Scott Adams is the creator of the famous cartoon strip, Dilbert. It is a strip whose brilliance derives from close observation and understanding of human behaviour. Some time ago, Scott turned those skills to commenting insightfully and with notable intellectual humility on the politics and culture of our country.
Like many other commentators, he fervently encouraged people to take the Covid vaccine and sympathised with measures to pressure people into doing so.
Recently, however, he posted a video on the topic that has been circulating on social media. It was a mea culpa in which he declared, “The unvaccinated were the winners,” and, to his great credit, “I want to find out how so many of [my viewers] got the right answer about the vaccine and I didn’t.”
“Winners” was perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek: he seemingly means that the unvaccinated do not have to worry about the long-term consequences of having the vaccine in their bodies since enough data concerning the lack of safety of the vaccines have now appeared to demonstrate that, on the balance of risks, the choice not to be vaccinated has been vindicated for individuals without comorbidities.
What follows is a personal response to Scott, which explains how consideration of the information that was available at the time led one person – me – to decline the ‘vaccine’. It is not meant to imply that all who accepted the vaccine made the wrong decision or, indeed, that everyone who declined it did so for good reasons.
Some people have said that the vaccine was created in a hurry. That may or may not be true. Much of the research for mRNA vaccines had already been done over many years, and coronaviruses as a class are well understood so it was at least feasible that only a small fraction of the vaccine development had been hurried.
The much more important point was that the vaccine was rolled out without long-term testing. Therefore one of two conditions applied. Either no claim could be made with confidence about the long-term safety of the vaccine or there was some amazing scientific argument for a once-in-a-lifetime theoretical certainty concerning the long-term safety of this vaccine. The latter would be so extraordinary that it might (for all I know) even be a first in the history of medicine. If that were the case, it would have been all that was being talked about by the scientists; it was not. Therefore, the more obvious, first state of affairs, obtained: nothing could be claimed with confidence about the long-term safety of the vaccine.
Given, then, that the long-term safety of the vaccine was a theoretical crapshoot, the unquantifiable long-term risk of taking it could only be justified by an extremely high certain risk of not taking it. Accordingly, a moral and scientific argument could only be made for its use by those at high risk of severe illness if exposed to Covid. Even the very earliest data immediately showed that I (and the overwhelming majority of the population) was not in the group.
The continued insistence on rolling out the vaccine to the entire population when the data revealed that those with no comorbidities were at low risk of severe illness or death from Covid was therefore immoral and unscientific on its face. The argument that reduced transmission from the non-vulnerable to the vulnerable as a result of mass vaccination could only stand if the long-term safety of the vaccine had been established, which it had not. Given the lack of proof of long-term safety, the mass-vaccination policy was clearly putting at risk young or healthy lives to save old and unhealthy ones. The policy makers did not even acknowledge this, express any concern about the grave responsibility they were taking on for knowingly putting people at risk, or indicate how they had weighed the risks before reaching their policy positions. Altogether, this was a very strong reason not to trust the policy or the people setting it.