Almost from the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s been a frightening amount of disinformation about the disease and the vaccines. Although most rational people have a basic understanding of why this has been the case, recent discussions have reminded me that some people still believe the lies. So, I felt like it might be worth a shot to give my take on it, along with some fundamental facts to hopefully help clarify what’s going on.
Part 1: The Science and the Facts
Before getting started on the disinformation, it may be a good idea to briefly go over the scientific facts of Covid-19 and how vaccines work, just in case.
Essential facts about Covid-19
Let’s start with this. Covid-19, an abbreviation for “Coronavirus disease of 2019”, is a disease first discovered in Wuhan, China in December 2019, caused by a new type of coronavirus, hence the name. Previously known coronavirus diseases included mostly harmless diseases like cold and influenza, but also serious diseases like SARS and MERS. The new virus, which turned out to be somewhat on the lethal side of the spectrum, was named SARS-CoV-2. A bit like the original SARS, this new virus would typically kill you by damaging your lungs until you suffocate to death.
There are some theories about the virus’s true origins (before it was detected in Wuhan), but nothing has been confirmed (and perhaps never will, as China pretty much decided to sweep it under the rug). However, for the purpose of this article, its true origin is not really that important. Regardless of how it came to be, the rest of the world is still responsible for the way it responded to it.
Anyway, in many ways, this new disease was unlike any disease seen before. For example, it was strangely selective; it predominantly killed older people (although younger people weren’t completely safe either). Even if you survived, it could give you fever experiences like nothing else, including spiritual experiences like seeing dead people and such (as reported by e.g. Chris Cuomo of CNN). Furthermore, it turns out that even if you do recover from the disease, you can still find yourself essentially disabled for months or years afterwards (“long Covid”).
Covid-19 was initially a very dangerous disease, with some initial mortality rates estimated as over 10%, but it quickly became a little less fatal in industrialized nations, as health personnel soon got access to treatments like ventilators. Still, by the end of 2020, there were almost 2 million confirmed deaths (3 million estimated), and an excess death analysis estimated that by the end of 2021, almost 15 million deaths were caused by Covid-19.
Coronaviruses belong to a class of viruses called RNA viruses. Unlike DNA viruses and retroviruses, RNA viruses do not directly change your cell’s intrinsic genetic code, but it may still be useful to understand a few details about how they work.
So, what’s an RNA virus?
First, let’s review how a normal, healthy cell works. As we all know, our genetic code is stored in a molecular double-helix structure called DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). The DNA is protected inside the cell’s nucleus, and is not allowed to move outside. Therefore, when the cell needs its genetic information, special enzymes will transcribe (copy) the desired information to smaller molecules called RNA (ribonucleic acid). The RNA then moves outside of the nucleus, where it can, for example, be read by the ribosome in order to produce proteins and such. RNA which is intended to be read by the ribosome is called messenger RNA (mRNA). And keep in mind, DNA contains recipes for all the proteins needed for survival, repair, and the production of new cells.
It should now be clear what an RNA virus does. If it manages to punch through a cell’s defenses and enter it, it will inject parts of its RNA into its new host cell. The ribosome will read it and produce whatever proteins the virus wants. Through this mechanism, the virus can produce complete copies of itself. The copies will then go on to infect other cells. This means virus infections spread exponentially, often killing the host cells, and in any case depleting the body’s resources, causing all kinds of problems.
Because RNA is less stable than DNA, RNA viruses tend to mutate relatively often. This is one reason why, for example, immunity against influenza, and certainly the common cold, typically don’t last very long, usually not longer than a year or so. Thus, people who might be at risk from the flu, are usually asked to take a new flu shot every year. (In contrast, immunity against DNA viruses like e.g. chickenpox can last a lifetime.)
And what’s a vaccine?
A vaccine is defined as a substance designed to stimulate immunity to a particular disease or pathogen (bacterium or virus). This has traditionally been in the form of a mass-produced version of a modified version of the pathogen — changed just enough so that it does not itself cause the disease. In the case of bacteria, this could work by killing the bacteria before injection. Viruses, on the other hand, are not living beings in that way, but they can be rendered harmless by, for example, removing their genome payload (DNA or RNA) or some other important component. In any case, the idea is to get the body’s immune system to recognize enough of the original pathogen’s structure to allow the body to prepare effective antibodies for it, and quickly fight any later infection. Essentially, vaccines depend on stimulating and giving information to the body’s own natural defenses. In contrast, ordinary medicines (which you usually take after you’ve already become ill) tend to try to fight disease with the help of other foreign substances and chemicals, which tend to have a higher risk of side effects and a lower chance of being effective.
Ever since vaccines were invented, they have proven themselves as the modern world’s safest, most natural, and most effective way of preventing disease. However, a problem with developing traditional vaccines, is that it takes a lot of work, time, and money to come up with a good way to mass-produce a dead version of a pathogen. Usually, a process for that has to be painstakingly developed anew for every new vaccine. Wouldn’t it be nice if this could be done more efficiently?
The mRNA breakthrough
In order to make development and production of new vaccines more efficient, several pharmaceutical companies started using gene synthesis technology to develop a new delivery system: mRNA vaccines. Instead of finding a way to mass produce the modified virus in the lab, just find a way to mass produce a modified version of the virus RNA (for example, keeping only the RNA needed to produce SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein). Then, if you inject this RNA into your body, then the cells that are exposed to it (typically immune system cells) will produce the modified virus themselves. From there, the body’s immune system can react to the virus, and everything proceeds as for a traditional vaccine, with the same effects and benefits, while being no more harmful to your body than a regular virus infection would be (unless, I suppose, you’re allergic to the substances they still need to use to keep the RNA stable until it’s injected, but this is not very different from traditional vaccines).
Arguably, this kind of technology could change vaccine development in the same way calculators and computers changed business. Those things made everything more efficient, and in turn, allowed everyone to get better quality for lower price, in the end making life better for everyone. And I think especially developing nations, who previously could rarely get the vaccines they need, should benefit from this technology, allowing them to have more of the vaccines they need, faster and cheaper, yet no less safe.
Alternative vaccines
But options are good, and vaccines using older technologies were also eventually developed against Covid-19. For example, the Novavax vaccine, a traditional protein-based vaccine, became available in 2023. (There were also previous viral vector vaccines like AstraZeneca and Janssen, but this type of vaccine works a lot like the mRNA viruses, except for putting RNA into actual viruses instead of injecting frozen RNA directly. These turned out to be slightly less effective and more risky than the mRNA vaccines.) As far as I can tell, the Novavax vaccine has been shown to be just as safe as the mRNA vaccines, thus making it a good option for those who prefer this more traditional type of vaccine.
Part 2: The Politicization of Death
Although there have always been “anti-vaxxers”, they’ve been mostly a fringe group dabbling in conspiracy theories, far away from the mainstream. The Covid-19 pandemic drastically changed this somehow, and I think the most important reason for it has to do with what happened in the United States. Let’s take a look.
Welcome to the United States
As we’ve seen, the disease was first detected in China in 2019, and by the end of the year, the WHO and the rest of the world already knew about it and were starting to take steps to limit the spread of the new disease. In January 2020, the United States started screening airline passengers, and started work on developing both a test and a vaccine. Yet, Jan 20 marks the first known case of Covid-19 in the United States.
This happened in the last year of the presidency of Donald Trump. I’ve written about him before in the article “Lessons from a democracy in peril”, but if you haven’t read it, the most important takeaway is that he’s been shown to be a lifelong fraudster, primarily concerned with his own image. But his charisma and his ability to lie convincingly, along with support from right-wing media and other influences, helped him mask his incompetency and lack of morals, and so he somehow became president (feel free to read my article if you wish to understand how). By 2020, he had already done quite a bit of long-term damage to the United States, for short-term political gains (his voters were, of course, only told about the short-term benefits, not the long-term damage). At this time, he was also being impeached for attempting to blackmail the president of Ukraine (he was trying to to get dirt on Biden, and thought blackmailing a country that was threatened by Russia was a good way to get it). He was quite desperate to look as good as possible, so that he could still be re-elected. So, if a national crisis were to appear, he was quite interested in making it look like he did an excellent job handling it, but not as interested in actually doing an excellent job. (There were already many examples of this, for example in 2019, when Trump used a Sharpie marker to pretend he reported correctly about Hurricane Dorian. Having an ego unable to admit making even the most innocent of mistakes, he tried to cover it up in the stupidest way imaginable. While President.)
Thus, once Covid-19 arrived in the United States and started wreaking havoc there, Trump was utterly unable to accept that he didn’t have the epidemic under control, and so he started covering up the seriousness of the situation. For starters, he wanted to slow down testing because the numbers would look bad. After a while, Trump’s supporters, believing his lies about the disease not being serious and about to go away, started refusing to follow public health guidelines like wearing masks, often falsely claiming they didn’t work, or that they have some sort of constitutional right not to wear them. (It has since been revealed by people working close to him that the reason Trump himself didn’t want to wear Covid masks, is because it would ruin his orange makeup.)
Covering up the dead
As the epidemic spread in the United States and started killing people en masse, Trump continued trying to cover up his lack of control, often claiming that the numbers were false, even fabricated just to make him look bad. He saw his medical advisor, Anthony Fauci, as disloyal because Fauci dared to speak the scientific facts, even if they contradicted Trump, so he started publicly attacking Fauci. Because the science was still evolving, health recommendations sometimes changed, and Trump and his followers would use that kind of thing as ammunition against Fauci, not caring about the fact that when scientists learn more about something, and correct earlier guesses using more accurate data, that’s generally a good thing.
Right-wing media like Fox News, being on Trump’s side, largely went along with his false stories. Thus began the politicization of death: if you acknowledged the reality of millions of people dying from Covid-19, you were considered a left-wing radical, some sort of horrible person. To Trump and his loyal supporters, him looking good was clearly way more important than even feeling sorry for all the people silently dying in pain. It didn’t matter that the deaths were observably, objectively, scientifically, and factually true, and causing an unimaginable amount of suffering, acknowledging reality was not an option for those wishing to support Trump.
Enter the Vaccine
One of the few things the Trump administration did manage to do right (although this was mostly thanks to Jared Kushner, also an unscrupolous person, but at least more intelligent than Donald), was to provide funding, resources, and incentives for the development of a vaccine. The program was called “Operation Warp Speed”.
After much work and many tests and trials, the first vaccines were finally approved for the generic public in December 2020, thanks to the dedication and compassion of the thousands of hard-working scientists and engineers who spent every waking hour working hard to develop this life-saving thing and save as many lives as they could. By then, 18 million Americans had been confirmed infected, many hospitals were under unimaginable pressure, and over 300 000 Americans had died — about one in a thousand of the entire American population. About 2-3 million had died worldwide, and everyone knew it would continue to get worse if the disease was not brought under control.
Despite this technological triumph, the Trump administration still botched the rollout, and it ended up taking a long time for everyone who wanted the vaccine, to actually get it. Of course, Trump didn’t care and blamed everyone but himself. (Ironically, the vaccine became the one triumph that Trump couldn’t brag about, because it was incompatible with the story he had pushed to his followers that Covid-19 was no big deal and there was no point protecting yourself from it.)
Disinformation for power, profit, and pleasure
In January 2021, Joe Biden became the next President of the United States (although not before Trump incited an insurrection in order to stop the peaceful transfer of power, the infamous Jan 6 attack on the Capitol, where Trump willingly put even his own vice president, Mike Pence, in mortal danger, because Pence would not go along with Trump’s attempted coup d’état. Many hundreds of people have already been convicted, though Trump himself was not charged before August 2023, and his trial is still pending.) Trump was ultimately unable to stop Biden from being recognized as the next President, but Trump still attacked Biden and smeared his name as much as he could, including the way Biden was actually taking Covid-19 seriously (which Trump had effectively told his followers not to do), and actually trying to reduce the number of deaths (which Trump had effectively told his followers were fabricated). Furthermore, Trump continued to convince his followers to donate money to him in order to “save America”, as he called it. (Of course, Trump usually used all that money for other purposes, such as paying his lawyers and expert witnesses to make him look good, never for actually “saving America”.)
It was likely at this point that traditional anti-vaxxing and right-wing politics truly joined forces (a type of combination I also previously looked briefly at in my article “World of bullshit”): if you were a Trump supporter and hated Biden, then the vaccine would likely seem like a conspiracy to you, and it would be relatively easy for you to adopt anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories. After all, they are quite compatible with Trump’s bold lies. So you could use these theories as a tool to attack Biden and the political left, and advocate for bringing Trump back to power in order to crush the imagined conspiracy (fitting neatly into the authoritarian dynamic I outline near the end of “Lessons from a democracy in peril”).
Part 3: The Consequences
Excess Republican mortality
It’s been repeatedly confirmed that there’s a much higher mortality among the unvaccinated than the vaccinated. And because of the disinformation pushed by the political right, Covid-19 did end up killing many more Republicans than Democrats. (Incidentally, this is one of the reason American polls have been pretty useless since the pandemic: polls are done based on pre-pandemic census data, which don’t take this effect into account. Which is one reason why Democrats currently always perform better in actual votes than they do in polls.)
Worldwide spread of disinformation
Conspiracy theorists outside the United States also picked up on the abundant disinformation, even if they weren’t otherwise interested in American politics. Thus, we now see a pretty widespread worldwide belief in Covid-19 conspiracies, even among otherwise non-political people. It’s no longer limited to fringe groups, crazy conspiracy theorists can now be found everywhere. It’s becoming a real problem for those of us who want to live in the real world (with an extra emphasis on “live”, as opposed to “die”) — now we pretty much all have someone in the family who believes this dangerous bullshit.
The most unforgivable argument
Some of the arguments pushed by Covid-19 anti-vaxxers are not only false or illogical, but also demonstrates a callous disregard for human life. Among those, there’s one which I find particularly heinous.
“They developed the vaccine too fast.”
Let’s remember the conditions under which this happened: thousands of horrible deaths daily, overloaded hospitals, overworked hospital staff, shortage of medical supplies and equipment, pretty much every family losing loved ones to the disease. Many were desperate and would try anything, even risky treatments, in order to at least have a chance. (Some even did end up killing themselves with insane treatments.) They weren’t asking for a perfect solution, they didn’t demand a miracle. They only asked for a chance. But they didn’t need it later. They needed it now.
So, when you say they developed the vaccine too fast, what you’re saying is that these people’s suffering don’t matter to you. You’re saying they shouldn’t even have been given an imperfect solution to give them a chance, they should have been given nothing. You’re saying thousands of innocent people should have continued to die every day, without hope and without a chance at life, just because you believe the vaccine wasn’t 100% perfect. You’re saying you don’t care about the millions of lives that would be lost, only about your own self-serving beliefs.
That’s why I consider this the most unforgivable argument. If you’ve made that argument, then I think you’re a monster. You’re no better than the most brutal of mass murderers, and if you believe in one, I’m sure your God will send you to the Hell you deserve. In any case, you’ll certainly be dead to me.