Beware the vaccine-skeptical panic porn
Some vaccine skeptics are exploiting fear
Texas cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough recently claimed that the Covid vaccines are part of a program of "bioterrorism" that has killed 50,000 Americans, with the vaccines causing more deaths per day than Covid itself, "by far." Entrepreneur Steve Kirsch (briefly famous after appearing on Bret Weinstein's "Dark Horse" podcast) disagrees: the real number could be more than 100,000 dead (scratch that: make that 150,000). According to Dr. Vladimir Zelenko (President Trump's hydroxychloriquine doctor) both numbers are too optimistic: according to him, over 200,000 Americans may already have died from the vaccines.
Meanwhile, ex-Pfizer VP Dr. Michael Yeadon is among a handful of figures (others include Geert vanden Bossche and Luc Montagnier) arguing that these deaths may be just the tip of the iceberg. According to Yeadon, the Covid vaccines may well be designed by population controlling globalists to kill as much as 90-95% of the world's population. (The government, he says, "is going to kill you...They’re going to kill you and your family." Italics in the original.) Vanden Bossche and Montagnier do not, so far as I know, allege that the motive is to kill, but are more-or-less equally dire in their predictions.
A few days ago, Catholic Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who briefly entered the national consciousness last year when President Trump tweeted out one of his now-innumerable prophetic missives, distilled the religiously-motivated anti-vax case down to its most potent essence. By getting vaccinated with the Covid vaccines, he wrote, "one is incorporated into the ‘mystical body’ of Satan, the globalist anti-church."
Those who are not immersed in the anti-vax media ecosystem are probably unaware that many people are not merely "hesitant" to get vaccinated. They are terrified of getting vaccinated. And understandably so. For months, they have been wading through a torrent of nightmarish - indeed, apocalyptic- claims like the ones above, often couched in convoluted but convincing-sounding medical, statistical, political or theological arguments, and coming from people who at least superficially seem to possess the credentials to be taken seriously.
Clearly, not all vaccine hesitancy or skepticism is unwarranted. A degree of uncertainty in the face of rapidly-developed vaccines using novel technology is a perfectly understandable, and up to a point reasonable response. The fact that some serious adverse events (i.e. myocarditis, blood clots) were identified only after the vaccines were widely deployed shows that we did not know - and likely still do not know - everything about their effects. Given the huge age-gradient on the lethality of Covid, it is especially understandable that younger and healthier populations are wary of taking something that they fear could have negative repercussions that they will have to live with for many years. And there are some legitimate ethical questions about how some of the vaccines were developed. For this reason every person - pro and anti-vax - should be united against the increasingly heavy-handed vaccine mandates. Persuasion, not coercion, is the only acceptable tool for convincing people to roll up their sleeves.
And yet, it has also become increasingly obvious that a troubling proportion of prominent anti-vax figures are peddling a product that is barely distinguishable from the so-called "panic porn" for which conservatives have spent the last year lambasting the mainstream media. The effect is that in many cases they are guilty of precisely the same crime of which they have accused the health authorities and the media: waging a campaign of fear based upon exaggerated or outright false claims in order to manipulate people to behave in a way that they have decided is in their best interest, and from which the anti-vaxxers sometimes stand to benefit.
The psychology of panic porn
In March, Gallup released a large poll that should have sent shockwaves through mainstream newsrooms across the country. The poll found that 41% of Democrats believed that over 50% of people diagnosed with Covid would have to be hospitalized. Another 27% of Democrats responded that the risk was between 20-49%. The correct answer? Between one and five percent.
That poll was a damning indictment of the mainstream media's Covid coverage. Despite the scorn heaped on right-wing misinformation, and the self-congratulatory preening about the mainstream media's commitment to "the science," the primary consumers of mainstream reporting had somehow come away with a mental model of the pandemic that bore little relation to reality.
In a brilliant rant, Bill Maher rightly noted that such a high rate of misinformation among self-appointed "high-information, by-the-science" liberals was not benign. Misinformation never is. After all, it was primarily Democratic states that unnecessarily shut schools down, burdening children with the baseless fear that they might die or kill the adults in their lives should they so much as leave their bedrooms. And that's but one example where panic led to drastic public health measures, the costs of which may well turn out to have outweighed the benefits.
However, where I quibble with some of my fellow conservatives, is that I am unsure just how much of this panic porn is explainable by mendacity, and how much by basic human psychology.
Overexaggerated fear in the face of an unknown threat is the most natural, and even reasonable, response in the world. When the WHO put out an infection fatality rate estimate of 3.4% last spring, we all knew that it was almost certainly too high. At the same time, however, we all asked ourselves: "But what if they're right?" If there was even a slight chance that the WHO's estimate was anywhere in the ball park, the outcome would exceed our worst nightmares.
And so we reacted accordingly, defaulting to what decision theorists call the position of "least regret." Basically, the risks of overreacting seemed preferable to the risks of underreacting. "Better to terrify people so they take precautions than to lull them into complacency so they take risks" the thinking went, and has gone ever since.
The rise of anti-vax panic porn
To the hundreds of millions of people who are happily vaccinated it must seem bizarre that there are people who are worried that the vaccines are a plot by Bill Gates, or Klaus Schwab, or whomever, to inject microchips, or to kill or sterilize billions of people in order to depopulate the world. And yet, in order to understand vaccine skepticism, I think it necessary to realize that precisely the same psychological dynamics are at work in the anti-vax movement as are at work in mainstream Covid panic porn.
Faced with the unknown (and now, in some cases, known: e.g. myocarditis) risks of rapidly-developed vaccines, anti-vax figures and media have responded by retreating to their own position of "least regret".
To people who are afraid, moderation has all the appearance of a threat. And so, crouched in a position of self-protection, vaccine-skeptics have been willing to credit anyone peddling an apocalypse, no matter how prima facie preposterous. Hence the indiscriminate, tireless piling-on of terrifying claims of imminent (or occurrent) doom: pathogenic priming; spike protein shedding; huge numbers of miscarriages and/or sterilizations; microchips; body magnetization; mass-isolation gulags; highly-lethal immune escape variants; and mountains and mountains of post-vax deaths.
As in mainstream Covid panic porn, it isn't necessarily true that the people promoting or reading this stuff believe everything the prophets of doom are predicting. Instead, they are operating from the question: "What if there is even a chance that they are right?" In that case, better to risk overreacting than to risk underreacting.
As in Covid panic porn, however, the result of the anti-vax panic porn has been the creation of a secondary "feardemic" that the evidence suggests is grossly out of proportion to the threat. By now it is clear that all the most apocalyptic anti-vax arguments and figures are also the most consistently careless with the facts, and the most consistently and demonstrably wrong. But whereas the anti-vax figures and media have become efficient purveyors of every new anti-vax theory, they are not half as efficient (or interested in) identifying and correcting the errors. ("Better to terrify people so they take precautions than to lull them into complacency so they take risks.") And so the errors multiply, unchecked.
To choose but two among a thousand examples: McCullough, Kirsch, and Zelenko have been telling people that a study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that 82% of pregnant women who were vaccinated miscarried (proof the vaccines are designed to reduce the population!). However, the real miscarriage rate in the study was somewhere between three and nine percent, i.e. well within the range of normal. McCullough has also been telling people that "43%" of people with the Delta variant in the UK were "fully vaccinated," which proves that the vaccines are literally worthless. The actual number is 12% (the remaining 31% were people who only had one shot, many of whom had only received their shot in recent days). Meanwhile, all the evidence clearly indicates drastically better outcomes for highly vaccinated jurisdictions like the UK, even in the face of the more vaccine-resistant Delta variant.
As for those claiming tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths from the vaccines, they're going to have to find some way of explaining why, precisely at the time the vaccine campaign got into full swing in the U.S. (and, well, everywhere), total mortality in the country dropped off a cliff, to the point where weekly deaths are basically back to pre-pandemic levels, even as the vaccine campaign carries on.
I could go on like this, cataloging the parade of errors made by anti-vax figures who seem to view data not as things to be analyzed to discover their meaning, but as things to be used as confirmation of what they somehow always knew to be true. But no matter how many mistakes they make, it seems that they rest comfortable in the conviction that they are the scrappy, beleaguered, censored heroes of this story, while the oceans of frequently far-more-qualified experts in the world's universities, public health institutions, and hospitals who are quietly going about their work are, to a man, dupes of or willing participants in a vast global conspiracy to suppress the "real truth" that only the elect few can see.
In the end, the continued spread of unproven or debunked theories and claims appears to be in part thanks to the formation of a self-propagating feedback loop that perversely incentivizes the production of more anti-vaccine panic porn. In brief, anti-vax figures are learning what their mainstream counterparts learned last year: i.e. fear sells. Predict an apocalypse, and you will attract a million eyeballs begging you to provide a blow-by-blow account of the end of all things. Like those who obsessively watched the Covid deaths tickers, those concerned about the vaccines quite reasonably want to know the worst so they can protect themselves and their families, and they will happily open their wallets to help the anti-vaxxers terrify them further. Such is human nature.
Reality-based vaccine skepticism
But just as criticizing Covid panic porn does not imply Covid-denialism, criticizing anti-vax panic porn does not imply pro-vax denialism. The unfortunate truth is that the mainstream and alternative media have simply swapped places: the former from being Covid Chicken Little to pro-vax Pollyanna; the latter from being Covid Pollyanna to anti-vax Chicken Little.
The mainstream media and health authorities, however, need to understand that every time they intone the "safe and effective" mantra without honestly addressing the substance of the vaccine-skeptical concerns, they only feed the anti-vax beast. Meanwhile, the most militant pro-vaxxers should pause and consider how the fear - occasionally outright neurotic - fomented by the overestimation of the lethality of Covid as exposed in the Gallup poll mentioned above may be motivating them to support coercive measures long before prudence would deem them wise, or just.
This recent article in Wired, for instance, pointing out the errors in the CDC's mathematical models favoring vaccinating teens and children, is an exceptional example of responsible vaccine skepticism: carefully argued, mathematically rigorous, evidence-based, and with all the appropriate caveats in place. As Michael Brendan Dougherty recently suggested, once recognize the weirdness of the CDC's talking points on vaccinating children, and you begin to understand the genesis of anti-vax sentiment.
But with that said, most vaccine skepticism is not one one-hundredth as careful as that. A portion of it is based in an eschatological narrative of good vs. evil that is literally impervious to every fact or data-point that does not fit the narrative. Too much of the rest relies on undisciplined speculation that selects and tortures the data to support but one conclusion (i.e. the most terrifying one), refusing to consider alterative hypotheses, and never, ever revisiting or retracting old claims that didn't pan out.
As we have learned in the case of Covid panic porn, however, taking the position of "least regret" comes with its own risks. At worst, those risks may eclipse the threat you were attempting to evade. After months of immersing myself in the messy vaccine-related data and listening to untold hours of vaccine-skeptical podcasts and interviews, I can't say precisely where the risk/benefit scale tips for or against vaccination. I am, however, convinced that at a bare minimum the evidence strongly favors vaccination for the elderly and otherwise vulnerable, whose risk of dying from Covid is many hundreds of times higher than the young and healthy. The risk of anti-vax panic porn for such as these is obvious: they may be convinced by the ghoulish fantasies of the catastrophists to forego vaccination, get infected with Covid, and die.
In the end, my proposal is modest: vaccine skeptics must commit themselves to the hard-won truth-seeking principles developed and followed by what Jonathon Rauch calls the "reality-based community." That is, they must be cautious in publicizing strong claims for which they lack strong evidence; set aside their a priori political and other loyalties and strive to approach the facts with as few presuppositions as possible; eschew appeals to authority; give preference to expertise over agenda-driven dilettantism; publicly retract and/or correct errors when they make and/or find them; voluntarily submit their conclusions to the strongest possible criticism, with the humble awareness that they may well be wrong; be open to changing their mind on any point where the evidence supports doing so, etc.
And we must all beware of those who would cynically arouse and exploit fear to get us to act against our best interests and the interests of the community. Some of the loudest and most-extreme anti-vax proponents right now are precisely those whose arguments are the poorest, or who have made the greatest number of grave errors, but who speak most directly to our darkest fears. Regardless of their intentions, they have squandered our trust. It's time to dial down their volume.