View this post on the web at [link removed]

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 [ [link removed] ]. It is estimated to have saved three million lives [ [link removed] ] in the U.S.—many more than the 1.2 million lives [ [link removed] ] COVID claimed—and tens of millions of lives [ [link removed] ] globally.
Yet the immediate result is that resistance to vaccines increased [ [link removed] ]. 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 [ [link removed] ] 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?
A Pandemic Interrupted
The effectiveness of the vaccine is well supported by facts and evidence. For instance, a 2022 study [ [link removed] ] in the New England Journal of Medicine (see a summary here [ [link removed] ]) found that COVID vaccines were “52.2% effective at preventing infection and 66.8% effective at preventing hospitalization.” In other words, if you were vaccinated, you were half as likely to get the disease, and if you did get it, you were a third as likely to suffer a serious case. The effectiveness of the vaccine fades over time—but then again, so does the natural immunity conferred by getting full-blown COVID.
You can see the result in this chart [ [link removed] ] of COVID death rates for the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated. The differential has narrowed in recent years as the pandemic recedes and far fewer people are getting COVID in the first place. But notice the giant spike in January of 2022, when the unvaccinated were dying at a rate 10 times as high as the vaccinated. That is how we know this was a successful vaccine, and that’s when a lot of lives were saved.
A flurry of bad arguments has attempted to bury these facts in the public mind. Consider the complaint that the COVID vaccines are not “real” vaccines because they don’t provide “sterilizing immunity”—that is, they don’t completely prevent transmission of the disease. But this is based on ignorance about how “real” vaccines work. For example, Jonas Salk’s famous polio vaccine didn’t provide sterilizing immunity [ [link removed] ], either. Yet it kept the polio virus from attacking the nervous system, preventing paralysis and death.
But this issue is a red herring, because other vaccines such as the HPV vaccine do provide sterilizing immunity—and more than that, a 2020 study [ [link removed] ] showed that the HPV vaccine’s adoption resulted in a 90% decrease in cervical cancer. Yet this vaccine was also targeted by a misinformation campaign. Some of you may remember that it briefly became an issue in the 2012 Republican primaries, when antivaccine talking points were promoted by Sarah Palin [ [link removed] ] and others in the populist faction of the party that has since become dominant.
(Other objections, such as complaints about inconsistent or inaccurate early CDC recommendations about, for example, masking, are also red herrings, because the people who tout these arguments then tend to credulously accept the assertions of vaccine skeptics who have been wrong far, far more often [ [link removed] ] than the experts.)
The success of the COVID vaccine can be seen in the degree to which we no longer worry about the disease. That in itself is not too remarkable. All pandemics eventually fade. What was really different this time is that the COVID vaccine cut the progress of the disease short. Before COVID, the fastest time for developing and deploying a vaccine was four years [ [link removed] ]. At that pace, we would just have gotten our first COVID shots in 2024. But the new vaccines were deployed in less than a year, before the end of 2020.
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.
The Little Box That Lies to Us
In the future, we may do better. The rapidity of developing and testing mRNA vaccines has inspired a new U.K.-government-led program to develop a 100-day vaccine [ [link removed] ]. We might be able to do this for the next pandemic—but not if the antivaccine movement controls our health agencies. We have a new technology that has just demonstrated its ability to save lives. So why are popular leaders vowing to clamp down on it?
Part of the reason is that we are swimming in misinformation. 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 [ [link removed] ].”
All the old media “gatekeepers” have been cast down in the climax of our age of anti-institutionalism. I recently saw the news that 77 Nobel laureates [ [link removed] ] in science and medicine have signed a letter to the Senate warning against the confirmation of RFK Jr.—and so far as anyone can tell, it had no impact. For many people, it will have the opposite effect to what was intended. This warning will be dismissed precisely because it comes from Nobel laureates, who represent “the establishment.”
The New York Times documents [ [link removed] ] a significant decrease in childhood vaccinations starting in 2020. Nationally, vaccination rates have decreased from 95% almost down to 92%. But in some states, the numbers are dropping more rapidly, and in a few they are falling below 85%, “creating new pockets of students no longer protected by herd immunity.” If most people are vaccinated, a disease cannot infect enough people to spread quickly, which indirectly protects the unvaccinated. But if vaccination rates fall low enough, outbreaks will become more common.
People who reject modern interventions and wax poetic about a “natural” lifestyle ignore the brutality of a natural rate of infectious disease. As economist and Our World in Data founder Max Roser puts it [ [link removed] ], “Humanity’s history is a continuous battle between us and the microbes. For most of our history, we were on the losing side.” Measles, for example, used to kill 2.6 million people per year. After widespread vaccination, it kills only 83,000 a year globally, and in recent decades, there has been an average of 160 cases per year—not deaths, but cases—in the U.S. A childhood killer has been essentially eliminated.
Industrial Amnesia
This forgotten history suggests one of the main drivers of the current vaccine paradox. People turned against vaccines after COVID simply because the pandemic required them to think about vaccines, which they haven’t done for a long time. And because they haven’t done it for such a long time, they have forgotten—or never learned in the first place—why vaccines existed, what problem they solved.
You may have heard the famous story about church bells ringing [ [link removed] ] 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 U.S. 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.
Jason Crawford of Roots of Progress has written [ [link removed] ] about how understanding progress requires us to appreciate what is not there.
Life is convenient, comfortable, predictable, safe, and clean, in a way that’s hard for any of us to appreciate. We don’t smell the stench of sewage or horses in the streets, we aren’t burned by the sun while laboring in the fields, we don’t feel the weight of a pail of water as we carry it back from the well. We don’t worry about whether the crops will fail from drought or frost, or whether the creek will flood and wash out the footbridge, or whether we’ll have enough firewood to last the winter, or whether a brother will be lost at sea on his two-month voyage across the Atlantic, or whether a child will die from a scrape by a rusty nail.
I asked Crawford to give this phenomenon a name, and he suggested “industrial amnesia.” It is precisely because the technological and industrial system of the modern world protects us so well from the rigors and horrors of the premodern age that we are able to forget those problems ever existed. This gives us the luxury of scrounging around for anything we don’t like about the system and clamoring that we need to tear it all down.
That’s the solution to our paradox. It is precisely because the COVID vaccine was developed and deployed so rapidly, precisely because the pandemic was interrupted in its first year and killed many millions fewer than it might have, that the online disinformation network has been able to dismiss the whole thing as an invented threat and pretend that the cure is the real threat.
Rows of Tiny Coffins
Another reason people were able to dismiss the pandemic is because COVID disproportionately killed the elderly and almost universally spared children. It is a macabre element of human nature that we tend to value the lives of the young more than those of the old.
But most diseases are not so kind. Check out the story [ [link removed] ] of an outbreak of measles in Samoa a few years back, following a visit from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a campaign by those who oppose vaccines. The disease killed dozens of small children, and the image that jumps out at me from this report—and from other stories [ [link removed] ] about measles outbreaks—is “rows of tiny coffins.”
It is possible to solve this paradox and overcome industrial amnesia through education, imparting more appreciation for the modern world and its scientific and technological systems. Or we can relearn all the old lessons the hard way, with rows of tiny coffins.

Unsubscribe [link removed]?