Politics, not science
In his Sept. 9 speech announcing vaccine mandates, President Biden for once managed to get the numbers right, when he noted that “Based on available data from the summer, only one out of every 160,000 fully vaccinated Americans was hospitalized for covid per day.”
That is an important statistic, because it tells you that a vaccinated person likely has a greater probability of being hospitalized after falling down their stairs than from the virus. But it never occurred to me to not climb the stairs to the bedroom last night.
Armed with such a number, vaccinated people can overcome the virus hysteria, make appropriate risk assessments, and thereby choose to get on with their lives in normal fashion.
Alas, Biden then diluted that necessary message (that the vaccines work remarkably well, so more people need to get vaccinated) by asserting that the purpose of his employer mandate was to “protect the vaccinated workers from the unvaccinated workers;” which amounts to saying that the vaccines only protect you if others are vaccinated too, which isn’t how vaccines work and would render them entirely worthless if it was.
Biden apparently wants but can’t have it both ways—he can either try to convince the unvaccinated to get vaccinated by touting the impressive protection the vaccines provide or he can play politics by trying to turn the vaccinated against the unvaccinated by depicting the latter as a threat to the former.
A major problem in all this is that too many vaccinated people still feel they are vulnerable (when they aren’t), and too many unvaccinated people still feel they are invulnerable (when they aren’t).
Apart from the possible need for booster shots at some point, the vaccinated are neither threatened by nor a threat to others and the unvaccinated threaten only each other. And any other basis for purposes of decision-making will only have the effect of undermining the incentives for getting vaccinated.
Biden is also jettisoning science under the pretext of following it and commits the same offense he accuses others of when he claims that Republican governors in places like Texas and Florida who oppose school mask mandates are “playing politics with the lives of their citizens, especially children.”
Along these lines, some potentially useful scientific data, for those who at least pretend that it is the data and science rather than politics that should dictate policy: According to CDC statistics cited by Matt Welch in Reason magazine, only 439 out of the 658,754 who have died in America since the start of the pandemic were under 18.
Going further, and as reported in The Wall Street Journal, studies from reputable research centers in England, including the University of Bristol, the University of York, and the University of Liverpool, estimated that the survival rate for children infected with covid is 99.995 percent.
In summarizing these and other data, Welch of Reason notes, “The president is saying explicitly that kids in unmasked environments are unsafe. That would mean every student in Arizona, Utah, Oklahoma, Iowa, Tennessee and Georgia, for starters, plus most in the UK, Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy.”
The odds of a child dying in the car on the way to school are almost certainly higher than their dying from being infected by the virus at school (and also from drowning, cancer, drug overdoses, heart disease, and suffocation, among others on the pediatric Top 10 cause-of-death list).
Biden has now gone further to claim that “for any parent, it doesn’t matter how low the risk of any illness is when it could happen to your child or grandchild,” which is, of course, both false and logically absurd.
Every responsible parent, including this one, makes dozens of cursory risk assessments on behalf of their children every day, in which we judge threats along a continuum. Exceedingly rare diseases from which they are extremely unlikely to die and which we’ve never heard of don’t enter that picture.
We also don’t, contrary to Biden’s implication, operate when it comes to kids on a premise that eschews all risk; rather, we accept a certain amount of it on a daily basis in return for having kids lead normal, fulfilling lives, which includes traveling with us to vacation on airplanes, playing sports, going swimming in lakes and pools, and so on.
Biden’s “it doesn’t matter how low the risk” principle is a close cousin to “if it saves a single life it’s worth it,” which also happens to be one of the dumbest credos ever articulated by human beings because it’s instantly refuted by almost every activity human beings engage in.
Reasonable risk assessment is integral to human existence; otherwise we would never cross a busy street or take a shower (or, by Biden’s logic, permit our children to).
But encouraging people to think in terms of costs/benefits and rationally assess risks is apparently less politically useful than scaring the bejeezus out of parents by exaggerating threats to their kids.
Maybe too many Democrats have come to think that a nation of anxiety addicts will elect more Democrats.