[conspire] Clocks, vaccines, boosters

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ivan Sergio Borgonovo (mail at webthatworks.it):

> She has to take care of covid patients that are nearly exclusively
> no-vaxxer. She said it is professionally a pain in the arse.

I'm sure it is infuriating, depressing, and sometimes mortifying.

Deirdre (who may or may not choose to elaborate) spends some time 
reading and (sometimes) contributing to several subReddits where 
nurses and doctors pseudonymously tell horror stories about dealing with
delusional antivaxers and their families, both before and after they get
infected (and infect others) and die ignominiously, avoidably, slowly,
and alone.  The collateral damage they do to the medical system is
severe.

I find those subReddits, e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/,
https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=Nursing -- in the latter case, the
COVID-19 subthreads -- to be too distressing to read for very long.

The point is, a subpopulation is so deeply invested in clinging to their
delusion that they literally die rather than adapt.  I have some hope
that this is _much_ rarer here in the San Francisco Bay Area (and, mostly,
across California) than in other, more systemically insane places in the
USA.  E.g., I have high hopes that a high percentage of Bay Area parents
of age 5-11 children will leap at the opportunity to vaccinate them, or
at bare minimum will stick to the "let's wait" stance for only around a
month.

(The very worst case of surprise side-effects from a public vaccine
rollout, the politically-rushed-out winter 1976 USA vaccination campaign
against H1N1 "swine flu", causing Guillain-Barré syndrome cases,
a muscular weakness caused by neurological auto-immune effects, one case
per 100,000 persons vaccinated, and 53 deaths, was revealed as a mistake
within one month.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4599698/
By contrast, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been massively tested at
this point, and it strains credulity that a reduced children's dose
might have undiscovered side-effects after successful trials.)


> No-vaxxer saying the vaccine is useless is like hearing people saying
> they are disappointed by aspirin because after taking one they had
> other headaches in their life and aspirin is way riskier than covid
> vaccine.
> 
> It's like dealing with children, they chose unreasonable expectations
> just to prove, mostly to themselves, they are still right.

Quite so.  And the "doubling down" effect upon one's irrational stance
being challenged, even politely, is notorious.

But, beyond that, I sense that the mental aberration called
"survivorship bias" has a great deal to do with this -- the pernicious
quirk, a cognitive bias, of assuming intuitively that everything will
continue to work out, just because you have continued to be upright and
breathing up to the present moment.  

The most famous case study of _overcoming_ survivorship bias was when
brilliant Hungarian Jewish mathematician Abraham Wald, working at
Columbia University because of being a refugee from the Nazis, helped
the US Army Air Corps and other parts of the military solve
statistics-based problems, heard about a USAAF general's order to apply
armouring to bombers returned from missions in the specific places where
they'd been damaged by enemy fire -- specifically, the wings, around the
tail gunner and down the centre of the fuselage.  Wald urged
countermanding the order immediately, and instead applying armour in
places the planes were _not_ shot up.  (Armouring the entire craft would
make it too heavy to fly.)  Wald's epiphany is that the bombers shot up
in vital parts of the aircraft _had not returned_.  The evidence of
where the most vulnerable areas were needed to be inferred from which
airframes (and crews) died and were no longer present to examine.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200827-how-survivorship-bias-can-cause-you-to-make-mistakes

But the Abraham Walds of this world are very few.  Most people 
_utterly suck_ at visualising the data that are not present to examine
because of failure that removed the data from immediate focus, and this
is how the unvaxed come to think "I'm still alive and my antivax friends
are still alive, so we must not need vaccines" -- because having lucked
out (so far) is too easily confused with having pursued a winning
strategy.  As the BBC article (above) points out, this is the same
near-universal bad logic that leads people to think "Bill Gates dropped
out of college and got rich, so I should drop out of college, too."

Deirdre and I feel that one of the reasons we were a good match is that 
we each, for separate reasons, know very well that a person can set off
on one's day, optimistic and with plans, and end up suddenly and
prematurely dead through some mishap or unplanned risk.  We thus look
for the ways things can fail, and try to rationally contingency-plan,
looking at what can go wrong on _all_ paths including drifting along
doing nothing.

For example, when appointments for the Moderna booster suddenly became
available to most of my immediate family on Monday, Oct. 26th, and my
mother-in-law Cheryl was scheduled to get it the next day, I re-reviewed
what I thought I knew:

Having completed the Moderna two-shot series this past mid-April, I
_probably_, according to the best science, had robust vaccine-based
immunity then, just past six months out, the estimated longevity for
Moderna being even better than for Pfizer.  However, the data are
necessarily tentative, and also are a statistical generalisation -- and
what if either the data are off, or I were unlucky?  I'd feel justly
stupid if I were to be soon lying in hospital, gasping for breath, and
thinking "And I could have had the booster."  

So, despite my "boosters probably aren't needed for most people at this
time" position, which I still hold, I got an appointment for jab #3 the
next day _anyway_, because it was an easy and safe precaution with
really no downside to doing it (and supplies were bountiful enough that
I wasn't depriving someone who needed it more), while the downside of
_not_ doing it could be very high -- either in my own medical
consequences or in greater chance of asymptomatically infecting someone
more vulnerable.  (I know two immunocompromised people, for example.)

I have no profound words of wisdom to finish with, so I'll go with:
Br careful out there.

-- 
Cheers,           Day 4278 of my caffeine LD50 field test experiment.  Eyeballs
Rick Moen         are vibrating.  Can hear colors.  Caught a hummingbird.
rick at linuxmafia.com                             -- Matt Watson (@biorhythmist)
McQ! (4x80)