Vaccines: An Attempted Rational Synthesis

From Advocate to Soft Skeptic

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” -Thomas Sowell

I have always had a bias towards trusting the science, sometimes annoyingly so. After participating as an eleven-year-old in Louisiana State University’s “Genetics Camp” for budding science nerds, I recall telling an uncle that the reason he had brown eyes and I had blue eyes was due to the workings of the Punnett square and my being homozygous for recessive alleles. He told me that all of that was up to God, and I didn’t know what I was talking about. He was right too, but I liked my explanation better.

So in the ‘00s, when my children were born, we eagerly followed the recommended vaccine schedule. Most years, we took the children to the pharmacy for annual flu shots despite their anxiety about needles.

I dismissed anti-vaxxers as misguided Luddites with short historical memories of the ravages of polio and other preventable childhood diseases. I felt that vaccination was one’s civic duty to achieve herd immunity, and while I never supported coercing people into taking them, I believed that if enough people avoided them, microbiology would reassert itself and teach the avoidant the necessary lessons of their benefits.

In the minimal research I did to verify vaccine safety, I was persuaded by the argument that the immune stimuli of vaccines were a tiny fraction of the insults our immune systems endure every day in a non-sterile world surrounded by billions of microbes and allergens. They were thus almost equivalent to placebos in their potential side effects, except that they prepped the immune system for very specific and dangerous infections.

And while I had always had heterodox views on many topics, vaccines were an area where I was a total normie with conventional opinions. Then Covid changed everything.

Covid’s Radicalizing Influence

The response to the Covid-19 pandemic was a real-time test of the competence of public health authorities. Since it was real-time, I could observe the various contradictions and reversals in policy. Most pointedly, it became obvious that public health communication was about manipulating behavior, not communicating truth:

Masks don’t work, don’t wear or horde them. Oh wait, now that we’ve figured out the supply chain issues with masks, actually you should wear them all the time. The virus is a universal danger to everyone such that we must shut down schools and even outdoor events. Except if you need to riot for the left-wing cause du jour, that notably doesn’t pose a public health risk. The vaccines prevent the disease. Wait, they only stop the spread. Wait, they neither prevent symptoms nor stop spreading but they do reduce mortality. And, yes, you are anti-science if you question whether on-net shutting down the economy is worth it for a virus with a <0.5% mortality rate.

Perhaps the kicker for me was the documented low GRE scores¹ for public health master’s degree programs. This confirmed what I observed, which was a bunch of midwits struggling to balance a complicated multivariate problem. In such situations where the demands of data analysis and tradeoff balancing exceed brain CPU capacity, the usual response of midwit types is to engage in overly conservative recommendations that minimize their chance of being blamed. Economist Tyler Cowen asked a similar series of questions.

Midwits also tend to be extremely defensive when challenged, as their “analysis” is an LLM-like simulacrum of consensus rather than an informed hypothesis subject to empirical revision. Public pronouncements may wear the skin suit of neocortical science but function more like limbic moral dogmas of “good” and “bad.”

Governor DeSantis, notably, initially shut the state of Florida down, as my family was unable to travel in April 2020 for a planned beach trip because he had canceled all short-term rental activity. But when he dug into the early Covid data and made a judgment call that the virus, while serious, was not lethal enough to justify shutting down his state’s economy, public health authorities did not, notably, see this as a useful natural experiment to update their prior assumptions. However reckless they might have thought DeSantis’ actions were a priori, when his gamble proved right and Florida emerged relatively unscathed, the midwits in charge did not reject their hypothesis but rather doubled down on “science” as quasi-religious dogma.

Hence, the one variable that was optimized was that of preventing the spread of a serious but not world-ending virus approximately equal to a 4X bad flu season. It turns out that if the world’s not actually ending, it’s really important to not act like it, and it’s almost certain that more life years of human flourishing were sacrificed² in the overreaction to the pandemic than by the virus itself, which eventually reached nearly 100% penetration into the population anyway.

Regression to Personal Observation

During this time it dawned on me that the public health authorities had no credibility to communicate truth, and their adherence to empiricism was essentially fake, given they were unwilling to change their recommendations based on natural experiments among the states. Given I had previously accepted their words semi-authoritatively, I now had to resort to personal observation and analysis to make sense of the post-Covid world. Some of my readers will recall the beginning of this Substack as a space where I shared those analyses with my first readers, a few family and friends.

In the early stages of Covid, it was largely the elderly, extremely obese, or otherwise health-compromised individuals who suffered the most. Deaths were much more common than a mere flu but relatively rare. Meanwhile, the vaccines, at least according to the admittedly hard-to-discern VAERS data, were the deadliest vaccines on record by an order of magnitude, though relatively safe compared to the virus for certain populations. One of my insights was noticing the relative safety, in terms of reported VAERS death rates, of the single-dose non-mRNA JNJ vaccine, similar in its mechanism of action to the Russian and Chinese vaccines not available in the US, which was run off the market by the FDA due to rare cardiovascular side effects that seemed not all that different than the mRNA variants.

After seeing the ravages of the Delta strain, where I observed relatively healthy local 50-somethings dying, my best guess was to recommend the JNJ vaccine for overweight men over age 20 and overweight women over age 40 (i.e. most Americans), and for lean individuals at ages 43 and 55 for men and women respectively. While I chose not to be vaccinated (I was lean and just under the age threshold at the time), I probably leaned into recommending vaccination more for others due to regret minimization, even as I provided the data for someone to make a different decision.

If someone chose not to vaccinate based on my advice and died of Covid, I would regret that more than their following the standard advice to get vaccinated and possibly suffering a side effect for which I could not be plausibly blamed. This bias in the vaccine debates is very salient and will be discussed more thoroughly below.

Loss of Trust

It is said that trust takes years to earn and an instant to lose. Covid destroyed my trust in public health authorities and over time, caused me to re-examine my previous assumptions about vaccination more generally. I had to revert to personal observation.

As a part of the conservative, Christian parent community, I knew a lot of families who, unlike ours, chose not to vaccinate. I observed their kids were fine and can’t recall any among the dozens of families we know whose kids ever suffered a serious problem from a vaccine-preventable illness; at worst, a few kids got chickenpox, just like I did at two years old in the 80s³.

On the other side, I’ve noticed a lot of children with weird autoimmune-related diseases, skin problems, food allergies, you name it, that are a strange break from my childhood. The fact that peanuts and gluten in a PB&J sandwich — a major source of sustenance for 1980s children — have to be treated like a biological weapon today to protect some kids is extremely odd. I don’t remember a single kid growing up with a peanut or gluten problem.

Difficulty of Debate

The vaccine debate is among the most polarizing, given it involves people’s children. Vaccination is an exercise in regret minimization, as death or disability from a vaccine-preventable illness is obvious whereas any potential side effects in say the development of an autoimmune condition will always be uncertain as to its cause. This is the dilemma of any informed but contrarian choice.

Since the pro-vaccination side enjoys mainstream approval, anti-vaccination advocates hedge their regret minimization with extreme claims that minimize any opportunity cost of their choices. They claim vaccines don’t work anyway or that they always cause health issues.

As my friend CP noted in a book review, they entertain the arguments of people like Dr. Thomas Cowan, who, however reasonable his arguments about vaccines might be, also questions basic biology like the sodium-potassium system and whether the heart functions as a pump. It’s all so tiresome and makes it difficult for rational people to engage in the debate. The broader “stank” surrounding allied individuals like Alex Jones, who make claims like “they’re turning the frogs gay,” makes it hard to take arguments seriously even when they’re directionally correct.

People seek certainty and bombastic voices provide it. In the event of a bad outcome, like a rare death from measles, most people can’t say to themselves, “I made a bet I thought was a good bet with my child’s health, but I had bad luck on the less likely sample path.” Because of the emotional salience of their children, black-and-white views are comforting justifications but very unlikely to reflect good reasoning.

What might an informed synthesis look like? I suppose I’ll foolishly dive, assisted by the engineer’s earned arrogance in all things quantifiable⁴, into these emotionally charged waters.

The Tom Synthesis

1. I affirm that vaccine skeptics are correct in that the public health benefits of vaccines are exaggerated compared to historical improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and the introduction of antibiotics; the simultaneous deployment of these general technologies causes a bias toward the benefits of disease-specific vaccines relative to their actual effects. Sanitation and clean water reduced pathogen load across the population, while nutrition, particularly cheaper protein, improved immune response in poorer populations who formerly subsisted on grains. Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Fogel attributed up to 40% of the decline in childhood mortality through 1900 to better nutrition. Vaccines likely account for significantly less than 20% of the increase in life span since 1800. Moderately dangerous diseases like measles, for example, are much less deadly in well-nourished populations, and vaccines had a more dramatic marginal effect in past undernourished populations (including significant portions of the US as late as the 1950s) than they do today when almost everyone has sufficient food.

2. I deny that vaccines don’t work for specific diseases. The eradication of polio and near-eradication of measles in vaccinated populations is obvious and claims to the contrary are too byzantine in their rationalizations.

3. The unique problems with relatively ineffective Covid vaccines do not undermine the general effectiveness of vaccines. Covid-19 is a coronavirus, sharing the anatomy of most common colds, which feature the ability to mutate rapidly. Despite decades of attempts, scientists were unable to develop an effective coronavirus vaccine of any kind, so in the desperation of the pandemic, a barely effective solution that simply reduced mortality without conferring immunity or preventing spread was perhaps the best that could be expected.

4. Similarly, the uniquely dangerous side effects of the Covid vaccine were due to its having the body manufacture the most toxic, likely bioengineered portion of its anatomy, the spike protein, to produce an immune response. Significant questions remain about the mRNA vaccines, including the unexpected persistence of spike protein at six months after vaccination. This mechanism is unlike that of any standard childhood vaccines, which protect against natural rather than bioengineered pathogens and feature direct introduction of weakened virus or virus parts instead of hijacking cells to manufacture them. While perhaps not technically possible, an mRNA vaccine that targeted a less toxic portion of Covid’s anatomy might have been effective without significant side effects.

5. My initial conception of vaccines as more-or-less a minor irritant compared to cumulative daily immune insults is almost certainly wrong upon further reflection. About half of vaccines are not quite as advertised, i.e. weakened pathogens. They feature adjuvants such as aluminum, which provoke a stronger immune response than would be produced by the weakened pathogen alone. Since aluminum is dirt cheap and biological materials are expensive to cultivate in a quality-controlled manner, this has the effect of reducing doses and cost per dose for manufacturers and is likely technically required for certain vaccines to be effective, as the immune response to each pathogen is highly idiosyncratic. Nevertheless, adjuvants represent a highly unnatural insult to the immune system and could present a tradeoff between specific immunity for the target disease and an undesired cumulative systemic effect.

6. This conceptual intuition of vaccines as highly potent medicines rather than minor irritants is confirmed by vaccine safety practices. Certain vaccines, such as pertussis, cannot be given to sensitive newborns. Others have been pulled from the market for excessive side effects despite efficacy. Some immunocompromised individuals must avoid vaccines altogether. Anyone with a scientific bent will understand that strict categories of “safe” and “unsafe” are fiction, but rather, these categories represent tolerance thresholds for side effects relative to benefits. Many vaccines on the market likely have significant yet statistically tolerable side effect profiles that are under the threshold yet cannot be said to be absolutely safe.

7. This is further verified experientially in that most people have some sort of malaise, aches, or even a mild fever after vaccination, events that are not usually part of the immune system’s daily response to natural pathogens and allergens.

8. Thus, if vaccines are potent medicines, is it plausible that they might have negative cumulative effects? Even if individual vaccines in isolation are safe at the margin, what is the effect of scale? It is well-known in science that quantity can introduce its own sort of quality if there are cumulative effects, which are often subject to non-linear thresholds. This is not an insane hypothesis given the growth of the vaccine schedule since I was a child in the 1980s. I asked ChatGPT’s o1 model to give a summary:

   

   

   So that’s up to 7x more vaccines. For babies in particular up to age 2, ChatGPT o1 reports the following sums:

   

   In particular, the use of adjuvants has risen considerably. Around 1980, only one vaccine, DTP, featured an aluminum adjuvant. Today, at least six vaccines on the schedule have one. Comparing total doses, we get the following:

9. I am skeptical of the effects of liability protection given to vaccine manufacturers in 1986. As a businessman, I can’t think of any reason other than self-interest why my products should enjoy such protection. Nor did this legislation always lead to significant reductions in cost as promised. ChatGPT o1 estimates, for example, that 2 million girls annually in 2006 would have been recommended to get the HPV vaccine at $120 per dose and a gross margin of 90%, or about $110 in profit per patient, or up to $220MM annually. That’s at least a 20% IRR on its maximum estimated development cost of $1 billion. And that’s with no marketing expenses since it was placed on the recommended schedule. Anytime this kind of money is involved, a higher degree of skepticism is warranted. It created obvious incentives to bloat the vaccine schedule if individual vaccines could be shown to be acceptably safe and effective on their own.

10. Similarly, the CDC’s stubborn retention of Covid vaccines on the schedule, despite Covid’s post-Delta evolution into a relatively harmless infection for adults and virtually riskless to children, further adds to my suspicion that the schedule is a revenue racket rather than subject to any analysis of potential tradeoffs.

11. While correlation is not causation, the expansion in the schedule has been accompanied by a large increase in autoimmune diseases, asthma, and allergies among pediatric populations. All of these involve an over-functioning of the immune system to harmless stimuli. Since vaccines are the only universal medicine administered to stimulate the immune system, it seems a fair hypothesis that while individual vaccines at the margin may be safe within tolerance limits established for side effects, the total effect of “tolerable” side effect profiles may present a qualitative change that will have a marginal effect in an increasing proportion of children. Note this hypothesis is not a conspiracy theory. Vaccine manufacturers and public health authorities could be acting in good faith, offering marginal benefits with each vaccine, but have not thoroughly studied the cumulative effects.

12. Absent controlled trials, which are unethical per the CDC, the best way to test this hypothesis is via longitudinal data comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated populations. There are at least three studies suggesting a higher prevalence of autoimmune-type conditions in the vaccinated. One compared medical records from pediatric practices with a high proportion of unvaccinated children, finding, “Vaccination before 1 year of age was associated with increased odds of developmental delays (OR = 2.18, 95% CI 1.47–3.24), asthma (OR = 4.49, 95% CI 2.04–9.88) and ear infections (OR = 2.13, 95% CI 1.63–2.78).” More telling, they found a dose-response relationship based on exposure: “In a quartile analysis, subjects were grouped by number of vaccine doses received in the first year of life. Higher odds ratios were observed in Quartiles 3 and 4 (where more vaccine doses were received) for all four health conditions considered, as compared to Quartile 1.”

13. A less reliable study based on surveys of mothers of homeschooled children found similar effects. Most notably, it found that vaccinated children were less likely to have vaccine-preventable infections, as expected, but found similarly increased risks of various autoimmune-type conditions like allergies and asthma.

14. Most recently, a study based on Florida Medicaid data found similar patterns. I want to be careful about saying whether this proves too much, in that critics of all of these studies point to the fact that a) most childhood pediatric visits are only strictly necessary for vaccinations, and thus b) unvaccinated children who visit the doctor less often are less likely to receive an ancillary diagnosis, which would tend to bias any study to finding more disease conditions among the vaccinated⁵. The authors of this study responded to this criticism here. I find this perhaps a little hard to swallow as a complete explanation. Close family members of mine had childhood asthma, and I think it is very unlikely such a diagnosis would be “missed” because of a preference not to vaccinate. When a child is in acute respiratory distress, most parents, regardless of vaccination preferences, are going to seek medical attention and thus underlying diagnosis rates would normalize.

15. RFKJ and others claim the CDC has comprehensive nationwide data to answer these questions. Significant numbers of children are not vaccinated, and this provides the ultimate natural experiment to see if there might be some cumulative effect on health. If the data exists, yet we don’t have it, why not?

16. Despite my earlier criticisms, I do have sympathy for public health authorities. The public largely thinks in broad categories of “safe” and “unsafe” rather than continuums of risk and reward. Any party line that deviates from promoting vaccines as universally and cumulatively safe would massively grow the number of parents opting out. And contrary to the claims of anti-vax zealots, this would have public health consequences. Infections of preventable diseases, like measles, would increase. Polio might return. The inability of the public to digest scientific nuance makes honest communication extremely difficult.

17. The only viable option would be to study the data quietly. If comprehensive national data did show a cumulative effect of vaccines, public health authorities could simply reduce the schedule to the more reasonable ~1980 dosages, based on a public rationale to “increase voluntary compliance,” applying well-known medical principles of triage to maximize benefits for a fixed number of shots.

Absolute Risk

In thinking holistically about vaccines, I am going to defer to the wisdom of my smartest friend who likes to highlight the importance of relative versus absolute risk. That is, we shouldn’t worry too much about claims like “not doing X raises the risk of Y by 300%” if the baseline rate of Y is very small. What does this look like for vaccines?

Perusing a government website advocating vaccination, it appears vaccine-preventable pediatric deaths total something like 20 per year for pertussis, maybe 1-2 deaths per year from measles, 30 from rotavirus, 10 from pneumonia, maybe two from meningitis, and then 200 from flu. Let’s be conservative and say 300 per year.

By contrast, there are 3,700 annual deaths alone from sudden unexpected infant deaths. 945 children die annually from drowning. It appears actions like using an infant O2 and pulse monitor and avoiding owning a swimming pool are more important than getting vaccines as scheduled.

I challenged the ChatGPT o1 model to attempt to estimate the marginal decrease in child mortality caused by the marginal new vaccines between 1980 and 2020. Its best estimate was that new vaccines accounted for 2.5% of the net 10 per thousand decrease in child mortality during that period or a net benefit of 0.25 deaths prevented per 1,000 children. As a comparison, the pediatric study cited above showed that, for asthma alone, vaccination might increase prevalence by an absolute 4%, or 40 per thousand.

And that’s what makes this hard. Vaccines clearly prevent deaths, even the newer ones with fewer marginal benefits, and the only credible objection is that they may increase non-fatal quality-of-life conditions like asthma. How does one ethically compare 0.25 deaths to 40 cases of asthma?

Again, citing o1, it appears economists, depressing creatures that they are, would weigh childhood moderate asthma, which typically resolves by adulthood, at something like 1/40th equivalent to a single infant death. That is, we should accept 40 cases of asthma if it prevents one infant's death. However, the data above implies that we are possibly accepting 160 cases of asthma to prevent one death, and this is not even considering the other chronic conditions that may be associated with our increased vaccination schedule. This is not quite a fair comparison in that it compares rates among the completely unvaccinated to the marginal effects of vaccines introduced since 1980.

But even taking this at face value for asthma alone, o1’s analysis of US childhood mortality estimates that all infections of any kind represent, at most, 2% of childhood mortality under age 5. 2% of the current rate of 7 per thousand is 0.14 per thousand. Even if one assumed that all of the 0.14 per thousand is due to vaccine-preventable infections (clearly preposterous) this would far exceed what economists estimate are the equivalent costs in chronic conditions like asthma, assuming the small-scale studies cited above are in the ballpark.

Bottom line: at the margin, a family’s decision to not vaccinate is a very minor medical decision, not likely to have major health consequences for their children, and depending on how one weighs the risks of chronic, non-fatal conditions, is rational.

Vaccine Optimization

For people caught in the middle of this debate, a possible option is to pursue a strategy of vaccine optimization. That is, limiting total doses to the 1980 levels of around 10, which vaccines would provide the most marginal benefit and least opportunity for a regret-maximizing death from preventable disease? Delaying vaccines can also reduce harm, as potential side effects seem most acute in younger children.

What modified schedule minimizes the risk of regret? For now, we can ignore the flu vaccine because it’s not subject to the same social pressure; if a child dies of the flu, few parents would blame themselves for forgetting the annual vaccine. Just looking at the schedule and the death tolls, just immunizing for DTAP (which includes pertussis), rotavirus, pneumococcal, MMR (measles), and meningitis would entail a maximum of 5, 3, 4, 2, and 2 doses, respectively, or 16 doses, closer to the 1980 schedule. And meningitis is typically given to older children where the developmental risks should be minimized.

An optimization strategy might skip polio (zero cases since 1979), Covid (near zero deaths), MMR (1-2 deaths annually), chickenpox (3 deaths per decade among children), and Hib (near zero deaths), along with the sex-and-drugs-and-filth-transmitted HPV and hepatitis shots. A strategist could also opportunistically wait to vaccinate until outbreaks begin since the odds of being at ground zero of an outbreak are low, such as right now with measles.

Perhaps a simple method would be to simply follow the CDC-recommended schedule but not dosages, triaging immunizations based on the expected payoff according to the magnitude of annual infant deaths. This might look like:

1. An overall heuristic of a) no more than one vaccine per scheduled well visit, with knowledge that partial or delayed doses provide some marginal benefit, b) skipping any vaccination on the subsequent well visit if the previous vaccine involves an adjuvant less than 6 months before, c) maximizing protection for the child by vaccinating Mom for RSV before she gets pregnant (which avoids vaccination for the child), and making sure all adults giving care are caught up on pertussis immunizations, and d) avoiding highly infectious environments like daycare to minimize overall risk.

2. Birth - skip Hep B unless Mom tests positive

3. 2 months - Rotavirus oral (no adjuvant) 1/2

4. 4 months - Rotavirus oral (no adjuvant) 2/2

5. 6 months - DTAP 1/4

6. 9 months - skip since DTAP has adjuvant

7. 12 months - DTAP 2/4

8. 15 months - skip since DTAP has adjuvant

9. 18 months - pneumococcal 1/1 (only one dose needed if administered this late per CDC)

10. 2 years - skip since pneumococcal has adjuvant

11. 3 years - MMR 1/2

12. 4 years - DTAP 3/4

13. 5 years - MMR 2/2

14. 6 years - DTAP 4/4 (per CDC, 5th dose of DTAP unnecessary if the last dose is administered after age 4)

15. Thereafter - meningitis per schedule, and others as desired since key developmental milestones passed.

Thankfully, I made these decisions for my children in blissful ignorance without any severe outcomes. But if I had to do it again, I’d probably completely opt out until more comprehensive data is released and analyzed.

Coda: The Freeloader Problem

One objection to this sort of calculation is that the unvaccinated benefit from herd immunity provided by the vaccinated. This is a real ethical problem and one of the reasons why anti-vaxxers are motivated to deny the efficacy of vaccines altogether.

Ethically, however, I’m not sure that “taking one for the team” to provide a community-wide benefit is morally obliged if one sincerely believes the action causes marginal harm to one’s children. Our duty to our children is the most morally salient, and such an action is not morally intuitive, at least to me. Further, what do we mean by “community?”

For decades now, arguably since the 1965 Immigration Act passed over a decade before I was born, America has not existed as a traditional nation but rather as a free-trade zone, and the governing ethic of a Star Wars cantina / global bazaar is caveat emptor, not semper fidelis. For even longer the financial elites have been looting the country with fiat currency printing. If we are to be governed by the principles of pure capitalist self-interest in trade and immigration, and theft through Cantillon currency debasement, why am I obliged to sacrifice as if there is some sort of natural community to which I have obligations?⁶ I reject Milton Friedman for thee but not for me.

But what if more people freeloaded, vaccination rates dropped to 50%, and every vaccine-preventable disease returned? I asked o1 to estimate the impact of this, and it estimated that childhood mortality under 5 years would rise from approximately 7 per 1000 to 8.5 per thousand if we counted polio⁷ paralysis as equivalent to 80% of a death (polio has very low mortality). Since this rate was 17 as recently as 1980, this would take us, estimating with linear extrapolation, back to child mortality rates circa 2014, hardly world-ending. And any outbreak would be self-limiting as many unvaccinated would get vaccinated quickly in such a situation.

All this is to say that questioning the vaccine narrative is not some catastrophic, apocalyptic medical scenario. And we do have an increasing problem with immune-related diseases. The studies ought to be done with comprehensive longitudinal data, and if the data reveals a problem, the schedules revised to take cumulative effects into account.

Those who wish to peruse my interactions with ChatGPT’s o1 model on this topic can view the history here.

1. Since prospective MDs take the MCAT, the average GRE score of “Health/Medicine” applicants is an approximation, likely overestimated in its blending with other fields, of that of public health graduates.

2. I would guess the resulting inflation, economic devastation, and run-up in home prices prevented more babies from being born than the total death toll of Covid. If weighted by life years, in that Covid tended to slightly shorten the lives of the already unhealthy and/or elderly, the analysis would be even worse. Consuming their own grandchildren, a final coup de grâce for Boomer leadership!

3. I’ve known a few adults who regretted not getting the shingles vaccine, a disease which while usually not serious produces pain like something out of Dante. I will be getting my shingles vaccine on time.

4. The arrogant engineer’s creed: any argument not stated in quantifiable terms is irrational nonsense, and engineers are better than anyone at quantifying. Ergo, everyone else is wrong.

5. Another cited bias is that perhaps unvaccinated populations are different socioeconomically than the vaccinated, i.e., healthier and richer. However, the more common cause of missed vaccinations is mild parental neglect in missing well visits, not intentional choice, which arguably balances this bias.

6. The recent deficits in military recruiting possibly indicate that historical Americans are realizing that risking their lives so people like Vivek Ramaswamy can get rich is a bad trade. And the free-trade zone won’t last long if the rootin’-tootin’ Scots-Irish ethnos refuse to provide their historical muscle for the American military.

7. Vaccine advocates have been “dining out” on polio for many years, as it is the most salient vaccination success historically. Something like 1 in 200 infections resulted in permanent paralysis. I don’t think anyone seriously objected or would object to universal polio vaccination alone, but the halo of this triumph has enabled the growth of the schedule.