17 minute read
Papers, Please
By Patrick MacAuliffe
As the world begins to reopen from the pandemic and millions of COVID vaccines are being administered to more and more groups of people, a startling trend has started to emerge. Talking heads, people who haven’t left home in a year, and many others in between are calling for legislation to mandate proof of vaccination against COVID in order for a person to return to pre-pandemic participation in society. Restaurants, airports, concert venues, and more would require a “vaccine passport” just to get in. Proportionality bias - the human brain making the irrational deduction that big events must have big causes - may cause one to jump fully off the conspiracy theory deep end about the whole affair. In my view, whether the COVID vaccine is truly safe and effective, or it’s purely experimental gene therapy rotting the brain because of Bill Gates’ microchipping, is irrelevant. The safety of the vaccine, deduced from reputable sources, will be explored in this article. However, at the heart of the issue is the massive affront to liberty and legality that is a “vaccine passport” law.
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The COVID vaccines most common in the US market at the moment are mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson. A typical vaccine uses a weakened or inactive version of the virus it is trying to prevent, allowing for the T-cells in our bodies to learn how to defeat it without the serious side effects of the real virus. mRNA vaccines, however, don’t imitate a virus itself so much as the “spike protein” used to deliver copies of the virus’ RNA into healthy cells (the messenger RNA, hence the name). If the structure of a given virus spike protein is known, replicas of this protein can be used in vaccines to teach white blood cells to attack these mRNA proteins, preventing the virus from replicating upon transmission. According to Harvard Medical School and the CDC, experimentation with mRNA vaccines has been conducted for decades, and the appearance of COVID-19 has provided an “exciting” opportunity, as Harvard puts it, to put these experiments to the test.
Like many people, I was hesitant to immediately jump on board with a vaccine that was produced and tested in under a year. The FDA takes years to approve any sort of new medical technology, and no new vaccine has been approved in fewer than four years, according to Harvard Medical School. In the case of COVID-19, the reason that this vaccine took such a short amount of time to test, produce, and distribute is that Chinese scientists had a head start on studying and cataloging the structure of the virus. The Annual Review of Virology contains a study on the methods of coronavirus spike protein bonding from September 2016, and Science magazine has another study on the specific structure of COVID-19 from March 2020. This latest study is based on the data from China’s scientists, which may be part of the reason why some QAnon-types claim that COVID was grown in a the COVID vaccine works, and the scientific intricacies are worth taking the time to fully understand. My skepticism about the process by which the vaccines were produced has been significantly abated through my research. I can say with confidence that the mRNA vaccines will not cause, for most people, adverse long-term side effects.
What is not abated, however, is my skepticism about the motives of the large pharmaceutical companies producing the vaccines and the government policies surrounding the mass vaccinations. Pfizer, producer of the most effective COVID vaccine at 95% efficacy, has had a long history of settlement payments and lawsuits, some of which totaled in the billions of dollars. In 1996, Pfizer even conducted an unauthorized clinical trial for its antibiotic Trovan on children in Nigeria, 11 of whom died and dozens more of whom were left disabled, according to drugwatch.com. Both Pfizer and Moderna made millions from selling their companies’ shares in the stock market as news of their vaccines’ effectiveness was released to the public, raising questions from NPR and Forbes about insider trading. Johnson & Johnson, producer of a 65% effective COVID vaccine, had to dispose of 15 million incorrectly produced doses on April 5th. One day later, the New York Times reported that 62 million more doses of J&J’s vaccine would potentially need to be thrown out after checking them for contamination. My reservations about these companies are that they seem to either be purely motivated by crony profit or they are horrendously incompetent.
The concern about crony acquisition of money comes to a head as the international debate about mandatory vaccine passports rages. Should proof of vaccination be required to return to a pre-COVID operation of society, this may provide a cover for large pharmaceutical companies to lower their quality control standards. If people have no
Chinese lab as a biological weapon. For a virus with an approximately 1-2% mortality rate, COVID-19 is a rather poor biological weapon if this was the case.
I encourage doing one’s own research from multiple reputable sources to understand how these mRNA vaccines work and why they could be produced so quickly. Growing large amounts of a virus and then working to weaken it enough for use in a traditional vaccine takes exponentially more time than merely replicating a harmless version of a virus’ delivery system. The overview I’ve provided is a very basic explanation of how
choice but to take the vaccine (and its inevitable subsequent boosters), and only a few vaccines are authorized by the government for production and distribution, the companies have an incentive to let the safety of their vaccines slide. What can anybody do about it? They have the weight of the federal government behind them, and they’ll keep making their money.
This concern, along with several others, will make both mandatory vaccine passports and herd immunity through vaccination very difficult. According to an NPR poll, 1 in 4 Americans say that they would refuse to get the COVID vaccine. This is a diverse group of people, from the QAnon-types to people in rural areas, where COVID transmission is less of a problem, to a large portion of African-American and other minority communities. This last group has valid cause for concern about the mass push to get vaccinated due to the government’s historical bad faith healthcare in their communities.
For those unfamiliar, the study commonly referred to as the Tuskegee Experiment took place from 1932 to 1972 in Macon County, Alabama. The horrifically unethical study was conducted by the US Public Health Service to track the progression of syphilis in the African-American community. 600 men, primarily sharecroppers who did not frequently receive medical care, were tricked into the study by members of the PHS. 201 of the men served as the control group for the other 399 that had syphilis. Over the course of the study, the men were only given placebos and very basic medical care, such as aspirin, by the PHS, which was determined to see how syphilis in African-American men would fully manifest. The government discouraged local doctors from providing treatment to the men, hoping to establish a truly controlled experimental setting. PHS conducted an internal investigation into the study in the mid1960s, but as internal investigations tend to go, the study was permitted to continue until July 1972, when the study became public news and mass outcry forced the PHS to end the study. By its end, 128 African-American men had died from syphilis or a related condition, 40 spouses and 19 children contracted the disease, and hundreds more suffered the gruesome side effects of syphilis, including blindness and insanity. For their trouble, survivors of the Tuskegee Experiment and their heirs received a $10 million out-of-court settlement from the US government in 1974, and former President Bill Clinton issued a public apology in 1997. The deep distrust of government-sponsored healthcare among minority communities seems fairly obvious from this atrocity and the long train of atrocities before this.
These valid concerns from several demographics of American society make vaccine passports a very problematic nationwide policy. This idea is nothing like getting a flu shot to participate in sports or to go to a certain school; what is being proposed is a mandate that any sort of public participation at all requires a health decision made, not by the individual, but by the government. Perhaps some people may not need a vaccine if they are at low risk for COVID infection. Perhaps some people live in areas where the healthcare system can adequately support those with the most serious symptoms. Much like blanket lockdowns, where the attitude has become “sick until proven healthy”, vaccine passports are a massive affront to the freedom of people to make decisions about their own health.
It could be argued that the right to make these types of decisions for oneself must be suspended when the consequences of one’s actions produce negative externalities for those around them. Governor Cuomo has adopted this mentality, perhaps to its actual extreme: “You’d be killing Grandma,” or put more tactfully, that refusing a vaccine directly places a person or a group of liberty-minded people at the epicenter of putting the most vulnerable populations at risk of infection and possible death. Not only does this mentality rely on the above “sick until proven healthy” axiom, it also discounts the ability of people to make rational choices about infecting others. If someone doesn’t feel well, they will stay home to prevent others from catching what they have; if they see someone who appears sick, they will take measures to keep themselves healthy. This was the assumption about avoiding disease transmission before the pandemic, and it should be the assumption during and after the pandemic. To reduce these choices of individuals to a vaccination card mandated by the government is a dangerous way of thinking that opens the door for other restrictions on the free choices of individuals. The vaccine is scientifically safe to take, and (for now) it is effective at reducing COVID-19 infection and transmission. At the end of the day, however, it is still your right to refuse it, and your responsibility to carry both the freedom and duties of that choice.
COVID Insanity
By Joe Badalamenti
In the year 2020, Americans were faced with the biggest crisis in over a decade. COVID-19 went from a regional virus to an uncontrollable pandemic spreading worldwide. The major effects of this pandemic were a national recession and widespread panic amongst American citizens. The challenges that the country faces call for courage and leadership to guide everyone through these troubling times. What we saw was the opposite. To combat the pandemic, we were given lockdowns, social distancing, mask mandates, and other restrictions that have endured in many places as we pass the one-year anniversary. When implementing such drastic changes, one should be confident that what is sacrificed leads to an outcome which is better than the alternative. However, when looking at the effects of the pandemic response, I would confidently say that the measures taken were not worth the consequences.
American political institutions, mainly state and local governments, responded to the pandemic consistent with the advice given by public health officials: mask mandates, travel bans, social distancing orders, and more. Events which could not operate according to these guidelines were told to transition to a virtual setting or shut down completely. The main reason was that these measures would flatten the curve or reduce the weekly number of hospitalizations to prevent an overflow of the healthcare system. This would also give scientists more time to investigate the risks presented by the virus. This response was reasonable if done voluntarily and exactly as planned. However, as the months went by, these measures were kept in place far past their proposed shelf life. “Two weeks to flatten the curve’’ become months and eventually a full year. Moreover, criticisms against these measures were treated in the media as outright falsehoods or even silenced completely. This wasn’t universal; politicians in states such as Florida and Texas did lessen these restrictions. In response, they were met with harsh criticism. One Florida health official said that the governor was “putting politics in front of lives’’. Other states, such as California, New York, and Pennsylvania, either left these measures in place or only gradually repealed them. This was justified through the classic case of shifting the goalposts. As media and political figures adopted this new stance, arguments became much more hyperbolic and polarized; “Flatten the curve” became “stop the spread”, which then became “if it will save one more life”. Not even an effective vaccine is enough if we were to go by the current presidential administration’s guidelines. This may be a side effect of the partisan divide, often intensified during presidential election years, within American politics and the hyper-polarization of social media. As with other things in society, when anything controversial happens, it is either paraded as heroic or commended as evil with little room for nuance in these performative circles. For instance, someone like New York Governor Cuomo, who implemented some of the worst policies, was given a book deal, an Emmy, and was paraded as a hero by his left wing tribe. While the measures taken were not as draconian as an authoritarian nation such as China, they still lead to poor outcomes within civil society.
The results of these prolonged lockdown measures were consistent… ly bad. As common sense would dictate, when the government restricts the movements of society, the economy will suffer greatly. Since the first quarter of 2020, unemployment has skyrocketed and has still not dropped to pre-pandemic levels. The economy is not just the “economy”, but the stability of many incomes and the health of many businesses and start-ups, as well as the average life of a citizen. When an economy goes into a downturn, businesses fail and incomes diminish, leading to a lower standard of living for many. Sure, you can spend trillions of dollars, excluding funds spent on earmarks or other unnecessary spending, on stimulus packages to attempt to revive the economy, yet these efforts often extend recessions and lead to an increase in inflation. The economy wasn’t the only thing which suffered as a result of the pandemic, as the mental health of an already suffering generation went into a downward spiral. Mandatory quarantines have intensified this despair through forced isolation. This occurred as many lost their hobbies and livelihoods only for them to be replaced by poorly-suited virtual alternatives. For instance, while virtual education may work if designed correctly, the efforts of many virtual transitions were poor and riddled with technical errors and “zoom bombing”. Additionally, students lost out on many benefits of in-person ed-
ucation such as social interaction and hands on experience. As one statistical indicator of this decay states, a crisis mental health hotline saw an increase of 891%. The Foundation of Economic Education (FEE) also reports that emergency room mental health visits for children aged 5 to 11 and 12 to 17 have increased by 24% and 31% respectively. Finally there’s the impact on the ill and disabled. Because of both the lockdown restrictions and the shift in priorities to COVID patients, many are losing out on diagnoses and treatments. Removing important early medical testing for diseases as a result of the pandemic has hindered one of the best approaches to a patient’s healthcare: early prevention. It’s a shame that many of these consequences have been generally ignored to focus on a singular virus. As economists tend to show, if you focus all your attention on one group or thing, other groups will suffer accordingly. There were other harms of the pandemic response, including a rise in domestic violence, a rise in drug abuse, an increase in poverty, and even the loss of liberal democracy in some countries. While there may be other harms brought about by the response, the ones mentioned have been the most harmful.
It would be unfair if I were to ignore the benefits proposed by those in favor of the prolonged measures. As many have suggested, the reason why the lockdowns have been prolonged is to reduce the number of cases/deaths from COVID. The issue with this claim is that there is scarce evidence to back it up. A recent National Review article, where per capita cases for different states are plotted against each other, shows nearly identical graphs despite the contrast on COVID restrictions. This is even ignoring cover ups of data such as the misreporting of COVID related nursing home deaths in New York. While it may be strange to take in the data presented, there are a few explanations for these trends. First of all, some of the COVID measures are not being applied with their intended uses. For instance, the purpose of lockdowns is to delay the amount of cases contracted in order to prevent an overflow of hospitalizations, not prevent the spread of the virus entirely. Masks, on the other hand, have many criteria which must be met to be effective; for instance, the presence of facial hair makes masks ineffective. According to ABC News, too much facial hair will break the seal on certain masks such as N95 masks, reducing their efficacy. Within common guidelines, however, no one seems to be asking men to shave their beards. Some face masks that are made with graphene may have the potential to cause lung cancer. The other explanation is that the guidelines are either arbitrary, or difficult to follow. This applies to the social distancing guidelines as well as restrictions against mass gatherings. Recently, the CDC released their revised educational guidelines where they recommend social distancing of only three feet. At the same time, they still recommend six feet social distancing for all other gatherings. At this point, the sheer inconsistency makes the CDC appear as though they are pulling numbers and recommendations out of their ass. Moving on to restrictions on large gatherings, this was one of the more reasonable guidelines as part of the COVID restrictions. The only problem is when this guideline became…well, let’s just say, politically inconvenient as the summer’s protest-filled whirlwind went by. The fact that this was treated as “following the science” tells me that those spreading these claims have a false notion of what science actually is. Science is supposed to encompass the discovery of new knowledge based on highly scrutinized studies, not just blindly following whatever the “experts’’ are saying. While the Milgram experiment may show a general trend of obedience to authority, the COVID experiment goes even further to say that people will act righteous in their obedience to authority no matter their cruelty so long as their actions are framed as morally or scientifically correct. The fact that this behavior is not only widespread but also common in universities is a very pessimistic sign for the future, as well as the current state of universities. Overall, it seems as though the purpose of the COVID restrictions is not to deal with the pandemic but rather to make an already incompetent generation feel like they have accomplished something.
At this point, you may be asking what should have been done. After all, these measures were unanimously agreed upon by public health officials. However, there was another approach to the pandemic which received little attention from mainstream media outlets. This approach is known as Focused Protection and is outlined in The Great Barrington Declaration. According to the document, the focus of COVID measures should be to protect those who are at the greatest risk of harm from the virus, such as the elderly and immunocompromised. The document also proposes multiple controls when dealing with interactions between those with a high COVID risk. Others considered to be low risk should be free to resume their lives as before the pandemic. As of now, the document has over 750,000 signatures worldwide, including over 50,000 signatures from both medical practitioners and public health scientists. While this was only written in October, the document presents a comprehensive plan which could have prevented months of harm in the following months before the vaccine was released. Given the failure of lockdowns and other current COVID measures to produce any significant results, it appears that the US would have been better off if it had followed the plan outlined within The Great Barrington Declaration.
All in all, the COVID pandemic was a public tragedy. However, much of the damage was caused not by the virus but in our response to it. If you would like to know more about the case against the COVID lockdowns, I would recommend checking out REASON magazine, The Foundation for Economic Education, and the podcast The Tom Woods Show, each of which have provided a myriad of details and evidence against the restrictions. If you have have been negatively affected by the incompetent response to the pandemic, I would remember this event in order to prevent future abuses of power.
