BAN #383: A pandemic of the anti-vaxxers

13 December 2021 Issue #383

December 13, 2021

[The planetary nebula M 2-9, winds from a dying star. Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Legacy Archive / Judy Schmidt]

Blog Jam

[A fuzzy blob marks the place where a star is being born near the edge of the Milky Way’s disk. From Tuesday’s article. Credit: NASA / NSF / 2MASS / UMass / IPAC-Caltech]

Tuesday 7 December, 2021: Star birth at the galaxy's edge

Piece of mind

I have opinions. I try to base them on evidence.

My friend Pamela Gay is an astronomer and science outreacher extraordinaire. Her contributions to both the fields of science and science communication are significant and wonderful.

And now she’s made a contribution to word coinage. It was a typo, an accident, but — as often happens in science — one that is better than the original word.

 

She was praising vaccinations in reducing sickness and death by COVID-19 while lamenting how hospitals are still at or beyond capacity. She wrote that hospitals were “everwhelmed”.

Obviously she meant “overwhelmed”, but I think this word works better.

We have gone through cycles of increasing and decreasing waves of infection in the United States, but the one constant has been how hospitals are crammed full of COVID-19 patients. At first it could’ve been anybody, but as months went by after the vaccines were introduced it became clear that the vast majority of people hospitalized, and those who died, were unvaccinated.

This is still true, despite the vaccines first being given emergency authorization for use in the US fully one year ago, on December 10, 2020. As of one year later, Dec. 10, 2021, 71% of Americans have had at least one shot, and 60% both. I don’t know how many have had the booster (I got mine a week ago).

As of that same date there are 333,800,000 people in the US. Not worrying too much about kids too young to be inoculated and other confounding factors, this rate means something like 100 million people have not been vaccinated at all for COVID.

One. Hundred. Million.

Again, some are children, some are immunocompromised, some are allergic to vaccine components. But the vast majority of this number is made up of people who are anti-vax.

Back in the day those people slanted somewhat liberal; thank Oprah and Jenny McCarthy for that. But conservatives got on this specific anti-science boat when a Gardasil vaccine was developed for HPV, and the numbers became more evenly divided ideologically.

There’s no doubt, however, that today those numbers are heavily slanted towards the right-wing.

This graphic is damning, showing how screwed up politics has promoted anti-science so rabidly that people are dying in great numbers because of it.

We’ve all read it, seen, heard it, but take a moment to really absorb it: Tens of millions of people in the United States of America in the year 2021 are so virulently anti-science that they are literally virulent. They deny the vaccines are effective or that COVID-19 even exists with their (again literally) last breath.

That makes me incandescently angry for many, many reasons. One is selfish; I have family members who are immunocompromised, and these people put them at risk. Another is that denial of science is something I have fought vigorously for decades, and to see us slip so far backwards that millions of people would rather die than admit to basic science is galling.

And also because cynical forces in this country — the GOP, Fox “news”, Tucker Carlson, ad infinitum ad ipsum nauseum — have hypocritically and with intent caused huge suffering by lying repeatedly for years to the public, and a large swath of that public has lapped it all up and internalized it. In their arrogance or in the iron grip of their partisanship they think they know better than the doctors, scientists, researchers, nurses, health care supporters, and hundreds of thousands of others who have devoted their lives to fighting health crises like this.

I keep hearing that this is the pandemic of the vaccinated. But that’s garbage. It’s a pandemic of the anti-vaxxers. If people got their shots and masked up, this pandemic would’ve been over months ago. Instead, we still have a vast pool of incubators for the virus. Evolution being what it is, those viruses mutate. Most mutations are harmless or detrimental to the virus, but some are beneficial to it, and those prosper. So we get Delta, and Omicron, and and and.

If there were no reservoir of hosts for the virus, those mutations would be far fewer in number, and the odds of a breakout variant far lower. We’d be done.

Yes, some people being hospitalized have been fully vaccinated, and this is a point loudly made by the far right. But this graph shows why that claim is misleading, if not an outright lie:

A small fraction of vaccinated people get infected, but the vast majority don’t. The reason we see any at all is because the pool of vaccinated people is so big. And again, the vast majority of hospitalizations are from unvaccinated people. Too many of them proudly so.

My friend John Scalzi, as usual, has an excellent piece with his thoughts on that, and I urge you to read it. It’s from August 2021 but still holds true about what happens when anti-vaxxers die from COVID-19. I’ve pointed out many times: It’s not ironic, it’s inevitability.

[Number of active cases of COVID-19 in the US starting in February of 2020. That should’ve flattened and zeroed out months ago. Instead, today numbers are increasing again with the Omicron variant. This pandemic is far from over. Graph from Worldometer.]

And while these people get sick and fill up hospital beds, I have two elderly parents about whom I worry should they fall and injure themselves, or have some other emergent situation that requires hospitalization. Colorado hospitals are still full, some over capacity, and now, today, that’s all because of anti-vaxxers who needlessly occupy beds which others desperately need.

I remember when the vaccines became available; so many of us were eager to schedule them, excited with anticipation when the scheduling opened up, and exuberant to receive them so much that there was a flood of photos on social media of people getting them (from me included).

That was in early spring of this year. It’s two seasons later, and here we are. And so the most galling thing of all: It need not have been this way.

[My mask, after too much use. Credit: Phil Plait]

A final thought.

I got a mask in summer of 2020*. I remember wondering how long I would need it, and when it would be safe to put it away, a sad memory of a global pestilence that would one day be in the history books.

I noticed the other day as I took it off after returning home from shopping that it was getting frayed; one of the flaps that holds the string was coming undone from use.

I’ve had that mask so long that it’s become tattered. If not for anti-vax sentiment I could’ve put that mask away months ago.

Everwhelmed, indeed.

If you are not vaccinated yet, please talk to your board-certified health care professional about it. The booster is now widely available, and children under 5 are now eligible as well. Do it for yourself, do it for your loved ones, and do it for people who may eventually need one of those hospital beds.

* Note: Cloth masks are now being downplayed in favor of paper masks, depending on the mask. I just picked up a bunch of 3M Aura N95s, but haven’t been out and about yet to test them. When I do I’ll report back.

Et alia

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