Why the anti-vaccine sentiment persists – The refusal to examine data – The increasing rate of hospitalizations – Marjorie Taylor Greene’s love for her fellow-Georgians – Evening statistics
I have written a good deal in these pages against the anti-vaxxers, but in one respect I can understand where they are, as we say in the U.S., “coming from.” There is a good deal of arrogance among those who would dictate to them and to the populace generally as to what they should and should not do, which naturally rubs some people the wrong way. A couple of months ago Dr. Fauci said that “attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” Quite frankly, Dr. Fauci is not the embodiment of all that science is capable of achieving. He has had a long and distinguished career, but that is all the more reason to be wary announcing himself infallible. It is not for refusing to conform to the accepted medical wisdom of the day that I blame in the anti-vaxxers; the accepted medical wisdom of any age is far from reliable. For example, over the course of many centuries blood-letting was used as a response to many different diseases. This is not quite the barbarous practice that its reputation would lead one to believe; in some cases it might have counteracted the effects of hypertension. But in the long run it undeniably did more harm than good. During much of the history of human medicine, to quote Charles Reade’s “The Cloister and the Hearth, “for one Mr. Malady killed, three fell by Dr. Remedy.”
My quarrel with the anti-vaxxers, then, is not that they challenge the accepted wisdom of contemporaneous medical experts but that they refuse to accept or even to look at the evidence of the data that are available to everyone, regardless of whether or not they are scientists. The ratio of unvaccinated to vaccinated patients requiring hospitalization varies from one locality to another, but the range is 999:1 to 19:1. Similarly, the range of those who have succumbed to the disease is 499:1 to 15 2/3:1. No one can be definitely proven as having died as a result of having received the vaccines and the number of adverse reactions to any of them that are not limited and temporary appear to be 1 in 200,000 at the most. And it is not as if we are dealing with a small statistical sampling emerging from one or two isolated laboratories. In the U. S. alone, nearly 168 million people have been fully vaccinated. Any fears that the anti-vaxxers about the vaccines’ effects in light of this evidence are, to say the least, overblown.
Our hospitals are now clogged with cases that for the most part consist of people who have resisted the vaccines. In North Texas (including Dallas and Ft. Worth), no pediatric ICU beds are available; at this point any child who is materially injured in a car accident or who comes down with the disease will have to be transported to another county or even to Oklahoma for treatment. In Middle Tennessee no ICU beds, pediatric or otherwise, are available; while Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Florida, and Georgia have filled more than 90% of their ICU beds. San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenber has said that “Yesterday in San Antonio, we had 26 minutes where the seventh-largest city in the United States was without EMS units to transport people.” Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, and Texas account for half of the recent surge in hospitalizations, and, with the exception of Florida, every single one of these states has a vaccination rate well below the national average.
Speaking of Georgia, I must not neglect Marjorie Taylor Greene’s poignant display of concern on behalf of her constituents. When questioned about hospitals exceeding capacity on account of COVID, she replied with majestic simplicity: “We can’t live forever.”
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 206,878,352; # of deaths worldwide: 4,357,276; # of cases U.S.:37,336,706; # of deaths; U.S.: 637,132.