I’ve received the autumnal flu jab every year for the last twenty years. I still only have one head.
No one has given the entire world a Christmas present before, but our scientists are clubbing together to get everyone a nice anti-Covid vaccine.
But some aren’t celebrating. They’re busy bleating about imagined vaccine dangers, and they’re unleashing memes.
A ‘bumper sticker’ level response would see me asking who tested COVID-19, and what are COVID-19’s side effects. If I wanted to tip-toe into mathematics, I could set Covid’s current death toll beside the numbers killed by vaccines (almost zero). Vaccines are much nicer than smallpox or polio.
What’s the anti’s motivation? A few may dislike governments and big industry, and I’ve sympathy with anyone wanting scrutiny. Let’s see open data and rigorous testing.
Other reasoning is less wholesome. Some relish disaster, or fret about over-population. Other groups find comfort in seeing shadowy conspiracies who spend their vast resources in keeping ‘the little guy’ slaving away. But there’s another cohort waiting.
We’ve all seen the advertisements. ‘Nature’s Wisdom’, or ‘Health the natural way’. It’s called the ‘Appeal to Nature fallacy’. This appeal to nature drives many vaccine opponents – apparently nature offers the best state of affairs. Nature provides the best sustenance, the best design for the human body, the best ways to make anything. Nature is like holy writ. Any deviations are blasphemy: a herbal treatment always beats modern medicine because herbs are ‘natural’. And if vaccines interfere with what’s natural, we must oppose vaccines.
I don’t agree.
Many natural substances are poisonous. Cyanide lurks in apple seeds, and botulism is lethal. COVID-19 is a natural killer.
It’s also hard to define what makes a substance natural. We know acetylsalicylic acid as aspirin. Look it up and you’ll find technical diagrams showing how those atoms link. It looks synthetic, and these days it’s made in laboratories, but it also exists in willow tree leaves. Is aspirin natural or man-made? The best answer is ‘both’.
Any belief system which says ‘nature is best’ exists on a shoddy foundation of unsupported evidence and cherry-picked examples. It’s no basis for deciding public health policy.
Nature is often harmful (ask yourself why the ‘Destroying Angel’ toadstool is so called). Nature is unimaginative (it hasn’t developed wheels or gears), and perverse (the Spanish Flu epidemic killed 50 million young and healthy people).
Forgive me if I’ve no problem with ‘mucking with nature’. COVID-19 has killed over a million, and the economic pain will kill more. We can learn from nature, find out what makes birds waterproof, work out how natural painkillers work, etc. But let’s not be content with nature’s rations. If we can improve on what nature provides, let’s improve. If a vaccine heals nature’s damage, let’s get unnatural for a time.
Nature is where you start, not where you stop.