The Agency problem
Regulators and policymakers have been on a crusade for nearly two years now. The premise for the crusade is simple, succinct, and utterly unreasonable: all choices affect others; therefore, all choices must be strictly regulated.
There are times when choices do explicitly affect others. A young man with a history of drunk driving offenses gets in his car early in the morning after “having breakfast with his parents”, say. He runs a stop sign and hits a young mother and her child, killing the mother instantly. He flees the scene and pleas to a minor offense. It takes decades for the child to find out who killed his mother, and it is only exposed because the killer is now a well-known and successful politician. The story is all too familiar, and Canadians may have even heard of a similar tragedy. I’ll leave that story for another time, though.
Rather than focusing on the destructive choices of politicians in charge of creating mandatory vaccination laws, I want to focus on their logic.
Essentially, the crusaders are treating our current scenario similar to an agency problem. In an agency problem, there are two parties with an inherent conflict of interest, usually referred to as a principal-agent relationship. The typical example is a stockholder (principal) and a CEO (agent) where a fiduciary relationship exists. It is in the best interest of the stockholder for the CEO to maximize the price of the stock or the dividend, but that may be contrary to the CEO’s own interest. The stockholder lacks crucial information that the CEO possesses, thus, it creates an opportunity for the CEO to make decisions against the interest of the stockholder.
The crusaders, in this case, are interested in maximizing public health, and consider every agent to have a fiduciary responsibility to act in the interest of public health. The agents possess, of course, more information about what would maximize their own health, and aim to maximize that. Lacking information, the crusaders use an instrument to measure public health: vaccination uptake. They believe that any agent that does not get vaccinated is acting against their interest of maximizing public health, and thus, is violating the fiduciary responsibility that holding a position in society demands (ignore the fact that no one actually signs a social contract outlining their obligations).
However, vaccination uptake is not a good metric for public health, and in fact, may act against public health. I have an acquaintance that, despite previously acquiring natural immunity, was pressured into taking the first dose by her doctor. She now has a blood clot in her leg and the doctor still wants her to get the second dose. Why? Well, the individual doctor may be a psychopath, but the public push in my country is to get fully vaccinated – no matter what. The only measurement of public health is in vaccine doses. The more the better.
Not only is the individual health of my acquaintance impacted negatively, but she had immunity prior to the shot, so there was no chance of benefit to public health from getting the shot. There was, in fact, no conflict of interest present and, thus, no agency problem to begin with.
For a large segment of society, those with natural immunity, the young, or the healthy, there is no individual benefit to getting the vaccination even if we assume that it is moderately effective in the medium term and there are no long term consequences. We cannot assume that it is either effective in the short term or long term as neither is true. Nor can we assume there are no short or medium term consequence as the literature does not bear that out. Nor can we even assume that a fully vaccinated population will eliminate the virus.
To reach herd immunity, the equation below needs to be satisfied:
HI = 1/x*(1-1/R0)
Where x = Vaccine Efficacy; and,
R0 = the reproduction rate of the virus
Actually, x is a bit more complicated than that, and this link may be helpful if you want to take a deeper dive, but for our purposes VE is fine. R0 is variable and seems to have increased since the vaccine was produced (which is suggestive of the vaccine creating more infectious variants), and is well above the level where even a highly effective vaccine would help society reach herd immunity easily.
The fact that the vaccines have negative VE in the short term, wane over time, and even after reaching herd immunity it would take time to reduce the spread means reaching herd immunity with the vaccines was at best a pipe dream. This is further complicated by the fact that the vaccines cannot be distributed world wide to every individual on the planet on the same day, thus, even if herd immunity was temporarily reached, because the vaccines wane over time, the virus would come back with a vengeance.
In reality, the only feasible way to reach herd immunity with a highly reproductive virus is with sterilization. Leaky vaccines do not offer that, and while it appeared natural immunity offered sterilization, that may no longer be true for the vaccinated.
The essence of the problem is that public health is not satisfied by an imaginary benevolent dictator solving all of societies problems with a miracle cure. Unless a fully sterilizing vaccine comes along, and it almost certainly will not, then public health can only maximized by individual agents maximizing their individual health. These two things are not in conflict with each other; rather, they work in unison. The real conflict of interest is in having insane health crusaders try to solve health problems by diktat.
The crusaders have no clue what they are doing, and it has become abundantly clear over the course of the last two years. Either that or they are actively working against public health. It becomes harder to attribute malice to stupidity the more mistakes the so-called experts make. At some point, their stupidity becomes malice.