Covid, Public Health, and Civic Virtue

Following up last week's post

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash

Last week

I objected to the slogan “Science is Real.” I found it nearly meaningless, and alienating to vaccine resisters. I talked about missteps in the campaign to unite the country against Covid.

One reader responded: “You’re soft-pedaling the mistakes made by public health.” 

Another: I was soft-pedaling the forces of disinformation.

Fair points.

I’ll start with the second. The world of misinformation and disinformation is vast. Some of it is simply evil. Toward that part of the picture, given the lives that were lost, outrage is more than understandable. But for practical and principled reasons, I focus, as Maya Goldenberg does, on the those who simply see the world differently. The evil and the delusional are beyond persuasion, but the ordinary dissenter might listen – if treated respectfully. 

The first comment came from a public health professional. She is active in the academic world and has worked setting up and administering vaccine clinics. She reminds me that public health is a human activity, and so it’s fallible. Like science, it’s self-critical. Reviews of what happened began as soon as 2021. Inevitably, mistakes were made simply out of ignorance. Cloth masks seemed perfectly reasonable at first, but now we know they’re ineffective. That sort of mistake is unavoidable; we’re always learning. But failures of transparency could, and should, have been avoided. One example is that the public was not initially advised to wear masks, even though they were known to help. The reasoning was understandable: The shortage of masks for medical professionals would be made worse by surging demand from laypeople. In other words, officials feared that encouraging general mask use would increase deaths in health care settings.

The trouble with any kind of deception is always in long term effects. When the truth came out, trust in public health officials decreased. The field’s success depends on public cooperation, which depends on trust, and that depends on honesty.

Similar well-meaning mistakes were made throughout the pandemic.  Lots, of course, was done well, and at great personal cost to workers in the field. But acknowledging missteps, tracing them to their roots, is essential for a better future. The field is grappling with what went wrong, and we should be grateful that they are.

For more on this sort of issue, see Paul Offit’s Vaccinated.  Dr. Offit is a strong proponent of vaccines, and therefore worried when campaigns go off course.

Civic Virtue

As I said last week, once the vaccines came out I knew that I wanted them. To protect myself, of course, but also to protect those around me.

I have been surprised that public discussions of the vaccines said so little about out duties to one another.  Even the evangelical Christians who resisted the vaccine never seemed to consider vaccination for the sake of others. I kept remembering that the central narrative of Christianity is self-sacrifice; I wondered why the welfare of others never seemed to enter the calculus. But I don’t know enough about their rationale to say more, and it’s possible that I missed something.

A friend’s story illustrates the point nicely. She has a history of extreme, in fact dangerous, reactions to vaccines, and has foregone some (for instance, the shingles vaccine) out of self-protection. In 2021, however, she did not hesitate to be vaccinated, to protect herself as well as those around her. Now, in 2023, the vaccine provides only a few months of protection, and the disease has become less deadly. What’s best for her own sake is less clear. She is nevertheless considering a booster shot, for the sake of the community.

More hindsight

Schools should have reopened much sooner.  Many factors went into bad policy, but one was opposition by teachers’ unions. Teachers suffered from the closures (try teaching a class of 25 by Zoom). But they were fearful, and – to my point here – mistrustful of advice from on high.

Finally, a link to an interview with Michael Mina. Dr. Mina is an immunologist and epidemiologist. He argues that much of what happened during Covid was foreseeable, given that no one on earth was immune to this new pathogen. He argues that we should have been better prepared, for the way the disease spread and for the microbe’s mutating. But, he points out, epidemiologists, immunologists, and virologists know different things and don’t always communicate. In other words, science is sometimes done in silos.

The interview is valuable reading for many reasons. It complicated my understanding of immunity (a gradient rather than a binary). It says surprising things about what’s happening with measles and chicken pox, both relevant to the future of Covid.

There will be another pandemic. (For one thing, we are constantly increasing our contact with wild animals as we destroy their habitats; contact with them is contact with their pathogens.) The more we understand what went right, and what wrong, with this one, the better we will do with the next.

We will do better. But a few of the old mistakes will persist, and we’ll make some new ones. We remain only human.

To comment, or read the comments of others, click below.