Occam's Razor

The state of Maryland reported yesterday that everyone that died of covid-19 in the state during June was unvaccinated. Moreover, 95% of covid-19 related hospitalizations in Maryland in June were from people who haven’t been inoculated.

This tells us something that should be obvious: these vaccines work. The news is especially good here in the United States where we have three very effective vaccines, including the “one and done” Johnson & Johnson vaccine. They appear to be ninety percent effective or greater, even against the new and more contagious delta variant now wreaking havoc worldwide.

It’s not like it costs money to get the vaccine. It’s free, even to the undocumented. It’s not like it’s hard to get a shot either. It’s available pretty much everywhere now, including in many doctors’ offices. If I needed a shot, I could get one at a Walgreens pharmacy a mile from my house. Check how far you would have to go to get a shot here. If that weren’t enough, President Biden is pushing for door-to-door outreach to try to increase the vaccination rate, hovering at just under seventy percent of eligible adult Americans. And yet plenty of Americans still aren’t convinced, and likely won’t be convinced, to get the vaccine.

It’s not too surprising that the variants are becoming more lethal over time. Although viruses aren’t technically alive, those variants that are easiest to acquire will naturally tend to infect more people. If there is an epsilon variant, it won’t surprise me if it is more transmissible and deadly than the delta variant.

Generally, our survival instinct is pretty powerful. But it appears that about thirty percent of us have an instinct more powerful than survival: believing in untruths. If you hear the message from your peers that these vaccines are fake or contain a microchip controlled by Bill Gates or that it’s part of a great conspiracy, somehow these things can override the basic survival instinct for a lot of us.

While I don’t wish misery and death on anyone, it is clear that these people are predominantly Republican and conservative, not to mention Trump supporters and wholesale swallowers of The Big Lie. Many have guns in their household too. Effectively they are playing Russian Roulette with their own lives and the lives of their family members who are also unvaccinated. It’s not too hard to figure out that there will be yet another covid-19 wave, probably in the autumn, and that almost all the fatalities will be from these people who simply refused to accept basic science.

When the pandemic started, it was an equal opportunity disease. Well, not quite. Certain people like me were well protected as we didn’t have to go out and earn a living. And a lot of people could also work from home to mitigate risk. Otherwise, it was an equal opportunity disease, but you have more “opportunities” if you lived in close contact with others. Unsurprisingly, it hit minority communities disproportionately hard.

Now, at least here in the United States, it’s not that way at all. Unless you are stupid or choose to be willfully ignorant, you are choosing to risk bad odds. The disease is likely to always be with us, so for the unvaccinated it’s just a matter of time before you will get it. It’s still unlikely to kill you, but the delta variant will give you a more severe case of the disease than at the start of the pandemic. The mortality rate is about 1.7 percent. There are some 600,000 dead Americans who, if they were still alive, could attest to the lethality of the disease.

Approximately 174 million people in the United States are not fully vaccinated. About 52 million of these are children not yet eligible for vaccination. There have been at least 33 million cases in the United States so far. So roughly one in ten Americans have gotten the disease.

Assuming that until recently cases and deaths are proportionate, with 150 million Americans unvaccinated, ninety percent of those haven’t acquired covid-19 yet. That’s 135 million people. If ten percent of them get it in the next year we can expect 13.5 million more infections and about 230,000 more deaths to stack on top of the 603,000 confirmed covid-19 death. So before the pandemic is over we can expect over 800,000 deaths from covid-19 in the United States. And probably 200,000 or so of these will be fully preventable if these people had simply taken the time to get the free vaccine.

About 88 percent of the population is age 18 or over. Assuming fifty percent of these people are registered to vote, and eighty percent of them vote Republican, this means there will be about 70,000 fewer Republican voters in the next election. This only counts those who haven’t died yet. Add in those that have and it’s likely there will be 150,000 or more fewer Republican voters in the next election.

Republicans of course are doing their best to pass restrictive voting laws to make it more difficult for principally non-white people to vote. Many of these people will have died from covid-19 too. But if Republicans lose elections in these states in spite of all this, it’s pretty clear why. It’s because they promoted baseless covid-19 vaccination conspiracy theories and untruths. In short, they did it to themselves.

I am reminded of Ebenezer Scrooge. He was speaking of poor people, but I’m not. Still, it’s true enough: “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” Given all the opportunities for these people to say yes to the vaccine, it’s hard to disagree.