The Logical Fallacy Behind Anti-Vaccine Claims

Historically, anti-vaxxers have presented various reasons not to be vaccinated for diseases. If we include a proto-vaccine, inoculation for smallpox, these arguments go back to the early 18th century in Europe and Colonial America. (Image: Inoculation for smallpox, 18th century)

The first was the religious argument: injecting something into the body to prevent disease interfered with Providence, with God's power to decide whether to inflict a disease or not. If God's anger brought the punishment of epidemic disease, the proper response was to placate Him with prayer, repentance, and sacrifice. What God had sent he could remove, if people showed true repentance.

The second argument was medical: inoculation/vaccination was dangerous and /or useless. It might bring serious harm or even death, and all to prevent a disease one might never get. Better to take one's chances and rely on medicine to cure or relieve the sickness if infected. 

Both arguments recur in the dialogue over disease today. The religious argument retains strength among followers of certain sects and mindsets. "God made me, and he will protect and preserve me," they will say, ad nauseum. 

The medical argument that vaccines are dangerous is probably more powerful today because its proclaimers include the unchurched and secularists. Today, a major part of this argument is based on anecdotal evidence, often second or third hand. 

Here is an example, a comment on my arguments in this blog for getting vaccinated for Covid-19: "I lost two uncles, twin boys aged five to the smallpox vaccine, a requirement to get coming into the US through Ellis Island. The year was 1903." 

I think we can agree that the writer was probably not around in 1903, so the story must have been handed down in the family over two or three generations. It may have become embellished in the retelling. But that is not the real problem.

Here's an anecdote of my own: My family emigrated from Scotland to the USA in 1952. I was six years old. We also had to get vaccinated for smallpox to be allowed entry. Five of us were vaccinated. None of us died, got smallpox, or any other disease or complication. 

Which of these two anecdotes is useful from an epidemiological or  public health point of view? Neither. They are merely isolated incidents, and the first may have become distorted over time. Also, we have no evidence that the smallpox vaccine was responsible for the deaths of these two unfortunate lads. Maybe the cause of death was something else entirely. 

The writer's anecdote is an example of a logical fallacy that has bedevilled vaccines from the beginning: post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, because of this). This is the mistaken notion that just because one event follows another, that the first caused the second.

This fallacious reasoning is the at the root of untold numbers of erroneous beliefs. An example is medical remedies: "I had an upset stomach. I drank a concoction of powdered dog poo and it cured me. Believe me, it works." 

If I told you that, you probably wouldn't believe me. The idea of drinking powdered dog poo is repulsive to most of us. Interestingly, anti-vaxxers have claimed that being vaccinated is like eating dog poo. 

Historically, people have eaten/drunk such things and worse to cure what ailed them, including powdered flies, spiders, frogs, animal testicles, urine, etc. Urine is still popular. Some people were taking bleach for Covid not too long ago on the advice of Dr Trump.

The problem with this kind of post hoc reasoning is that two events constantly occur in sequence with having any causal relationship between them. To demonstrate causality in this kind of case, it is necessary to carry out carefully designed and implemented double-blind experiments, involving large numbers of subjects, human or animal. The experience of your uncles or my family isn't sufficient. 

If I can just get a few thousand people to volunteer for such an experiment with dog poo, I can show that it is effective -- or not. What are my chances? 

 

    

The British Monarchy and the Media in Historical Perspective

Writing in The Independent 16/12/22 Sean O'Grady refers to the revelations of the new Harry/Meghan Netflix series as "a tsunami of princely grievances publicly thrown at the Palace with the sort of acrid bitterness rarely glimpsed from the House of Windsor." 

We can all agree that things have got a bit nasty. But unseemly family feuding in the royal family is hardly unusual, as a brief look at their history reveals. The salacious interest of the mass media in Royal Soap Oprahs is also nothing new. 

The British monarchy and the mass media have long existed in symbiotic relationship. The royals benefit in popular opinion from the sentimental rubbish the tabloids spew forth on an almost daily basis. 

On the downside for them, the media can turn rogue when it promises to boost their profit margins. For the tabloids there is no downside. Stories about the royals sell, toadying or tacky. 

Prince Harry blames the media for Meghan's miscarriage. Accurate or not, it wouldn't be the first time media coverage made royal lives miserable. Rail against it all you like. Nothing is likely to change. 

The Sun and Jeremy Clarkson know that. They can write and print the most obnoxious drivel, knowing it will cause outrage. Once they have aroused the storm, they can say they are sorry and even retract the story. But the damage is done and millions of papers have been sold. It's a good business model. 

   

You may recall that the infamous Oprah interview with Meghan and Harry and its sequels blew almost everything else off the news cycle. Trump was gone (we hoped). We were bored of Covid and Brexit. We never did pay that much attention to the sufferings of the planet and its lesser mortals. 

Before we get our knickers in a twist over Oprahgate and the Netflix series, however, we should put this domestic squabble into perspective. 

Historically, the media has fawned upon or denounced the royals, sometimes at the same time. By historically, I mean primarily since the 18th century, when newspapers and magazines first began to emerge as significant sources of information for the general public. 

Let's begin with the first two Hanoverian kings, George I and II. That's when the media and the royals first developed a serious symbiotic relationship. The first two Georges were unpopular in Britain, to put it mildly. For one thing, they were foreigners, always a problem in insular England. Ask the EU. (Images: George I and George II)

The press skewered them for spending too much time in Hanover, although they spent more time in England. They never went to Scotland, Wales, or Ireland. Queen Victoria was the first British monarch to spend any quality time in Scotland or travel to Ireland and Wales. 

Critics accused the first two Georges of not speaking English. In fact, they could speak it, but not well, and they generally communicated in German or French.

Opposition politicians, and the press they controlled or influenced, made the most of the monarchs' failings, real or perceived. Some of the criticism was true, some not. 

George I was not a nice man. He was probably responsible for the murder of his wife's Swedish lover. He was definitely responsible for imprisoning his wife for life. Possibly his worst failing was that he was dull and awkward in public. I share a birthday with him but there the resemblance ends, I hope.

The opposition media often heaped ridicule upon him. They made fun of his mistresses, real and alleged. They characterized him as a borderline political idiot, which was far from the truth. Some Tories schemed to replace him and his heir George II with the exiled Catholic Stuart "Pretender" James "III" because they favored the opposition Whigs in Parliament. 

George I survived a couple of attempted and botched "Jacobite"* rebellions and handed the throne to his son, George II. Here it is important to note that father and son hated each other. That would become a royal family tradition.

George II and his eldest son, Frederick, Prince of Wales, also despised one another. They engaged in many nasty domestic battles. Frederick took revenge by supporting the political opposition to his father's ministers. 

A mock epitaph someone wrote for Prince Frederick when he died in 1751 is indicative of the public disdain for the first two Hanoverians:

"Here lies Fred, 

Who was alive and is dead.

Had it been his father,

I had much rather.

Had it been his brother,

Still better than another.

Had it been his sister,

No one would have missed her.

Had it been the whole generation,

Still better for the nation.

But since t'is only Fred,

Who was alive, and is dead,

There is no more to be said." 

Quoted in W. M. Thackeray, The Four Georges.

(Image: Frederick, Prince of Wales)

George II survived the media attacks, and the last and most serious of the Jacobite Rebellions in 1745. He died in 1760 aged 76 and handed the throne to his 23 year old grandson, son of Frederick. 

George III was born in England. He avoided Hanover, and these things immediately made him more popular than the first two Georges. His reign of 60 years, the longest ever until then, saw many ups and downs in his popularity, however. The media treated him and his family with both contempt and veneration. Here is an example of the former, in which John Bull, symbol of England, is farting at the king's portrait:

The family dysfunction continued. George III's relationship with his eldest son resembled that of his predecessors. George, Prince of Wales, like Frederick, supported the political opposition once he obtained adulthood. He tried to get his father declared mentally unfit to rule.  His critics mocked him as the Prince of Whales for his gluttony and rotundity. 

George IV had no problem with his heirs. His only child, Charlotte died in 1817, before he became king. If she had lived, Victoria might never have become Queen. George's family problem was his wife, Caroline. Their relationship became a public scandal. They had been estranged for years when he ascended the throne in 1820. 

George tried to have her excluded from the Queenship, but she was still his wife and most of the British public was on her side. Caroline became Queen. Only her death the following year saved George from that indignity continuing. 

His death in 1830 brought his elderly brother to the throne, William IV. At 65, he was the oldest person to inherit the throne, until today and Charles III. He had no children, and his reign was short. In 1837, 19-year-old Victoria became Queen. She would reign until 1901 and give her name to an era.

Enough! I could go on to Queen Victoria and her mess of trouble-making children and grandchildren (including Kaiser Wilhelm), but I think I have made my points: 

1. To expect good behavior from royals is just as hopeless as to expect it from other mortals. 

2. To expect the media to forego opportunities to sell their "product" to a salivating public is a pipe dream. Unless you enforce strict censorship.... 

*From the Latin for "James" (Jacobus)

 

Smallpox and the First Vaccine: A Lesson for Our Covid Time

The greatest weapon human beings possess against infectious disease is vaccines. They are also one of the most cost-effective, because they prevent serious disease and therefore costly hospital and medical procedures. 

This lesson needs to be hammered home repeatedly, because humans have short memories and short attention spans. They are also prey to charlatans peddling misinformation about medical procedures. 

Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives in our lifetimes alone. The new vaccines for Covid-19 are now promising to release us from our lockdowns as well. They may be the only hope beyond herd immunity, which will cost many millions of lives. 

The terms "vaccine" and "vaccination" derive from the Latin "vacca" for cow. The reason is that the first effective vaccine used pus from a mild skin disease, the so-called cowpox, to immunize people against the deadly smallpox. 

"Cowpox" was in fact horse-pox, which sometimes infected cows. Most people who got it worked with cows or horses.

The cartoon below by James Gillray, c. 1800, shows Edward Jenner, usually given credit for the procedure, vaccinating people, who are turning into cows. Although satire, the cartoon shows the fears the procedure aroused in many people. 

The use of the vaccine derived from observations that people who worked with cows and got "cowpox" never got smallpox. Jenner was not the first to use the procedure. A farmer, Benjamin Jesty, pictured below, had employed it about twenty years before.

Jenner (below) was the first to publicize it and get credit, a knighthood, and a ton of money from Parliament.

Before the use of "vaccine" an immunization using actual smallpox pus from human cases had been in use, in some places for centuries. Inoculation, or variolation, as it was called, was intended to induce a mild case of the disease and lifelong immunity. It was not always mild. It had a mortality rate of about 1% inoculated and it sometimes left ugly scars. Image below compares inoculation and vaccination effects on arms.

The natural disease, however, often killed 20% or more of the infected, which explains the attraction of inoculation, especially during epidemics. Its use had become widespread by the time Jenner popularized vaccination. 

Vaccination was much safer than inoculation, but it was soon discovered that it did not provide lifelong immunity. Once that was understood, periodic re-vaccination became standard in the later 19th century. (Image below shows people being vaccinated in the US in 1870s.)

Public resistance to vaccination remained high in many countries for a long time. But access to it was a bigger problem, often because of cost or lack of health care infrastructure. 

By 1979, a global vaccination campaign headed by WHO had eradicated smallpox, the greatest killer disease known to mankind. Its success had also led to the development of many other "vaccines." The polio vaccine has nearly eliminated that disease. Vaccines have many other diseases on the run. 

The lesson: Get your jab!