The line, “tell me how this ends,” asked by US General David Petraeus in 2003 during the Second Iraq War, holds a lot of relevance for today’s Covid-wracked world.
Last year when this virus appeared, I asked my former colleagues to explain their victory conditions for fighting Covid-19. How would they know when the struggle is over?
Because without clear victory conditions, it is impossible either to advance a useful strategy or repair the key vulnerabilities that led to the crisis in the first place. A flimsy set of victory conditions results in what Gen. Petraeus and the rest of the US military is now very familiar with: mission creep.
Failing to identify an achievable set of victory conditions was what collapsed Washington’s war in Afghanistan. These were to destroy both Al-Qaeda and “terrorism”.
But Al-Qaeda was never truly just an “extremist” group; it represented the Venn diagram overlap between traditional Islamic thought and the Westernised, “progressive” version of Islamic thought that has been infecting the Arab world for 100 years. Osama bin Laden was the perfect reflection of this schizophrenia: he was a wealthy Saudi, and Saudi Arabia only existed because of American military and cultural domination.
And since “terrorism” is not a thing to be destroyed, the Global War on Terror was really just a fight to discredit a particular brand of politics. After all, voting and lobbying aren’t the only ways to win in a democracy. This meant fighting “terrorism” was un-ironically about outlawing the full expression of democracy. Your mileage may vary on whether you think that is a good thing.
In the same way, New Zealand’s victory conditions for fighting Covid-19 are to have zero active Covid-19 cases. Not “zero deaths from Covid-19” or “achieve minimum herd immunity” or “reduce the R0 to less than 1”. New Zealand wants “zero Covid-19 cases”. This is unachievable.
Why? Because it relies on Covid-19 being a static virus that does not undergo changes in allelic frequency over time, aka evolution. Unfortunately, Covid-19 does evolve and is evolving in real-time (about 0.3% at the DNA level) which is creating new variants like Delta.
The thing is, the government already knew this and yet it still chose those unachievable victory conditions.
It is fairly common knowledge that the annual influenza vaccine doesn’t combat the current year’s strain of the flu but instead is aimed at the previous year’s virus. The flu evolves so rapidly that the shot is permanently outdated no matter how up-to-date it is. Coronaviruses are similar.
But it’s worse than that. All the Western-manufactured vaccines (I’m not talking about China’s Sinovac or Russia’s Sputnik V) still don’t have normal approval of safety and efficacy. They only have emergency authorisation. It is hard to overstate the negative impact this is having on public trust.
It’s not like having some official authority bless the vaccines would make any difference in terms of actual evidence, but we don’t even have that fake blessing. A lot of people already don’t trust the government, but how much can a doubter trust these institutions when they won’t even go through their own motions of sanctification?
Compare these vaccines to all other vaccines developed and approved for full market access over the last half century. Not one made it to mass market in less time than the Covid vaccines. The government’s victory conditions demanded they be rushed into use even though no expert can possibly know for certain they are safe and effective.
Let’s use Gardasil as an example. The vaccine for human papillomavirus took seven years just to design and test in the initial stage of the Phase III trials. Those Phase III trials ended after 12 years, though the vaccine was filed for approval after the trials were ongoing for 25 months. Even today, Merck & Co is still conducting extensive post-market surveillance on Gardisil.
For the Covid-19 vaccine, two years of a Phase III study is way too short against such a novel and evolving target. Even more disturbing, the Phase III studies for these new Covid-19 vaccines are presumably happening minus their placebo arms and are being given to a few hundred million people with more being coerced into it every day creating a huge N-size of experimental subjects.
These Phase III studies are simply too short to determine both the long-range benefits and side effect profiles, and the short-term side effect profiles already look worse than any vaccine ever brought to market in history.
On top of this, it is now clear the vaccines don’t do any more to stop Covid-19 than the typical flu vaccines have stopped influenza and may be even less effective. For older and more vulnerable people, the risks of getting Covid-19 appear to outweigh the risks of the vaccine. However, as age scales down, the risk of serious illness from Covid-19 drops but vaccine risk stays constant. In other words, for younger people the health risks of taking the vaccine outweigh the risks of getting Covid-19.
That’s a big deal. If the vaccine both kept me from getting infected and stopped me from spreading the virus, I would probably calculate my benefit as being a “good citizen” to be higher and take the vaccine. But since we know vaccinated people can still be infected and spread the virus after receiving multiple full doses, the “good citizen” persuasion doesn’t work so well.
And if higher vaccination rates also lead to higher spread rates due to asymptomatic spread, then the equation probably runs the other way – it would actually be better for people to show symptoms so they know not to mingle with uninfected people.
I suspect the reason the R0 is now greater than 1 in New Zealand is not because of the unvaccinated adults, but because the number of previously-infected or vaccinated adults is higher than the herd immunity threshold since the virus mutated into the Delta strain. Said differently, acquired immunity (as opposed to natural immunity) from the vaccine is no longer effective at preventing infection, spread and transmission.
Pfizer has already started trials of an updated mRNA vaccine using the new genetic code from the Delta variant to restore effectiveness levels back above 90%. That might bring R0 below 1 without needing masks and lockdowns if enough Kiwis can get a booster shot with the new version in the next few months. But, again, this will require rushing the vaccine through emergency approval and sidestepping public safety protocols. This will hurt public trust even more.
Until the vaccines can be shown to stop transmission, the decision to be vaccinated will remain personal. I can think of many good reasons to be vaccinated and many good reasons not to. But the political and social pressure to get vaccinated implies a public benefit from vaccination that simply does not exist.
The government can’t have it both ways. It is unfair for the experts simultaneously to say a vaccine is not fully approved because there is insufficient evidence of safety and efficacy, but then also call those who are hesitant about taking the vaccine for precisely those safety concerns stubborn and irrational. And the unprecedented penalties and mandates undermine public trust even further.
The reason New Zealand finds itself in rolling lockdowns and escalating mask policies, and facing dodgy, barely-legal enforcement actions to nudge people to be vaccinated, is because the government chose a static solution to fix a non-static problem. Dealing with a chaotic system like nature demands some measure of flexibility. At minimum, it demands achievable victory conditions, which New Zealand presently does not have.
To answer Gen. Petraeus’ question, I would say: the Covid-19 crisis cannot end because the goal of zero cases in New Zealand is not achievable and never was.
What should we be aiming for? That will require some serious compromises. The analogy of cybersecurity is useful here. Cyber professionals gave up defending networks from viruses a long time ago and switched to a concept called “survive while penetrated.” This assumes viruses are already in a system and a business must be built around that assumption so it can still function.
That’s what adaptability looks like. It is OK to be wrong. New Zealanders will forgive a humble government because it shows seriousness about solving the problem. What they won’t forgive is pursuing victory conditions that can only lead to miserable mission creep and mortal wounds to public trust.
No amount of money printing will be able to pay back that kind of social debt to future generations.
Please share this BFD article so others can discover The BFD.