With only 20-30% of the population determined to get vaccinated against Covid at first call, Romania is at the bottom of the ranking, alongside France, a vaccine-skeptical country by tradition (and proud of it). We are tempted to blame domestic and foreign propaganda, the influence of the church or the manipulation of political leaders with personal agendas. But we too easily ignore the structural conditions that make us vulnerable not only to anti-vaccination campaigns, but in general to the understanding of a growing number of complicated phenomena, which, because of modernity and the Internet, come upon us in real time, leaving us no space to breathe.
When critical thinking disappears: the world seen as it was in the stone age
The pandemic hit us hard where it hurt the most: catastrophic scores, permanent decline, PISA tests in math and science. Scores where we are below the OECD average, but also below our Bulgarian and Moldovan neighbors; not to mention the Hungarians, who are way far ahead. The discussion about epidemics and vaccines is probably the most loaded with mathematics and logic in all medical science, because it counts on advanced statistics, mathematical modeling of phenomena, risk calculation, inferences, correlations that do or do not imply causations, randomized double blind studies, etc.; adding to that, the rapid adjustment of theories in the light of new discoveries, establishing when it is prudent and when not to do it, uncertainty and normal error rates. When a vector propaganda intervenes, the field has already been well mined. How can adult people have critical thinking if this way of thinking is not fostered from a tender age in the education system? Moreover, why need the likes of Putin, Trump or AUR when in our medical universities, individuals turned professors in shady circumstances, in the absence of criteria of the past decades, without any research of their own, are numerically illiterate and make errors of elementary logic in argumentation, and therefore would undoubtedly fail the TOEFL or GMAT tests required for admission to serious colleges in the West, regardless of specialization? Despite all that, they are still invited to comment publicly as "experts", by virtue of their official position, by equally numerically illiterate journalists. The problem here is not fake news, it’s something by far more serious, which cannot be solved as easily as "debunking fake news", unfortunately. In this field of generalized quarter-learning, the opposite effect is predictable: the more you inform somebody more thoroughly about the details of new treatments and the state of research, the more panicked they get when hearing things that sound shocking to them, things that are so difficult to grasp; so, the natural direction they take is that of conspiracy. "Let there be transparency, let us be shown the leaflets of the new vaccine!" shouted the crowd the other day. And, when shown the leaflet, the Cardinal of Valencia concluded in a sermon: aha, so it is made from an extract of aborted fetuses, it is "a manifestation of Satan on earth." This is the kind of credible interpretation for the emotional crowd in times of great social distress such as the Covid crisis, because it weaves real factoids into a manipulative narrative (see the details of the episode in the anti-fake video made by EFOR here, at min 9: 20).
Conspiracies are actually ancestral thinking clichés that are well grounded in Sapiens’ brain to account for complicated phenomena in the surrounding world that they cannot understand. When you don’t have any other analysis tool, you put everything in human forms, attach them intentions (good or bad) and thus build a play with characters, like a puppet theatre, which suddenly makes reality intelligible: George Soros wanted that, Bill Gates planned, the big corporations are pursuing goal X, and the enemies inside the nation have joined hands with those outside, behind our back, so that, by some mysterious means, to make us sick (or lock us in our homes.)
The first anti-vaxxers: “People will grow horns and tails!”
Anti-science populism is not something new, it’s always been with us. When Dr. Edward Jenner invented, in the early 1800s, the vaccination against smallpox, a terrible disease that killed one in 12 people and disfigured half the population, being the leading cause of blindness at the time, public opinion immediately split into two irreconcilable bubbles, just like today. Some declared him a hero and erected him statues, including political leaders hostile to Britain (such as Napoleon or Catherine the Great). Others instantly demonized him, as an avant la lettre combination of Soros and Bill Gates. This is how the anti-vaccination movement was born, which in Britain and the United States remained for two centuries one of the most powerful forms of mass mobilization of communities.
Jenner's brilliant invention was to inoculate the population not directly with the smallpox virus (this had been done before, and it was difficult, dangerous and long lasting) but with a related viral material, namely cowpox. He had noticed that the milkmaids who lived near the cattle and had cowpox, with mild symptoms in humans, acquired cross-immunity to the much more severe smallpox infection. That is why he called the procedure, in Latin, vaccinus - meaning "from the cow".
As a result, hell broke loose on Earth! Newspapers started publishing adds and caricatures of people growing horns and tails; clerics and political leaders argued that it was against nature and God’s will to inject people with biological materials taken from cattle. In a splendid Victorian idiom, it was suggested that “honorable ladies will get in the mood of running the fields to make themselves available to the bulls”. Such tabloid anti-vaccination memes are no different from those circulating on the Internet today. In fact, we see permanent recycling, in new forms, of the main anti-vaccine narratives (and its obligatory nature imposed by the state), that emerged in the 19th century.
Jenner himself did not make it any easier for science, because he was an arrogant and stubborn guy who wouldn’t admit his mistakes: for example, that the immunity obtained through vaccination is not for life, as he believed, but is lost after a number of years. In addition, as the bacteria and the process of infection were unknown, the vaccine could theoretically be ok, but unhygienic administration led to over-infections; it was difficult for people to understand what was right and what was wrong with the medical procedure. Diseases contacted in utero by babies, such as syphilis, were transmitted from one child to another through vaccination, which created outbreaks immediately after the first smallpox vaccine campaigns. 500 doctors sent a letter to the Times saying the vaccination was safe and could not cause syphilis, although people saw it as causing it. If we add to the cocktail the cohort of traditional practitioners and manufacturers of medicines that treated the disease as it had been done for centuries, with purgatives, bleeding, herbal syrups or leeches, and now started organizing anti-vaccine media campaigns to prevent them from being removed from the market, it is clear why scientific progress has not been linear at all and that there has always been plenty of space available for disinformation.
The new anti-vaxxers: bigots, libertarians and suburban hipsters
It is just as difficult today to explain to the general public how science is advancing, through trial and error, never being able to guarantee 100% success but only maximum benefits in light of what we have come to know at some point. What we know now, in any field, can be reviewed at any time in the future. But this does not mean that there are no standards of science and truth, that everything is relative and that we can believe in any pseudo-theories. When politicians and celebrities encourage conspirativitis, resistance to vaccination increases in proportion to the number of followers. For example, the distrust in large pharmaceutical companies, or even capitalism in general, based on the idea that vaccines are made 100% for profit, without control of efficacy or safety, is largely speculated. In fact, controls are strict, and vaccines are a rather unprofitable product for Big Pharma (which is why government subsidies so abruptly accelerated research in 2020), unlike chronic disease drugs, where there real big money is. When the specialists themselves, i.e. the doctors, engage in disinformation campaigns, things become really dramatic, because the potential to confuse the world is huge. For example, when you make statements like, "the vaccine can lead to leukemia." Then comes the strategic retreat: “I did not say that now, or even next year, but it is not known when, maybe in 5-10 years… and anyway "I do not say, just asking…", after the famous expression that hypocritically and skillfully invites the other speaker to prove different, which is of course impossible. This is exactly the populist-unscientific way of sprinkling a speech with highly emotion charged keywords (leukemia) specially chosen to scare the world and discredit a cause. The most famous character is the British doctor Andrew Wakefield, who launched in 1998 the theory that the measles vaccine caused autism, after tempering data from a clinical study. His right of practice was revoked, but that did not stop the idea from becoming an axiom of the global anti-vaccination movement, and he, a martyr of "free speech" (details of this story in another anti-fake clip of EFOR, here). In today's inflamed atmosphere, a serious policy discussion on, for example, a vaccination law that stipulates obligations is hard to imagine. It's actually less likely than it was years ago: trolling would be deafening. It seems almost miraculous how it was possible for governments to introduce compulsory vaccination laws two centuries ago: the first in Boston in 1809 (!) And in Britain in 1853, after the vaccine had been voluntary and free for more than a decade. The reality today is moving in the opposite direction, with various social groups rallying to the anti-cause: not only religious or uneducated people, but also hipster suburban families, famous vegan dietitians, mindfulness and alternative therapies practitioners or radical libertarians. The nutritional & aromatic supplement industry sponsors skepticism about allopathy more or less discreetly.
School’s helplessness in the face of magical thinking
In Romania, the signs of erosion of standards become visible right in the heart of the system when a chief school inspector recommends numerology courses to teachers through an official notice, and the only reaction of the Ministry is that it was just a communication mishap, let's forget about it. In reality, obviously, it is not a communication problem, but a fundamental one when a person educating children is simply unable to distinguish between scientific theories and obscurantism in pompous language. How representative the teacher in question is for the school system as a whole, no one has the courage to really research; in any case, since she became the boss, she is clearly representative of the counter-selection system that promoted her. And if we have such syncope with numerology, where things are relatively clear, I hate to think of what the situation will look like in a few years, after the campaign that is already boiling in the same underground where from the surprise came at the December 6 elections: the one for the introduction of creationism in schools. How many biology teachers have the ability to win a polemic, in front of students, with a well-trained creationist, as I have seen elsewhere, in a discipline where scientific theories are really complicated, and we have been lying to ourselves for decades that what is taught in schools change the magical thinking children get in their families and in society?
