Health policy today seems hell bent on reviving the days of yellow journalism, where sensationalization was the calling card for the masses.
Every media outlet, political candidate seeking office, or purported subject matter expert has a take on vaccines. Usually they’re the most extreme takes. Those garner the most attention.
The problem, however, isn’t the lack of a more centrist, pragmatic approach to vaccines. It’s more fundamental. We lack a basic understanding of vaccine risk and benefits. As a result, we’re unable to contextualize the value of vaccines relative to their downside. In our ignorance, we grow irate. To reset the escalatory rhetoric, we need to relearn the nuts and bolts of vaccines.
Vaccines have always been a fiercely contested topic. Each argument, no matter how eloquent, revolves largely around individual rights versus collective benefits. Those who champion individual rights focus on the risk of receiving a vaccine injection. Those who stress collective safety focus on the risk of being infected by a disease the vaccine intends to protect against.
At face value, arguments on both sides are justifiable. This is why the debates never end. Nobody’s truly wrong in the absolute sense. Each vaccine injection carries an individual risk and vaccines in aggregate provide a collective benefit. But the collective benefit is determined by the aggregate behavior, which is the sum of all the decisions and actions of individuals that lead them to receive a vaccine.
The more who receive it, the greater the benefit, which varies based on the percentage of a population that get vaccinated, while the risk per vaccine is fixed per individual. The issue comes down to a balance between the varying benefit to the community against the fixed individual risk of vaccines. This can be visualized as a ratio which increases or decreases based on the percentage of a population that receive the vaccine.
Simply put, those who are against vaccines focus on the fixed risk, while those who are for vaccines focus on the collective benefits.
That’s the crux of the argument. But you wouldn’t be able to tell based on what you hear. Most of the debate centers on individual scenarios or anecdotal case studies. But the benefits and risks cannot be assessed at an individual level alone. Yet that’s where we see most of the back-and-forth. More problematically, those who support vaccines fail to convey the collective benefit to those who may be more skeptical by reframing the argument in collective terms, at a population level.
It would be more instructive if we contextualize the discussion on vaccines around individual risk and collective benefit. Recognize that risk to benefit cannot be compared one-to-one nor at a population level alone. Rather, it’s a difficult-to-quantify balance of individual risk to collective benefit. The complexity of the matter makes it difficult to distill into a bullet point argument – regardless of the side you’re on – because the points of contention don’t really match up.
Individual risk doesn’t directly compare to collective benefit. Collective value to the masses doesn’t really equate to an individual’s risk.
But we don’t want to see it that way. We want to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges: individual risk to individual benefit, or collective risk to collective benefit. Unfortunately, vaccines don’t work that way. So we’re stuck with incomplete, not-quite-wrong, but not-quite-right, arguments. And of course, like children arguing until they forget what they’re arguing about, the rhetoric gets lost in the heat of the exchange.
Soon winning the argument becomes the only goal, leading both sides to argue for inherently incomplete stances taking one extreme side or another that instead should be contextualized as a balance between two perspectives: individual risk and collective benefits.
This is why we argue so passionately about vaccines. Each side simply focuses on their own point of view without considering the context of the argument. Behavioral economists call this denominator neglect: situations in which people focus only on the most overt aspects of an argument but cannot consider the full context of the issue. Denominator neglect is largely a problem of perception. It can be corrected if the argument is seen as a balance among multiple perspectives and visualized through a structured framework.
But instead, we find simplified talking points dominating healthcare policies and decisions. So that’s how we come to think. Eventually, the talking points are parroted enough to where they’re ingrained in the minds of the public, whether or not correct.
People have a tendency to look for what’s familiar in the news they consume, particularly for healthcare topics. This is well known among media outlets that cover health policy and the politicians who legislate over it. That’s why we see overly simplified arguments repeated ad nauseam until what’s familiar becomes what’s generally understood by the listening audience.
It’s yellow journalism using nothing more than the veneer of science to perpetuate an inherently incomplete, dumbed-down argument about a complex topic. It’s modern-day opium for the masses.
