No Man Is an Island

How to avoid a one-dimensional analysis of vaccine risks

"holding hands" by waithamai is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Introduction for regular readers

We probably all know someone who has refused to accept the vaccines against COVID-19 on trust. Why not share this guide with them to help them do it the right way?

Introduction for new readers

Welcome to Sharpen Your Axe! I am an investigative journalist with thousands of exclusive bylines to my name on an international subscription service read by financial professionals. I regularly have to get to grips with complicated material about finance and business. It is hard! This is a project to share simplified versions of tried-and-tested research techniques with people who want to think critically about the news.

It is great that you want to take your first steps in amateur research. This short guide is designed to help you avoid common research mistakes when thinking about vaccines. It is easy to get this wrong. If you read the article below and follow some of the links, you will find plenty of material that will hopefully point you in the right direction. Good luck with your research!

Risk analysis

If you want to work out the risks of getting vaccinated against COVID-19 yourself, the first step is to think about your methodology before you start crunching any numbers. Do you understand Bayesian statistics? Have you practiced applying it to other questions? Do you know how to avoid the base rate fallacy? If not, please struggle with the basics of statististics before you even look up the raw data.

Have you been trained on how to do a literature review? If so, do you understand how exponential growth works? Have you read about the history of smallpox in the Americas and other cases when new diseases have swept through populations without any immunity? Have you thought about the risk of long COVID?

Doing research at a decent level is often a humbling experience. Have you checked your ego at the door? Also, have you eliminated any conspiratorial assumptions from your work? Are you sure your fear of needles isn’t a factor in your analysis? Are you prepared to abandon your starting position if your findings go against your assumptions?

Secondly, research is a team sport. Do you know any trained statisticians or medical professionals who can check your sums for you? Thirdly, will you be able to cope with the inevitable cognitive dissonance (an uncomfortable emotion we all feel when someone contradicts us) if the person who checks your work tells you that you are over-estimating the risks of getting vaccinated or under-estimating the risks of not getting vaccinated?

Even if people who do their own research on vaccine risks take these steps, my feeling is that their work is often a little one-dimensional. It tends to be all “me, me, me,” with very little solidarity for other members of the community. The cliché about the vaccines not stopping people from getting infected tends to do a lot of the heavy lifting. In fact, I think there are five reasons why healthy people should consider getting vaccinated for the sake of others.

Leadership

You might well have a strong immune system and be at low risk of dying from COVID. However, other members of your community might look up to you, particularly if you are a personal trainer or yoga teacher or world-champion kickboxer or have a large following on social media. Some members of your community might be worried about vaccines, but have a much worse risk profile than you. If you loudly and confidently discuss the alleged risks of vaccines on social media, they could be less likely to get the jab. They might die as a result.

Infections

The vaccines are designed to prevent serious illness, hospitalization and death, as we all know. However, researchers have also found that fully vaccinated people are much less likely to contract the delta variant than the unvaccinated, which makes them less likely to spread it. In other words, being unvaccinated increases the risks of infecting those around you. Some of them might die.

Overloading hospitals

At the beginning of the pandemic, people who understood exponential growth got very scared at the prospect of too many people getting sick at the same time. Intensive care units (ICUs) can only cope with a certain number of very sick people, as we saw in India as the delta variant took hold. If too many people remain unvaccinated, a new wave of the virus can quickly crash ICUs. Innocent people are likely to die as a direct result of too many unvaccinated people falling ill at the same time.

Firewall

We can never get 100% compliance with any vaccines. A small percentage of the population will have to avoid getting one because of serious health issues. The way to keep these people safe is for as many healthy people as possible to get vaccinated. If we all get vaccinated, we can act as a firewall to lower the risks of infection for our more vulnerable neighbours. If too many people refuse to get vaccinated, some people battling serious illnesses might die as a result.

Mutations

Finally, viruses mutate fast. If we can get as many people vaccinated as possible, we can reduce the rate of mutation. Having large pools of unvaccinated people creates the perfect conditions for new mutations, as we have seen recently with omicron. Of course, the latest strain appears to be milder for most individuals after they catch it but more dangerous for communities because it is so easy to catch.

The slippery nature of omicron makes it particularly important not to indulge in a one-dimensional risk analysis. Even if you insist on thinking about the risks to you instead of those around you, research shows that booster shots appear to be very effective against the newest variant.

But what about the next variation? If the virus mutates again, it could be even more dangerous. Thinking about the risk of mutatations will be a hard lesson for some. We need to vaccinate the whole world to keep everyone safe. Not only do we need to persuade people in the west who are hesitant about vaccines to get jabbed for the sake of others, we also need to go into remote areas, extremely poor countries and war-zones.

The pandemic has shown us that humanity is united in a very fundamental way, despite our many disagreements, as mystics throughout the ages have always told us. In 1623, English metaphysical poet and clergyman John Donne wrote a series of meditations and prayers while convalescing from a nearly fatal illness, probably typhus. The most famous was Meditation XVII. Even if you remember the text from school, it worth re-reading the most famous passage in the light of the pandemic:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Nationalists, populists and anti-vaxxers might be surprised to hear that you can’t “build a wall” to protect the allegedly good part of humanity from the allegedly bad part. Both are connected in a deep and fundamental way and always will be, even if we rarely agree on core issues. Happy New Year and see you next week!

Further reading

Beautiful fusion music to listen to as you dig into the links below

Meditation XVII in full

Economist Alex Tabarrok defends vaccine passports from a libertarian perspective

Isaiah Berlin’s famous 1959 essay on two different concepts of liberty provides a useful framework to understand the difference between the freedom to refuse a vaccine and the freedom to live your life without getting infected by unvaccinated people

The free-rider problem in social sciences

Did you know that the Nazis opposed vaccine mandates because they wanted people from ethnic minorities to die from disease?

Contrarianism is very powerful when done right

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated! If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the first-anniversary post, which includes links to a free book.

[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.