When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and its full impact was experienced worldwide in terms of loss of lives and livelihoods, I had a naïve expectation. I reasoned that now that the American people got to see the sorry state of the world as a result of the absence of ONE vaccine, they would fully realize the lunacy of the antivaxxer movement that wants a world with NO vaccines. And when the COVID-19 vaccines were produced in record time and became available, I fully expected the American people to flock in droves to get vaccinated and protect their lives and those of their loved ones and friends. Alas, although a majority of Americans received the vaccine and the boosters, a substantial number refused. Not only that, but the antivaccination movement had a resurgence and effectively spread alarmist misinformation and conspiracies about the vaccines far and wide promoting vaccine hesitancy, which hurt and killed many people. The antivaccination movement, which before the pandemic was mostly a movement among people with left-wing ideology concerned about vaccine safety and effectiveness, expanded during the pandemic into right wing groups rallying around ideas of parental rights and freedom from the imposition of government vaccination, which in turn gained a measure of backing from politicians eager to capitalize on their support. This activism also produced a campaign of harassment of health professionals and scientists promoting and dispensing vaccines. After the pandemic, the antivaccine groups have remained active by organizing and trying to influence vaccination policies such as school vaccination requirements in several states. Regardless of the above, the COVID-19 vaccines performed admirably. The vaccines saved more than 20 million lives worldwide the first year they were introduced, and in the United States they prevented three million deaths. During the height of the pandemic, unvaccinated people were 10 times more likely to be hospitalized and 11 times more likely to die than vaccinated people. As it was during president’s Donald Trump tenure that the Covid-19 vaccines were developed, it is ironic that Republican voters had a higher proportion of deaths than Democratic voters because of their reticence or outright refusal to receive the vaccine. Many notorious vaccine deniers including talk show hosts and social media influencers died as a result of Covid-19. In a move reminiscent of the well-known Darwin Awards, a subreddit forum created the Herman Cain Award, which is bestowed upon people who publicly declare their opposition to the COVID-19 vaccines and then die of the disease. Even though many vaccine scientists have been publicly maligned and harassed, they have soldiered on making our world a better place by producing new vaccines, creating better vaccines or vaccination methods, or molding public policy. The rest of this post is a celebration of their achievements. We start with the COVID-19 vaccines which were made possible by decades of research, during which many problems were identified and solved. The Hungarian-American scientist, Dr. Katalin Karikó, overcame adversity and along with her colleague, American immunologist Drew Wiseman, made key discoveries that allowed mRNA to be stable and not produce an inflammatory response. This in turn made possible the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines. They both shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023. The American immunologist, Barney S. Graham, experienced a life-changing event when two children died in a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine trial in 1967. He spent the rest of his life trying to figure out what happened. Graham discovered that viral proteins change their shape when they interact with the cells they infect, and that the best vaccine is the one that targets the protein in the shape before it interacts with cells. This discovery was instrumental in developing the COVID-19 vaccine, and also allowed the development of effective vaccines against RSV, a disease which can be lethal for infants and older people. Dr. Graham and his collaborators received the 2020 Golden Goose Award, which recognizes federally-funded basic research that leads to discoveries with significant impact on humanity. Now we move on to the remarkable case of the prevention of a cancer by a vaccine! In the 1980s it was discovered that some types of human papilloma virus (HPV) could cause cervical cancer. Several researchers, among them American immunologists Doug Lowy and John Schiller, and Australian Immunologist Ian Frazer, took up the study of the genes and proteins in HPV that were responsible for making human cells cancerous. They discovered that when several copies of an HPV viral protein are mixed together, they assemble into a virus-like-particle that can elicit a strong immune response. This approach was then employed by pharmaceutical companies to produce vaccines that are effective against the virus and which have been found to significantly reduce the risk of cervical cancer in women, anal cancer in men, and genital warts in both sexes. Lowy and Schiller received the prestigious Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for this achievement, and Frazer received the Prime Minister's Prize for Science in 2008 and was voted a “National Living Treasure” in 2012 by the National Trust of Australia. Finally, there is malaria, which kills more than 500,000 people (80% children under 5) each year, and which is a fiendishly complicated disease to tackle due to the many stages of development that its parasite goes though, and its capacity to evade the human immune system. However, after more than 60 years of research and trials by many scientists and clinicians, the first malaria vaccine was approved for use by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2021 and another vaccine two years later. In clinical trials, the vaccines reduced the number of cases of malaria and mortality, and their evaluation is ongoing. Vaccines are a success story and a tangible example of what science has done for us. Vaccines have decreased infant mortality in the world by 40% in the last 50 years, and the future of vaccines with new technologies to develop more effective vaccines seems promising. In the meantime, antivaxxers are causing real harm by promoting vaccine hesitancy. The obstacle to greatly diminishing the burden of disease on humanity is not lack of tools anymore, but overcoming misinformation. The photo of the COVID-19 vaccine by Lisa Ferdinando (DOD) was taken from the Flickr photostream of the US Secretary of Defense and is used here under an Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.
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During my time on Twitter, I have dealt with quite an assortment of individuals, ranging from COVID-19 and global warming deniers, 2020 election skeptics, and antivaxxers, to proponents of the 911 and chemtrail conspiracies, creationists, Flat Earthers, and QAnon. Apart from these people, I have also had to deal with a group of people whom I had not expected to cross paths with: militant atheists! But here I am not talking about people merely claiming that God does not exist or people pushing for freedom from religion. When I say “militant atheists”, I mean people who claim that a belief in God is incompatible with rational thinking. These people often insult believers calling them stupid or other monikers, while claiming that the belief in God has no place in a mind devoted to rationality and science. I find this claim surprising because the concept of God is beyond the realm of science. It cannot be proven or disproven by science. Viewed from this vantage point, in fact, atheism is not a rigorous intellectual position rationally grounded in evidence and facts, but rather just another belief. In any case, the claim that believers are somehow stupid or irrational is simply not true. For example, when it comes to scientists, some of the greatest scientific minds in the history of science as well as good number of contemporary scientists of renown (including Nobel Prize winners) have been or are believers. Several examples are Nicolaus Copernicus, Blaise Pascal, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Antonie Lavoisier, Louis Pasteur, James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, John Dalton, Max Planck, Robert Millikan, Werner Heisenberg, Arthur Compton, Albert Einstein, John Eccles, Gerty Cori, Joseph Murray, Freeman Dyson, Antony Hewish, and Peter Grunberg. A Pew Research Center poll of scientists in 2009 found that, while the proportion of scientists that believe in God is lower than that of the general population, about 33% of scientists believe in God while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. The point is that rational thinking is not necessarily hindered by belief in a God, spirit, or a higher power. Having said that, everything depends, of course, on what you believe, how you believe it, and your circumstances. Take for example the belief in creationism. If you are a scientist who believes that the world is 10,000 years old, you will have problems if you work in fields such as geology or astronomy. If you don’t accept evolution, you will have problems if you work in fields such as biology, genetics, or molecular biology. On the other hand, if you are a scientist in the field of metallurgy, belief in creationism may not affect your work at all. I believe in God (although not the God depicted by traditional religions), and I don’t believe myself to be irrational or stupid. I also I do not find my belief to be in contradiction with science, as I subscribe to the proposal by the late Harvard paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion have “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA). This means that science and religion have different areas of expertise, and rather than be in conflict with each other they should complement each other because science lacks what religion has and vice versa. Things such as values, morals, ethics, right and wrong, good and bad are the realm of religion. On the other hand, the behavior of matter and energy in the world around us is the realm of science. Religion and related disciplines should guide us in navigating the tricky maze of moral choices that we make throughout our lives. But science should guide us in choosing which beliefs to accept, modify, or discard when aspects of these beliefs clash with reality. Of course, there are some areas of friction between science and religion, but the goal is to deal with these cases in a way that endeavors to maximize the separation between the areas of competence of the two disciplines. When it comes to the belief in a God, spirit, or a higher power, I distinguish two modalities. The first modality occurs when individuals come to accept the existence of God through a process that involves faith and evidence, facts, and reason. I consider this a healthy belief in God because there is an intellectual element involved in the process. The second modality is one that occurs when the process described in the first modality is deficient or absent. This occurs, for example, when individuals believe in God because they were taught to believe in God, or because they grew up surrounded by people who believed in God. In these cases, the belief in God is just a form of social inertia. Another way of believing in God within this second modality is through a highly emotional event that may have involved a conversion from living a wicked life, or at least a life a person felt bad about, into being a better person. For these people the mere fact that they changed their lives is proof that God exists and made this happen and no further analysis is necessary. This second modality of belief in God is unhealthy, because it is unexamined and therefore prone to the uncritical acceptance of the beliefs of groups or churches that may hold views of the world that are contrary to science and reason. Most scientists who believe in God, a spirit, or a higher power, believe in them in a reasonable way, because they allow their beliefs to be tempered by evidence, facts, and reason. For example, evangelical protestants tend to have creationists views that deny the age of the Earth and evolution while accepting that there was a universal flood (although there are subtleties to this claim). In the Pew Research Center poll mentioned above, while 28% of the general public claimed an evangelical protestant affiliation, only 4% of scientists did. To recap, I don’t consider the belief in God to be anathema to rational thinking, but I do consider that the unexamined belief in God is unhealthy, as it may lead to the denial of the reality around us as discovered by science. Image by Van Ericsen was taken from flickr and is used here under an Attribution 4.0 International Deed. The image was not modified and the licensor does not endorse my use of this image. |
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