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Nothing says childish like the current vaccine debate. I think that it’s instructive to look at how the country reacted to the COVID vaccine compared to the polio vaccine. First, some facts. The first polio vaccine was released in 1955. According to the CDC, in the prior year, there were 38,475 cases of polio and 1,368 deaths. Contrast that with the year prior to the COVID vaccine being released (I chose March 1, 2020 to March 1, 2021 as the time period just to get an equivalent number of months). In that year span, there were 28,000,000+ cases and 515,124 deaths.
And how did the country react to these two scenarios? I am old enough to remember being given the Sabin polio vaccine shortly after it came out (I’m pretty sure that they gave it out in school). And I don’t remember any arguments against taking it. In fact, I only remember people being happy that such a miracle drug was available (I think that pictures of people in iron lungs will do that for you.). No one accused the medical authorities of crimes against humanity. No one claimed to have been magnetized by the vaccine. No one accused J. Paul Getty (the richest man in America in 1955) of trying to profit from the vaccine.
In other words, as a country, we acted like adults.
And what about 2021? Here we were faced with a disease that caused 376 times more deaths than polio (and was more transmissible to boot). And a vaccine with a 90%+ effectiveness was being given to us free of charge. Yet armed with that knowledge many of us decided to do our own “research” and then decided that we weren’t going to take the vaccine because we believed it was somehow designed with evil intent or (at best) was going to cause more harm than good. How did we know that? Because we have seen a “collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers - in other words, between those with any achievement in the area and those with none at all”. So a lot of people simply decided that they knew more than the medical experts, or they simply searched for someone who would confirm their already-held beliefs. And in 2021, there’s always someone.
And, of course, it wasn’t just the vaccine. We reacted to simple mitigation steps like wearing a mask as if we were being forced to crawl across broken glass on our hands and knees. We weren’t about to eat that broccoli.
Serious countries don’t react like we have.
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