The Illusion of Failure

Why is the idea of “vaccine failure” so popular in the U.S.? James Hamblin on the instinctive appeal of a false idea. “You can draw on a base of facts, you can highlight these outlier cases, and you can come to believe that we’re seeing vaccine failure.” Circumstantial Evidence With inoculation being the strongest defense against a resurgent COVID-19, why is there any popular sense in the U.S. that the vaccines aren’t working? James Hamblin on the instinctive appeal of a false idea. With the rapid spread of COVID-19’s Delta variant, more than [twice as contagious]( as prior variants, hospitalization and mortality rates are once again on the rise across the United States and around the world. According to the U.S. national public-health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, newer victims are [overwhelmingly among the unvaccinated]( with less than 0.1 percent of fully vaccinated people having experienced a “breakthrough case” of the virus—and a smaller percentage still having experienced a case resulting in hospitalization or death. Yet less than 50 percent of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated. The reasons behind these numbers are complicated—and complexly related to a [highly polarized political environment]( one of the ideas in high circulation among “anti-vaxx” skeptics is that the vaccines are “failing” against the Delta variant. Tucker Carlson, [maybe the most influential voice on America’s contemporary cultural right]( is just [one amplifier of the idea]( which continues to replicate across mainstream and social media: “Weird how many vaccinated people seem to be spreading the virus at this point.” How has this idea managed to get traction? According to James Hamblin—a physician specializing in preventative medicine and public health, a lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health, and the author of [Clean]( the forms of political pressure and media manipulation that have become common drivers of misinformation in contemporary American life are part of the answer; but a significant part is how easily the appearances of evidence in health and medicine can be deceiving. Understanding the cognitive frameworks behind an idea like vaccine failure isn’t, as Hamblin illustrates, simply a matter of understanding ignorance or bad faith; it’s a way of understanding an important dynamic in vaccine skepticism—and how vaccination advocates can engage with it more effectively. ——— Eve Olivette: What do people mean when they talk about vaccine failure? James Hamblin: During the rollout of the vaccines, public-health advocates and doctors used a lot of language to convey how effective vaccines are at stopping the virus and ending the pandemic—and that language was both true and potentially a bit oversimplified, in a way that could lead people to believe that there would be zero instances of post-vaccine infection and breakthrough cases. People actually mean different things by vaccine failure. The technical definition would be when you actually become sick with the disease against which you were vaccinated, as opposed to, say, briefly carrying some of the virus in your nose. But some will use the expression “vaccine failure” more casually, to say that the vaccines aren’t working in the way that they were promised or that they expected—which they see as a sort of absolute protection, as if you were coated in a nonstick anti-virus armor. Seatbelts are a better comparison. If your seatbelt breaks during an accident, and you go flying through the window, then that’s a seatbelt failure. But if you get rear-ended and the seatbelt works, yet you still have some injuries, that’s not a seatbelt failure. That’s actually the seatbelt doing its job. Which could seem confusing if you were thinking, “I was wearing a seatbelt, so there should be zero injuries whatsoever.” More from James Hamblin at The Signal: “It’s something that happens in medicine. You can point to single instances of people becoming very sick and use that as a framework to highlight individual cases, where, indeed, the vaccines failed—the person got very sick despite being vaccinated—then imply that it means the vaccines don’t work. But that’s a much bigger takeaway than the truth, which is that there are some vaccines which that sometimes happens with, but that doesn’t mean they’re not working. In fact, it’s just the normal and expected outcome.“ “Everything we do in health and medicine has the possibility of adverse effects—even the most time-tested things. There’s no medication and no procedure that doesn’t come with the possibility of something going wrong—or of some negative symptom that comes as an effect of the thing actually working. Everything involves a risk-benefit calculation, and the risks of side effects, or adverse effects, from vaccination is nowhere near comparable to the risks you undertake if you forego vaccination.“ “There’s legitimate debate about how mandates should work. And that might play into certain ideological beliefs about the role of government. But if you spend all of your time talking about how mandates are bad, and you’re not extremely clear that vaccines are good, and not harmful—and that everyone should get vaccinated—the ultimate takeaways get rolled up together in people’s minds.” ——— Free Access This Week [Keep Your Enemies Closer]( Are there no choices left other than to recognize the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan? Chimène Keitner on the strategic decisions facing the U.S. and the international community. For Subscribers [The Devil You Don’t Know]( How prevalent is white supremacy in the U.S. military? Lecia Brooks on the Pentagon’s struggle with a troubling and uncertain question. [The New Marauders]( What’s behind recent ransomware attacks on critical U.S. industries? Dmitri Alperovitch on kingpins, safe havens, and large transactions. [To the Ends of the Earth]( How can we vaccinate enough people to create global herd immunity to COVID-19? Merrill Goozner on patents, production, and prices. ——— [The Signal]( is a new, independent digital publication exploring vital questions in democratic life and the human world—and sustained entirely by readers like you. To support The Signal and for full access: ——— We recently resolved a broken-link issue with our opt-out function. If you’ve received this in error, our apologies—you can immediately unsubscribe below. Thank you. © 2021 The Signal The Signal | 717 N St. NW, Ste. One, Washington, DC 20011 [Unsubscribe {EMAIL}]( [Constant Contact Data Notice]( Sent by newsletters@thesgnl.email