Free Speech In the Age of Government-Influenced Facebook

 

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, chairman, and CEO of MetaPlatforms, which includes Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, recently sent a letter to Jim Jordan, Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.  Zuckerberg is a busy man, and this was no bread-and-butter socializing note, but more along the lines of a confession. 

 

In the note, Zuckerberg admitted that in 2021, Facebook had caved in to government pressure, specifically from the Biden White House, concerning certain posts relating to COVID-19, "including humor and satire."  The company was also guilty of "demoting" stories about Hunter Biden's laptop when it chose to believe the FBI's claim that it was Russian disinformation in 2020.  In both cases, Zuckerberg says basically we were wrong and we won't do it again.

 

The most generous interpretation of this letter is that here is an upstanding citizen, who also happens to be the fourth richest person in the world, admitting that he and his people did some things that in retrospect might not have been the best choice, given what he knows now.  But hey, he's learned from his mistakes, and we should all feel better that Zuckerberg and his companies have admitted they messed up in what were understandably hard circumstances. 

 

Ranged against this rather anodyne letter are some cherished U. S. traditions such as freedom of speech and the rule of law.  Let's talk about the rule of law first.

 

In a recent issue of Touchstone magazine, professor of law Adam J. MacLeod outlines how the idea of rule by law rather than men arose during the reign of the Emperor Justinian (485-565).  Justinian caused twelve ivory tablets to be placed on public display, tablets that contained a concise summary of the laws of the land.  All disputes were to be decided on the basis of reasoning from what the tablets said, not from what somebody in power said.

 

In placing reason above power, the rule of law placed everyone on a much more equitable footing.  The peasant who could reason out law was now able to defend himself against a powerful lord who wanted to take his land, if the peasant could show what the lord was trying to do was against the law.  MacLeod admits that since the late 1800s, jurisprudence has largely abandoned the fundamentals that supported the rule of law, but in practice, vestiges of it remain.  No thanks to Zuckerberg, however, for those vestiges.

 

Although Facebook is not a branch of government, in bowing to White House pressure it acted as a government agent.  And its near-monopoly on social media channels makes it a powerful player in its ability to censor unfavored speech, such as people making fun of Anthony Fauci or other prominent players in the COVID-19 follies.  So where was the ivory tablet to which a satirical outfit such as the Babylon Bee could appeal when its posts disappeared?  Their only option was to mount a lawsuit that might take years, would certainly cost tons of money, and might in the end amount to nothing.  So much for the rule of law.

 

Some counter the claim that the principle of freedom of speech does not apply to private companies such as Facebook, because a private entity can allow or disallow anything it likes and be as capricious about it as they want.  If Facebook had the reach of my town paper, the San Marcos Daily Record, this argument would carry weight.  One little outlet being arbitrary about what it publishes is no big deal.  But Facebook, although not the only social-media show in town, is by far one of the largest, and its censorship, or lack thereof, hugely influences public discourse in the republic that is the United States, as it does in many other countries of the world with less of a tradition of free speech. 

 

Once again, while Facebook is not a government entity, when it takes actions that the government pressures it to do (either through legal means or simply jawboning), it becomes an agent of that government.  And while it is perhaps true that Facebook did not violate the letter of the First Amendment which prohibits only Congress from making a law that abridges the freedom of speech, the spirit of the law is that the Federal government as a whole—executive, judicial, or legislative—should refrain from suppressing the freedom of the people to express themselves in any way that is not comparable to yelling "Fire!" falsely in a crowded theater. 

 

There are two extremes to which we might go in this situation, at opposite ends from the muddled middle in which we presently find ourselves.  One extreme would be to treat near-monopolies such as Facebook as "common carriers" like the old Ma Bell used to be.  With very few exceptions, nobody regulated what you could say over the telephone, and in the common-carrier model, Facebook would fire all its moderators and only retain the engineers who would keep hackers from crashing the entire system.  Other than that, anybody could say anything about anything.  Zuckerberg wouldn't censor anything, and I bet he'd be relieved to be rid of that little chore.

 

The other extreme would be to regulate the gazoo out of all social media and set up explicit "twelve-tablet"-like rules as to what can and can't be said on it.  We have something like this model in the way the Federal Communications Commission regulates what can be said or shown over the (public) airwaves (not cable).  The FCC is mostly concerned with obscene or indecent content, but that's just a historical fluke.  In a republic you can vote to regulate anything you want.  This would be a return to the pre-deregulation days of inefficient but reliable airline and phone service.  It would be duller and more predictable, but there are worse things than dull.

 

Neither of these extremes will come to pass, but the present near-total governmental inaction in either direction leaves a political vacuum in which Mark Zuckerberg, emperor of social media, will continue to do what he thinks best, and the rest of us simply have to deal with it.  And the rule of law and freedom of speech will continue to suffer.

 

Sources:  I referred to an Associated Press article "Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook over some COVID-19 content during the pandemic," at https://apnews.com/article/meta-platforms-mark-zuckerberg-biden-facebook-covid19-463ac6e125b0d004b16c7943633673fc.  Zuckerberg's letter to Congress is at

https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1828201780544504064/photo/1, and I also referred to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires.  Adam J. MacLeod's "How Law Lost Its Way" appeared on pp. 22-28 of the Sept/Oct 2024 issue of Touchstone.

 

How Did COVID-19 Start?

 

Nearly two years after the initial fatalities that would turn out to be caused by the COVID-19 virus, we still do not know the answer to that question.  But last week, the U. S. National Institutes of Health revealed that it was funding "gain-of-function" research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan during 2018 and 2019, in direct contradiction to Dr. Anthony Fauci's testimony before Congress that no such research was being supported by NIH there. 

 

In times past, plagues were regarded as simply acts of God, and while people tried to avoid transmitting infections by means of quarantines and travel restrictions, it was rarely possible to pinpoint the exact time and place where a given pandemic began.  But with advances in genetics and biochemistry, infectious agents can often be tracked down and successfully traced to their source, as was done with a localized outbreak of what came to be known as Legionnaires' disease, when it was traced to bacteria harbored in an air-conditioning water system.

 

By all measures, the COVID-19 pandemic has been the worst plague in modern times in terms of economic and social disruptions, casualties, and deaths.  According to the website www.worldometers.info/coronavirus, COVID-19 has been responsible for about 4.9 million deaths worldwide so far.  If for no other reason than to learn from our mistakes, it should be an urgent global priority to discover how the pandemic started, and whether it was by accidental transfer from an animal species such as bats to humans, or by means of deliberate creation of more aggressive viruses than occur in nature and accidental spread from the laboratory that created them.

 

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic started in a country that has systematically suppressed the information that would help in deciding this question.  But the following facts are known.

 

Shi Zhengli, a viral researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has worked for years with viruses taken from wild bats, as bats have the peculiar ability to host a wide variety of viruses that can be harmful to other species without themselves becoming ill.  To perform this research, she and her colleagues traveled far and wide to collect samples from bats in remote caves in other parts of China.  She has continued to perform research connected with COVID-19 in China after the pandemic began, and denies that there has ever been an accident in her institute resulting in infection of staff or students. 

 

Wuhan is by all accounts the city where COVID-19 first claimed its victims.  It is the largest city in central China with a population of about 11 million.

 

As we now know, the NIH funded so-called "gain-of-function" research through an organization called EcoHealth Alliance, headed by researcher Peter Daszak, which was conducted in association with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  Gain-of-function is a bland phrase that means an infectious agent has been enhanced in its ability to infect a host.  While some argument can be made that concocting such viruses is the only way to figure out a defense against them, it is obviously an extremely dangerous thing to do.  Dr. Zhengli admits that prior to COVID-19, much of her viral research was done in lab conditions that were less safe (so-called "BSL-2" and "BSL-3") than the highest-security BSL-4 labs.

 

Let's imagine a different scenario and ask some questions about it.  Suppose nuclear weapons had not yet been invented, but researchers were hot on the track of cracking the secret of nuclear energy.  Suppose also in this contrafactual fantasy world that the U. S. funded some of this research at a center in Sao Paolo, Brazil.  Suddenly one day, a huge explosion happens in Sao Paolo, wiping it off the map and sending radiation into the air that eventually kills a total of 4.9 million people worldwide.  Despite the fact that most of the relevant data to determine the exact cause was vaporized in the explosion, wouldn't it be wise at least to do our very best to figure out what happened, with or without the cooperation of the Brazilian government?

 

In a sense, we already know what to do.  Whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, actually originated in a lab accident in Wuhan or in an exotic-food market there, we now know that early detection and faster responses to highly contagious new diseases might make the difference between another world-crippling pandemic and a minor contained outbreak. 

 

In the case of COVID-19, the Chinese government delayed for weeks before even publicly acknowledging the magnitude of the problem, and criticized brave medical workers who tried to publicize the seriousness of the nascent epidemic.  In retrospect, this was exactly the wrong thing to do, but it is the natural response of most governments to minimize something that is not yet so obviously awful that denials will look silly. 

 

One hopes that if a similar outbreak happened in, say, Chattanooga, state and federal officials would be more forthcoming than their Chinese counterparts in telling the rest of us about what was going on.  As to the measures that would have stopped the epidemic in its tracks, it seems that only a city-wide 100% quarantine with extreme measures taken to enforce it would have worked, and maybe not even then.  Any government will be reluctant to impose such a draconian measure unless there are very good reasons to do so. 

 

But as things stand, there are still unanswered questions about what other activities EcoHealth Alliance was doing in China that they were supposed to report on but didn't.  Unless the Chinese government suddenly becomes more forthcoming about what really happened in Wuhan, we may never know how COVID-19 really began.  But we certainly know how it spread.

 

In investigations of engineering disasters, future accidents of a similar nature can't reliably be forestalled until the exact mechanism of the one under investigation is understood.  We have part of the picture of COVID-19's origins, but not the whole story.  The best we can do now is to be much more aware of rapidly spreading fatal diseases in the future, and willing to take what may look like extreme measures locally to prevent another global pandemic. 

 

Sources:  National Review carried on its website the article "The Wuhan Lab Coverup" at https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/the-wuhan-lab-cover-up/.  I also referred to the NIH letter at https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1450947395508858880 and the Wikipedia article on Shi Zhengli. 

Worldwide Health Journal Editors Call for Climate Dictatorship

 

Maybe I exaggerate, but only a little.

 

In a recent National Review piece, Wesley J. Smith highlighted an editorial that was recently co-written and published by editors of some eighteen medical journals, including such prestigious ones as The Lancet and PLOS Medicine.  In essence, they're saying, "Hey, you see how much government-caused disruption we've stood for to fight COVID-19?  Let's do even more to fight global warming, combat biodiversity loss, and, yes, incidentally, even improve public health." 

 

They take global warming very seriously, saying "The risks to health of increases above 1.5º C are now well established.  Indeed, no temperature rise is 'safe.'"  Because global warming was caused by countries that emitted more carbon dioxide, and those tend to be wealthier ones, the editors call for a form of retributive justice:  "Wealthier countries will have to cut emissions more quickly, making reductions by 2030 beyond those currently proposed, and reaching net-zero emissions before 2050."

 

So how should we go about doing these things?  Here it gets juicy:  "To achieve these targets, governments must make fundamental changes in how our societies and economies are organised and how we live . . . . Governments must intervene to support the redesign of transport systems, cities, production and distribution of food, markets for financial investments, health systems, and much more." 

 

Who will pay for all this?  Why, the wealthy countries, of course.  As a famous bank robber said when asked why he robbed banks, "Because that's where the money is."  Rich countries need to increase their spending on poor countries with grants, not loans.  And after all, having these big differences in wealth is apparently bad for public health too:  " . . . the changes cannot be achieved through a return to damaging austerity policies or the continuation of the large inequalities of wealth and power within and between countries."  In other words, let's have global socialism so that everybody has more or less the same income.

 

If we took that advice literally and divided up all the world's wealth and income evenly, every person in the world would end up with about $34,000.  That sounds nice, but it ignores the literally Hellish world-government system it would take to do that.  If you think Venezuela is bad, where only tiny steps toward this goal have been taken, wait till you try to apply it to the whole world.

 

Perhaps when these editors stick to matters of medicine, they make sense, but in their attempt to address a complex problem that has huge diplomatic, political, and philosophical implications, I think they bit off more than they can chew.

 

First, what about the idea of making the most wealthy countries suffer the most?  If you look at total carbon dioxide emissions from 1750 to 2019, it turns out that the two largest contributors are Europe and the U. S., with about a fourth each, followed by China and the rest of Asia with about a sixth each, roughly speaking. 

 

That obscures the fact that currently, China emits about twice as much carbon dioxide as the U. S. does. So if you're talking about reducing current emissions, a radical action such as putting the entire U. S. economy in a deep freeze would not make as much difference as if China simply reduced their carbon emissions by two-thirds. 

 

What I'm trying to get at is the underlying philosophy of the editors' call to action.  They clearly are going beyond science, and admittedly, medicine is more than just science.  But in conformity with a notable liberal tendency to see solutions to problems as more straighforward than they are, they view the world in a scientistic way in which humans are reduced to pawns or nodes in a giant network that simply needs some adjusting to make it work right.

 

Too many resources over here and not enough over there?  Why, just move the ones that belong to the rich countries over to the poor countries.  If it was a matter of underpowered neighborhoods and a surplus of electric power elsewhere, you really could solve the problem by building a transmission line to move the power where it needs to go. 

 

But how did those wealthy countries get wealthy in the first place?  By their governments allocating everything according to some formulas devised by economists, or even editors of medical journals?  I don't think so.  Economist and author John C. Médaille has said, "Values are created only from human labor applied to the gifts of nature.  There is nothing else."  Historically, the most wealthy countries encouraged human labor to apply itself to the gifts of nature by treading lightly on rights of private property, which includes "transport systems, cities, production and distribution of food, markets for financial investments, health systems, and much more." 

 

If wealth is treated simply as a government-controlled asset that can be sent here and there like electricity on a transmission line, said governments will very soon discover that there is no wealth to send.  The fact that this has happened over and over again in socialist and communist countries seems to make no impression on certain types of people, apparently including the types that edit medical journals.

 

Should we just ignore global warming and go on our merry way?  Not necessarily.  It is an unfortunate byproduct of human ingenuity, and we would be foolish to look for anything other than more human ingenuity to get us out of the situation.  But human ingenuity cannot be trammeled and ordered around like so many million barrels of oil, or anything else.  Governments can guide and encourage, but the heavy-handed global dictatorship called for by the medical-journal editors would not get us there.  Instead, it would result in a worldwide economic crash and famine from which the world economy might never recover, and which would incidentally kill millions of people in the process.  So much for improved health care.

 

Some people might be happy to see the future as a vastly reduced number of people eking out a subsistence living in the empty skeleton-shells of cities, hunting deer in Central Park and living on thirty-year-old canned goods, as envisioned in the forgotten Stephen Vincent Benét short story "By the Waters of Babylon."  But that is not where I wish to reside for my time remaining, thank you.  After I'm gone, you can please yourself.

 

Sources:  The editorial in question, "Call for emergency action to limit global temperature increases, restore biodiversity, and protect health," appeared in the British Medical Journal (and many other similar journals) at https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1734.  The data on historical and current carbon-dioxide levels is from https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-china-the-main-climate-change-culprit/a-57777113#:~:text=The%20data%20shows%20that%20although,released%20410%20billion%20metric%20tons.  The world's wealth evenly divided was calculated at https://www.bnd.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/answer-man/article170650812.html.  The Médaille quote is from his Toward A Truly Free Market (ISI Books, 2010), p. 66.  And Benét's short story can be found in a number of older short-story anthologies, and is also online at

https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/13_By%20the%20Waters%20of%20Babylon%20by%20Stephen%20Vincent%20Benet.pdf.

Facebook Is Watching Your Friends

 

Suppose you went to a party with a group of friends, one of whom is a rather outspoken person we'll call Ms. A.  After an hour or so, someone you never met before comes up to you and says, "I couldn't help noticing that you came here with Ms. A.  Aren't you concerned that her views are a little extreme?  I can give you the number of somebody who can help her." 

 

How would you react?

 

I don't know about you, but my first thought would be, "Who the — are you to be judging my friend?"  The whole thing smacks of authoritarian control and monitoring on the part of the snoop who expressed concern about Ms. A.  Yet in early July, Facebook announced that it was going to do a trial of a system that essentially does that very thing.  And I know someone it's already happened to.

 

Here is the way Facebook explains what it's doing, as reported by Reuters on July 1:  "This test is part of our larger work to assess ways to provide resources and support to people on Facebook who may have engaged with or were exposed to extremist content, or may know someone who is at risk."  That sounds reasonable—after all, groups such as Al Qaeda used platforms like Facebook to recruit U. S. citizens to their cause, and if there's something Facebook can do to keep that from happening again, it sounds like it's worth doing.

 

I'm involved in a group that meets monthly to discuss an article from the journal of religion and public life called First Things.  Most of us are over 50, and a more harmless group of non-radicals is hard to imagine.  For a time, a woman attended who later joined the Roman Catholic Church.  From my limited interactions with her, I would say she was conservative, but not radically so, and unusually articulate about various social problems, including abortion. She no longer attends our discussion group, but some of us still follow her on Facebook.

 

Her Facebook followers were surprised the other day when Facebook asked them if they thought the Catholic woman was becoming an extremist.  I don't use Facebook and so I can't say what material she might have posted which inspired Facebook to ask this question.  But based on what I know about the woman, at the very least Facebook is wasting its time.  And more seriously, this anonymous action on the part of a powerful corporation exerts a chilling effect on the tattered, bedraggled thing we once called free speech.

 

The fly in this otherwise admirable-sounding ointment of extremism prevention is the question of just what counts as "extremist."  One person's extremist is another's enthusiast.  Also on July 1, Fox News reported the comments of several people who had received such warnings, which typically read  "Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist?" followed by an option to "Get Help" which leads to an organization called "Life After Hate."  One user who received this type of notice neatly summed up the dilemma that Facebook faces: "'Confidential help is available?' Who do they think they are? Either they’re a publisher and a political platform legally liable for every bit of content they host, or they need to STAY OUT OF THE WAY."

 

The reason Facebook isn't liable for every bit of content they host, as a conventional newspaper publisher would be, is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which exempts platform hosts from being liable for what third parties place on their platforms.  Perhaps in the early days of the Internet, this protection was needed in order to encourage investment in the young, struggling things that were Google and Facebook.  But now that social media constitute a major, if not the primary, source of political and cultural news in the U. S., the pretense that they are insignificant people-connectors who just barely make enough money from ads to stay in business and need special protection from the government is looking more ridiculous every day. 

 

Not only is Facebook deciding who is an extremist, it's getting help deciding what truth is from the White House.  Biden Administration press secretary Jen Psaki said on July 15 that they are "identifying 'problematic' posts for Facebook to censor because they contain 'misinformation' about COVID-19."

 

Again, this sounds reasonable at first glance.  Some things that people are saying on Facebook about COVID-19 and vaccinations for it are ludicrous and harmful.  But what happened to the old saying "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"?  According to Wikipedia, this quotation comes from a biography of Voltaire by one Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing as S. G. Tallentyre. 

 

Hall was trying to illustrate one of Voltaire's principles, which was a radical (there's that word again) belief in free speech, which is one of the pillars of what should now be called classical liberalism, along with democratic governance and freedom of religion.  The American Civil Liberties Union adhered to radical free-speech principles until a few decades ago, even defending such scurrilous extremists as a neo-Nazi group that wanted to stage a march in a Chicago suburb where many Holocaust survivors lived.   This was in 1978, and although the ACLU itself has a page on its website describing this episode, I think it's fair to say that the current ACLU is finding other things to do with its time.

 

Facebook wants to have things both ways.  They want to receive plaudits as the platform for the little guy where a thousand free-speech flowers bloom, and they also want to avoid opprobrium (and lawsuits, and fines) for hosting material that is illegal, libelous, or harmful in someone's eyes.  But as the gentleman quoted above implied, you can't have freedom without responsibility.  Editing or censoring one thing on Facebook means the whole thing is now an edited entity.  You can't be just a little bit pregnant, and you can't pretend a platform is free if parts of it aren't—especially when the parts that aren't change from day to day, or from White House instruction to embarrassing news report. 

 

Sources:  The Reuters report describing Facebook's test program advising about extremism was published on July 1, 2021 at https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-asks-are-your-friends-becoming-extremists-2021-07-01/.  I also consulted a Fox News report at https://www.foxnews.com/media/facebook-warns-users-have-been-exposed-harmful-extremists.  The New York Post reported on Jen Psaki's comment about the White House advising Facebook on COVID-19 "misinformation" at https://nypost.com/2021/07/15/white-house-flagging-posts-for-facebook-to-censor-due-to-covid-19-misinformation/.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Evelyn Beatrice Hall and Voltaire.

Should We Worry About the Chip Shortage?

 

A recent article in Wired goes into the reasons for the current worldwide integrated-circuit shortage, which is affecting everybody from videogamers to drivers who want to buy new cars, but can't because the automakers can't get enough chips.  Reporter Eric Ravenscraft says there are several interrelated reasons, starting with COVID-19.  But underlying them is a more structural problem:  the fact that over 60% of global semiconductor manufacturing revenue comes from factories in Taiwan, and a good portion of the rest comes from mainland China.

 

The economists will tell you that shortages happen when demand outpaces supply so fast that producers can't keep up with consumers.  As millions around the world transitioned to working from home, the demand for more laptops, webcams, and associated equipment soared.  At the same time, manufacturers were dealing with COVID-19 shutdowns and absent workers, although Taiwan managed to keep their total number of reported coronavirus cases under 1000—until about a month ago, when their numbers shot up to the current figure of 12,000, according to the Worldometer coronavirus website.  This does not bode well for the near-term future of chipmaking.

 

So even if semiconductor manufacturing had continued at its normal pace, we would have seen prices rise and supplies shrink simply because of increased demand. 

 

Ravenscraft then turns to the fact that the Trump administration in particular enacted policies that are consistent with trying to start a trade war with China.  The details are complicated, but the net effect on availability of chips was negative.

 

And because semiconductors are some of the most complexly-engineered things on the planet, you can't just stop making one kind of processor one day and start making a different kind the next day.  Millions of coordinated process steps, masks, and other details have to change for yield on a new product to rise into the profitable range, and that can take weeks or months.  Here in Texas where our Big Freeze in February knocked out power to a Samsung semiconductor plant in Austin for over a week, it took them on the order of two months just to get things going again.  So chipmaking is not a turn-on-a-dime industry.  Sudden increases in demand cause big problems with supplies that can last months or longer, as these seem to have done.

 

Looking at the big picture, the semiconductor industry has become as essential to the world economy as oil or even food.  People can't eat chips (not the silicon kind, anyway), but they are nonetheless vital to the way we live now.  I have dabbled in the history of technology from time to time, and now and then the occasion arises to determine the relative importance of a given technology to a given culture at a given time.  The following thought experiment is useful:  Suppose everyone woke up one morning and the technology in question had vanished off the face of the earth.  How disruptive would that be to normal life?

 

Some technologies would not be especially missed:  dental floss, for example.  But as we found out in Texas last February, electric power is pretty necessary to normal life for most of us, and if all the semiconductor chips vanished out of our devices one fine morning, we would be arguably worse off than we were without electric power.  Cars newer than 1960s models wouldn't run, nobody's phones would work, businesses from mom-and-pop stores to Amazon would freeze up instantly and lose most of their records (how's them apples?), and, well, it's starting to sound like some descriptions of the consequences of an electromagnetic pulse that would result from detonating a nuclear weapon above the atmosphere, only worldwide.

 

Fortunately, short of divine intervention, we won't have to suffer theglobal disappearance of semiconductor technology.  But this little thought experiment shows how crucial it is to modern life, and how even a mild thing like a chip shortage can have extensive and surprising ripple effects.

 

The other factor that makes a chip shortage serious is the rapid pace at which new products overtake old ones.  This is largely a circumstance of the industry's own making, because anybody with billions of dollars tied up in a semiconductor manufacturing plant has to keep it running at a profit or lose their investment.  So markets have to be found for all those chips, and that is why you have to turn loose of your old electronics even if you like it, because the rest of the world moves beyond it and you have to keep up or else just quit.  And sometimes "old" means only a year or two. 

 

Of course, the manufacturers would say that they're just trying to make their customers happy, and there is some truth to that.  But let me bring in a different voice from a different tradition.

 

Paul Kingsnorth is an environmental activist and writer who, after thirty years of activism and dabbling in Buddhism and Wicca, recently joined the Romanian Orthodox Church.  As an activist, he saw problems with the way the world was going, as he puts it in the June/July issue of First Things:  "We would remake Earth, down to the last nanoparticle, to suit our desires, which we now called 'needs.'"  Needs for semiconductors, for instance.

 

But after his conversion, he views Christianity as the history of man's rebellion against God.  The global issues he was so focused on formerly—climate change, economic inequality, and so on—he no longer views as problems to be solved, but as spiritual issues, consequences of sin.  Toward the end of his article, he writes "In the Kingdom of Man, the seas are ribboned with plastic, the forests are burning, the cities bulge with billionaires and tented camps, and still we kneel before the idol of the great god Economy as it grows and grows like a cancer cell.  And what if this ancient faith is not an obstacle after all, but a way through?"

 

The chip shortage looks like at most an annoying interruption of what we have come to regard as business as usual.  But what if COVID-19 and its consequences form an opportunity for us, individually and corporately, to ask some questions about the whole set of assumptions that underlie that business?  Maybe business as usual isn't where we should be trying to go.  But that is a discussion for another day.

 

Sources:  Eric Ravenscraft's article "Here's Why Gadgets Are So Hard to Get Right Now" was published on the Wired website on June 12, 2021 at https://www.wired.com/story/heres-why-gadgets-are-so-hard-to-get-right-now/.  I also quoted from Paul Kingsnorth's article "The Cross and the Machine" on pp. 35-41 of the June/July 2021 issue of First Things.

Trust and the COVID-19 Vaccine

 

In the last three weeks, the U. S. Food and Drug Administration has approved two vaccines for use against COVID-19.  Both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were developed in less than a year, a stunning technical achievement that relied on cutting-edge science and engineering.  Now the big question is, how many people will be willing to take it? 

 

The only vaccine rollout of comparable importance in my lifetime was the advent of polio vaccines in the late 1950s.  I was not old enough to be reading the newspaper regularly when I ate the sugar cube the Sabin vaccine came on, being about eight years of age, but I understood by the way my parents acted that it was a big deal. 

 

Polio was a terrifying disease for two reasons:  it tended to strike children and teenagers, and it usually crippled rather than killed you, putting many of its victims in clumsy braces, wheelchairs, or a medieval-looking contraption called an iron lung.  So it's not surprising that polio vaccines received near-universal acceptance in the far-off days when your doctor's word was tantamount to the word of God and the only people who objected to vaccines were Christian Scientists and other minority groups.

 

Things are different now in a lot of ways.  Public trust in expertise of all kinds has seen a decline in recent years.  There is now a substantial anti-vaccine movement motivated by a variety of factors, but sharing a common belief that the harm vaccines do may well outweigh the good, and assurances to the contrary by scientists or the medical profession should not be trusted.  Surveys asking people whether they will be willing to take a COVID-19 vaccine turn up substantial numbers of people who don't want it, although recent trends have been in the more-willing direction.  For example, a Kaiser Foundation survey conducted between Nov. 30 and Dec. 8 and reported in U. S. News says that 41% of Americans say they will definitely get it and 30% will "probably" get it.  The number of people who say they definitely won't get a vaccination is 15%, and 12% say probably not. 

 

The poll broke down respondents by rural versus urban, Republican versus Democrat, and African-American versus everything else.  Those in rural areas, Republicans, and African-Americans are less willing than other groups to get vaccinated for COVID-19.  Why is this?

 

One factor cited for the reluctance of African-Americans to receive the vaccine is the bad track record of medical experimentation on Black Americans exemplified by the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study conducted between 1932 and 1972, which followed the course of the untreated disease in African-American men by lying to them that they were receiving free medical treatment, when in fact they were not being helped at all, just observed as the disease progressed to its fatal conclusion.  This study is a poster child for unethical experimentation on human subjects, and it's not surprising that after betraying trust in this manner, the U. S. Public Health Service and the Centers for Disease Control find that Blacks are less than enthusiastic than other ethnic groups about government-supported vaccine programs. 

 

But that doesn't explain why 27% of the U. S. population still doesn't want a COVID-19 vaccination. 

 

Part of the reason may simply be that younger people don't think catching COVID-19 will hurt them that much, whereas the vaccine makers are admitting up front that the second of the two necessary injections makes many people mildly ill for a day or two.  Absent a job requirement to receive the vaccine (and I'm not aware of any organizations which have yet implemented such a requirement), that is a judgment call that is up to the individual. 

 

The novel factor in this whole situation is the way that a vaccine that can keep you from contracting a widespread potentially fatal disease has become a political football, with Republicans showing more reluctance to take it than Democrats.  The simplistic answer to this question, namely that followers of Donald Trump are a bunch of ignorant morons who he can lead around by their noses, won't do.  At least before the November election, Trump was boasting about how fast Operation Warp Speed was going to produce and distribute the vaccine.  So why aren't Republicans all on board with it? 

 

A better answer may be that trust in governmental institutions in general, rather than in individual politicians, has undergone severe erosion in the last decade or two, and perhaps more so among Republicans than among Democrats.  The Gallup poll organization publishes annual samplings of how ethical various professions and members of institutions are perceived to be.  The poll asks, "Please tell me how you would rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in these different fields—very high, high, average, low, or very low?"  Their findings are instructive.

 

Members of Congress, for example, don't do very well in these polls.  In the latest poll conducted earlier this month, Congresspeople rated only 1% very high, 7% high, 29% average, 39% low, and 24% very low.  Contrast this to the public perception of, say, engineers (in 2019):  17% very high, 49% high, 31% average, 2% low, and 1% very low (1% had no opinion).  This is better than engineers were doing in the 1970s, for example, when only 10% of respondents rated them very high. 

 

Now engineers don't have to run for public office by raising millions of dollars of campaign funds, and if they did, their public perception might be different.  Interestingly, of all the major professions, nurses come out even better than engineers:  41% of the public in December 2020 thought nurses' ethics and honesty were very high and 48% thought they were high.  So maybe public-service ads featuring nurses encouraging you to get a COVID-19 vaccine would be more effective than government pronouncements.

 

As you probably know, the vaccines will not begin to affect the overall spread and persistence of COVID-19 until a substantial fraction of the public receives effective vaccines.  Estimates of the substantial fraction vary, but it's somewhere around half.  And one thing that is still unknown is whether the vaccines only prevent people from suffering adverse symptoms of COVID-19 (it's pretty clear that they do that), or whether they prevent people from spreading it as well.  There simply hasn't been enough time to determine their effectiveness at reducing infectiousness.

 

Well, my sister (a nurse, whom I trust) received the first of her pair of COVID-19 vaccine injections last week, and assuming it's eventually available to people in my category (engineer, college teacher, over 65), I plan to get it too.  But I can understand that people may have reasons to refuse, and so far, this is a free enough country where you can do that.

 

Sources:  The U. S. News report on the Kaiser poll about willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine appeared at https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-12-15/americans-willingness-to-get-coronavirus-vaccine-increases-poll-finds.  The Gallup organization has posted historical and up-to-date responses to its honesty-and-ethics polls at https://news.gallup.com/poll/1654/honesty-ethics-professions.aspx.  I also consulted the Wikipedia article on "Tuskegee Syphilis Study."

The COVID-19 Vaccine: When, Where, and Who?

 

Most experts agree that the only thing which will put the current COVID-19 pandemic to rest is some kind of vaccine.  One firm—Pfizer/BioNtech—has progressed to what is called a Phase 3 trial, which involved about 43,000 people who took it with apparently no serious side effects.  There is still a long way to go even with the most advanced projects, because achieving "herd immunity"—enough immune people to discourage the virus from spreading—may require on the order of several billion doses.  And many of the prospective vaccines require two injections spaced weeks apart, which further complicates matters.

 

Engineers are familiar with tradeoffs that are usually imposed by economic restrictions.  When I was a young engineer just out of college, I was teamed with an older and more experienced engineer, and one day we were talking about various possible ways to tackle a certain problem in a new design we were working on.  I described three or four different ways to tackle it that I thought were pretty clever, but he seemed unimpressed.  Finally, I asked him why he wasn't more excited about these innovative ideas I was proposing.

 

"Heck, I can build one of anything!  The real challenge is making thousands of them work at a price we can afford."  The harsh realities of the marketplace had educated him to look not just for technically sweet ideas, but for ideas—new, old, or otherwise—that would do the best job for the least money.  That taught me that having clever ideas—or one dose of a highly effective vaccine—is only a small step toward solving a real-world engineering or technical problem.

 

Making a billion high-quality vaccine doses in a short time is a challenge that hasn't been discussed much so far.  But supposing that vast production problem is overcome, and reliable vaccine doses begin to enter the pipeline, who is going to get them first? 

 

An interesting study cited by a recent BBC article says that the first doses should go to different groups, depending on how effective the vaccine is.  No vaccine is 100% effective, and this is especially true of virus vaccines.  The annual flu-virus vaccine that millions of people get is rarely more than 60% or so effective, depending on the particular year and the mix of viruses that show up after the vaccine is developed. 

 

There are different ways to measure the effectiveness of vaccines.  One way is to measure how many people who are vaccinated and then exposed to the virus develop symptoms.  Another way is to measure how likely a vaccinated and exposed person is to spread the disease to others, whether or not they manifest symptoms.  The study's authors point out that if you developed a vaccine that was only 30% effective in preventing symptoms, it would fall below the U. S. Food and Drug Administration's 50% threshold and wouldn't even be approved.  But if it happened to be 70% effective at stopping people from spreading the virus, it would actually do more good than a different vaccine that prevented symptoms with 100% effectiveness but allowed the virus to spread.

 

That is why there is no single answer to the question, "Who should get the vaccine first?"  If it is most effective in preventing the virus from spreading, then the target population should be the ones who spread it the most.  Currently that appears to be older children and younger adults, say between 10 and 35.  Few people in that group die of the virus, but just because many of them have either mild symptoms or are asymptomatic, they spread it very easily. 

 

On the other hand, if the vaccine is good at preventing symptoms but not so good at stopping the spread, you probably want to target the population that is most vulnerable to the disease:  people in rest homes and over 65.  That will save the most lives in the short term, while giving us time to vaccinate the rest of the population to approach the goal of herd immunity.

 

Any way you slice it, we face a very long uphill battle in fighting this disease.  In some countries such as the U. S. and China, the expense of buying and distributing the vaccine is relatively trivial compared to other things the government is doing.  But in poorer countries, vaccinating the majority of the population with anything is a major challenge, and so we can expect the disease to hang around in pockets long after it has been controlled in more economically well-off places.  So the last thing to go may be travel restrictions concerning COVID-19, at least to some countries where it may not be controlled for several more years.

 

Within a given country, the distribution of the vaccine may be implemented mainly by the government, mainly by private enterprise, or more typically by a combination of the two.  As it is in the interests of every government to free its citizens from the threat of COVID-19, substantially free distribution would seem to be a no-brainer, although there are practical obstacles to that as well.  Certain minority populations have been disproportionally affected by COVID-19, and the U. S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine has stated that there is a "moral imperative" to make sure that this imbalance is addressed in any proposed distribution scheme. 

 

And last but not least, there is the problem that not everybody is going to want to be vaccinated.  We are a long way from the 1950s, when Jonas Salk was universally praised as a god-like hero and millions of U. S. citizens gratefully took their children to receive polio vaccine injections without raising even a quibble concerning its safety.  Nowadays, the pronouncements of experts always inspire somebody on the Internet to say, "Sez who?" and the small but vocal opponents of any kind of vaccination have persuaded lots of people at least to hesitate before believing uncritically anything an expert says. 

 

Even with all these uncertainties, it does look like we we get a vaccine sometime, and eventually it will begin to slow down the spread of COVID-19.  As far as I'm concerned, it can't come too soon.

 

Sources:  The BBC published the article "COVID:  How close are we to a vaccine?" on Nov. 12, 2020 at https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51665497.  The New York Times published "Who should get a COVID-19 vaccine first?" at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/magazine/who-gets-covid-vaccine.html on Nov. 5, 2020.