We have a surfeit of ideological certainty and a dearth of empirical confidence.

From The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think by Zeynep Tufekci.  Tufekci makes some good points but her condescension to others and conviction in her own knowledge undermine, indeed contradict, her core message.

Her whole piece is marred by her consistent obfuscation between those who are vaccine hesitant and those who are anti-mandate.  As we can clearly see, there is a reasonably large contingent of the public who are both pro-vaccination and anti-mandate.  Conflating the two is convenient for rhetorical purposes but calls into question just how trustworthy might Tufekci be.  

So who are the unvaccinated?  It is less than clear.  She spends so much time larding the essay with politically correct opinions, hard left jargon, and factually questionable assertions that the actual categories of people have to be sought for, buried as they are in her words.

She leads with the unvaccinated categories most popularly demonized on the left and which she openly condemns:

Republicans

Anti-vaxxers

Conspiracy theorists 

 

Anti-science die-hards

 

She starts with them, and proving her leftist credentials to her leftist readers, she condemns them.  She does not actually quantify how representative those four categories are among the unvaccinated.  The last two categories in particular (conspiracy theorists and anti-science die-hards) seem unlikely to be actual categories and merely ideological invective.  

However, Tufekci acknowledges that those categories are incomplete and perhaps not even the primary groups of the vaccination hesitant.

She identifies other groups.  She does not say which groups are most responsible for the vaccine hesitancy numbers but given indirect allusions in the article and other extra-article data, I am guessing that it is in the following order from greatest to least.  

African-Americans and Hispanics 

 

The confused and concerned

Those with low trust in institutions and authorities 

Those without health insurance

Those without a healthcare provider 

Pregnant women

Those with Trypanophobia, a fear of needles 

Those who do not think the vaccine would be beneficial to them

Tufekci is tackling a real knowledge problem with possible real consequences.  Regrettably, she is so dismissive of others with different knowledge, experiences, interpretations or opinions that she conveys exactly what she recommends against.  

Throughout the piece she takes the position that we are knowledgeable about the effectiveness, safety, and reliability of vaccines.  While broadly that case can be made, it is not iron-clad and cannot be.  The virus is novel as are the vaccines developed through a new technology.  We think they are safe and reliable, but we cannot know until time has passed.  

While that time is passing, it has become increasingly clear that on the reliability side that the vaccines are not nearly as reliable and immunizing as was originally anticipated.  That they are probably still net beneficial is my default assumption but that they are so much less immunizing than we thought and so much briefer in duration than we thought both suggest that our knowledge is still much more provisional than warrants the confidence evinced by Tufekci.  

If we thought double vaccinations would provide long term immunity and now know it is more like six months, what does that suggest about our conviction that there are no long term negative effects?  

Tufekci writes her piece with a conviction about the holistic integrity of our knowledge of both Covid-19 and of the vaccines that is clearly unwarranted.  Her degree of confidence in her own interpretations seems surprising since she appears not to have any medical background.  

She clearly communicates her disdain for the current American health system.  She endorses the belief that the US is systematically racist.  She strongly condemns of Republicans and conservatives.  She insists that any information inconsistent with her views must be propaganda.  

There is no room in her opinion piece for diversity of opinion and variance of interpretation of data.  She is an epistemic hardliner, insisting on her knowledge being of sufficient quality that it should supersede that of all others.  

The entire piece is laden with ideological and political priors, and with an overwhelming conviction that we know all that needs to be known to take the actions she endorses, that it completely undermines her otherwise uncontentious closing argument.  

Instead, we need to develop a realistic, informed and deeply pragmatic approach to our shortcomings without ceding ground to the conspiracists, grifters and demagogues, and without overlooking the historic inequities in health care and weaknesses in our public health infrastructure. It’s not all fair, and it is not a Hollywood ending, but it’s how we can move forward.

If you want to convince others, you need to have a good evidentiary position, you have to meet those others on their own epistemic ground, you need to respect their starting assumptions, you need to have a steel man argument understanding of their position, you have concede the limits of opinion versus shared facts.  

There is little in this opinion piece indicating that Tufekci would be able to adopt such prerequisites.  Indeed, there is an unavoidable whiff of "Comply, ignorant serf!"

What is especially intriguing is a throw away paragraph towards the beginning of the opinion.  

Real-life evidence, what there is, demonstrates that there’s much more to it.

Indeed.   Real-life evidence, what there is of it.  That is precisely the issue.  We are uncertain.  We have contradictory information from across the globe.  Our forecasts have sundered on the reefs of reality.  We can see apparent successes in countries with entirely contrasting public health policies.  Non-mask, non-lockdown countries with low all-causes mortality rates.  High mask, high lockdown countries with high all-causes mortality rates.  More deaths in 2021 with vaccinations than in 2020 without vaccinations.

We don't know yet what is going on with Covid-19.  Humility requires us to acknowledge that and once we do, it opens the door to acknowledging that there is no opinion yet which is iron-clad.  We have a surfeit of ideological certainty and a dearth of empirical confidence.