One of the problems with trying to explain something by analogy is that someone will try to come up with an analogy that ‘proves’ their point. The fun part is to try to explain how the analogy that they just created is a false equivalence or faulty analogy. For some good practice, you can go here to see some lines of faulty analogies: https://www.txstate.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions/Faulty-Analogy.html
I love this analogy, picked up from one of the blogs that I read of someone who continues to spout faulty logic that agrees with their own confirmation bias. It doesn’t call out the vaccines by name, but tries to draw a parallel analogy to call out how they are not effective or safe to use. It brings out a couple of ideas that run rampant through the disinformation ranks.
The first false analogy here is that everyone understands the purpose and function of scissors. Not everyone understands the purpose and function of vaccines. Vaccines are not supposed to completely stop all transmission of a virus. Read that again. Vaccines do not provide 100% protection from either being able to transmit the virus nor of getting the virus. I’ve used the analogy of a bullet proof vest in passing as a better analogy of how vaccines help the immune system to work in protecting someone. If you do take a direct hit, you may be sore but you won’t be in the ICU or dead. That’s still only the individual function of a vaccine. So, what is the purpose of a vaccine, then?
We’ve all heard the term “R naught” by now, with respect to contagious diseases. What does that really mean and what does it have to do with the purpose of vaccines? R naught tells you the average number of people who will contract a contagious disease from one person with that disease, in normal social situations and interactions. It specifically applies to a population of people who were previously free of infection and haven’t been vaccinated to that disease. The delta variant of Covid-19 has an R naught of 5 to 8. The critical threshold for R naught is 1. Above 1, and the disease will spread through a population who were previously uninfected and unvaccinated. Below 1, and the disease will slow down and eventually die. How quickly it does that is in relation to how close to 0 or 1 it is.
And this is the purpose of a vaccine. It is to reduce the R naught below 1 and as close to 0 as possible. To understand this, we can use another visualization.
For anyone living today, we have all grown up in the shadow of the various forms of the atomic bomb. There is a very simple experiment to show how fission works – the mousetrap and ping pong ball chain reaction. Each mouse trap is an atom of fissile Uranium, and each ping pong ball is the subatomic particles that are released when one atom of Uranium splits. Every time a trap goes off, heat and more subatomic particles are released to do more damage to the remaining unsprung traps.
It’s easy to see that if you drop a ping pong ball on top of one of the triggers, what will happen next. This is an effective explanation for what happens in fissile Uranium when it reaches critical mass and achieves fission.
As it turns out, this is also a very effective visualization for disease transmission. The original variant might throw 1 ball that triggered 2 or 3 other traps in bouncing around. The delta variant throws 2 or 3 balls that trigger 5 to 8 other traps. What does a vaccine do, in the terms of this visualization of how a disease spreads? It upgrades each trap from a mouse trap into a longspring trap.
Most of us should be familiar with these from various cartoons that we've seen. It takes considerably more force to trigger a longspring trap versus a mouse trap. It can still happen with a direct hit, but is much less likely to trigger the trap, throwing more balls into the air. There is also considerably more surface area that the ball can hit without triggering the trap.
This is what a vaccine does in it's purpose, it reduces the incidence of balls flying around by making it harder for the virus to trigger a trap with acquired immunity. Even the most jaded reports that I’ve seen shows that a vaccine reduces the incidence of triggering the trap by at least 8 fold. This means that instead of one trap triggering 5 to 8 mousetraps, it will trigger less than 1 other longspring trap. With distancing and masks, this effective potential to trigger other traps (called Re or Rt in the scientific world), this number reduces much closer to 0.
Incidentally, this visualization also helps to understand social distancing and masks as well. Traps spaced much further apart have a much less possibility of being triggered. For masks, imagine a net dropping to a few feet above individual traps. It might help some with balls bouncing around and potentially triggering that trap; however, the biggest advantage is that it takes most of the energy out of the balls that get thrown out of the trap that was just triggered. If the traps are spaced further apart, have nets a few feet above them and are longspring traps, the chances of a direct hit are very significantly reduced below that 1 threshold.
What the scissors analogy does highlight in inescapable terms is the complete lack of understanding of why anyone would use these social tools in the first place, by those who create and believe an analogy like the scissors one above. Scissors are an individual tool. If it “doesn’t work” for me, then it has no value. The thinking demonstrated by those who use this type of scissors analogy have one focus, themselves. The ball visualization highlights how the various attempts to get people to understand the method of how vaccines, distancing, and masks work will continue to fall on deaf ears – because those who create and spout these false analogies have a world view that doesn’t give a shit about any other trap, let alone the entire group as a whole. If it doesn’t work for them 100%, they have no problem being the ball that sets off the entire bomb and kills people in the process.
One final thing, the scissors analogy above says something about the tool not being safe to use towards achieving the end goal. There are on average about 16,000 scissor injuries that require emergency room visits every year. There have been over 386 million vaccine shots administered in the US. For all the major reaction types that have occurred around the vaccine being administered – there have been under 2000 cases of severe allergic reactions due to the vaccine, 47 reports of thrombosis, 201 preliminary reports of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, and about 900 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis. If we double those to account for a full year of complications around vaccine shots, that’s still well under half of the incidents involving scissors.
