Why I Should Finally Take a Covid-19 Vaccine
A Utilitarian Self-Rebuttal on my Kantian Vaccine Hesitancy
As part of my new postdoc at Rutgers, I recently outed myself as “vaccine hesitant” and gave my Top Ten reasons for not getting the Pfizer, Moderna, or J&J vaccine.
The larger aim of that work was to steelman an unpopular position, which I just so happen to hold. Thus, in the name of demonstrating the art of ‘steelmanning,’ here is a list of reasons why I was wrong in that argument and why I should get vaccinated, and what it would take for me to change my mind.
My reasons for refusing those three vaccines (and no others) break down into two main clusters -
First, government and pharmaceutical companies behaved in ways that made me not trust them.
Second, the safety and efficacy of those of the claims made about the vaccines were oversold, and my individual autonomy was not respected.
Anti-Vaccine Argument One - Claims of untrustworthy behavior of the government and corporations, including pharmaceutical corporations, large social media and tech companies, and politicians.
Counterargument One - All major institutions have track records of abuse, dishonesty, exploitation, etc. If these behaviors disqualify trust, then that leads to the necessity of rejecting all information and arguments produced by these institutions. However, a more likely description is that these institutions have a mixed track record.
Even if the pharmaceutical industry has been fined 1,015 times for a total of $87,016,147,991 (Claim 7) since 2000, it does not logically follow that there have been no successes or medical breakthroughs in those times. Similarly, even if one-third of all new medications are found to have side-effects, including lethal ones (Claim 10), that does not necessarily mean that any of the three vaccines will necessarily fall into that category, only that it is possible that they could.
Counterargument Two - Just because those who encouraged the vaccines engaged in non-trustworthy behavior, that doesn’t mean that those critical of the vaccines are beyond reproach themselves. Dr. Malone (Claim 8) went beyond saying that he made major contributions to mRNA technology and claimed he was the inventor of the technology, which is a significant exaggeration. Many of the partisans I listen to (Claim 1) likewise have, shall we say, less than perfect histories when it comes to honesty.
Further, it’s entirely plausible that I am, and have been, under the effect of motivated reasoning because of my intense dislike of coercion (claims 2, 3, and 9). Thus, I could be overselling the dangers, and underselling the benefits, to myself (claims 4, 5, and 6) as justification for refusing to do what I felt coerced to do.
Anti-Vaccine Argument Two - The safety and efficacy of those of the claims made about the vaccines were oversold, and my autonomy was not respected.
Counterargument One - I’m going to cede the point to myself that the safety and efficacy was oversold (Claim 8) by some (i.e., President Joe Biden) in order to accomplish two goals. First, there is a utilitarian argument for dishonesty / exaggeration in the name of the public good that justifies overselling as a net positive. Second, my response to this overselling is impacted by my being motivated to misunderstand statistics (something most humans are guilty of).
The first point - Public health during the covid pandemic was at risk, and there was a possibility that maximum vaccination would have reduced transmission and saved lives. Possibly thousands or millions of lives. By over-riding my personal autonomy and using exaggerated claims to coerce me into getting vaccinated, it is possible that the utilitarian (act) net gain of pain and life saved justified that behavior.
I argued against mandatory vaccination from a Kantian position that said that the government and pharmaceutical corporations were treating people as means and not ends (2nd formulation of the Categorical Imperative) during the pandemic. However, the ‘greater good’ position does have its champions, as Kant’s Categorical Imperative and Jeremy Bentham’s Act Utilitarianism are almost always at odds at one another in ethical debates, and there are many who, like Spock, take the side of Utilitarianism.
I.e., it is possible that my decision to place my autonomy above the well-being of others caused pain and death that could have been avoided, meaning that I made a morally wrong choice.
The second point is that I, along with almost everyone else, am really bad at statistical reasoning. I’ve taken a bunch of stats and quantitative data classes; and I can run programs, regressions, and models; but intuitively if I’m told that the vaccine is 100% safe, and I find out that it’s 98% safe, I’m going to hyper-focus on that 2% discrepancy because of motivated reasoning.
When the corporations and governments had to backtrack and say that yes, there were breakthrough infections, and yes, some people suffered side-effects, including lethal side-effects, from the vaccines, their position was that these incidents were comparatively rare and that, overall, the vaccines helped public health and lowered the risk of serious illness and death. Even if I accept that they are telling the truth now about these things being rare, or even extremely rare, admittedly all I focused on was the fact that…
According to Daniel Kahneman (a personal academic hero of mine) in Scientific American, our intuition has serious limitations as a Type-1, fast thinking process. Throw in motivated reasoning, and if I intuit that I’m facing a coercive threat, I’m going to be hyper-aware of that threat, at the expense of being able to make deliberate, thought out, accurate choices.
So what would it take for me to change my mind? Because of claim 10, I firmly maintain that this is, and will continue to be, an experiment for the next several decades, because sometimes it takes that long for side-effects of medications to manifest. I want as much time as possible to see what happens to other people who chose to take these medicines of their own accord. The more they turn out fine, the less hesitant I’ll be (The opposite is also true).
I’m a little over 40, but I do exercise quite a bit, and so I don’t want to risk cardiomytosis, especially when I had Omicron and it was less unpleasant than a typical flu for me. I’m exercising to improve my health, so dying from a heart attack would count as a major setback in that area.
I am applying for some very nice positions that may not honor my personal or religious exemptions, but there are opportunities that I would risk my health to pursue them. Should I wind up taking them, and cannot get an exemption, I wouldd probably take the new Novavax at this point, because in my ignorance I sort of understand how traditional vaccines work - dead viruses to train the body to fight ‘live’ viruses. For mRNA, I understand two things:
One, that’s really neat and amazing and complicated and beyond my ability to understand or explain the mechanics behind how it works.
Two, it’s -so- amazing that I am skeptical of any claims that anyone knows enough to say with any kind of certainty that they can alter this process and know what the long term consequences of that alteration will be.
Admittedly, that’s a logical fallacy known as the appeal to ignorance. But fear of consequences of playing with forces we do not understand is a staple narrative in our culture - The Tower of Babel, Pandora’s Box, Frankenstein, anything involving AI or killer robots, the Alien franchise, etc.
On the other side, there are always going to be people uneasy of new technology, and sometimes new technology does make the world better.
Final thought - I am not the only person who feels this way, and the declining trust in science has the potential for major consequences down the road. As a Public Administration scholar, this needs to be taken seriously now, before the next pandemic arrives. According to Richard Horton (2022) at The Lancet,
The COVID-19 syndemic is entering its most dangerous phase. There is a mounting breakdown of trust. Not only between politicians and the public. But also among politicians and publics with science and scientists. This breach of faith with science is far more threatening. For the public is slowly turning against those who have sought to guide the political response to COVID-19. As countries face a resurgence of coronavirus transmission, scientific advisers are recommending further restrictions to our liberties. There is now a palpable public reaction against these mandates. Whereas in March people were ready to stay at home to protect their health and health systems, the growing economic emergency that has followed national lockdowns is leading politicians to resist similar measures being applied once again.
As always, thanks for reading and listening to me talk to myself. If you have any further material you would like me to add that could improve this argument for vaccination, let me know in the comments.