More interesting than the news that the Louisiana Department of Health has taken a more holistic view of public health is the motivation behind those, including the media, who bemoan it.
Last week, National Public Radio ran a breathless piece about how LDH had deemphasized indiscriminate pushing of vaccines for the Wuhan coronavirus and influenza and maybe the flu-like mpox, although its incidence in the U.S. in its weak form is rare and in its more virulent form nonexistent. Allegedly, LDH officials instructed employees not to make vigorous efforts to advise the public to get these vaccines and noted the department “is shifting away from one-size-fits-all paternalistic guidance to a more informative approach aimed at enabling individuals, in consultation with their doctor, to make better decisions for themselves.”
That is an entirely appropriate and productive approach to these illnesses, all of which share the same characteristics, to varying degrees, that people with healthy immune systems and/or co-morbidities rarely become seriously ill from these. Mpox potentially is the most serious but can be taken care of with smallpox vaccination, although the less prevalent vaccine version in the U.S. dedicated to it does present a relatively high 1 in 175 rate of developing myocarditis/pericarditis among other less severe side effects, while the more prevalent vaccine hasn’t been studied enough to come up with a hard number although it is thought to be less deleterious.
COVID-19, as the extensive research has demonstrated, poses close to zero risk of serious illness to youngsters and very little risk to healthy people. The flu is worse as the very youngest are more vulnerable than the younger to middle-age adult population. The virus in Louisiana at present has an age-adjusted death rate of 0.001 percent in the population while nationally the latest hospitalization rate for it is 0.0016 percent, the flu’s national death rate last survey year was 0.003 percent and hospitalization rate was 0.081 percent.
These numbers are affected by immunizations, but consider that in both the virus and flu cases these are often fairly ineffective. COVID strains change constantly making any particular vaccination, if it works at all, short-lived, and the flu vaccine because of various factors in recent years sometime worked on only 10 percent of recipients. And, both have side effects that aren’t extremely but rare that, in cost-benefit terms, become riskier the less the likelihood there is of someone in a particular cohort having any ill-effects from catching either malady.
In short, it’s pretty good advice to say talk it out with a health care provider than be told you better get a shot or you could be in a heap of trouble. The more nuanced approach better serves individual needs and respects individual autonomy.
But from media coverage like the NPR piece, you would think these diseases will run rampant because without being prodded to get vaccinated for these lots of people won’t do it. This view depends upon a deeper scaremongering of “anti-vax” sentiment taking hold if people aren’t shoved into vaccinations in their being given the luxury to think for themselves and their own welfare on the issue by government being hands-off.
Ironically, any increased antipathy towards vaccinations generally in recent times stems from this kind of coverage, implying virtue in getting vaccinations without any regard for individual circumstances or basic human autonomy, encouraged by its heavy-handedness, born of thinking that government must be empowered to shape lives, rather than viewing government as a servant of individuals. If backing away from a hard sell of vaccination, which supposedly will cause problems, that attitude has proliferated precisely because of the coercive overselling of vaccinations and other behavioral modifications pursued by many governments during the pandemic era with the media largely uncritically and sometimes mistakenly cheerleading along.
Invested as they are in their agenda and unable to let themselves see its scientific evidentiary flaws or its perverse understanding of the role of government, they eagerly build a mountain out of a molehill. It’s refreshing to see a government challenge that hubris.
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