"Vaccines Are The New Motorcycle Helmuts," By Philip Bump, New York Times

Vaccines are the new motorcycle helmets       By Philip Bump  Email It has been seven days now that I’ve been writing this newsletter, making this the penultimate iteration of Bump-authored emails. It’s important that, before I go, I make sure you know that I know big words like “penultimate,” so I’m glad to have had the opportunity to do so. I was doing a radio interview today in which I used the word “obstreperous,” which is a very natural word to have at your disposal if you are the parent of two toddlers, which I am. But it’s also the sort of word that you don’t really need to casually drop into radio interviews or, for that matter, newsletters. Anyway, that’s my way of reinforcing that you have only two more newsletters in which you have to endure my bottomless self-referentialism. That’s a good vocabulary word, too: “self-referential.” We’re having a lot of fun here. The evolution of how Americans want to flaunt death Let’s stipulate at the outset that few people really love government, just as no one really loves rules in general. Government is predicated on governance, which is to say it is predicated in some way constraining how things are done. People may like aspects of what government does, like spurring the development of a vaccine that can defend against a dangerous virus and then providing that vaccine to people for free, but in general people would rather do their own thing. (I could again have mentioned toddlers here, but you’ll notice I didn’t.) But it is weird that so many people have targeted so much fury at one particular aspect of government: health experts. We’ve seen repeated incidents in recent months in which national or regional experts are mocked, threatened, shouted down and otherwise harassed. It’s not new; doctors advocating for vaccines have been the targets of ire from anti-vaxxers for some time. But couple the emotional opposition to vaccines with the emotional partisanship of the coronavirus response and you get a huge mass of people willing to disparage career professionals as anything from dishonest to evil merely for pointing out that the coronavirus vaccines are safe (which they are), help prevent infection (which they do) and can lessen the negative effects on the off chance that someone is infected anyway (which can happen). In a concerted effort to come up with an analogy that turns down the temperature on the subject, I’ve started occasionally comparing the vaccine to seat belts and air bags in cars. But that only covers one aspect of the protection, that you’ll take less damage in the event of an accident. Imagine a seat belt that also made you drive better and made everyone else drive better, and we’re getting close. But this analogy is useful in another way. After all, the government didn’t always mandate seat belts. And when it did, data from the biennial General Social Survey reveal, there wasn’t much of a partisan divide in views of a government mandate. The question was asked once, in 1985. Just over half of Democrats supported a mandate for seat belts; just under half of Republicans did. Add in those who didn’t care much, and both groups were near 75 percent. Something has changed since then, it seems. The line from thinking seat belt mandates are okay to thinking that Bill Gates wants to put a microchip in your arm because of 𝖗𝖊𝖆𝖘𝖔𝖓𝖘 is not entirely direct, though. Overlapping with the seat belt debate we had another useful issue to consider: motorcycle helmet laws. In the mid-1970s, most states required motorcycle riders to wear helmets. Then, in the 1980s, states began retracting those laws, often citing precisely the sort of personal freedom we hear so much about in the context of the vaccine. A 2009 study found both that rescinding or scaling back those laws was correlated with increased motorcycle fatalities and that it was Republican governors and legislators who were most likely to promote the changes. States with Republican governors (and presumably more Republican voters) were 22 percent less likely to have helmet laws. Consider Florida. “In 2000, the legislature passed and Governor Jeb Bush, a Republican, signed a bill amending Florida’s helmet policy to apply only to those riders who are either under age 21 years” or without a certain level of insurance, the study notes. It cites the sorts of rationale Bush offered: we don’t mandate that people exercise! etc. Then: “One evaluation estimated that in the year after the law change, rider fatalities rose 21.3% after adjusting for [motorcycle] registrations.” In 1975, nearly every state had a helmet law. About 3,200 motorcycle riders were killed in accidents. By 1980, less than half of states had such laws. More than 5,000 riders died in accidents that year. Again, though, the analogy is incomplete. Imagine if every motorcycle rider without a helmet risked transmitting an accident to vehicles nearby. It would seem to be hard to argue that not wearing a helmet was a tribute to personal responsibility.