Opinion by
Fareed Zakaria
Columnist
April 22, 2021 at 6:13 p.m. EDT
The pandemic has brought out the crazy in all of us. We’ve all been selective about the science we take seriously and the stuff we disregard. We’ve often been more moved by vivid anecdotes than scholarly studies.
But I really start to worry when even the experts seem irrational. Consider the decision from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration to recommend pausing distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after six cases of severe blood clots were reported in the United States (now nine). Nearly 7 million Americans had already safely received the vaccine. That’s a 0.0001 percent chance of a blood clot.
Meanwhile, 1.5 percent of covid-19 patients still die from the virus. In other words, even if all the blood clots proved fatal — and most have not been — the virus would still be thousands of times more dangerous than the vaccine.
The agencies’ decision came after similar rare reports of blood clotting led European nations to temporarily suspend the AstraZeneca vaccine in March. That vaccine uses technology similar to Johnson & Johnson’s, and again its benefits far outweigh the potential dangers.
These government pauses are fueling many people’s fears about vaccine safety, perpetuating conspiracy theories and wasting precious time at a moment when the crucial imperative is to get people vaccinated. Many developing nations are counting on these two vaccines because they are cheaper than mRNA vaccines and easier to store. Now, though, even some people in those places are scared to get them.
Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic
There is a pattern to the problem. Politicians and governments are much too worried about the chance of something bad happening on their watch, no matter how unlikely. For example, there has been a reluctance to send children back to school, even though numerous studies have found the risks to be quite low if precautions are taken. And while the dangers are exaggerated, few people think about the massive benefits to society — to children, parents, the economy as a whole — if schools would reopen quickly.
Sometimes this obsession with risk turns into what the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson calls “hygiene theater.” It has been apparent that the virus overwhelmingly spreads by breathing, not by touching surfaces. Yet businesses have made a great show of sanitizing everything, as if activities such as indoor dining are somehow safe if only the tables are clean. Thompson is reminded of the “security theater” at airports after 9/11. An elaborate set of measures — toss away your water bottles! — was put into place to make people feel safe, much of it useless.
More important, the obsession with the dangers of terrorism — which, even after 9/11, were quite low — led us to build a massive new homeland security industrial complex, launch military interventions across the globe and curtail civil liberties just to try to reduce the incidence of terrorism to as close to zero as possible. We denied hundreds of thousands of people visas into the United States just because we wanted to be sure that no one let in someone who turned out to be a terrorist. In government, the incentive is always to take every precaution and spend as much money as necessary to ensure that bad things don’t happen. Those are the events that make you lose your job or get you pilloried by the media or hauled in front of a congressional committee. If you make lots of good things happen, by contrast, you will be lucky to get a pat on the back.
During the early stages of the pandemic, the U.S. government kept worrying too much about all the problems that could emerge from rapid mass testing and neglected to consider the huge benefits of returning to normal life. Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina argued that we should have authorized all kinds of tests — in-home, pregnancy-style ones, for example — that would have offered constant information about who was safe and unsafe. Getting tests to be 100 percent accurate was less important than catching most cases before they spread.
The truth is that we live with risks all the time. Nearly 40,000 Americans die every year in car accidents. Would we agree to make the speed limit 25 miles per hour if it would save half of those deaths? Even now, hundreds of Americans are dying of covid every day, compared with the nine people who got blood clots. We need to think more closely, carefully and rationally about risk and remember to balance it with that other half of the equation: reward.
