Data without context; context without data.

Cigarette warning labels are one of those interesting behavioral nudges implemented by regulators that most people take for granted. In the U.S., the first warning labels appeared in 1965. These labels were in small print and vague. Over time, warning labels have become progressively larger, more detailed, and brazenly morbid. Hungry lawyers have carved out entire legal careers in the back-and-forth saga between regulators and the tobacco industry, but in the end, the regulators have carried the day.

In Canada, the package is the warning label at this point. These packages feature ominous pictures, smoking factoids, a resource website, and contact information for those wanting to quit. In totality, 75% of the front and back of the package is required to feature this labeling. The crux of the regulatory position is simple, albeit ironic given 2022: Smokers should be informed of the risks involved with smoking in order to make an informed decision on whether to quit. Now, we can argue all day about whether the information provided to cigarette consumers is heavily curated, in which case the regulators are being consistent and the comparison I am about to make will border on the absurd, but I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that the spirit of these warning labels is transparency of information.

Juxtaposed to cigarette warning labels is the risk-benefit information provided by regulators to the general public when it comes to vaccinations. The New York Times, surprisingly, printed an expose on data withheld by the Center for Disease Control over the course of the pandemic. The article notes that a ton of data is being collected, but not released. While “[s]ome outside public health experts were stunned to hear that information exists”, I am assuming most of my readers will be unsurprised by this fact. Indeed, even the reasoning for the data not being released is not surprising. As the article notes,

“Last year, the agency repeatedly came under fire for not tracking so-called breakthrough infections in vaccinated Americans, and focusing only on individuals who became ill enough to be hospitalized or die. The agency presented that information as risk comparisons with unvaccinated adults, rather than provide timely snapshots of hospitalized patients stratified by age, sex, race and vaccination status.

But the C.D.C. has been routinely collecting information since the Covid vaccines were first rolled out last year, according to a federal official familiar with the effort. The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.”

In other words, the logic dictates that providing people with the right information in order to make the “right” choices takes precedence over providing people with the full information in order to make the right choices for themselves. Those of us that have been parsing data as best we can given the iron curtain set up by supposed public health officials have understood for a long time, even from the beginning of the vaccine rollout, that the public representation of vaccine effectiveness has always been false. But unfortunately, the pillow talk given to the general public by these agencies has created a disconnect between those of us who want reasonable discussion on vaccines and those who get snippets of carefully curated information from the CDC and other similar bodies.

The lack of transparency has inevitably led to a loss of public trust, possibly for the best, in these institutions. But, in an even more concerning fashion, the data released by these impenetrable institutions has been used world-wide both to curry public opinion by opportunistic politicians and to justify broad mandates regardless of individual circumstances. For example, the CDC sat on data showing that natural immunity is better than vaccines for the entirity of 2021, and even went so far as to suggest that vaccines are better than natural immunity despite hundreds of independent studies showing otherwise. There is still a broad base of people that believe natural immunity does not even exist.

Yikes.

Due to the disinformation released by the CDC and their ilk, the public is more fractured than ever. Vaccine mandates could have never been justified in a world where natural immunity was recognized as being superior to vaccines. Individuals that ran little risk of being reinfected have been injured due to the vaccine and there is mounting evidence that the vaccine or at least repeated doses and boosters has disastrous effects on innate immunity. The CDC literally helped pave the road to a post-totalitarian power-grab.

While I was never of the absurd opinion that “we are all in this together”, the phrase, while mildly annoying, did little to contribute to societal discontent in 2020. In 2021, the context the CDC presented to the public, without providing the underlying data, ended up convincing people that they need to “do their part to end the pandemic”. The obvious fallout from that statement is that people who are not getting vaccinated are prolonging the pandemic. People that take the CDC at their word actually believe the pandemic would be over if everyone was vaccinated despite contradictory evidence.

We can be certain of one thing: the data, the raw data, without the CDC’s added context would have shown what we are witnessing in the real-world. There was never any doing your part to end the pandemic. The vaccines simply did not work as advertised; we knew this early on, and it took the fracturing of civil society for the CDC to admit it.