[Info-vax] [Totally OT] Covid-19 vaccine situation

[John Dallman]

In article <s41s2j$5ul$1 at dont-email.me>,
clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP (Simon Clubley) wrote:

> I'm reacting to the various decisions made to restrict or even stop 
> the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine just because of a few possible 
> cases of nasty blood clotting side effects out of many millions of
> doses given. And at the moment, it's not even clear if the AZ 
> vaccine is even responsible for those cases because there are so 
> few of them.

> Are some people really so risk-adverse that they are looking for 
> medicines without _any_ side effects and are unwilling to accept 
> a low level of risk ?

It seems to me to be a viewpoint problem. This needs a bit of explaining.


You, and I, and most of the people who post to comp.os.vms, tend to think
about problems from a viewpoint of scientific rationalism. We may well
disagree about where that viewpoint leads us, but we have that common
starting point. However, this is definitely not a majority view in the
West.

The most common viewpoint, as far as I can tell, is the need to follow
fashions, in thought, attitude and behaviour, as well as in clothing and
interior decoration. People's self-esteem comes largely from being seen
to do that, which is - I've just realised - why social media platforms
are so successful, because they allow you to demonstrate conformance to
fashion much more widely than you can do in person. To most people, this
viewpoint is automatic and assumed, and they're no more conscious of it
than they are of breathing while asleep. 

Being "geeky", by wanting to know about the detailed facts of things, is
a challenge to this viewpoint, so it is generally denigrated. However,
it's a necessary viewpoint for dealing with technical operating systems,
so we carry on doing it here. 

There's another viewpoint, which is becoming increasingly important, and
is also unconventional: the view that "the experts" are entirely
self-interested and ignoring their advice is sensible, or even imperative.
It's very good for one's self-esteem to feel that one knows better than
those highly credentialed people with their suits and long words. This
has become popular because the penalties for believing in things that
aren't true, like astrology, or very literalist religion, have been mild
to non-existent in recent decades, encouraging philosophers to suggest
that truth is a human construct, and doesn't describe anything real.

That last viewpoint, of course, is shared by COVID-19 denialists, people
who are opposed to vaccines in general, and many other kinds of
conspiracy theorist.

The people making the vaccine decisions are worried about the prospect of
the population they're responsible for starting to decide that the
vaccines are more dangerous than the disease. The population, and the
decision-makers, are both tending to under-estimate the seriousness of
the disease, because it hasn't, so far, spread so widely as to overwhelm
medical systems, in the rich Western countries. That is happening in
Brazil, because their government has been in denial about it, and the
results are not pretty.

I looked up the number of hospital beds in the UK. It's about 0.25% of
the population. 3-4% of people who get infected need to be hospitalised,
heavily biased towards the elderly. Pretty well all of those people will
die if not hospitalised; the UK only has enough hospital beds to
accommodate a twelfth to a sixteenth of the number who will need them if
the disease infects the whole population. So it was absolutely necessary
to prevent that happening, because that would cause 2-3 million deaths in
the UK alone. 

However, nobody seems to want to tell the population that, or the
equivalent for other countries. So the risks aren't being sensibly
assessed, and it seems to many people that refusing a COVID-19
vaccination will have the same penalties as skipping an MMR vaccination
for your kids. That is, usually, nothing at all. 

John