
The chaos of the Trump administration is coming thick and fast. Over the weekend, Elon Musk and a gang of very young interns just knocked over a congressionally mandated federal agency with absolutely no legal authorization and without holding any official position in the government.
I’ll have more to say about this later today or tomorrow, but let’s just say I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.
In the meantime, my examination of the “vaccine paradox” went up this morning at Discourse, just as the Senate is preparing to confirm RFK, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services after a series of hearings in which he repeatedly lied to them.
I step back and try to figure out how we got here.
The COVID-19 pandemic has produced a startling paradox.
In response to the outbreak of a deadly disease, scientists developed an effective vaccine in record time. It is estimated to have saved three million lives in the US—many more than the 1.2 million lives COVID claimed—and tens of millions of lives globally.
Yet the immediate result is that resistance to vaccines increased. Those who oppose vaccines progressed rapidly from the fringe to the mainstream, and now, President Trump has appointed prominent vaccine skeptics to run the nation’s top health agencies: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services and Dave Weldon at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
How did we arrive at such a perverse result? Why are people turning against a lifesaving technology precisely at the moment when it has demonstrated its value?
I look at the evidence for the effectiveness of the covid vaccines and dismiss the various attempt to cast doubt on them. You can read that if you like, but I doubt I have to repeat it for this audience. Maybe this observation will be somewhat new.
In previous pandemics, a vaccine didn’t become relevant until after the disease had already run its course, burning through victims until most people had already been infected. A vaccine would be too slow to stop the big disaster and instead just cut off the tail end and prevent a reemergence. But not this time. This time, we created a vaccine fast enough to make a massive change in the initial course of the disease. It was a pandemic interrupted.
In the future, we may do better. The rapidity of developing and testing mRNA vaccines has inspired a new UK-government-led program to develop a 100-day vaccine.
Why would we reject this? I talk a little about online misinformation and the rejection of knowledge, expertise, and fact-checking in our anti-establishment age.
We have all become addicted to staring at little boxes that lie to us, so despite the fact that all the information about the COVID vaccine is readily available from reputable sources, I regularly encounter people who seem to have gotten all their information from TikTok videos and YouTube influencers who “did their own research.”
And so we get to the point where 77 Nobel laureates can come out in opposition to RFK, which would have killed his nomination ten years ago, and now it doesn’t even make a dent.
But my larger answer is a phenomenon that is very familiar to anyone who writes about progress, but which didn’t exactly have a name before.
You may have heard the famous story about church bells ringing in 1953 when the successful test of the polio vaccine was announced. This is because most people had actually witnessed the horrible effects of the disease—it peaked in the US in 1952—and many still remembered an era when children routinely died from infectious diseases.
This fits an overall pattern for opposition to progress. If a new technology solves a problem, the immediate result is that the problem goes away—and in a shockingly short period of time, people forget that it ever existed. Then they find all sorts of annoyances in the solution, which seems totally unnecessary because the problem no longer exists.
Since Jason Crawford of Roots of Progress had already written about this, I also quote him, and I gave him a chance to name this phenomenon. He called it “industrial amnesia.”
Read the whole thing, especially the ending, which hits pretty hard. I will be pleasantly surprised and extremely relieved if it all sounds hyperbolic five years from now.
Enlightenment Amnesia
There is reason to think some very bad scenarios are possible. I’ve been warning you about the example of RFK’s role in the measles outbreak in Samoa. Here is a blockbuster report about how that ghoul viewed a large number of unvaccinated children in Samoa as a chance for a “natural experiment” to show that vaccines aren’t really necessary.
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