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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I remember delaying the decision partly to mull on it and partly to look at outcomes. Thanks to Christian bloggers like Bruce Charlton and Vox Day I allowed myself to be sceptical, and, in any case I’d become aware of the media fear and coercion which seemed unwarranted. So I didn’t get the peck, though it was a close thing.
I would say the decision was intuitive, not the result of reasoned analysis. This is how I conceive defending against such large-scale evils now. By the time you have a good explanation of why something is bad it’s too late, therefore intuition is the key, assisted by prayer. The funny thing, and I hope this doesn’t offend anyone, is is that statistics don’t seem to help much. Statistics are brought in when the truth is uncertain and the stakes are high. But the very fact that the stakes are high means the statisticians themselves or their publishers are primary targets for corruption by the powers-that-shouldn’t-be and so they end up misleading people rather than informing them.
I didn’t get the vax and I think I made a logical decision based on evidence at the time. 1) I am middle aged and healthy. 2) There was significant evidence already that the CV wasn’t as deadly as people were claiming. 3) mRNA as outlined above. 4) The fact that the government had been lying to us and changing their stories at that point for about six months about everything related to the virus (masks, social distancing, death rate, vaccine efficacy, everything PDT said, etc). There was little to no evidence that I had anything to worry about from the virus and there was always the possibility of worry about from the vax.
I also almost lost my teaching job. They suspended me for two weeks while they decided whether or not to grant a religious exemption after denying my medical exemption. I was OK with that and making plans to escape Washington.
I like Scott Adams and I think he’s funny and interesting to listen to, but he also likes to make himself sound intellectually superior. His show includes long segments where he rambles on about this type of stuff in order to impress the listener. It’s annoying which is mostly why I stopped listening.
I got the vax for pretty much the same reason as Scott. Wife and I were not particularly afraid of the virus, but she wanted to take a cruise and kept talking about it until I caved in. Had to get vaxxed in order to fly, just like Scott. No boosters, though.
We did not vax.
70 yr old… good health.
Both got the bug and it was awful. Had the worst sore throat of my life for 3-4 days. Wife had flu like symptoms.
We had hydroxychloroquine but if it helped it didn’t seem to be a great help.
There seemed to be plenty of info from credible sources to merit skepticism about the vax which was not a vax.
The protocols seemed designed to kill.
The way the bug infested various parts of the country at various times seemed too curious to be accidental.
Remember everybody in the Rose Garden suddenly getting ill. I always thought some malevolent source had aerosoled the bug.
My daughter’s was skeptical of the vax because she thought the government was pushing it too hard and it didn’t seem to have much effect despite their claims. Scott did pooh-pooh that line of thought, but it seems to line up with my experience and analysis of the data at the time. Same with masks.
Debating atheists on evolution for a good long while made me aware of certain things due to certain arguments attempting to leverage the mutations of viruses as “proof PROOF!” for Darwin’s nonsense. Mainly that mutations are always genetically destructive; they build nothing upwards, even if they allow a survival advantage that allows the virus to overcome the effectiveness of an old vaccine.
mRNA vaccine were also known as a science fiction possibility. A neat idea, but their failure to turn out demonstrated that DnA and biology is a very very complicated thing, and THE SCIENTISTS ™ don’t know much about despite knowing so much.
THE SCIENCE ™ has been terrible at making anything better from what currently exists as God would have it.
So when THE SCIENTISTS ™ came out on TeeVee and started contradicting long-standing science for this special TOP SECRET Chinese Lab leaked Microscopic Alien creature, or something that naturally “evolved” up in nature, depending on which network you asked…
RIGHT AWAY, I was alert to bullshit.
When they extended the lockdowns past the 2 week curvature, I was convinced.
Once atheism is made as socially ridiculous as coming out as a scientologist, and Darwin’s body has been dug up from the Abbey and thrown in the Thames, you’ll see a major reduction in all such gullibility.
The entire covid saga is demonstrable proof of the necessity to go to ABSOLUTE TOTAL F-ing WAR against the incestuous transgendered disorders known as Scientism and Atheism. There is a time to love and a time to HATE, to cast stones and not gather, that time to turn-turn-turn is here. It’s not too late.
The Emergency Use Authorization listed more serious adverse reactions than viral infections. The shot looked like a bad gamble.
Thank you, Dr. Briggs, for a cogent, informative reprise of the situation as it was vis a vis Scott Adams’ opinions then or now.
The very worst thing about the Covid era was that the government did everything it could to block a discussion of the various issues on their merits, e.g., masks, distancing, lock downs, and the mRNA jab. Like many others, Wife and I almost immediately distrusted the mRNA jab when the government mandated it or encouraged it (depending upon the jurisdiction) long before it was taken off the “experimental” list.
I was privileged to prepare all the pleadings, motions, and appeals in two of the lawsuits against the Governor of Hawaii’s power grab that locked down all the islands and did things like arrest people standing alone on a beach — that’s right, alone on a beach — without a mask. That authoritarian police state (in the correct use of those terms) convinced me that the virus, the supposed protocols, and the jab, were driven more by powerlust than sober medicine.
P.S. We both got Covid and we took Ivermectin and the bulk of the FLCCC protocol. We recovered after about one lousy week, rather like a flu. And we were and are senior citizens. Our kids and grandkids used the same protocol and either never got it or recovered rapidly. My 90 year old mom either never contracted Covid or had a subclinical case — she had been taking IVM prophylactically.
I profoundly disagree with Scott Adams on this, it was dead easy to know with available data (such as in the case of the Diamond Princess cruise ship) and just using basic math that the virus was a nothing-burger.
The moment one reads anything about how viruses are isolated, how do they sequence their DNA “in silico” (basically using software auto-complete) and about virology in general.
And more importantly the moment one looks at the lack of proof that vaccines work, the hundreds of cases of vaccine injuries (the few that are reported) and reads any book critical of vaccination…
It is easy to know it was all industrial grade B******T, I’m sorry Scott, your mental gymnastics while spectacular prove you’re Intellectually nothing but a gullible boomer.
Vaccination proved useless and dangerous 1889: https://dn720601.ca.archive.org/0/items/b2136140x/b2136140x.pdf
Anybody over the age of 40 already had years of knowledge about just how often pharmaceutical products approved by the FDA were subsequently pulled from the market because of the poor research and testing that went into them – testing which took YEARS. So the idea that a product tested for only a few MONTHS was going to be safe and effective was implausible.
Nobody has perfect knowledge, but that doesn’t mean “chicken entrails”. If he didn’t shave his head, Adams’ pointy hair would be on display for all to see.
Observation has convinced me that lies tend to cluster. In other words, a source that has told you one lie is more likely to tell you a second lie, than is a so-far truthful source likely to tell you a first lie. When the officials, both governmental and big pharma, told the lie that a drug which could not possibly have been long term tested was safe, I knew they were liars. And that is a hell of a BIG lie.
Just as a side comment, I was already more than a little skeptical when the vaxx was released. Way back at the very end of May, 2020, I compiled each state’s then-current death numbers available at Johns Hopkins, and correlated them with the political leanings of the state. The Democrat states were reporting a death per capita rate THREE TIMES the reported rate from Republican states. (And I did discount the chance that political leanings were responsible for individual immune systems.) Were the Dems reporting too high? The Repubs too low? Either way, I became convinced that I was looking at a “political pandemic” more than a biological event. So I ignored the politicians on both sides.
If you rely on the mortality rate to assess the effectiveness of vaccinations or treatments, then seriously, when you are sick, don’t see a doctor or take any medicine. And this would significantly reduce my health insurance costs.
Think of the heart attack mortality rate of 200/100,000 ~ 0.2%.
JH,
I assess the effectiveness of vaccines, not on mortality, because come on!, but on the bottom line of Pfizer.
In the tech industry, we have a rule of thumb: “Never buy version 1.0 of anything.” My reasoning, though also informed by the Diamond Princess case, was very simple: (1) Never buy version 1.0 of anything. (2) The Covid vaxx is version 1.0 of something. Therefore, (3) don’t buy the Covid vaxx and *especially* don’t let anyone put it in your body.
I’m not critical of those who gave the jab no serious thought. If I had not been biased against the medical industry – a bias reinforced by the pandemic response – I suppose I would have just gone along with the narrative.
But I fought the narrative from the beginning and once the jab propaganda began it just seemed obvious to me the claims didn’t add up. The lie that clinched it for me was that the jab was better than natural immunity. This made absolutely zero sense. It was an obvious lie. Why lie?
Adams didn’t see what many skeptics saw. This apparently bothers him. I understand he is vaccine injured and he wants to salve his ego that he couldn’t have known the jab was a bad decision. It is unfortunate he cannot give jab skeptics credit for making an intelligent decision.
Ah Mr. Briggs, you are treasure! Not only was it the Diamond Princess and Johnny Ioannidis that convinced me the corona doom was overblown, it was you too!
Thank you for all your excellent work. I’ll probably keep on reading your blog daily.
PhilH,
Many kind thanks.