Stating the bleeding obvious: The ‘ought’ and the ‘is’ of vaccination.
Murderbot 24 Sep 2021
There are a small few of my friends from the left who think we should support the anti-vax campaign. I am not always a hundred per cent sure about what they want me to do. Go to a demo to ‘defend democracy’ organized by the far right? Post on Facebook to say I have seen the light? Write a letter to my local member? Be nice to anti-vaxxers and welcome them into my local bar? The extreme moral outrage of these campaigners from the left can seem a bit pointless if the policy outcome is thoroughly predictable.
The powers that be are making decisions based on a set of well-known facts.
• The risk of dying from a Covid infection are seriously more severe than the risks we normally regard as acceptable. Death rates are about one in a hundred for people who get infected – in rich countries with good medical systems and lots of lockdowns (Mahajan et al 2021; Levin et al 2020). The rate of hospitalisation is about one in fourteen (Mahajan et al 2021). To take an example for comparison. For the USA, if you are in the 45 to 54 age bracket your chance of dying if you get infected with Covid is one in 400. Your chance of dying in a car accident, for the same age bracket, is one in fifty thousand (Levin et al 2020).
• The mortality rate for the vaccine itself is vastly less than the mortality rate for Covid infection. For example, in the Canadian experience (with 54 million jabs), the death rate from adverse effects of a vaccination is about one in every ten million jabs. This is deaths they are sure are due to the vaccine. If we add in all the deaths they are not totally sure about yet (those with insufficient information and those still being investigated) it still only gets up to one in half a million (Government of Canada 2021). So, people are hardly ever going to end up in hospitals and ICUs from the side effects of getting vaccinated.
• As anti-vaxxers never tire of pointing out, the vaccines do not totally protect you from catching the delta variant of Covid and perhaps transmitting it. However, what they never mention is that you are only one third as likely to get Covid if you have been vaccinated – and consequently one third less likely to transmit it (Bennett 2021).
• Hardly anyone who has been vaccinated will die from Covid. Figures from the US track Covid hospitalisations (107,000) and deaths (18,000) in May this year. Only one per cent of the hospitalisations (1,200) were for fully vaccinated people and only 0.8 per cent (150) of the Covid deaths were those of fully vaccinated people (Johnson and Stobbe 2021). These figures suggest a total infection tally of 1,800,000. The take home message for government policy. People who have been vaccinated will be extremely unlikely to end up in hospital because of a Covid infection.
Those are the basic medical facts. The key social facts are these:
1. The business community and the public at large cannot cope with an indefinite extension of lockdowns.
2. Covid is extremely contagious, as has become obvious. Combined with this are the impacts for hospitalisation and mortality described above. Accordingly, letting Covid loose without lockdowns or vaccination would rapidly overwhelm the hospital system (Mannix 2021). A disaster like that could never be an intentional policy outcome. There are just too many knock-on effects from a failure of the health system.
The percentage of the population that needs to be vaccinated so that we can open up the economy (while avoiding a medical melt down) is a moot point. It could be 70, 80 or 90 per cent. My bet is on 90 per cent.
Given all the above, there can be little doubt about how governments will act and little doubt about the eventual outcome. Governments will encourage vaccinations and be forced to implement various kinds of lockdowns till we get to that magical figure. They will want to hasten this process to avoid prolonging the lockdowns. They will ramp up the degree of compulsion till we reach that tipping point. Their initial method will be mandating vaccination for various kinds of employment and for participation in paid leisure entertainments (Mackintosh et al, 2021). How this works out in any particular jurisdiction will depend on the choices of the public and the strategies of politicians. But in the end the outcome is not in doubt. Businesses may pretend to protest but in fact they will be relieved that the compulsion seems to be coming from government. They will know that customers are more likely to be attracted to premises where patrons can be guaranteed to be vaccinated. They will be wary of allowing their workers to come to work unvaccinated, jeopardizing the operation of their business. The anti-vaxxers and the far right will continue to stage demonstrations and take selfies to recruit followers. The distrust they foster will slow things down, with yet more unnecessary deaths. But the percentage of the vaccinated will steadily climb.
The fact is that in a capitalist economy you cannot afford to be excluded from a chance of employment and you will end up getting vaccinated. You will also want to get vaccinated to fully enjoy your leisure and travel options. Ultimately, when we reach that tipping point figure this crisis will be well and truly over. Variants on Covid 19 will be suppressed by tweaked vaccine boosters, just like the flu now. People will forget why they were ever worried. In the next few years, rich country governments and philanthropists will supply sufficient vaccines to the developing countries to secure a similar outcome there. Again, for the sake of business, the tourist economy, global trade and international investment.
What seems to me to be wildly unlikely are the pipe dreams of anti vaxxers and the far right. For example, that thirty per cent of the population will refuse vaccination and abandon paid employment – to live in rural hobbit splendour, separated from the mainstream economy. Or that this crisis can be ‘accelerated’ into a general meltdown of democratic authority, the economy and public services, allowing the far right to impose their ethno-state tyranny as a way out of the chaos. Neither of these drastically contradictory scenarios is the least bit probable.
So, there is little point in getting het up. Don’t bother to tell me what I ought to be doing and how I should be feeling. The outcome is beyond obvious.
References:
Australian Government Department of Health (2021), ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19) case numbers and statistics’, Sep 21.
Bennett, Catherine (2021), ‘NSW’s extraordinary vaccination rates give it a fighting chance against Delta’, The Age, Aug 24.
Government of Canada (2021), ‘Reported side effects following COVID-19 vaccination in Canada’, Sept 17.
Johnson, Carla K and Stobbe, Mark (2021), ‘Nearly all Covid deaths in US are now among unvaccinated’, Associated Press, June 30, https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-941fcf43d9731c76c16e7354f5d5e187, accessed 21 Sep 2021.
Levin, Andrew T. et al (2020), ‘Assessing the age specificity of infection fatality rates for COVID‑19: systematic review, meta‑analysis, and public policy implications’, European Journal of Epidemiology 35:1123–1138
Mackintosh, Eliza; Ataman, Joseph; Vandoorne, Saskya and Melissa Bell (2021) ‘Will Biden’s mandates work? Macron’s vaccine pass gamble may hold some clues’, CNN, Sep 15.
Mahajan, Shiwani et al (2021), ‘SARS-CoV-2 Infection Hospitalization Rate and Infection Fatality Rate Among the Non-Congregate Population in Connecticut’, American Journal of Medicine 134(6): 812–816.
Mannix, Liam (2021), ‘Hospitals likely overwhelmed, road map modelling shows’, The Age, Sep 19.