Enlightenment Amnesia
My examination of the “vaccine paradox” went up yesterday at Discourse, just as the Senate is preparing to confirm RFK, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services after a series of hearings in which he repeatedly lied to them.
I step back and try to figure out how we got here.
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. It is estimated to have saved three million lives in the US—many more than the 1.2 million lives COVID claimed—and tens of millions of livesglobally.
Yet the immediate result is that resistance to vaccines increased. 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 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?
I look at the evidence for the effectiveness of the covid vaccines and dismiss the various attempt to cast doubt on them. You can read that if you like, but I doubt I have to repeat it for this audience. Maybe this observation will be somewhat new.
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.
In the future, we may do better. The rapidity of developing and testing mRNA vaccines has inspired a new UK-government-led program to develop a 100-day vaccine.
Why would we reject this? I talk a little about online misinformation and the rejection of knowledge, expertise, and fact-checking in our anti-establishment age.
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.”
And so we get to the point where 77 Nobel laureates can come out in opposition to RFK, which would have killed his nomination ten years ago, and now it doesn’t even make a dent.
But my larger answer is a phenomenon that is very familiar to anyone who writes about progress, but which didn’t exactly have a name before.
You may have heard the famous story about church bells ringing 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 US 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.
Since Jason Crawford of Roots of Progress had already written about this, I also quote him, and I gave him a chance to name this phenomenon. He called it “industrial amnesia.”
Read the whole thing, especially the ending, which hits pretty hard. I will be pleasantly surprised and extremely relieved if it all sounds hyperbolic five years from now.
Enlightenment Amnesia
There is reason to think some very bad scenarios are possible. I’ve been warning you about the example of RFK’s role in the measles outbreak in Samoa. Here is a blockbuster report about how that ghoul viewed a large number of unvaccinated children in Samoa as a chance for a “natural experiment” to show that vaccines aren’t really necessary.
Here’s how the experiment turned out.
Months after Kennedy’s visit, the question of what would happen to Samoa’s unvaccinated babies was answered. A measles outbreak swept the country, sickening thousands and killing 83, mostly small children. As measles raged, Kennedy stayed connected to the island, writing to the prime minister to raise concerns about the vaccine and providing medical guidance to a local anti-vaccine activist who posted false claims about the vaccination campaign and promoted unproven alternative cures.
If the US Senate were doing its job, Kennedy’s nomination would never have gotten off the ground. But they’re not doing their job.
Part of the problem is that we’re suffering from a form of political amnesia, in which people forget why we had separation of powers, the rule of law, civil service reforms, and a whole host of other liberal norms and institutions.
Here’s a paragraph I cut from my vaccine article.
This isn’t just a rebellion against the current “establishment.” It’s a revolt against the entire modern world. Opposition to vaccination is part of a perverse “wellness” movement that rejects just about every scientific advance in the field of health and medicine going back 700 years, from quarantine to vaccination to pasteurization, in the form a fad for “raw milk” that has not been treated to kill off bacterial contamination. The latest craze is “raw water” from natural springs—or at least it is assumed to be from natural springs. According to a New York Times report, “In 2022, 19 people in Montana became ill, including one who was hospitalized, after drinking from what they thought was a spring but was actually creek drainage.” Maybe a little water testing and treatment is not such a bad idea, after all.
The idea of a “revolt against the modern world” is the biggest big picture here.
We are suffering from what you might call Enlightenment amnesia. The Enlightenment produced a sweeping set of reforms in how we do everything: how we organize government, how we debate ideas, how we fight disease, how we produce goods, and on and on and on. The result has been a vast and ongoing improvement in human life, which people simultaneously deny and take for granted. Then they grow annoyed with all of these norms and rules, and they indulge in false nostalgia for various imagined pre-Enlightenment utopias.
So they are determined to go back and try all these leftovers of our barbarous past: unpasteurized milk, information passed by rumor and folklore, rule by a strongman.
It is an experiment people seem very determined to make right now, and we can only hope they are so horrified with the results that they quickly realize it is all a mistake.