On the Right's Anxiety: Vaccine Mandates, Lockdowns, Conspiracy Theories
A writer friend sent texted me the Irish writer Paul Kingnorth’s newsletter this week with the intent of providing me with a well-articulated conservative view of vaccine mandates and other elements of Western countries’ Covid policies. That view, in a word, is that Western governments have had something other than our health in mind in forming these policies. If nothing else, his aim was that I sympathize with those attracted or committed to positions like Kingnorth’s.
“The logic of Kingsnorth’s argument is rather simple,” my friend wrote.
1) Authorities justify mandates and passports by claiming that it’s the only way to stop the spread.
2) There is abundant evidence that the vaccines do not stop the spread.
3) Authorities have known this (2) was the case for quite a while.
4) Therefore, they are justifying policy based on claims they know to be false, which necessarily means other motivations are at play.
The syllogism seems, at least to many conservatives, to be sound. About that my friend is quite right. (1) is obviously true, and if (2) is true, mandates, passports, lockdowns and the rest would indeed be unnecessary.
If in turn (3) is true (and it would stand a good chance of being so), whether or not their motivations are as insidious as conservatives fear, (4) is too.
Kingnorth’s claim then it dependent upon whether there is “abundant” evidence that vaccines do not stop the spread of Covid. Is there peer-reviewed evidence that this is so? Indeed there is…or seems to be. In September the European Journal of Epidemiology published a paper by S.V. Subramanian and Akhil Kumar that argued that increases in Covid-19 case counts over a given seven-day period are unrelated to levels of vaccination in a given country. During the period Subramanian and Kumar discuss, Israel, Iceland, and Portugal—some of the most vaccinated countries in the world—have among the highest case counts per million in the world. By itself this paper makes Kingsnorth’s argument look unassailable.
Unless you talk to the authors. Mother Jones, for example, did. To be sure, they are not a rag known for welcoming all opinions. (Neither is conservative media, and that’s true by definition.) But they noticed that their conclusions in the paper were not, as conservatives had billed it, that vaccines should be abandoned. Quite the opposite. They should be supplemented by other “pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions.” MJ rightly sees masks and lockdowns as being in the latter category.
Further, other problems surface for Kingsnorth’s argument as soon as you open the New York Times Covid tracker. Across the US the vaccinated aren’t just between 11 and 15 times less likely to be hospitalized or die from Covid. They’re also 11 (or more) times less likely to get Covid in the first place. That would seem to be true even with the Delta variant.
Is it possible that other factors have skewed the NYT’s numbers? Certainly. Perhaps liberals and the vaccinated are more careful and take better precautions to avoid getting Covid. Perhaps the unvaccinated tend to cluster in regions, industries, and other social groupings in which taking precautions is more difficult.
But if it’s true that we can’t yet get to the bottom of the NYT US numbers, it’s blatantly obvious that Subramanian and Kumar’s paper cannot justify conservative libertarian ideology (or libertinism) regarding Covid. So many possible other factors present themselves that could lead away from Kingsnorth’s conclusion that enumerating them would be tedious. But a few seem necessary to name: population density; frequency of mask usage; average building ventilation; climate and whether people tend to live outside; lockdowns; percentage of people who in the country who believe in Covid conspiracy theories; average age of population; obesity rate; average occupancy per square foot per household.
Doubtless there are many more factors that we could consider. But while Subramanian does not think that vaccine mandates are the best policy route, he argues that vaccines themselves are an indispensable part of our arsenal in fighting Covid. And still more importantly, there are far fewer factors that might alter the implications of NYT’s Covid tracker’s data than there are Subramanian and Kumar’s.
Ergo, in following the logic of Kingsnorth’s argument, we never get to the conspiratorial parts (4). We get stuck on (2). Vaccines may not stop the spread as much as we hoped around Christmas of last year. And there is indeed conflicting data that scientists will doubtless be examining for a long time.
But “abundant” evidence for the failure of vaccines there is not. There is, rather, still solid evidence—even from the conservatives’ favorite sources—that vaccines work.