My Problem with Sam Harris on Lex Fridman
A Radical Media column on how moral panic, media propaganda, and (selective) deference to scientific authority lead to the dangerous sacralisation of mRNA vaccines.
My Problem with Sam Harris on Lex Fridman
A Radical Media column on how moral panic, media propaganda, and (selective) deference to scientific authority lead to the dangerous sacralisation of mRNA vaccines.
Note: Despite his vehement disagreement, Radical Media columnist Rav Arora - the author of this piece - has great respect for Sam Harris’ spiritual work and has been a follower of his Waking Up app.
In Lex Fridman’s new 4-hour interview with neuro-philosopher Sam Harris, Harris provides the clearest, most elaborate articulation of his impassioned views on the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the course of his explication of why he chose to become a staunch advocate of the novel mRNA vaccines for COVID-19, we are given an illuminating case study into the ideological corruption of one of the most brilliant, intellectually honest, and sophisticated minds of the 21st century.
“In a few decades, many of our current [medical] practices will seem barbaric. One need only ponder the list of side effects that accompany most medications to appreciate that these are terribly blunt instruments.”
- Sam Harris in Waking Up (2014)
Harris makes a number of misleading and false claims in the conversation which may evade the sensibilities of a casual follower of the Covid discourse, but upon close inspection, his dubious assertions become remarkably salient. I’m going to go through merely a handful of such assertions.
Claim:
Sam Harris: “It was obviously reasonable to get vaccinated, especially because there was every reason to expect that while it wasn't a perfectly sterilising vaccine, it was going to knock down transmission a lot…so it wasn’t just a personal choice — you were actually being a good citizen when you decided to run whatever risk you were going to run to get vaccinated.”
As this first example reveals, Harris is operating from a remarkable level of Avidyā (ignorance), to use Buddhist terminology. Unfortunately, he is not quite informed in this debate — something he later reveals.
For one, the mRNA vaccines were never tested against transmission. They were only tested against symptomatic infection and public health experts extrapolated from the data the mRNA vaccines would halt transmission in the long-term. This proved to be accurate for only about a couple of months at best, before vaccine efficacy started approaching near-zero levels.
To say that getting inoculated with likely the most dangerous vaccine that has ever been promoted on the market is a civil duty because of the naive hopes that “it was going to knock down transmission a lot” (which proved to be short-lived) was a complete miscalculation. Indeed, it was not out of the question at that time — given the absence of long-term data — that vaccines may substantially curb transmission, there was no data to support the peculiarly strong faith individuals like Harris had in mRNA technology.
Claim:
Sam Harris: "Vaccines were reasonably safe and Covid was reasonably dangerous....the tradeoff for basically everyone was it was rational to get vaccinated given the level of testing...given what we were seeing with Covid"
As Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and I recently responded to Sam’s similar statements on vaccine risk-benefit ratios, he has not immersed himself in the relevant data in order to present a rational perspective. Such statements are far too simplistic and sweeping. There is simply no good evidence to suggest vaccines were “reasonably safe” compared to a “reasonably dangerous” virus for “basically everyone.”
In fact, the best available evidence suggests the opposite is true for the vast majority of people. According to a top, peer-reviewed re-analysis of the Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials (authored by scientists at Stanford, UCLA, and other prestigious institutions), mRNA vaccines are associated with a 1 in 800 adverse event rate — orders of magnitude higher than any other widely administered vaccine in international pharmaceutical history. Virtually every other vaccine on the market has adverse event rates in the 1 - 2 per million range.
Furthermore, Harris does not appear to understand the basic fact that mRNA vaccines were inadequately tested due to the public health crisis and invocation of ‘emergency use authorisation.’ Vaccines were rushed under ‘operation warp speed’ and corners were clearly cut in order to meet unprecedented and nearly impossible time frames.
The continually emerging safety concerns — myocarditis, blood clots, acute cardiac events, menstrual irregularities, and reduced sperm counts — prove the danger of mass-administering a poorly tested medical product.
Claim:
Sam Harris: “At every point along the way, I was the wrong person and Bret Weinstein was the wrong person — and there's many other people I could add to this list — to have strong opinions about any of this stuff...Deferring to experts much of the time makes a lot of sense.”
This is exceptionally hypocritical of Harris. All the while claiming to have no skin in the game, he openly airs his fallacious and uninformed views on the complex risk-benefit calculus of taking the mRNA vaccines during a global pandemic. When vaccines were rolled out, Harris did not at least conservatively say “I’m personally getting vaccinated and I think many others should consider it.”
Rather, he went on the air and dogmatically asserted,
“Even if you accept the worst claims about the risk of the mRNA vaccines, which are almost guaranteed to be false…the case for getting vaccinated is absolutely clear-cut”
Worst yet, he openly derided unvaccinated young men at a restaurant he was sitting at as deranged conspiracy theorists for making a medical decision different than his own. Harris practiced no reservation in his unwarrantedly confident views on mRNA vaccine safety and efficacy in the summer of 2021.
Moreover, while the individuals he names (including himself) are certainly not scientific authorities, their views on matters outside their “expertise” should still be taken seriously (if they are operating from good faith and some scientific reasoning). If we were to only listen to experts in a given field all the time without no outsider questioning, we would have a colossal problem on our hands.
Sam knows this.
This is why he has a popular podcast where he freely (and often compellingly) opines about a range of complex issues which are completely outside his area of expertise. Harris’ extreme (and disingenuously selective) deference to epidemiological “expertise” undermines his own views on the issue he is most known for: religion.
Harris is, in fact, not a credentialed “expert” on essentially any matter that is religious. Having immersed myself in comparative religions in college over the past two years, it is obvious Harris is no expert in Biblical hermeneutics, exegesis, patristics, ecclesiology, or the rest (as many of my professors have rightly pointed out).
However — despite the importance of studying disciplines such as exegesis — this does not discount Harris’ compelling views on the toxicity of sectarian, evangelical religious traditions nor should he be prevented from voicing them. He doesn’t need to spend a decade deciphering the Greek manuscripts of the Bible to hold some rational position on fundamentalist Christianity (whether he is right or not). Nor does he need to get a PhD in climate science in order to hold a reasonable view on the matter.
In the context of the Covid discourse, Sam attempted to fulfil his civic duty to provide rational, life-preserving, and disease-mitigating advice — with the aid of selectively chosen experts such as Dr. Eric Topol and Dr. Nicholas Christakis — but he was operating from the wrong premises and distorted facts.
The infection fatality rate for Covid in the non-elderly population was known to be in the proximity of 0.035% at the time (credit to John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacahrya on this area of research).
As an ardent supporter of Sam Harris, I wish he had maintained the hyper-skeptical foundation of his nominally atheistic, nonsectarian worldview during the Covid pandemic. Instead, he chose scientific experts who have been far from vindication, failed to fully update his views when the science evolved, and poorly treated others with levels of empathy, understanding, and compassion far inferior to the values he earnestly promotes in his Waking Up teachings.
Despite my comprehensive critiques, I have genuine faith Harris will come to his senses. In his sprawling and often-times contradictory interview with Lex Fridman, he also voiced uncertainty for the mRNA vaccines and opposed the mainstream CDC recommendation for getting the bivalent booster.
Hopefully, he will fully come around to acknowledging his mistakes and the rotting corruption at the heart of the CDC, FDA, and other governmental institutions who unforgivably abused a fear-generating crisis for political promotion and financial gain.
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