The wisdom and humility in slowing things down a bit
Science and truth both need time to do their work.
The bad cat and Eugyppius and many others have been writing yesterday and today on some new data out of the UK regarding the sort of antibodies vaccinated and unvaccinated people are producing to COVID-19. I will say up front and with complete sincerity that I do not know if the “ultimate implications” of those linked pieces are correct or not. They are interesting suggestions, and it would be great to hear a non-partisan-compromised expert offer his thoughts on them.
The pieces essentially suggest that if your "first exposure" to COVID-19 is via vaccination instead of infection, not only is your immune response inferior at the time, but subsequent immune responses to subsequent infections remain inferior. The claim is basically that getting infected trains your body to respond to the virus, while getting vaccinated (with the sort of vaccines we have) trains your body to respond to the effects of the virus, and that training appears to be "sticky" even if you subsequently actually catch the virus. Now again, "sticky" here is only many months of data at best, but that is what we have. (Even if the effect does only last many months it might help explain what is happening in highly vaccinated v. highly unvaccinated regions right now.) To quote Eugyppius:
Our Corona vaccines elicit antibodies against the spike protein alone, while natural infection provokes antibodies against other virus proteins as well, including the nucleocapsid or N protein. The broad spectrum of natural immune response is why recovered individuals enjoy much greater and longer-lasting protection, than people who have been merely vaccinated.
The vaccinators have always insisted that there’s nothing to see here. You can get the spike-specific protection of vaccination, they say, and pick up broader-based protection from low-risk natural infection later on. The problem, though, is that the vaccines appear to influence subsequent immune response…
And maybe “you’ll pick up broader based protection later on” is correct, again we only have a few months of data. But one thing you could say that is certainly true is that it takes time for science to really understand what's going on, ergo you should not go compel everyone's behavior based on what you think you learned yesterday. We need to relearn that lesson in a bad way and I fear it is going to take some truly awful thing to happen, where our rush to issue orders based on early data was undeniably the culprit, before society will relearn that lesson.
Why are we arrogant and foolish? I can offer you a few suggestions there.
Technology and the true successes of science have convinced us that we know better than everyone who lived before us, immediately and on every topic. I’ve actually heard it said that “modern progressivism is basically a side effect of technological development” (sorry I can’t find the original source right now). A good amount of truth in that quip I think, think about it.
It isn’t true that we always know better than our ancestors, but it is in the air we breathe now, and it goes along with the “right side of history” mindset. It is true that you know how to use a computer better than your great-great-grandfather who, if he knew the word at all, thought it referred to a human being who did calculations all day long. But that doesn’t make us correct immediately and correct about everything.Always-on media and social media impels everyone to immediately take a position on everything. This has done much to worsen our pandemic response and it does much to worsen society generally. We need to learn, next time there is a police shooting somewhere that sets all the alarm bells at CNN sounding (assuming they ever go off, these days), and someone says “what do you think about it, what should we do about it?”, an appropriate and often wise response is to refrain from comment and let the locals and due process determine what really happened, and then maybe you’ll have a comment. (On a positive note, only because we have seen example after example now of early reporting badly distorting what really happened, many people are learning this lesson.)
Wickedness, generally, loves to work quickly. A lie gets around the world while the truth is still getting its pants on (and in 2021, it can get around the world in a literal 30 seconds). Because truth and people who care for the truth care about formulating good and honest arguments, it takes time for them to work. Error has no such concerns and can work quickly and benefits from working quickly. If you can be made to feel out of control because error is five steps down the line while you’re still understanding and refuting step one, that’s great for error. There are obvious implications here about designing systems intentionally to make it impossible to work too quickly… in the political realm, permanent “emergency rule” by the executive is the exact opposite.
This ends some thoughts! Comments welcome as always.
On March 13 last year, or whatever the exact date was, it was as though the U.S. had a terrible meteor coming at it that demanded action that very day. Remember? The pro sports leagues and college basketball shut down in media res, most schools shuttered, I think the borders and airlines were closed. Maybe we are still in shellshock from that day of panic, which is why so many parts of the world are still acting as though the meteor is about to hit.