I recently found myself at a social gathering with a large number of medical professionals present. I expressed the view that the risk-benefit tradeoff for young and healthy people did not necessarily yield a hands-down recommendation to vaccinate. When pressed, I admitted to those present that I was not vaccinated, and explained that I had already had Covid-19, which was shown to confer superior immunity to the vaccines.
The reaction of some of those with a medical background was to immediately urge me to reconsider my decision. One gentleman told me it was best that I just keep my mouth shut rather than comment publicly on topics that I “knew nothing about.” Another doctor explained to me that Covid-19 was a serious matter, that he had seen first-hand. A nurse told me that I did not deserve to be covered by social security if I ended up in one of her ICUs.
At some point over the course of our heated exchange, I suggested that there were some worrying signals in the data of secondary harms associated with the vaccine, such as myocarditis, which might explain why these vaccines were proving to be so controversial. One of the doctors present reassured me that the vaccine was perfectly safe and certainly not more dangerous than other vaccines on the market. He did not offer any evidence to rebut my claim that reported vaccine harms were higher for Covid vaccines than for most other vaccines on the market.
This was my first head-to-head conversation on Covid-19 with a group of medical professionals. The experience was bracing. There seemed to be very little desire in my audience to understand how I had reached my conclusions, or which scientific evidence I was relying upon. Rather, every point at which I deviated from the orthodox opinion of the medical establishment was met with a mix of dismay, discomfort, and condescension.
It seemed that we were doomed to misunderstand each other. Much of what I said was met with shaking heads and rolling eyes, as though things like natural immunity or age-differentiated risk were things that a non-doctor could not possibly grasp, let alone articulate publicly, and less still in front of a room of doctors. My sense was that many - though not all - of my interlocutors were deeply upset that a mere “layperson” was freely opining about matters they alone were entitled to pronounce upon with scientific authority.
Now, it is possible that I formed an excessively gloomy impression of the situation. Perhaps there was more openness to dialogue than I sensed. Perhaps, if I had had a chance to sit down and talk things over with one or two of those present, things would have gone very differently.
All I have to go on, for now, is my experience in that room. What I observed was a flat refusal by most (though not all) of the people in that room with a medical background to engage with my arguments on their merits.
The claims I made about natural immunity and about the need to evaluate the potential benefits of vaccination on a case by case basis were dismissed out of hand, and no serious counter-argument was offered, other than arguments from authority, or general assertions that the ICUs were filling up.
It was even suggested that it was simply inappropriate for me, as a non-doctor, to advance or defend claims about Covid-19 or the Covid vaccine in the presence of doctors.
Not one of the doctors present was an immunologist, virologist, or epidemiologist. But even if they were, I could not understand why scientific claims, such as the claim that immunity from natural exposure to Covid-19 is superior to vaccine-induced immunity, or the claim that hospitalisation risk must be assessed differentially rather than globally, were met with impatience and annoyance, rather than examined with a scientific spirit.
I later talked the matter over with a number of friends, to get a broader perspective. The best explanation we have come up with is that people working in a hospital are confronted with the worst cases of Covid-19 on a first or second-hand basis, and are terrified that their hospital might become overwhelmed.
The topic touches them in a very personal way, and takes its emotional toll. They are understandably desperate to curb the wave of hospitalisations and not see a repeat of previous waves, and this makes them less open to entertaining an open and respectful dialogue with people who pick at the official narrative of the medical establishment, or diverge, however slightly, from its recommendations.
Perhaps the unexpected failure of a 90% vaccination rate to successfully stem hospitalisations has induced in doctors and nurses a sense of renewed urgency and despair to see the remaining 10% of the population vaccinated as soon as possible. Perhaps the understandable desire to get hospitalisations under control has made many medical professionals intolerant toward any questioning, however rational or evidence-based, of the Holy Grail of universal vaccination - what they perceive as their ticket out of the crisis.
I have a lot of sympathy for what doctors and nurses are going through. I analyze evidence - they live through this nightmare first-hand. It probably peeves them to hear someone not directly involved in hospital work expressing opinions on the risks and benefits of vaccines, or the need to apply alternative treatments to cut down hospitalisation rates.
It is understandable that doctors and nurses are emotionally invested in a topic that touches them in a visceral manner. Nonetheless, it seems to me that many medical professionals have allowed their close-up involvement with this disease to dampen their critical spirit and close their mind to the informed opinions of non-medics.
For what it’s worth, I have a friendly piece of advice for my doctor and nurse friends:
Try to separate out the harms of Covid-19 that you have observed in your patients and in your hospital from the correct diagnosis of these harms, and don’t assume that a diagnosis that differs from yours entails a denial of the reality of Covid-19 or its impact on your hospital.
There are valid and important scientific questions concerning the overall efficacy and risk-benefit ratio of vaccination for different populations, the distribution of hospitalisation risk, and the root causes of hospital dysfunctions, that must be investigated. Those of us who investigate these questions may not always come to the same conclusions as you do about the necessity or wisdom of vaccinating the entire population indiscriminately.
We are not alone in our conclusions. Eminent specialists in vaccine risk assessment such as Harvard University’s Dr Martin Kulldorff, and world-renowned epidemiological experts such as Dr Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University recommend targeting high risk populations with this vaccine rather than administering it willy-nilly.
Furthermore, those of us who take a different position to yours on the wisdom of universal vaccination are not “anti-vaccine”: to the contrary, most of us recognise that vaccines have saved millions of lives, and would not hesitate for a moment to avail of a safe and effective vaccine if we saw a reasonable risk-benefit tradeoff.
Nor are we in “denial” about the serious impact of Covid-19 on life and health, or the exhausting impact of the disease on your hospitals. We just assess the root causes of those harms differently to you.
Where you may blame the unvaccinated indiscriminately for what is happening in your hospitals, many of us opposed to universal vaccination reject such a simplification, since Covid risk is highly age- and health-stratified, rather than mapping neatly onto someone’s vaccination status.
Where you blame the 10% of the population that remains unvaccinated for the hospital crisis, we blame regulators for not approving safe and effective experimental treatments for Covid-19 (which have a strong support in clinical trials and the clinical experience of experienced doctors across the world), and a long history of hospital mismanagement for failing to adapt emergency services to winter peaks in hospitalisations.
So next time a non-doctor engages you in a dialogue about vaccination or Covid-19, why not give them the benefit of the doubt, and engage their arguments on their scientific and ethical merits? Why not hear them out, rather than assuming their misgivings about received wisdom amount to a blanket denial of the tough reality of Covid disease?
Maybe your “unorthodox” interlocutor is a “nutjob” who has pulled some crazy theory off the internet. Or maybe, just maybe, you have actually stumbled across an intelligent and well-read individual who has learnt from experts who are at least as learned about these topics as you are. Indeed, there is at least a chance that you might even learn something from this individual.
If you shut him down or treat him as an unworthy impostor, you may never find out, and both of you may have missed out on a valuable learning opportunity.
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As a rule we think too highly of doctors and they certainly think too highly of themselves. They are mere technicians, not philosophers, theologians, or scientists. The average engineer has far more scientific sense than do MDs.
I had a conversastion with someone today on this topic. His theory is that in addition to the mass formation psychosis that affects people's ability to behave rationally and does not depend on their intellect or experience (and so includes medical professionals just as much as anyone else), he suggested that a large part of the pro-vax ideology is based on decades of conditioning that vaccines in general are "safe and effective". Inevitably, no-one is more indoctrinated in this than the doctors and nurses who routinely administer them! They are being advised that the mRNA therapeutics are "vaccines" and that they too are "safe and effective". They simply do not disassociate them from all the others. There is a substantial psychological weight burdening medical professionals, so much so that those who are aware of the mass psychosis are probably wise to the fact that they are far from the best qualified to opine on the matter!