Ever-Shifting Definitions of "Immunity"
The Jack Bauer School of Public Health
It can sometimes be puzzling how the same word holds wildly different meanings in separate contexts.
In the classic (or infamous, depending on who you ask) show 24 starring Kiefer Sutherland and Mary Lynn Rajskub, an action series centered around terrorist plots & government conspiracies, the main character of Jack Bauer often encounters a turncoat double agent squealing "Jaaaaack! You gotta secure me presidential immunity for all these horrible crimes I've done if you want to stop the terrorists from setting off a nerve gas canister in the local shopping mall! Damn it, Jack!" Of course, Agent Bauer inevitably goes rogue and ends up shooting them.
24 is a bizarre show with a lot of quirky internal rules, like how even numbered seasons are centered around Muslim terrorist plots, and odd numbered seasons are centered around Eastern European or Russian terror plots. Oh, and the offices of the Counter-Terrorist Unit gets compromised every season.
The show 24 only really works as an exercise of extreme absurdity, bordering on slapstick: The world constructed around Jack Bauer is so over the top, with escalating levels of ridiculousness season after season, in the service of portraying a government agent who murders & tortures suspects as a heroic figure. The initial season, which was filmed before 9/11/2001, was somewhat grounded in reality; even with a ridiculous gimmick of having a 24-episode season in which every episode was 60 minutes of real time, featuring floppy discs and dial-up modems. By Season 4, Bauer is killing over a hundred people in a single 24-hour timespan. There even used to be a website keeping track of every time Jack Bauer shot someone.
Sadly, this wasn’t all fun and games. Shamefully, 24 also had a profound influence over Americans' political views. The late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia cited the program as a justification of torture; not realizing that the show, and his view of the world, was completely divorced from reality and rooted in bloodthirsty racism.
From The Atlantic:
"Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent's rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.
"Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. "Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so.
A serious political establishment would have immediately impeached Scalia for this indefensible garbage.
Sadly, we live in the United States of America.
Treating the Dictionary as a Canvas
To loop this into the COVID-19 pandemic, we have to establish the firm divide between abstract fantasy and complex, technical reality. The fantasy of a COVID-19 pandemic without public health mitigations is a rather seductive and enticing dream that certain individuals have made quite the name for themselves selling to the public. "Immunity" became this term that was completely twisted and tortured beyond belief into meaning whatever someone selling the SARS-CoV-2 virus wanted it to mean, similar to how 24 played rather fast and loose with the geography of the greater Los Angeles region in service of the plot and real-time gimmick.
We are stuck with a certain class of privileged academics who have had the luxury of getting to talk about the COVID-19 pandemic purely in the abstract, talking about population health like mere data points in an Excel spreadsheet. They've enjoyed talking about "immunity" to the virus as this formless, ever-shifting void of unbridled positivity. When their rosy predictions failed to come to pass, they simply moved onto their next talking point instead of admitting error. Shifting their perspective accordingly, these cranks desperate to wrap the pandemic with a nice bow and promote themselves as wise, enlightened sages. Many others sadly followed their lead.
With the CDC's failure to accurately monitor the impacts of COVID-19 on the population, we're left with imperfect forms of public health surveillance. Go search for the phrase "Since I had/got COVID" on Twitter and look at the direct testimonials of people who have developed serious health complications after "mild" bouts with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and ask yourself, do you think these people feel very immune? We also have far too many stories of young Americans being forced to abandon their dreams after being disabled by the virus, who had no idea of what they were being signed up for. When someone like Leana Wen or Jay Bhattacharya were making the rounds on cable news, were they saying that "Hey, a bunch of you are going to get really sick and possibly never recover, and that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make?"
Ah no, they didn't. Kinda dishonest!
While it's absurd to think you can just shoot and torture your way to safeguarding national security like Agent Bauer, yet it was (still is?) a pretty mainstream view that waterboarding random taxi drivers was somehow safeguarding democracy, much like the fantasy of letting SARS-CoV-2 burn through the population would render it inert and harmless. The debate surrounding COVID-19 has elevated absurd fantasy as superior to scientific fact.
The Origins of Immunity Redefinitions
In 2020, the academics who championed COVID-19 with the Great Barrington Declaration promised that herd immunity would be achieved in merely 3-6 months with the mass infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans, wrapping up the challenges of the pandemic before Christmas 2020 - weeks before a vaccine would be widely available. They seamlessly changed their tune just two years later, insisting upon "the maintenance of herd immunity through constant reinfection." Instead of condemning these shameless swindlers, these cranks have been treated as legitimate voices worth entertaining in mainstream discourse, who have built a devout following and leveraged this social capital into leadership roles in the federal government - purging actual scientists and doctors.
As the vaccine was being rolled out in 2021, academics found a new way to sell the virus, championing widespread COVID-19 infections in the population, with a new pitch of "hybrid immunity." Get vaccinated, drop all mitigations, embrace the virus and now you'll have "super" immunity? Well, except for the breakthrough deaths in the vaccinated, and the vaccinated people who were disabled by a "mild" COVID-19 infection. The answer? Whelp, guess you're screwed! Now go buy my book!
A year later in 2022, as children were suffering from constant bouts of illness, academics made up a whole new fantasy of "immunity debt," making absurd suggestions like how your immune system is "like a muscle" that is "trained" by constant bouts of viral infections. Journalists spread these fictions completely unchallenged. The boring technical complexities that governs the reality of how the body's immune system functions were cast aisde for childish, simple-minded fantasies constructed by academics who didn't have the decency to admit that they were making up fictions instead of proposing meaningful solutions to overcome the technical challenges of our present reality. This has all been a massive waste of time; a total distraction the actual problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Taking the Easy Way Out
We've been burdened with a litany of simple answers for complex problems, leaving us to turn a blind eye to the actual impacts of the virus. Instead of developing meaningful, durable immunity to the virus, we've developed an immunity to our awareness on how our general health is in a state of collective decline. Worse, once unthinkable ideas in public health have been laundered into mainstream thinking.
Let's look at a really terrible quote from Celine Gounder on the Epidemic podcast, who previously advised the Biden Administration:
"Neither vaccination nor infection...got us to herd immunity. But we all gained immunity somehow, some taking the riskier route of infection, and most of us now have good enough immunity that we won't get severely sick from Covid-19."
Left out of this magical "we" is the dead, the newly disabled, the people who developed serious health issues as a compilation from "the riskier route," one that many people didn't freely choose. Their boss bans them from masking in the workplace, their child is infected at school and brings the virus home, a talking head on cable news falsely assures them that dropping mitigations is safe. What Gounder doesn't seem to realize is that she's legitimizing the central premise of the Great Barrington Declaration - we don't need vaccines, we all need to embrace pathogens together in rapid succession and we can vanish pandemics away without any of that gnarly disruption of the economy, which is what's truly most of important of all!
Sure, a bunch of people will be cut out of that "we," but their families should be proud they had the honor to have their health and lives thrown away for the economy! No, we won't give you any medals or welfare benefits, and you'll be abandoned to suffer in silence, but isn't getting to watch anti-vaccine activists cripple America's public health organizations reward enough?
Closing Thoughts
Back in the 90s & early 2000s, there was significant fearmongering about the portrayal of violence in videogames - that they were training our kids to be killers somehow, or that they would struggle to separate fantasy from reality. Now-disbarred lawyer Jack Thompson made quite a name for himself in the media insisting that Grand Theft Auto would irreparably compromise an entire generation of youth. Yet, these were often the same voices who subscribed to the fantasy that America was spreading freedom and democracy by slaughtering Korean and Vietnamese farmers by the million decades before. They'd even use a fictional action show as a justification for torture. Oh, and Jack was disbarred in 2008.
Many young "Zoomer" men are being targeted by billionaire-funded white nationalist propaganda across social media, giving inexperienced youth a fictional narrative blaming women, non-white people, or transgender people for the challenges they face, which are actually caused by the economic disparity of which the wealthy backers of these propagandists exploit.
These same propagandists also dedicated a lot of resources to producing unscientific garbage attacking public health mitigations since early 2020 - overriding cautious scientists and doctors who correctly wanted to take a more precautionary approach to the pandemic and prevent needless suffering.
Now we have to deal with the consequences of fictionalizing "immunity" to SARS-CoV-2, a long-running disaster which may haunt us for decades to come. While many may retreat to fantasy, like Celine, that doesn't actually make the problem go away.
Believe it or not, words mean things. Especially in science and medicine. We all share a due diligence to not let our understandings of tangible reality be clouded by convenient fiction. Shrugging off the negative health impacts of population-wide COVID-19 infections as “immunity” helps no one.
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