Vaccines

America is a porned-out society. Half of young men and a fifth of young women admit to viewing porn in the past week (millions more do so and then lie to pollsters about it). Prestige cable shows such as Game of Thrones built their popularity through a bevy of brazenly-displayed breasts. The best-selling book of the 2010s was an erotic BDSM novel; the second and third-place spots were taken by its sequels. And the concept of a quick, dirty, cheap high extends outside the domain of sex, which is why the world has food porn, architecture porn, and military porn. And now, enter a new genre: COVID-19 death porn. On Saturday, the Daytona Beach News-Journal noted the death of radio host Marc Bernier after a three-week battle with COVID.

Remember spring 2021? COVID cases dropped as the days lengthened, every balmy, breezy morning bringing happy news of America’s three-vaccine rollout. By the end of the season, vaccination wasn’t just for hospital workers and overweight asthmatics. As temperatures rose into the 70s in the Northeast, where I live, we heralded the arrival of ‘hot vax summer’: the triumphant return of fun to the 20- and 30-somethings whose social lives had been shut down tighter than last year’s Democratic National Convention. After a long, dark winter, hope sprang. Now it looks like hot vax summer didn’t quite pan out for many in our sex-recessed country.

After months of uncertainty, the Centers for Disease Control shifted its policy this week to fully recommend that pregnant and breastfeeding women get vaccinated against COVID-19. The announcement marked a significant shift for expecting mothers, many of whom have struggled to weigh the risks and benefits of taking an experimental vaccine while growing a baby inside. Yet, in announcing the new guidance, the CDC carefully called pregnant and breastfeeding women ‘people’, implying that men, too, can give birth and produce breast milk. You could dismiss this as a harmless bit of inclusion, meant not to offend the trans men (born female-bodied) who are pregnant and breastfeeding.

Until recently, progressive elites had cornered the market in COVID irrationality. They shut down society to prevent one particular threat to human health, oblivious to the costs of that shutdown on the rest of human flourishing. They used a zero-tolerance approach to COVID risk, arguing that if lockdowns prevented just one death from COVID, as New York governor Andrew Cuomo insisted early on, the destruction of social and economic capital would be worth it. They inflated the toll that COVID was allegedly taking on human life, counting hospital admissions and deaths with COVID as hospital admissions and deaths from COVID. They hyped case counts as tantamount to death counts and refused to compare COVID deaths with other sources of human mortality.

The Biden administration is desperate for some fresh ideas as they attempt to convince more Americans to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Between White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Rochelle Walensky, we are constantly hearing about the White House’s latest creative ways to encourage people to get vaccinated. The administration seems eager to push the notion that all of the vaccine holdouts are Trump supporters. Unfortunately for them, recent studies suggest otherwise.

Janet Woodcock, MD Acting Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration 10903 New Hampshire Ave Silver Spring MD 20993-0002 Dear Dr Woodcock, You’ve got a problem. An executive is making unsupported promotional claims for a biological product, indeed one that has yet to be formally licensed by your agency. Doubtless you have dealt with such a violation before. When a pharmaceutical company tries to stretch an efficacy claim beyond the data, you can put a stop to it. You have tools: warning letters, fines, threats of criminal prosecution. But the current situation is a bit thorny. The executive is your boss’s boss. That would be President Joe Biden.

During the Trump years, Fox News was notorious for carrying advertisements with a target audience of one. Dueling ads would denigrate or praise the nation of Qatar. Julián Castro bought time in Bedminster, New Jersey during a presidential visit to blame the president for a mass shooting in El Paso. The Lincoln Project spent millions airing its ads on Fox mostly in the hope that the president would be enraged when he saw them. Now, the New York Times is borrowing the tactic. This time, however, the one-man target is the aged-yet-apparently-immortal head of the Fox Corporation, Rupert Murdoch. For half a decade, multiple NGOs and dozens of journalists have made the destruction of Fox News, or at least the cancellation of its most high-profile jobs, a virtual full-time profession.

The vaccine programs launched this year appear to offer a Happy Ending to the Horrible Story of the COVID-19 Pandemic. But I am cautious. Not because I am ‘antivax’, but because lasting ‘ever afters’ are never written in the language of emotional manipulation and coercive control. Herd immunity, when enough people have either recovered from COVID or been vaccinated, will end the pandemic. The pressure to get there has given us a vaccination drive with an unprecedentedly strong behavioral psychology and emergency response approach. A panoply of persuasions has been deployed to encourage the hesitant, the slow and the complacent. From dating app bonuses to donuts, lotteries to laminated vaccination cards — when do incentives become coercive?

Biden’s new-found support for a temporary waiver of COVID vaccine patents raises another fascinating set of questions. World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus makes the case for a waiver in terms of overwhelming priorities and the inequitable distribution of doses to date — 80 percent to the richest countries. Economic pragmatists add that the faster the whole world is vaccinated, the sooner global trade, including demand for exports from the rich West, will also recover.

The Seychelles has become a place to watch. Known as the world’s most vaccinated nation, ahead of even Israel, a third wave of COVID is hitting the archipelago despite the fact that over 60 percent of its population has been fully vaccinated — and nearly 70 percent have received at least one shot. In April the Seychelles was hopeful it was soon to reach herd immunity. But now 456 new cases reported over three days (the population is approximately 98,000) has cooled optimism there — especially since a third of the new cases were fully vaccinated (the remainder had received only one shot or were unvaccinated). It’s perhaps too soon to draw conclusions, but it doesn’t look like good news for those hoping widespread vaccination will bring about herd immunity.