Imagine that antibiotics were a new-ish thing in 2023. It’s likely that doctors would feel the same way about antibiotics today as they did in the 1940s, not just because antibiotics save lives and prevent suffering, but also because they prevent serious long-term consequences of untreated bacterial infections, such as rheumatic heart disease.
Very well done. You make a good argument for rational cost/benefit analysis.
Unfortunately no cost/benefit analysis was even allowed to be discussed throughout the lockdowns/remote learning/mandated vaccines/masking etc etc. Any risk was unacceptable then. Relative risks could not be examined, such as the huge risk differential between children and the elderly. I won’t question your figure of 1600 children dead in 3 years. How many of those were healthy prior to COVID, and how many had comorbidities?
It is true that people no longer trust experts as they once did. The experts brought that on themselves with their conduct during the pandemic, culminating in Dr Fauci claiming that anyone who disagreed with him was disputing The Science. Not sure of the number, but I believe it was thousands that signed the Great Barrington Declaration. Both Dr Fauci and Dr Collins moved quickly to squelch any reasonable discussion of it.
I liked the world better when we had confidence in experts to guide us. They destroyed that trust with their hubris. If experts want to understand the proliferation of vaccine mistrust, they should look in the mirror. They encouraged the very behavior you talk about- fear of any risk.
I'd take antibiotics in a pinch if prescribed, not just because I generally trust doctors with that kind of thing - but also because we have many years of experience with them and we know for sure they don't cause you problems later on down the line.
Although Covid vaccines are relatively new (obviously!), the concept of vaccines is not, and we also know that they generally don't do more harm than good many years later, either. (Nor do they cause autism.)
The one thing that still worries me though is the "trust medical experts" heuristic might have given the wrong answer to an important question a couple of years back in the UK. Imagine you're a parent and your child comes home from school one day and tells you they're transgender and want to go on puberty blockers. You panic at first, but decide you're going to apply the "trust experts" heuristic. The website of the National Health Service tells you that puberty blockers are safe, fully reversible, and have no long-term negative effects - more or less as safe as antibiotics. But the NHS was later forced to change that wording after a court case, where among other things they had to admit that there were no long-term studies because these drugs had not been in wide use for long enough to tell (except for specific, rare, non-gender-related conditions). The guidance has now been changed to "Little is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria."
If you'd gone along and got your child referred to the Tavistock clinic - the national "gender identity development service" so surely that's where you'd find genuine experts, as opposed to online - you would have been told by everyone you asked there that all experts agree on the "gender-affirming" model of care. Except that "the Tavistock" has now all but been shut down (they're not accepting new referrals) and they're facing a lawsuit.
So as a parent, going with the experts would be good advice for antibiotics, covid vaccines (and other kinds of vaccines like MMR), but the best I can say without openly taking a side is it's to early to say if the same is true for puberty blockers.
Your analogy with antibiotics is brilliant. The one I like to use is driving: Nearly every parent in the US readily accepts the risk of driving their kids everywhere, but some of them are afraid of vaccines? It makes no sense to me.
And, as someone who got J&J for a very good reason (Switzerland’s vaccine roll-out was slow, so I flew to the US at the end of March 2021 to get J&J), I was so disappointed that the FDA took it off the market instead of, say, recommending against its use for women on oral contraceptives. A one-shot vaccine could have been such a useful tool in the early stages of the pandemic, especially for people who were reluctant or whose jobs prevented them from having time for the two shots.
Very well done. You make a good argument for rational cost/benefit analysis.
Unfortunately no cost/benefit analysis was even allowed to be discussed throughout the lockdowns/remote learning/mandated vaccines/masking etc etc. Any risk was unacceptable then. Relative risks could not be examined, such as the huge risk differential between children and the elderly. I won’t question your figure of 1600 children dead in 3 years. How many of those were healthy prior to COVID, and how many had comorbidities?
It is true that people no longer trust experts as they once did. The experts brought that on themselves with their conduct during the pandemic, culminating in Dr Fauci claiming that anyone who disagreed with him was disputing The Science. Not sure of the number, but I believe it was thousands that signed the Great Barrington Declaration. Both Dr Fauci and Dr Collins moved quickly to squelch any reasonable discussion of it.
I liked the world better when we had confidence in experts to guide us. They destroyed that trust with their hubris. If experts want to understand the proliferation of vaccine mistrust, they should look in the mirror. They encouraged the very behavior you talk about- fear of any risk.
Great essay -- couldn’t fault any of the logic.
Out of curiosity, what do you think of Eric Feigl-Ding? And his recent “thermonuclear bad” tweet about China.
Also it’s well known capuchin monkeys are assholes
I'd take antibiotics in a pinch if prescribed, not just because I generally trust doctors with that kind of thing - but also because we have many years of experience with them and we know for sure they don't cause you problems later on down the line.
Although Covid vaccines are relatively new (obviously!), the concept of vaccines is not, and we also know that they generally don't do more harm than good many years later, either. (Nor do they cause autism.)
The one thing that still worries me though is the "trust medical experts" heuristic might have given the wrong answer to an important question a couple of years back in the UK. Imagine you're a parent and your child comes home from school one day and tells you they're transgender and want to go on puberty blockers. You panic at first, but decide you're going to apply the "trust experts" heuristic. The website of the National Health Service tells you that puberty blockers are safe, fully reversible, and have no long-term negative effects - more or less as safe as antibiotics. But the NHS was later forced to change that wording after a court case, where among other things they had to admit that there were no long-term studies because these drugs had not been in wide use for long enough to tell (except for specific, rare, non-gender-related conditions). The guidance has now been changed to "Little is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria."
If you'd gone along and got your child referred to the Tavistock clinic - the national "gender identity development service" so surely that's where you'd find genuine experts, as opposed to online - you would have been told by everyone you asked there that all experts agree on the "gender-affirming" model of care. Except that "the Tavistock" has now all but been shut down (they're not accepting new referrals) and they're facing a lawsuit.
So as a parent, going with the experts would be good advice for antibiotics, covid vaccines (and other kinds of vaccines like MMR), but the best I can say without openly taking a side is it's to early to say if the same is true for puberty blockers.
Excellent article! I would like to know your opinion on COVID vaccine mandates. Do you support them?
There is an interesting op-ed in today's WSJ: 'Experts' are Fueling Distrust in Vaccines by Allysia Finley.
Very good analogy.
Thanks so much for putting so much effort into research and into coming up with this creative approach in the first place.
Your analogy with antibiotics is brilliant. The one I like to use is driving: Nearly every parent in the US readily accepts the risk of driving their kids everywhere, but some of them are afraid of vaccines? It makes no sense to me.
And, as someone who got J&J for a very good reason (Switzerland’s vaccine roll-out was slow, so I flew to the US at the end of March 2021 to get J&J), I was so disappointed that the FDA took it off the market instead of, say, recommending against its use for women on oral contraceptives. A one-shot vaccine could have been such a useful tool in the early stages of the pandemic, especially for people who were reluctant or whose jobs prevented them from having time for the two shots.