Jumping off the vaccine messaging cliff

When the pandemic shutdowns began, the initial messaging was that the goal was to prevent overwhelming the healthcare systems. The basic idea was not, directly, to save as many lives as possible, but to weigh the costs of a shutdown against the costs of overwhelming hospitals.

To be fair, at the time, it was unclear the extent to which social distancing would prevent spread or whether there would be anything doctors could do beyond putting people on ventilators to help them heal.

Quickly, the focus changed away from this cost-benefit analysis and towards a system of preventing deaths (and necessarily preventing cases) as much as possible. That’s not a problem, and arguably was a good decision. But it is not going to last. Here’s what I expect to happen:

Though right now the demand for vaccines in the US outpaces the supply, that will change soon. Eventually we’ll run out of people willing (or due to medical conditions, able) to take the vaccine, likely at a percent of the population well below that necessary to achieve herd immunity.

That’s when we will reach a reckoning: People who have gotten the vaccine will be fed up with those who have not gotten it. Vaccinated people will want the ability to go back to normal.

Assuming I am correct that this will reach a breaking point and vaccinated people (and by extension, mainstream politicians) will refuse to keep restrictions in place, I believe there are two possible outcomes.

The first has been seen in some other countries already, which is opening things up just for those who have been vaccinated. But this depends upon a level of national coordination and bureaucratic capacity that I don’t trust the US to achieve, let alone arguments about fairness.

The second possibility, which is my expectation, is that things open up for everyone, even those who have not been vaccinated. The reasoning will go like this: “While we may not have herd immunity yet, the vaccine protects individuals from serious illness, and those who have not yet been vaccinated are making their choice to risk their own health”.

Of course, the implication of this is that we will return to a system that does not focus on minimizing deaths and cases. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. But I just felt like calling out the bullshit ideological purity that may claim to have right now in advance.