Scientism

The debate over vaccine mandates isn't scientific; it's political.

About a month ago, the President of the United States claimed that vaccinated people do not spread SARS CoV-2 to other people. That was in fact the second time he’d asserted that falsehood, though the first time was prior to Omicron, so it was a little less patently untrue then. If Joe Rogan were to say the equivalent but in the direction of vaccine skepticism, we know exactly what the media’s response would be. Following Biden’s gaffe, if that’s what it was, there were a few fact checks that corrected the record. But no doctors to my knowledge called him a “menace to public health” and attempted to deplatform him. Nobody accused him of stoking an “infodemic.”

“The science,” by now, is pretty clear: while the vaccines continue to help prevent infections from becoming severe, they do not stop transmission of Omicron. To the extent that people are still debating this fact, on Facebook or wherever, they’re just arguing over the artifacts of misleading claims, which have been coming at a pretty rapid clip from both sides, or they haven’t updated their world views since the emergence of Omicron. And yet, if my personal experience is any indication, when you argue with people who favor vaccine mandates, you quickly find yourself debating this very point. A lot of otherwise quite well-informed people, including, apparently, the President, haven’t quite absorbed the basic fact that vaccines do not stop you from spreading the virus. At best, being triple-vaccinated may reduce your chances of infection, but that’s really just postponing the inevitable; as even Anthony Fauci agrees, we’re all going to get it eventually.

That leaves those who support vaccine mandates in a bit of a pickle. The original argument for mandates — the only one that ever made any sense — was that by refusing the vaccine, you’re not just making a choice for yourself, you’re also choosing for others, because you’re perpetuating the spread of the virus and thus the continuation of the pandemic. So even if you personally believe that the vaccines have secret microchip homing devices in them, or if you happen to have a death wish, it’s not your sole prerogative to leave yourself vulnerable to infection. Society, and thus the government, has an interest in making sure you get the shot — not just to protect you, but to protect everyone.

That argument is more or less kaput now. The vaccine does not prevent you from infecting other people; it only prevents you from ending up dead or intubated, which is in fact your prerogative. As the tidal wave of Omicron among the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike has forced those who support mandates to concede the fundamental reality that vaccination does not stop transmission, they have been forced into their backup argument: that unvaccinated people who catch severe infections clog the healthcare system, taking beds away from other, presumably more deserving patients. This, to me, is not only a weak argument, but a dangerous one. Aside from the occasional pedestrian hit by a drunk driver, or patients with acute genetic diseases, most of us, should we find ourselves someday in critical care, will be there to some degree due to certain retrospectively regrettable life choices. Consider seriously whether we want to condone the idea of using state power to compel people to make better decisions for the purpose of keeping ICU beds open. Consider, for instance, if you’re comfortable extending the same moral logic that some are so willing to apply to the unvaccinated to drug addicts, who take up a lot more ICU beds than “anti-vaxxers.” Or to smokers. Or to the morbidly obese. Or to people who drink too much, or eat too much junk food, or who live sedentary lifestyles and don’t get enough exercise. Exactly where are you prepared to draw the line such that only the bad people are on the other side of it, and you and all the people you love are safely in the green zone?

On the question of vaccine mandates, “the science,” it seems to me, is basically settled. And if that’s the case, then we can stop having pubmed link thread duels about spike proteins and lipid nanoparticles and blood-brain barriers and get down to the real issue: government power.

As Biden has demonstrated better than anyone, nobody has a monopoly on “misinformation.” For all the talk about right-wing echo chambers, Democrats are at least as misinformed as Republicans are about Covid-19. Confusion over the virus is a trans-partisan problem. Despite what our tribalistic news sources tell us, neither political party is more selfish or more patriotic than the other. Neither is particularly abundant in brain geniuses, or deficient in mid-wits. Neither is “pro-science” or “anti-science.” Each just has its own propaganda ecosystem, driven by the same warped incentives of the same mass media. All of us are being fed bullshit by our respective bespoke media algorithms.

That bullshit has produced a good share of the ideological warfare we’ve been living under for the past two years. But at the root of our disagreement is something more fundamental than just conflicting factual claims. My suspicion is that even while, collectively, we’re fairly badly informed, the paranoiacs we all believe our adversaries to be are mostly edge cases. I can only speculate, but my hunch is that if you took any two random people in America, they’d probably more or less agree on most of the basic facts about Covid-19, such as that the virus is dangerous and that the vaccines work but are far from perfect. But that wouldn’t resolve their differences; it would only clarify the terms of the debate. That’s because largely, the terms of the debate are no longer scientific; they’re political.

Certainly there are those who believe the vaccine is unsafe, and there are still plenty of empirical arguments to be had with them, for instance over whether you’re more likely to get myocarditis from the vaccine or from Covid, whether the VAERS system produces reliable signals or not, and whether Dr. Robert Malone’s greatest invention is the mRNA vaccine or his storied career. (For what it’s worth, my belief at this particular moment is that the vaccines are safe in the short term — though somewhat less so than the government claims — and present a probably minuscule but unknowable risk in the long term. I’m sure I’ll be forced to defend each of those claims in the comments.) But I think vaccine safety is a red herring. For most of us who object to vaccine mandates, it’s not the primary issue. The primary issue is being told what’s best for us by our social betters. The primary issue is being grown-up enough to make our own decisions.

Before anyone asks: I don’t have polling numbers to back this up. I’m speaking from intuition here, not data. I could be wrong, obviously, or the picture could just be more a lot more complicated than this. But my guess is that the entire edifice of popular “scientific” debate over vaccine safety and efficacy over the last two years is just a discursive morass we’ve sunken into.

We each staked out our claim early in the debate as to whether or not we supported heavy-handed, coercive interventions by the state to protect public safety. Some thought lockdowns and other emergency behavioral control measures were clearly both necessary and humane in the face of a world historic public health emergency. Others thought the new powers being claimed by the government were arbitrary, disproportionate, and in the end would amount to a power grab that we could never undo. Once that conflict was underway, we attacked our opponents and defended ourselves with whatever weapon of argumentation was closest at hand, which, in the age of Covid, tended to be this or that longitudinal study from South Korea or the UK, or this or that Twitter-addicted epidemiologist from UCSF or Johns Hopkins.

When the vaccines were rolled out, we were already divided into opposing camps, so when it came to the government’s new initiative for persuading, pressuring, or coercing the public into getting the shot, it was the most natural thing in the world for us to line up on the side that corresponded with the positions on personal freedom and state power that we were already defending. Thus, the war of scientistic factoids continued.

As thousands have pointed out before me, had Trump won re-election and pushed the vaccines, the sides would have been completely flipped. Liberals would be calling vaccine mandates “fascism” and “white supremacy” and pointing out at every opportunity that vaccine doubters are disproportionately racial and ethnic minorities, while conservatives would be claiming that the Democrats would rather see millions of Americans die than to hand Trump a political victory. This just goes to show, again, that “the science” isn’t really what’s at the core of our conflicts; if it were, the lines of division probably wouldn’t line up so conveniently with partisanship. The debates over meta-analyses and randomized control trials are just window dressing, meant to bestow a patina of scientific-ish credibility to ideological positions.

Of course, it so happened that Biden won, and the dividing lines conformed to the familiar political format — liberals insisting on more government action and conservatives demanding less — as well as the familiar cultural one: metropolitan elites telling everyone else how to live their lives, and being resented for it. By happy coincidence, it happened to crest at the same time as a litany of similarly moralistic crusades crescendoed, including the demand for an overhaul of our most fundamental conceptions of sex and gender, calls to eliminate the police as we know it, the transformation of public schools into sites of ideological training, and the dismantling of meritocratic admissions in elite high school and college education in the name of equity. To those who advocate for all of these changes, they’re clear remedies for shameful historical injustices — reforms that provide protection and redress for the most vulnerable among us that should have been instituted a long time ago. To those who resist them, they’re the alien moral dictates of a Brahmin class, forced upon the peasants and the proles to punish them for their ignorance.

It’s no secret to anyone who subscribes to this newsletter that my own allegiances have shifted from the former group to the latter. I have found it harder and harder to deny that many educated liberals do, in fact, look upon vast swathes of the county with derision and condescension; that far from the jaded self-criticism they believe it to be, their dark, cynical view of America’s “unique” evils is just an extension of that class contempt; and that their deep reverence for institutions, education and expertise is just self-worshipping class narcissism. Conservatives have their own afflictions, such as a politics almost entirely shaped by ressentiment; the Republican Party’s cheap, opportunistic embrace of populism that’s belied daily by its actual economic agenda; and the morphing of their distrust of experts into vulgar anti-intellectualism. But at this historical moment, it’s the liberals who are ascendant; it’s their pathologies that are shaping the future.

And right now that pathology is their deep-seated disdain for the public. With its cultural and ideological roots on university campuses, liberalism has been intimately tied to the educated elite since at least the sixties. But a wire was tripped when Trump was elected. The American public, liberals came to believe, had betrayed them, and could never be trusted again. Any population that voted for such a man, for such an agenda, could never be relied upon to deliver the enlightened social justice agenda that America’s “marginalized communities” were counting on the liberal establishment to achieve for them. The great mass of Americans were ignorant racists who “centered whiteness” and jealously protected their “privilege.” Left in their hands, these bitter, small-minded people would only bring us fascism; they already proved as much in the election of 2016. Enlightened Americans could prevent this catastrophe only by policing their speech, re-educating them in their workplaces, regulating their social media diets and curbing their selfish instincts by force of law. And this is where we now find ourselves: with the social justice equivalent of the quasi-theocratic Christian right of the 1990s — a moralistic political movement that aspires to remake the nation through top-down social engineering and that’s becoming increasingly distrustful of democracy.

That’s what vaccine mandates look like to much of America, myself, obviously, included. It’s long been a conflict not over virological facts and epidemiological data, but over whether to grant the educated strata of America the license to construct a paternalistic state, with a legally enforceable official morality. It’s the same tension that has pervaded all of our culture war controversies, which is to say all of our controversies, period. From the start, the debate over “science” has been a sort of a farce, like when you fight with your spouse over the chores when you’re really fighting about whether you should get a divorce.

The truth is, I don’t really care what the latest data from Israel tells us. I don’t care what an epidemiologist has to say about vaccine mandates, any more than I care what an oncologist thinks about Kendian anti-racism. Their particular expertise is not relevant to the issue at hand, which is not about science. It’s about power.