Can we have both medical freedom and public safety?

As we inch closer and closer to forced vaccinations we should reflect on whether another way is possible.

Police in Vienna doing routine vaccine passports checks (photo by Lisa Niesner / Reuters)

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In the ongoing battle with Covid, the Austrian government has gone a step further than most. After implementing various lockdowns and still seeing Covid cases rise, it recently announced that it would make vaccinations compulsory for all citizens starting February 1st. Those who refuse will be hit with a $4000 fine ($1700 for anyone who doesn’t get a booster) and possibly a prison sentence if they fail to comply.

This is just the latest step in the growing tug-of-war between medical freedom and public safety. The question at hand is whether people can be left free to make their own health decisions (including to get vaccinated or not) or whether the danger is too great and people should be compelled.

The compulsion, of course, began a while back. It started off benignly enough with enticements like cash and ice cream, but has quickly moved to punishments like massive lay-offs and, for those fired, the inability to collect unemployment.

Just how far such forms of compulsion will go is the big question. What if Covid continues for years to come? It seems likely that fines and prison sentences will pile up (starving out the economically most vulnerable), but will we go all the way? Will we go so far as to give people the vaccine without consent? Will we break down doors?

Where is the line that we, as a society, are unwilling to cross? When social values like individual freedom and public safety collide, what kind of trade-offs are we ultimately willing to accept, and are they truly necessary?

There’s ample and obvious evidence to suggest that such trade-offs are not necessary but are only a symptom of the deeper issues plaguing our society. To resolve such issues isn’t impossible; we simply need to take them seriously.

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For a population to effectively manage a pandemic, people need to have at least some level of trust in the government, medical, and scientific communities. These institutions clearly understand this (even seem obsessed with it at times, if newspaper headlines are any indication), but they often don’t seem to understand why they’re not trusted.

In an article from last February entitled “Why We Must Rebuild Trust in Science,” Sudip Parikh, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and executive publisher of Science magazine, points to three reasons why there’s a lack of trust, and what his organization is doing about it.

The first reason Parikh gives is scientific jargon, the unfortunate byproduct of “the necessity of speaking with precision.” Basically, scientists need to learn to speak in layman’s terms.

Second, people don’t really understand science, especially how “messy” it is, so are often confused and frustrated when its recommendations change.

And third, scientists have not been “immune to the discrimination, subjugation, and silencing of marginalized people.” Here Parikh cites the US government’s appalling 40 year Tuskegee Experiment where they left syphilis untreated in 399 Black men in order to study the long-term effects of the infection (128 of them died and many passed it on to their wives and children).

So how is the AAAS, the “world’s largest general scientific society,”¹ remedying such failures? How are they helping rebuild trust in such a divisive and distrusting America?

“At the American Association for the Advancement of Science, we create opportunities for scientists to listen to and share information with public audiences through conversations with diverse communities — from policymakers to reporters, from religious leaders to lawyers and judges. We place scientists as policy fellows within congressional and federal agency offices where they can learn from and directly influence policymakers. We connect journalists with vetted scientific experts to help reporters understand the science behind key issues. We help integrate science into the curricula of theologically diverse seminaries, showing that faith and science can be compatible. Perhaps most importantly, we help scientists build relationships in their communities before they are needed during a crisis.”

What, exactly, is Parikh talking about? In the words of Greta Thunberg, it’s hard not to hear it as “blah, blah, blah” — these solutions are just so far from the actual experience of distrust. Imagine asking a vaccine skeptic what they think is needed to rebuild trust, and hearing them reply: more government- and media-embedded scientists, and more science courses at seminaries.

But coming back to the first part of his argument: are jargon, scientific messiness, and gruesome 50 year old experiments really the main causes for all the vaccine skepticism? (According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 28% of American adults are entirely unvaccinated, while the rest have received “at least one dose,” which is by no means the same as ‘fully vaccinated.’ How many Americans haven’t gotten a second dose because they, too, have grown skeptical? And how many will become skeptical when they need to get a booster every 5 months? — Are all these skeptics really just confused by the jargon?)

Of course others would point out different reasons for the distrust. Most pro-vaxxers would probably claim “misinformation” as the main reason for vaccine skepticism, and many on the left would likely add “political ideology” or “Trumpism” to the list.²

But are these really the main reasons for such widespread skepticism? A 2019 Gallup poll would suggest otherwise. It found that, before the pandemic began, Americans ranked pharmaceutical companies at the very bottom of all industries. Second to last on that list was the government. And third to last was the healthcare industry. These are the very sectors responsible for the vaccine rollout today. So the distrust is nothing new; just two years ago it was the norm in America. It is the surge of trust that has arisen in certain groups that is actually new.

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A much fuller account of the reasons for distrust can be found in a recent article by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, who’s taught at Columbia University for the last 30 years. This four-part essay — “Needle Points: Why so many are hesitant to get the COVID vaccine, and what we can do about it” — is a somewhat stunning act of self-reckoning.

As the subtitle suggests, Doidge himself supports Covid vaccination but nonetheless spends the entire article chronicling the blatantly corrupt actions of the scientific, government, and medical communities. And it’s not that Doidge describes anything new — most of it is simply the everyday corruption we find in the daily news cycle, as well as pretty much every Hollywood movie about the healthcare industry, US government, and big pharma (or really just any corporation). From Ben is Back and Dark Water to The Insider and Erin Brokovitch, to say nothing of all the documentaries — can you think of one blockbuster movie about these institutions that’s placed them in a positive, trustworthy light?

Nonetheless, Doidge’s account gives a helpful overview of the larger systemic imbalances we need to address. Below is a sampling of some of the issues he describes (all the references can be found in his essay — I’ve only added links to a few examples he didn’t mention).

In order to help clarify the larger dynamics, I’ve separated these issues into three basic categories: those that emanate from the business side, those that come from government, and those arising in the field of knowledge itself — from academia, the medical and scientific community, and the news media (who should be informing the public, and not running PR campaigns for corporations and the government).

Here are some examples from the side of business:

• The 70s and 80s witnessed so many vaccine injuries and lawsuits that pharmaceutical companies almost quit the business. Instead, Congress passed a law in 1986 shielding them from such lawsuits and making the government responsible to pay settlements instead. Nonetheless, over the years these companies have still been found guilty of fraud on a regular basis. The list of settlements from even just a few years is mind-boggling: in 2009, Pfizer paid 2.3 billion and Eli Lily paid 1.4 billion; in 2010, AstraZenaca paid 520 million; in 2011, Merck paid 1 billion; and in 2012, GlaxoSmithKline paid 3 billion and Abbott paid 1.5 billion.

• One of many fraudulent practices is for pharmaceutical companies to ghostwrite studies of their own drugs and have them submitted to journals by respected scientists outside the company.

• It’s also standard practice for companies to withhold both the protocols for their own internal studies as well as the resulting raw data, making it impossible for them to be independently verified. This has been the case for many, if not all, of the Covid vaccine-makers, including AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna, and others.

From the side of government, we find offenses such as:

• Congress rarely investigates allegations of malpractice by Big Pharma because they’re the biggest lobby in the country. In addition, there’s a well-oiled revolving door between the two — government regulators have often worked for the companies they regulate and will often leave the government to work for them again.

• For years, government scientists doing publicly-funded research were getting money from drug companies without having to disclose it. Today, members of FDA advisory committees that approve new drugs often get money from the very companies whose drugs they’re approving. In order to hide it they simply get it after the approval process, a scheme that the journal Science has called “pay-later conflicts of interest.”

• This has all led to some very questionable decisions on the government’s part. This past summer, the FDA approved an Alzeimer’s drug that many — including a council of 15 senior FDA officials and a 10 person advisory committee — thought lacked sufficient evidence (afterwards, three members of the committee resigned in protest). “In the middle of the biggest vaccine rollout in U.S. history… the FDA approved a drug that would line a pharmaceutical company’s pockets with billions of taxpayer dollars, even though studies showed the drug did little but raise false hopes.” Soon after that incident, the FDA was again embroiled in controversy when their top two vaccine officials resigned because the Biden administration was pressuring them to approve boosters before the FDA had actually completed their own approval process.

And from the side of knowledge we find such practices as the following:

• Besides government scientists getting money from Big Pharma, many university science departments and med schools also depend on such funding. (In addition, Big Pharma writes the medical textbooks that some schools use.)

• Although drug companies are considered the main villain in the opioid crisis, they weren’t the only ones: the FDA approved the drugs that have killed half a million Americans, and doctors prescribed them to their patients for decades. And this is clearly not the only instance of doctors being asleep at the wheel.

A 50s-era advertisement for doctor-sponsored cigarettes

• Although scientists claim their work is strictly factual, it’s obvious that they, like everyone else, often cherry-pick the data and twist the facts. For instance, Anthony Fauci claimed in June that over 99% of deaths from Covid were among the unvaccinated. But, as an article in New York Magazine pointed out, the data he was using wasn’t just for June but for the last 6 months. This clearly inflates the numbers because “80% of deaths came before April 1, when only 15% of the country was fully vaccinated.”

• Censorship of doctors and scientists is on the rise. Already in 2018, a New York Times pro-vaccine journalist described how the controversy around vaccines was “eroding the integrity of vaccine science… (scientists) are censoring themselves, playing down undesirable findings and perhaps even avoiding undertaking studies that could show unwanted effects. Those who break these unwritten rules are criticized.” And that was in 2018. Imagine how much more difficult it is to share “undesirable findings” today.

• And how well can anyone really even share a contrary viewpoint today? Have you seen one major news organization, besides Fox, run an article or even an op-ed questioning the dominant narrative? (I recently came across my first — this anti-vax op-ed in Newsweek). And of course it’s not just traditional media: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have all censored numerous individuals and topics, and Amazon has banned books.

• This past summer, three US medical boards sent letters threatening to revoke doctor’s licenses if they share information the boards consider not to be “scientifically grounded and consensus-driven.” Some doctors have had their licenses revoked and others have been suspended or fired.

• Things have gotten so bad that Amnesty International issued a report two months ago stating, “Across the world, journalists, political activists, medical professionals, whistle-blowers, and human rights defenders who expressed critical opinions of their governments’ response to the crisis have been censored, harassed, attacked, and criminalized… Censors justify these actions as simply banning ‘misinformation.’”

Of course, such problems are not rare — this list could go on and on. I’ve only included this small sampling because it points to the actual (and entirely obvious) reasons for the public’s distrust.

I’ve split up these issues in order to highlight the larger systemic problem: the lack of checks and balances between the three basic societal functions — between our economic, political, and cultural institutions. We instinctively recognize this problem when we read about the issues listed above. We feel the need for a healthy separation of powers, for these three functions — the pursuit of knowledge, the protection of rights, and the selling of commodities — to be completely independent of one another.³

Throughout his essay, Doidge touches on this problem by using the term enmeshment. The institutions of society are too closely enmeshed, too entangled with one another, and when people see this it erodes their trust. Why? Because this situation is actually incredibly dangerous. If we’re concerned about public safety then we should be concerned that drugs are approved without real transparency, that the people approving them have major conflicts of interest, and that doctors and scientists who try to speak up are silenced. These are good reasons to worry.

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Of course one might still ask, Even if we did clean up our institutions, why wouldn’t people still just fall prey to misinformation and fake news? Can we really ever trust the public if they’re so easily duped by snake oil salesmen?

This leads us to the temptation to just force our view on others, to win the political majority and then bend our enemies to our will. But the only way to actually combat misinformation and fake news is to strengthen and educate individuals so they can perceive, for themselves, the difference between truth and lies.

And this is where medical freedom itself is so important, though it’s really not just about medical freedom — it’s about freedom in general: freedom over our own bodies and freedom over our own minds, the need to be completely un-coerced. Because we can’t actually strengthen or educate people by forcing them to think and do certain things. It’s a losing proposition. We have to leave them free.

I know that to many people that just sounds like right-wing “live free or die” nonsense, but it’s not. It’s the very spirit of the scientific pursuit, and we’re losing it. It’s being replaced by the idol of scientific consensus. Today, when we hear someone say “Take Nobody’s Word For It,” it sounds like some anti-vaxxer bumper sticker and not the motto of the world’s oldest national scientific institution, the Royal Society in London (“Nullias in verba”).

Take nobody’s word for it, work it out for yourself — this is the true spirit of science. Here’s how the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman put it:

“Learn from science that you must doubt the experts... When someone says science teaches such and such, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it... Not science has shown, but this experiment, this effect, has shown. And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments (but we must listen to all the evidence), to judge whether a reusable conclusion has been arrived at.”

That doesn’t mean that everyone’s suddenly a scientist, but that everyone has to cultivate understanding for themselves. And that only happens by people working through the evidence for themselves, questioning assumptions, honing and following their own impulses.

This is what will strengthen and educate individuals: the pursuit of science, the pursuit of knowledge. And this can only happen if we leave people free, which of course means leaving scientists and doctors free, leaving journalists and academics free. They need to be free of all financial and political “incentives” — which just become a kind of bribe — and they need to be free of censorship. (Most importantly, we need to leave teachers free, which means getting government and corporations out of education.)

Because we grow strong not by being told what to think, but by actually thinking! Here’s how Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist, physician, and professor at Yale University, put it in a recent interview:

“If you’re so confident in the integrity and validity of your ideas, win the battle of ideas. Argue. Bring evidence and data and rhetoric and logic to the field of battle and win. It’s only people who lack confidence, in my view, who actually secretly suspect that maybe their ideas are not valid, that seek to silence their opponents, to prevent their opponents from speaking….

As J.S. Mill famously said, ‘He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of it.’ Your ideas get stronger when you test them against opponents. Why — when you fight in martial arts, why do you bow to your opponent? You’re grateful to your opponent for giving you an opportunity to perfect your own skills. You couldn’t do that without an opponent, right? It’s the same in intellectual battle — you need to test your ideas. Whether it’s scientific claims about the world, or philosophical stances about the world, I think they get better in the crucible of contention.”

For everyone concerned about public safety, it is this path — the path of open, unflinching scientific inquiry and rigorous debate — that will produce the best results. And in the end, these are also the only results that the public will ever trust, the only results that are actually worthy of our trust.

1. From the Wikipedia entry on the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

2. It’s interesting to note that American anti-vaxxers are almost exclusively portrayed as uneducated, anti-science, right-wing Christian conservatives, when the reality is that studies have found PhDs to be the most vaccine hesitant group and that 52% of all front-line healthcare workers were vaccine hesitant last January (to say nothing of the countless academics and scientists, like those at Los Alamos National Laboratory, that have protested and refused vaccine mandates). And of course, like most things, this simplistic left-right narrative often breaks down when you leave the US. For instance, in Canada, the average vaccine skeptic is a 42 year old female liberal and, in the UK, white Christians are the least vaccine hesitant group.

3. Unfortunately, this fundamental need for a separation of powers at the societal level (and not just within the government itself) is still almost entirely unrecognized, and so we continue to allow the necessary and healthy boundaries between business, government, and culture to be continually trespassed. The only comprehensive work that has been done in this direction (that I’m aware of) can be found in the social theory of the early 20th century philosopher Rudolf Steiner, often called “social threefolding.”