https://twitter.com/jenniferdlaws/status/1475154341522808833?s=20
One of my least favorite modern trends is "narratives". There's a narrative that something is true or good. Any evidence you have for it, or thought you have or action you do aligned with it, must be trumpeted. Evidence that goes against it is awk-ward and is to be pooh-poohed or better yet silently avoided. Of course narratives aren't new (among others Orwell wrote about them a lot), but they seem to be tightening their grip.
Carlos Tejada, the NYT's deputy Asia editor, died Friday Dec 17 at age 49 of a heart attack. The Times wrote a glowing obit and I have no reason to think he was anything other than a good guy. Only via social media did people spot that he had received his Moderna booster earlier the same day.
This could be a coincidence, though it's a stretch. Much more likely, the vaccines are amazing and well worth it for the vast majority of us but
- do carry some small but nontrivial risk of heart attack and
- may in fact not be a good risk tradeoff for certain patients.
There's a healthy debate to be had there, but we can't have it if any evidence that goes against the narrative is swept under the carpet in this ham-fisted way. Candor gets more important, not less, in an ever-shifting global crisis, where we need all the evidence we can get. There's a term now for how evasions like this erode public trust in authority: they are Good For Trump.
I was similarly disappointed by the kneejerk reactions to security researcher Dan Kaminsky's death 11 days after his 2nd (Pfizer) shot. That one may have been a true coincidence, but the timing merited reporting, rather than leaving it to social media types to dig up.
The question here isn't whether we should avoid the vaccines because of these rare risks. The question is whether, when a guy dies of a heart attack, and he had his booster the same day, and we write an 18-paragraph obituary, we should mention that fact (if not in the obit, somewhere).
To me, if you omit that you might as well just change your job title from "reporter" to "public opinion correcter". I completely reject the logic of "These things happen so rarely, letting the public know when they do happen would just confuse the poor dears."
On the side question of how rare these incidents really are, it's implausible to me that these are true one-in-a-million events, just given that one or perhaps two unusually public figures here died of them. Maybe it was a coincidence. But we're not going to find that out by declining to mention these coincidences when they do happen. And we're sure not going to earn the public's trust.
I'm still very glad I got my booster, and sorry for Tejada and his family. Could have been any of us.