Category Archives: Epidemics/Pandemics

Dying or Thinking: Health authorities’ “Agenda”

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, reason, The Sleep of Reason, Truth Seeking

 

CBS Morning show recently filmed a man in a Louisiana hospital bed recovering from Covid-19.  If I did not know better I would have thought he was in Boundary Trails Hospital l between Winkler and Morden. After a lengthy stay in the hospital as a result of Covid-19, he was about to get out of hospital but still he said he would not get a vaccine. The interviewer asked him why and he responded, he did not want the government to “shove it down his throat.”  When asked what they were shoving down his throat , he said the local, state, and federal governments were all trying to shove it down his throat. The interviewer asked, “what are they shoving the science?’  The patient answered “No they are shoving the fact that this is their agenda. The agenda is to get me vaccinated.” What is so remarkable about this is that he was dead right (not dead yet, but right).  Public health officials do want to get him vaccinated to protect the public, including him.

Excuse the naughty words, but as John Oliver responded to this interview,

“public health officials agenda is to get you vaccinated. And you know what Covid’s agenda is?  To fucking kill you! To burrow into your body, into your hot little mouth, fuck around with your body, flip your nostrils off, make soup taste more like nothing than it already does and then kill you!”

 

Why is no one worried about that agenda?  Because Covid -19 is not the government. And that makes all the difference. Such people don’t trust anything that comes from the government, even if it will save their life.

People like that will never be persuaded.

The vaccine is doing its job. Nearly 100% of patients in hospital beds for Covid-19 are now unvaccinated. It is not perfect. There are some breakthrough cases. But the success rate is astonishingly good and the side effects are surprisingly low. Frankly, for most of us there is no good reason not to take the vaccine and a lot of good ones to take it.

As Bertrand Russell said, “Most people would rather die than think. And most people do.”

 

Anti-vax Insanity

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Politics & Religion, reason, The Sleep of Reason, Trump

 

Charles M. Blow of the New York Times has written about unreason in relation of vaccines. He also saw that part of the reason for vaccine hesitancy could be explained by reference to their holder’s political beliefs. Unfortunately, in the United States and Canada, Covid-19 has become a hot political issue. This started when Conservatives asserted that they did not believe Covid-19 was real.  This movement was led by Donald Trump the President of the United States who originally said ‘Covid is a hoax’. He believed and convinced many of his followers that left wing liberals were trying to make him look bad and were trying to interfere with their freedoms. As a result, astonishingly, the richest country in the world became the largest victim of covid-19.

Blow summed up the history this way:

“Nothing better exemplifies the gaping political divide in this country than our embarrassing and asinine vaccine response. Donald Trump’s scorched earth political strategy has fooled millions of Americans into flirting with death. And now thousands are once again dying for it.

Almost from the beginning, efforts to combat the virus were met with disdain from a president who felt the crisis made him look bad. The science was denied. We came to live in a world where masking was mocked and ingesting disinfectant was offered up as a possible cure.”

 

This is what a world messed up by politics looks like. Every day I hear stories about people who refused to take the vaccine for the feeblest of reasons. Repeatedly people distrust physicians and government officials in favour of something they have “learned” from the Internet or their friends. How can that be?

Blow recognized that religion brought with it unreason in its trail. And that was not a pretty sight:

“The optics of countless socially distanced funerals is less offensive to those conservatives than the optics of being socially distanced in a Fuddruckers.

It was all lunacy. It is all lunacy. This should never have happened. There are people dead today — a lot of them! — who should still be alive and who would be if people in the heights of government and the heights of the media had not fed them lies about the virus.”

 

 

The result of course is frequently disastrous. As Blow concluded,

So, we have a situation in America where people are dying and will continue to die of ignorance and stubbornness. They are determined to prove that they are right even if it puts them on the wrong side of a eulogy. This is like watching millions of people playing in traffic.“

 

As Goya said,” the sleep of reason brings forth monsters.” What else can one expect?

We Should Celebrate Vaccines

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, The Sleep of Reason

 

I heard Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the Late Show earlier this week. Dr. Gupta pointed out that

“vaccines are 90% effective. I don’t think we can celebrate that enough. They were developed so fast and are so effective, it will fundamentally change science. It will change the pace of medical innovation. Those mRNA vaccines may be therapies for cancer in the future.”

 

And yet astonishingly, many people don’t trust them! Not only that, they don’t even want to take them. They are turning their backs on one of the wonders of science! Instead, people turn to ignorant friends for medical advice. They listen to friends who get their information from dubious sources on the Internet instead of these astounding scientists who have been working their hearts out to help us. How can this be?

Vaccines are one of the greatest wonders of modern science. In the 19th century 95% of all people died from infectious diseases. Now in the 21st century only 5% of people die from infectious diseases.  Vaccines are one of the main reasons that people in the 20th century lived twice as much longer as those in the 19th century. And this is mainly because of vaccines.

And yet so many people distrust them. How can this possibly be the case?

I remember when I was a very young lad in the 1950s  polio was the infectious disease that scared everyone. There was a man living down the street from us, half a block away. He contracted polio.  We feared that like so many others he would have to live in an ‘iron lung’ for the rest of his life.  Many patients died. I remember when the polio vaccine was developed and I could hardly wait to get it. It was new technology, like the Covid-19 vaccines, but we all wanted it immediately.

After the introduction of polio vaccines the illness has been virtually eliminated. The last person in the US who contracted the illness naturally died in 1979.

Sadly, many people today don’t believe in the vaccines. They think they are risky.  Some are waiting for the rest of us to take them and test them out like guinea pigs. They want us to blaze a trail for them before they take them.

Many people were surprised at how quickly scientists discovered vaccines for Covid-19. I know I was one of them. But there were things I did not know. Scientists have been working on the mRNA vaccines for about 10 years. This was not magical new technology.

Anti-vaxxers used to warn us that vaccines were very dangerous because they required insertion of the virus into our bodies to generate an immune response. That does sound risky doesn’t it?  These technologies don’t do that, they “teach” our cells how to make the proteins that will trigger an immune response to the new coronavirus SARS- CoV-2.  They don’t require the insertion of the virus into our bodies. Anti-vaxxers should be rejoicing! Then our own bodies make the anti-bodies to recognize the virus when it appears in our bodies at a future time.

We should rejoice that we have so many smart scientists to develop vaccines. We should trust them.

 

Disarmed by people who love us

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, reason, The Sleep of Reason

 

So why do so many people reject official doctrine in favor of wild conspiracies? Why are so many of these people evangelical Christians or right-wing zealots, or both?

First there is some evidence that this assumption is true.  In my community, I am sorry to report, vaccine up take has been slow. The  Winnipeg Free Press has recently reported this way about our region (“Falk’s riding”),

“As of Aug. 4, 81.7 per cent of eligible Manitobans have had at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, but the uptake has been much lower in some of the public health districts in Falk’s riding.

In Hanover, which borders Steinbach, just 44.8 per cent of people aged 12 and up have had one shot. The vaccination rate stands at around 60 per cent in Steinbach and further east in the La Broquerie and Ste. Anne area.”

Charles M. Blow of the New York Times described what was happening in the United States:

“A recent Monmourth University poll found that “among those who admit they will not get the vaccine if they can avoid it, 70 percent either identify with or lean toward the Republican Party while just 6 percent align with the Democrats.”

From such statistics it is clear that our region is not doing a great job at getting vaccinated. Frankly, I am not surprised. I have encountered many people here who are not getting vaccinated. At least not yet.  Most people I know outside our region have no such hesitancy. Why is that?

At the same time my community, and others in southern Manitoba where vaccine uptake has been slow, voters routinely vote for conservatives unless more extreme views are available. What is the connection between the two?

I have a theory. Get ready for it: It is their parent’s fault. What did their parents do you ask?  They indoctrinated them. That was the debilitating sin.  Through indoctrination parents taught their children to listen to them and believe. Forget, about what others say. Forget about what scientists say. Believe what the parents say. When children are young it is important for them to believe their parents. If a parent says the element is hot the child must believe the parent. It is important. And it is important that the parent is always right about such admonishments. Such indoctrination is good, but only for a limited time. It is good only until the child has learned to think independently. But such training can go over the top. And most parents do go over the top. In fact, they go way over the top.

The problem with believing things without evidence that they are true, is that this becomes a habit–a dangerous habit.   Such a habit makes us suckers for every crackpot theory, no matter how outrageous. We are really seeing how that happens now. Someone near and dear to me has been taught by a parent that pedophile Democrats eat babies. This is a wild conspiracy theory promulgated by Qanon, believed by many conservatives as gospel truth. She believes this is true because her parent tells her this is true.  She has also been taught by that parent that vaccines are not trustworthy. She has been disarmed. She cannot think critically about this. We need our critical intelligence to keep the crazies at bay. That job is getting increasingly hard. This is particularly true in times of an international pandemic amplified by disinformation on the Internet Without critical thinking skills we can be hoodwinked easily.

If enough people are so gullible as they currently are this can be dangerous for society. Abandoning Covid-19 vaccines for example, leads easily to too many cases of the disease. In Manitoba our health care system was recently overwhelmed. We were very lucky that Ontario and Saskatchewan were able to take our overflow intensive care patients. What would have happened had those provinces experienced their peak level of Covid-19 cases at the same time as Manitoba? This could have been a disaster. An entirely avoidable disaster because we had the tools to handle covid-19 and too many of us chose to ignore the best instrument of our survival–i.e., vaccines.

This is what happens to a credulous society–like Manitoba–which had too many vaccine hesitants.  Although he wrote the book  before the current pandemic, according to Kurt Anderson, the author of a  FantasyLand, we encountered such  dangerous situations because of  our abandonment of critical intelligence. It has “allowed preposterous thinking all over the map.”  He wrote the book before Covid-19, but it is relevant. Very relevant.

Anderson believes this idea of defanging critical thinking, which we learned at a very young age from our parents, led to the expectation that there is no objective truth and this has seeped into a large portion of American thinking. As Anderson stated, “it is part of the American operating system.”

Anderson said this tendency has been amplified by the arrival of the Internet and as a result “The Internet gave the alternative fact universe its infrastructure.” Part of the problem, says Anderson, is that the Internet through its search engines “rewards the excitingly false.” Instead of truth, the Internet gives us ever wild conspiracy theories. For example, he said, people are attracted to conspiracy theories for the same reason we are attracted to religious speculation.  Both make it easy for us to believe there is a puppet master controlling the world which is an attractive point of view because it gives us a ready made explanation for what otherwise often seems fantastical.

Conspiracy theories make the world seem simpler than it really is.  According to Anderson, “Conspiracy theories make a tidy fiction in the way that reality is not tidy.” Conspiracy theories teach us to ignore science and evidence and instead believe the theorists.

This is the mess into which credulity has thrust us. It is not pretty. Especially in a time of a health crisis this is dangerous stuff.

 

We Should Celebrate Vaccines

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, reason, The Sleep of Reason

 

I heard Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the Late Show recently. Dr. Gupta pointed out that “vaccines are 90% effective. I don’t think we can celebrate that enough. They were developed so fast and are so effective it is astonishing. It will fundamentally change science. It will change the pace of medical innovation. Those mRNA vaccines may be therapies for cancer in the future.”

 

And yet surprisingly, many people don’t trust them! Not only that, they don’t even want to take them. They are turning their backs on one of the wonders of science! Instead people turn to friends for medical advice. They listen to friends who get their information from dubious sources on the Internet instead of these astounding scientists who have been working their hearts out to help us. How can this be?

i know someone who does not trust vaccines, yet she believes that leading Democrats are kidnapping young children and drinking their blood , because she read it on the Internet.  She believes stuff like that rather than leading scientists around the world.

Vaccines are one of the greatest wonders of modern science. In the 19th century 95% of all people died from infectious diseases. Now in the 21st century only 5% of people die from infectious diseases. Vaccines are one of the main reasons that people in the 20th century lived twice as long on average as those in the 19th century. And this is mainly because of vaccines. And yet so many people distrust them. How can this possibly be the case?

Sadly, many people don’t believe in the vaccines. They think they are risky. Some are waiting for the rest of us to take them and test them out like guinea pigs. They want us to blaze a trail while they wait to see if they are safe. I have talked to people who take this approach.

Many people were suspicious of them because of how quickly scientists discovered vaccines for Covid-19. I know I was one of them. But there were things I did not know. Scientists have been working on the mRNA vaccines for about 10 years before anyone heard of Covid-19.

Anti-vaxxers used to warn us that vaccines were very dangerous because they required insertion of the virus into our bodies to generate an immune response. That does sound risk doesn’t it. These new technologies “teach” our cells how to make the proteins that will trigger an immune response to the new coronavirus SARS- CoV-2. They don’t require the insertion of the virus into our bodies. Anti-vaxxers should be rejoicing! Then our own bodies make the anti-bodies to recognize the virus when it appears in our bodies at a future time.

This is such amazing technology developed by scientists we should be immensely grateful. Yet too many people are suspicious. while we believe outrageous stuff from the Internet. That is a dreadful pity.

 

 

Vaccine Unreason in the Bible Belt

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Evangelical Christianity, Politics & Religion, reason, The Sleep of Reason

 

I am still trying to answer my friend’s question: ‘Why is there so mu vaccine resistance among conservatives and Christians?’ I think this is a very good question. It is particularly important to me since I live in an area stuffed with Christians and conservatives.

 

Conservatives distrust government. This is particularly true of those born in Eastern Europe where they had very bad experiences with their government. But they came here, to Canada, presumably to get more freedom and better government here. Yet they are also distrustful of Canadian government. I have talked to clients who are convinced the government is out to get them. They really believe that the government is using Covid-19 as an excuse to take away their freedom. Everything governments are in fact doing, such imposing restrictions, points in that direction. Even born in Canada Christians, it seems to me, have a strong tendency to distrust government. Why is that?

This summer I talked to one an acquaintance who comes from a family of fairly conservative Mennonites. They live in Winkler. When the vaccination uptake rate in Winnipeg was 70% in Winnipeg it was only 40% in Winkler. I believe that is because so many of them are conservative Christians who don’t trust the government. Our friend told us recently her father did not believe in Covid-19, but he was very ill with very serious cancer. He was immuno-compromised as they say. If he does get sick, he is likely to die. Meanwhile, his friends and relatives also don’t believe in Covid-19, so when they come to visit him they do not wear masks, nor do they remain socially from each other. Some of her father’s friends in fact actually had Covid-19 and but till did not believe they had it, nor that it was real. Even when they were sick with Covid-19 they disbelieved! Instead they came over to comfort her father, risking his life.

Recently a Christian pastor from Steinbach, Kyle Penner, gave a short invitation to get vaccinated to the community on a TV ad, in a casual non-judgmental manner. He did not castigate or blame the unvaccinated. I found it hard to believe anyone could be offended by his remarks. Yet he was piled on by members of our community. He was called “a traitor to Christianity.” Vicious rumours spread around town about how he had been paid to lie about Covid-19. The only payment he received was a $50 gas voucher to pay for his gas to the TV station in Winnipeg. I would say, the complainers were blinded by unreason. This can happen in the case of religious disputes.

Eventually, he had to close his social media account as he could no longer tolerate the harassment. It was as if he was speaking blasphemy. And that brings up an important point. To many people, one’s identity is tied up to one’s position on Covid-19. Covid-19 beliefs are like religious beliefs. They are sacred in other words and any one attacking them, no matter how gently, is in for a spiritual battle. Those are the worst kinds of battles.

Charles Blow of the New York Times described a similar situation this way:

“All the while, the patients on ventilators gasped for breath, and refrigerated trailers filled with bodies. Death is one of the ultimate truths of life, and yet not even it could dissuade the headstrong from casting doubt on the science.

And then, a miracle.”

 

The miracle of course, was the Coronavirus vaccine. And sadly, much of the Christian right rejected that miracle.

Of course, Blow detected this intimate connection between religious views among evangelicals, political views among conservatives, and the rejection of the science of vaccines. They all had a common thread—they were all religious views, and as a result this meant, in my view at least, that they were not adopted by reasoning or thinking, but instead by inculcation. This is what Blow said,

“As the Delta variant surges, there is an uptick in the pace of vaccinations in the country. It’s almost like religion: Many disbelievers will call out to whatever god there may be when the reaper is at the door. Fear of ideological defeat is no match for the fear of imminent death. And yet, it shouldn’t have taken another surge of sickness and death for good sense to set in.”

I add to this the observation that frequently, such beliefs were in fact just as strong, if not stronger than, the fear of death. As John Loftus observed, the consequence of holding such religious views is that it is not possible to dissuade someone of his or her religious views by reason, because the beliefs were not adopted by reason. Just as you cannot convince a Christian to become a Muslim, or a Muslim to become a Christian, you cannot convince someone to take a vaccine for Covid-19.

 Of course, there is a second religion involved, at least in the United States. This is the religion of Trump. As Blow pointed out,

“Why were Americans turning away a vaccine that many people in other parts of the world were literally dying for? Many did so because of their fidelity to the lie and their fidelity to the liar. They did it because they were — and still are — slavishly devoted to Trump, and because many politicians and conservative commentators helped Trump propagate his lies.”

 

The mixing of religion, politics, and disparagement of science, if not truth, has created a venomous brew. And it will haunt us.

A very good Question

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Rebel, The Sleep of Reason

 

Recently a friend asked me a very good question. He asked me ‘why is it that so many of the anti-vaxxers are also evangelical Christians or right-wingers, or both?” Why do these people also resist vaccines? I don’t have the stats, but I think the factual basis for the question seems to be correct. The classic example in our area is southern Manitoba, particularly the Winkler area which is known as the Bible Belt and also has traditionally (virtually forever) voted Conservative, unless more extreme right-wing candidates are running.

 

I remember early on in the pandemic when someone told me that all the eastern European immigrants in Manitoba did not believe Covid-19 was real. They all thought it was a hoax she said. Many of them are also very right wing politically. From my experience that observation seems to be largely true. Why is this enclave so adamantly opposed to vaccines?

 

I am all in favour of dissenting from authority, but it must be rational dissent. That means the dissent must be based on evidence, not on presumptions or anecdotes or gossip on the Internet. Otherwise, the dissent slips into paranoia. Paranoia, by definition means an unreasonable fear. We have too much of that already.

When it comes to public policy the best evidence is scientific data. Rational dissent must be based on better data or better reasoning from the data.

 

The Big question is this: why do so many people, not just conservatives or Christians, but surely plenty of those, distrust government so much? Many people distrust government so much that they are prepared to believe all kinds of nutty claims, no matter how absurd, and they are not prepared to believe anything the government tells them.

 

Everyone has right to believe what they want. But that does not make those beliefs right. Everyone does not have their own right to their own truth. Believing something does not make it true.

 

People who disbelieve everything they hear from officialdom are just as foolish as those who believe everything they hear from officialdom. We all need to exercise our own critical judgment–our own critical thinking–to find the truth. Then we have to be prepared to abandon our beliefs when presented with better evidence or better reasoning.

But too many of us prefer fantastic conspiracy theories, because such theories, by definition, are opposed to the official version. After official truth is what the are rebelling against. They believe these theories exactly because officials don’t. If officialdom is in favor of something than to these people they are against it. Automatically. Without thinking they are against it. And that is exactly the problem because thinking is what we need in a time of public health crisis. We need our best thinking and we are not getting it.

Of course, when officials are automatically disbelieved, it makes it very difficult for them to counter arguments against them. How do you fight such an opponent? Anything you say is automatically not believed. Good luck with opposing such “reasoning”. It is like quicksand, the more you struggle against it the more you sink into the morass.

So I have been trying to figure out, why so many of these people distrust authority and instead believe wild theories with reckless abandon? I intend to think about this and blog about, in my annoying meandering style.

Healthy economies depend on healthy societies

Epidemics/Pandemics

 

During this pandemic, the first sign I had that something serious was happening was when I noticed toilet paper was disappearing from stores where we were staying in San Tan Valley Arizona. The next thing that made me think something was happening , was when the National Basketball Association suspended their entire season. Then I knew it was very serious. No toilet paper and no  basketball. This is indeed serous stuff.

Then I started to notice things were shutting down. Like the golf course and pool where we were staying. Many businesses were shutting down. I wondered where would we get our food? I was not keen on driving into the desert to harvest cactuses for eating and drinking. Who would be willing to work in stores? I had no idea. Neither did anyone else.

Then our Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said to Canadians out of the country that we should come home “while we can.” What did that mean? It sounded scary. Would we be stopped from returning to our own country? How would we get from Arizona to Manitoba? Where would we get food along the way? Where would we stay? Would we have to drive straight through? Many crazy thoughts started going through my head.

Then I started worrying about things like “supply chains.” I had never worried about them ever before. How secure was our food source? These were all scary thoughts. Thought I thought I would never have. And I hope I never have them again.

Since then I have come to realize that if global supply chains are disrupted that could have a major effect on my life. Later I realized those global supply chains were stronger than I would have thought. Food kept coming into Canada, though, still no toilet paper. Why was toilet paper a problem? I could not figure that one out.

Over the months that followed I stopped worrying about things like that. It would all work out. I did work out. So far at least.

More recently successful vaccine trials were announced in less than a year. By now at least 4 different vaccines have been approved in Canada. All though were developed outside the country. How would we get them, some of us worried? Have no fear our Prime Minister assured us. His government had invested early with vaccine manufacturers to buy their vaccines as soon as they were available. Our government had gambled millions of dollars to commit to buying vaccines so that manufacturers would produce them. The government paid millions of dollars “up front” before the manufacturers even said they had produced them and they worked and they were safe.  Then regulators around the world, like Health Canada, each with a phalanx of scientists at their call, looked at the scientific reports of the vaccine trials, blessed them and began to send them to government officials to dispense the vaccines. It seemed miraculous.

Everyone, except the doubters, wanted the vaccines as soon as possible. Even sooner than that. They pushed the Biden Administration in the US and the Trudeau government in Canada to get the vaccines “into arms”. The terminology makes it clear. This was to be done with haste and urgency. Canadians were very upset when its supply of vaccines was briefly interrupted by Pfizer on account of production upgrades that were needed to their plants in Europe. In Canada Trudeau was quickly described as incompetent. In the US, without a severance from their local suppliers, distribution of vaccines was ramped up swiftly.

Now some of us are starting to realize that those of us who live in rich countries must help those in the less fortunate countries. Not just because we are nice guys–which we are of course–but because it is in our self-interest. If they also don’t achieve herd immunities it is possible that this virus will keep mutating and evolving and perhaps overcome our powerful vaccines that we have been hoarding. We are in an arms race that we don’t want to lose. That would not be pretty.

I am amazed at what I have learned during this year of pandemic.