On Scott Adams’s Vax-Decision Analysis

Dilbert’s Scott Adams posted a video on his reasoning behind his decision whether to get vaxed during the covid panic. He concludes that no one is now in a position to take any credit for making a good decision. The argument, outlined below, has much merit, at least when applied to most people. But it does not work for all.

Adams says things like “We didn’t know much at the beginning. We didn’t know how bad the virus was…We didn’t know if [the vax] would work.” It’s that “we” that is the source of his problem.

He said that once a vax was released “we” would face a situation akin to a “coin flip”: “It [the vax] would be something that worked, and we’d be happy about it. Or it would be something that didn’t work, and we would be unhappy about it.”

But, he stresses, there wasn’t sufficient (trustable) information for us (i.e. “we”) to know what the best decision was. Yet the decision had to be made. Get the vax or get fired was a real situation for many. That in itself, though Adams doesn’t say it, was sufficient information to make a the “best” decision, at least for those who needed their jobs to survive.

Before we get to the vax specifically, let me stress what part of his argument merits attention. Like he did, let’s use a coin flip as a generic situation in which the outcome is unknown and therefore uncertain, but in which, for whatever reason or reasons, we are interested.

One side reads tea leaves and predict heads, and the other examines chicken entrails and guesses tails. One side will get the right answer. He said that one side would be right, in the end, “even if their logic was incorrect.” If it was tails, Adams asks could you talk the people who used chicken entrails out of their usefulness.

The question is excellent.

Logical arguments can be invalid but have true conclusions. Such as, “The price of eggs is high; therefore, the sun rises in the east.” If you believed prices of eggs was causally related, however indirectly, to the direction of the sunrise, you have committed a fallacy. But any decisions you make with regard to the direction will be correct.

And if you make correct decisions you are apt to give your argument weight. This, after all, is how superstitions develop: superstitions are invalid logical arguments. Once embraced, they are difficult to talk people out of. Because all of us, scientists especially as I say often, are good at finding evidence which supports our beliefs.

But only a few are good at finding evidence which refutes them.

Now Adams would have this example apply in the real-life vax decision problem. He said people basically used chicken entrails for the vax decision, therefore it would be improper to trust whatever arguments were used to arrive at their decision.

I pointed out on Twitter to him that this failed, even for coin flips, when people had accurate causal information. Which, though you might not know it, can be had in coin flips! That is, some people can make valid logical arguments in coin flips and come to correct decisions when they know the causes. (See the link for proof.)

He responded “Chicken entrails.” Which shows that he can fall prey to his own example (think about it).

About the vax he said, “Nobody had enough [true] information that they could have made a good decision at the time.” But this is not true. It is true that most did not have enough trustable information early on, but it is obviously and demonstrably false that all people did not. Because some of us did.

Those who knew that gain-of-lethality research was old hat, for instance (hubris-filled scientists doing this work call it gain-of-function), knew of its successes and failures. Adams, even now, believes the bug was “weaponized”. I did not believe it then, and do not believe it now, because I know how scientists anxious to write papers are like. Not that some aren’t investigating militarily lethal bugs, but none of that work fit the details of this coronavirus. Gain-of-lethality work is premised on studying engineered bugs to understand them, and to develop possible cures against them. Which would never be needed, of course, unless the bugs were first manufactured. Military-grade bugs would be a hell of a lot more destructive.

I recall, vividly, pointing out to guys on our side (of most other political questions), who were running around with “exponential” on their lips after every news report of a new infection, that coronaviruses are one of the bugs responsible for the common cold. I was told I was wrong and crazy by some of these guys. Panic had set in pretty early in 2020, and panic robs the mind of reason. Those who knew a little biology went a bit nuts, as their knowledge allowed them to imagine the worst, and they went on the hunt to confirm their fears.

It was obvious very early that the bug was not panic worthy. The Diamond Princess cruise ship story was already out by December 2019. A bunch of generally older people trapped in a floating petri dish with the nasty alpha version of the virus, but just 0.2 to 0.4% of those on the ship died of the bug (7 to 14 out of 3,711). (Those are the final numbers; the ones we had in February and March 2020 were slightly different.)

That range was because, even then, ascribing cause to death is difficult, and some of us pointed out time and again. Recall the great battle of dying from or with covid? Some of us knew that then, and were screaming our heads off about ascription. Some of us remembered how the spread of the covid bug resembled the 1957-1958 Asian flu (see this and this). My first post on all this was January 2020 (here’s a review), and my second was  3 February 2020: “Unnecessary Panic Over Coronavirus?” 

I lost count of the number of times a few of us tried to educate people on the difference between infection fatality rate and case fatality rate.

Then came the vax. Most had never heard of mRNA vaccines. But not everybody didn’t know (double negative!). It was already well known in 2020, to those familiar with medical statistics, that mRNA treatments were far from panaceas—and that they could be harmful. But also that they had had some minor successes. Trials before the covid panic on other maladies gave weak hope the new ones about to be mandated would be work well (scroll down to “The Wrong Messenger” in this, and see the review paper linked).

In December 2020, we reviewed Pfizer’s first publicly released data on their medicine. I reported things like “With our assumption about cause, the vaccine has been confirmed to produce more A[dverse] E[event]s.” And gave the breakdown. The data on the efficacy of the vax was far from simple. Pfizer “excluded participants at high risk of SARSCoV-2 infection or with serological evidence of prior or current SARS-CoV-2 infection”. That was the first time, of many, many, where it was clear that prior infections could offer superior immunity. But that is another story not relevant to the initial release, but it was anyway obvious based on a host of other information. How could a dumb drug be better than prior infection!

Back then I called it the coronadoom, or just doom, in honor of the panic that swept the globe. I said of Pfizer’s data (with new bold emphasis):

Their numbers are: 9/18,559 = 0.05% got the doom in the vaccine group, and 169/18,708 = 0.9% got the doom in the placebo group. Rather, were measured to have it after symptoms developed. Nobody in the roughly 40,000 people studied died of the doom [placebo group or vax group].

For 19-55, it was 5/9897 = 0.05% in the vaccinated and 114/9955 = 1% in the placebo [infection rate].

For 55+, it was 3/7500 = 0.04% in the vaccinated and 48/7543 = 0.6% in the placebo.

My prediction, which you may dismiss, is that that ~0.05% rises, while the 0.9% (1% or 0.6%) won’t change much.

Suppose it doubles, which I believe to be the minimum increase. Then, if you’re 55+, it’s 0.1% versus 0.6%. My best guess is it will be closer to to 0.2% to 0.3% versus the higher number.

Is that 0.5% reduction enough for you, given the adverse events you might suffer? Is the test as sharp as they said in the experiment, seemingly with no error? If not, the differences between groups will be even smaller.

Do you trust them enough?

Unlike the government, or government, I stressed the decision should be up to you. The bolding was to remind you that Pfizer’s data was highly controlled. Which does not happen in the wild. All drugs (that I ever heard tell of) when released into the wild decrease in efficacy from the lab-controlled results.

It was at that point that liars like Rochelle Walensky, MD, chief of the CDC, starting lying to the public about vax efficacy. We pointed it out when it happened. She lied and said this medicine, in other words, against the entire history of all medicines, was perfect and flawless. You couldn’t get sick or hurt with it, she lied.

She wasn’t the only one. The behavior of Experts and rulers in the panic still needs a reckoning.

But enough. Regular readers remember the story. My point here is only to document that a small number of people resisted the panic, and had sufficient causal information on whether to take the vax, even very early on. Because of that information, I never did, and never will take that vax. I did get covid once, which I knew because I had to travel (in 2021) and take a test. It was not as bad, for me, as a regular cold. Even the CDC, which we also shouted loud and clear, early estimated great numbers of people—about 15% of the population—were infected and never even knew it!

Adams finished his reasoning, saying he had additional worries because of his asthma and his age. Respiratory infections for asthmatics are not welcome, and he was not wrong, I think, in his decision to risk possible adverse events and take the vax. Not wrong, given the information he had. He also says he wanted to travel to certain locales which required the vax. So again, he had good motivation. Not shared with others.

Adams intimates that many have become insufferable since the panic ended, and they got lucky in their decisions. He is exactly right about this. There were a lot of weak arguments against the vax. Including some ridiculous ones, like it was laced with nanoparticles or it made people magnetic (yes, really).

But as I like to say and ancient wisdom proves: panic kills.

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