point.
This is a “mandates only work if it stops everyone/99% from getting Covid” , and Mark’s post is enough response for that.
>I tell you this because I think that demonstrates that I’m not some anti-vaxer or even some anti-vax adjacent person
I do not see the point of telling me all that. I do not think you are antivax. Or more correctly, I do not care, nor is that a matter I am interested in, nor is it relevant to anything I say here.
I just don’t agree with what you are saying here about how decisions ought to have been made in the face of imperfect knowledge. What matters is that a good process is followed to make the best choice in the light of available knowledge. And the goodness and intention, and available knowledge guide those choices. Was that not done then? It’s hard to make that conclusion, without learnings from a future that happened since then
I’ll start with the easy one: I’m glad that you don’t think I’m anti-vax and I apologize for feeling the need to state my case for that over and over. I just so often feel responded to the way kenofken replied to Tony and I when he says “I’m more than a little worn out trying to argue with the anti-vaxx crowd”. There are *so* many people who will assume because one is against a mandate it means they’re anti-vax. My apologies for assuming incorrectly with you and thank you for taking me at my word on that subject.
I’d say the good news of our dialogue is that we agree about what we disagree about: When disagree about when the data regarding vaccine transmission efficacy was conclusive enough that it could be called “known”. And if we wanted, I’m sure you and I could bleed much ink back and forth today on litigating that, but I’d rather not. My hope would be that you’d at some point find some time to go research just how many papers and analysis of the government data on COVID spread in the summer and fall of 2021 and how conclusive that data was at the time. And I’ll leave it there.
That’s exactly my point as well, the Deacon and I are the farthest thing from anti vax, we literally got vaccinated and encouraged others to do so, but once we learned that it wasn’t stopping transmission, don’t you think it’s more than a little bit uncharitable to fire people over not getting it? It forces people into corners that they don’t even want to be in, that’s the problem in society right now