A Good Idea Gone Bad
/An idea is good or bad depending on two things: first, does it accomplish a good outcome? And second, is it feasible? If it’s not possible, it isn’t a good idea. In public affairs, feasibility often comes down to whether or not citizens support the idea and are willing to help make it work.
Examples abound. Recycling is a good idea, and communities all across America have tried various schemes for doing it. Those various schemes have succeeded or failed depending on whether people in the community cooperated. Did they separate the glass from the plastics? Did they separate the clear glass from the colored glass? Did they rinse out the food containers before tossing them in the recycle bin? Some recycling programs failed because they asked the people to do too much.
There are plenty of other instances where good ideas have caught on and been successful. Traffic roundabouts are a good low-tech idea and they’re catching on throughout the US. Drivers are puzzled the first time they encounter one, but soon become familiar and use them cheerfully. Self-serve checkout at grocery and retail stores is another good idea, and people make it successful by being willing to scan their own items and pay honestly.
An idea that has widespread public support can be successful -- and confer real benefit on society -- even when the idea itself has no real wisdom to it. Consider the preference, in the US and most nations, for driving on the right side of the road. Realistically, the right side is no better than the left. But there is tremendous advantage in everyone cooperating and doing it the same way.
Consensus and cooperation, then, bring community benefit.
A good idea that is likely to fail from lack of cooperation is the massive nationwide vaccination campaign against coronavirus. To be successful, that process needs for a sufficient number of people get the vaccination and make themselves ineligible as carriers. But it looks like not enough people are going to get the shots. There will be plenty of people walking around spreading the disease, and coronavirus will remain active.
The New York Times published an article showing that, since April 2021, fewer people have been getting the shots. At the time I write this (first week of May, 2021) about 148-million American have gotten at least one coronavirus shot. That sounds like a lot, but it is only 45% of eligible people. That’s not enough to accomplish the level of vaccine coverage that is described as ‘herd immunity’:
Experts now calculate the herd immunity threshold to be at least 80 percent. If even more contagious variants develop, or if scientists find that immunized people can still transmit the virus, the calculation will have to be revised upward again.
Polls show that about 30 percent of the U.S. population is still reluctant to be vaccinated. That number is expected to improve but probably not enough. “It is theoretically possible that we could get to about 90 percent vaccination coverage, but not super likely, I would say,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
So, we have a community solution that could provide a widespread community benefit — something good for the entire national population. But it is likely to fail because too many citizens refuse to go along with the recommendation.
Of course, there are many reasons why people refuse the vaccine. Cost isn’t one, because the shots are free. But there are reasons. Derek Thompson, writing for The Atlantic, offers some insight from his conversations with refusers. He says, to begin with, that the people who decline to take the vaccine are often people who haven’t let the pandemic cramp their style.
The no-vaxxers I spoke with just don’t care. They’ve traveled, eaten in restaurants, gathered with friends inside, gotten COVID-19 or not gotten COVID-19, survived, and decided it was no big deal. What’s more, they’ve survived while flouting the advice of the CDC, the WHO, Anthony Fauci, Democratic lawmakers, and liberals, whom they don’t trust to give them straight answers on anything virus-related.
The no-vaxxers’ reasoning is motivated too. Specifically, they’re motivated to distrust public-health authorities who they’ve decided are a bunch of phony neurotics, and they’re motivated to see the vaccines as a risky pharmaceutical experiment, rather than as a clear breakthrough that might restore normal life (which, again, they barely stopped living). This is the no-vaxxer deep story in a nutshell: I trust my own cells more than I trust pharmaceutical goop; I trust my own mind more than I trust liberal elites.
Thompson’s interviews show that a share of the vaccine refusers don’t fear the consequences of the disease (to themselves) enough to get the vaccine. Along with that, they don’t accept the authority of the people telling them to do it:
“I’ve lost all faith in the media and public-health officials,” said a 24-year-old in Brooklyn, said. And, from a truck driver in Colorado, “It might sound crazy, but I’d rather go to Twitter and check out a few people I trust than take guidance from the CDC, or WHO, or Fauci.”
I can understand the pushback against Dr. Fauci. He knows more than anybody else about the spread of disease and how to curtail an epidemic. But that seems to be all he cares about. Whatever cost to ordinary people in terms of lost income, lost opportunities, ruined business, lost humanity, lost life — Dr. Fauci has been willing to demand that American citizens pay it in order to accomplish his epidemiologic goal. There is a principle in social services that clients don’t care how much an expert knows until they know how much the expert cares. Fauci fails to show America that he cares about them, and it has diminished his stature.
But Fauci is just one voice. Thompson discovers that many vaccine refusers also won’t listen to the Center for Disease Control, or their state governor, or any other medical expert. That’s bad. Knowing how to find credible expert knowledge, and then to trust it, is a necessary epistemological skill in the modern world.
Another investigative writer, Dan Diamond, reports in the Washington Post that some former no-vaxxers have changed their minds and gotten the shots. Here are some of their reasons:
a 61-year-old small-business owner changed her mind after watching a convincing interview with a doctor explaining why the shots are safe.
a sports fan accepted the shots after the New York Yankees announced that fans would need to show proof of a negative coronavirus test or their vaccination card before being admitting into Yankee Stadium this season.
a mother of a child with a rare health condition got the shot, so she could be sure to stay health and able to take care of her child.
My own decision was to get the shots as soon as they were available. It was not because I feared the disease, because I live in a rural area and am working from home. I don’t have any elderly or immunocompromised relatives, so I’m not worried about passing the disease on to any loved ones, either. To be perfectly honest, I took the shots as soon as I could because it pleased me to be a good citizen and to act in a civic-minded way.
But there appear to be a good chance that the public health goal of herd immunity will fail and the disease will stick around because too few others feel as I do.
