In economics, the term “opportunity cost” is used to refer to any potential benefits that are lost because of a decision to do one thing instead of another. For example, if you spend $20 each month for a subscription to the New York Times, that’s twenty bucks you will no longer have available on a monthly recurring basis to instead support independent journalism that debunks the lies and deceptions propagated by the mainstream media.
The French economist Frédéric Bastiat provided a famous illustration of the importance of considering opportunity costs in his 1850 essay What is Seen and What is Not Seen, in which he provided the example of a shopkeeper whose window is broken, and who therefore must pay a glazier to fix his window. According to the mainstream economists of Bastiat’s day, that property destruction represented economic growth because “Look! A new job was created!”
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Bastiat explained why this conclusion was a non sequitur fallacy: had the shopkeeper’s window not been broken, he could have otherwise spent the money required to fix the window on something else. The job created because of the window destruction does not represent economic growth. Instead, it represents an economic loss because, if the window had never been broken, the shopkeeper would have had both his window and the money that he could have otherwise spent more productively.
If you think the argument Bastiat was countering is ridiculous and has no relevance for today’s world, recognize that it’s the same fallacy inherent to such still-popular myths as that the government’s spending on World War II ended the Great Depression.
In brief, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t end the depression, it prolonged it and helped make it “Great”. Reducing unemployment by drafting young men to be shipped off to fight and die in a destructive war is no substitute for productive labor in civilian sector jobs. The gross national product (GNP) estimates were practically meaningless given the absence of real market prices due to massive government intervention and shift to a wartime economy. And considering that government spending contributes to GNP, it again matters how money is spent given opportunity costs: diversion of resources toward destructive ends represents economic loss since in the absence of war that money would have otherwise been put to productive uses. In sum, the statistics used to support the myth create only an illusion of wartime prosperity, when in fact people’s standard of living was still suffering, and it was the end of the war and return home of soldiers that finally ended the slump and drove a period of true economic growth.
To further illustrate the point, take this response by New York Times columnist and Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman to the destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001:
Ghastly as it may seem to say this, the terror attack—like the original day of infamy, which brought an end to the Great Depression—could even do some economic good. . . . If people rush out to buy bottled water and canned goods, that will actually boost the economy.
Paul Krugman’s conclusion that the 9/11 attacks could spur economic growth was fallacious because he was ignoring the fact that those panicked consumers, in the absence of the terrorist attacks, would otherwise put their money toward other ends, and without the financial losses from all the destruction. He was also saying that any spending is good for economic growth, but that’s just not true. It matters how the money is spent.
As I have been observing for many years, public vaccine policymakers utilize the exact same logical fallacy when it comes to their ostensible evaluation of the risks versus benefits of the pharmaceutical products known as “vaccines”—and the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines are certainly no exception to that rule.
To explain it very simply, immunity to a pathogen can be acquired by experiencing an infection with that pathogen. The promise made by the government and pharmaceutical industry is that getting vaccinated will give you immunity while preventing you from experiencing the disease caused by that pathogen. But not everyone who has an infection develops the disease (much less a severe case of it); not everyone who is vaccinated is protected from the disease (“primary” and “secondary” “vaccine failure” are terms used in the literature to describe an initial failure to confer protection and waning immunity over time, respectively); vaccination itself can cause severe injury (and the government has granted the pharmaceutical industry broad legal immunity against vaccine injury lawsuits, shifting the financial burden for vaccine injuries from the manufacturers onto the taxpaying consumers); vaccines can have “non-specific effects” such as detrimentally affecting children’s immune systems in such a way as to increase their risk of dying from other causes (which is another factor that government policymakers totally ignore); and, more directly relevant for our specific purpose here, vaccination does not produce the same type of immunity as that conferred by infection. Natural immunity is superior.
Nevertheless, the US government, in coordination with state governments and through the corrupting influence of federal funding, has long maintained a policy of coercing people into vaccinating themselves or their children according to the recommendations of the executive agency known as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), without consideration for natural immunity as an opportunity cost.
The underlying assumption of this longstanding policy is that bureaucrats in Washington, DC, somehow know better than you do what is in your (or your child’s) best interests and therefore that there is no need for an individualized risk-benefit analysis.
But that is ludicrous! Of course there is a need for a risk-benefit analysis to be conducted on an individual basis before deciding whether to use any given pharmaceutical product. The idea of vaccination as a one-size-fits-all solution for disease prevention is totally unscientific in addition to resulting in the systematic violation of individuals’ right to informed consent.
In the case of the COVID‑19 vaccines, I had been warning about the need to consider natural immunity as an opportunity cost since even before these mRNA products received emergency use authorization (EUA) from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December 2020, which is a status specifically for products that have not undergone the same type of evaluation as approved and licensed products and are still considered experimental.
(Note that, contrary to lies from the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets, the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines still have not been FDA-approved for children under 12, for whom the products’ persistent EUA status was based on demonstrable scientific fraud.)
As I was pointing out back in 2020, there was a risk that mass vaccination with these experimental products could prolong the pandemic and worsen health outcomes in the long term.
For example, on behalf of the submitting non-governmental organization (NGO), I authored what officially became United Nations (UN) General Assembly document “A/HRC/45/NGO/43” on September 14, 2020, which was titled “Vaccine Mandates Violate the Right to Informed Consent”, in which I observed the following:
There are many legitimate concerns about vaccines in addition to their non-specific effects. Policymakers do not consider the opportunity costs of vaccination, such as the superiority of immunity acquired naturally compared to that conferred by vaccination.
For example, studies have found that having a flu shot annually could increase the risk of infection with novel influenza strains, as well as with non-influenza viruses, in part due to the lost opportunity to acquire the cross-protective, cell-mediated immunity conferred by infection.
A complementary hypothesis is the phenomenon of “original antigenic sin”, whereby the first experience of the immune system with an antigen determines future responses. Priming the immune system with antigen components of the influenza vaccine could potentially cause a mismatched antibody response to strains that the vaccine is not designed to protect against, thereby increasing the risk of infection as compared to an immune response in which naive T and B cells are instructed to fight off the infecting virus.
This phenomenon might help explain an increased risk of serious dengue infection among Filipino children who received the dengue vaccine and who had not already experienced a prior infection. This finding led the Philippines to the withdrawal of the vaccine, which the government had implemented into its childhood schedule upon the recommendation of WHO, despite earlier data having indicated that the vaccine might cause precisely that outcome.
A related hypothesis is that of “antibody dependent enhancement” (ADE), whereby vaccine-induced antibodies, instead of protecting the individual from subsequent infection, enhance the infection and thereby increase the risk of severe disease.
Attempts to develop a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS) were impeded by this phenomenon, whereby vaccinated animals were found to be at increased risk of viral infection. This past experience has raised concerns about the potential for ADE with vaccines under development for SARS-CoV-2.
As another example of opportunity cost, surviving measles is associated with a reduced rate of all-cause mortality in children, and this survival benefit appears to more than offset measles deaths in populations with a low mortality rate from acute measles infection.
Additionally, measles infection has been observed to cause regression of cancer in children and has been associated with a decreased risk of numerous diseases later in life, including degenerative bone disease, certain tumors, Parkinson’s disease, allergic disease, chronic lymphoid leukemia, both non-Hodgkin lymphoma and Hodgkin lymphoma, and cardiovascular disease.
Other infections have also been associated with health benefits, such as a reduced risk of leukemia among children who experience Haemophilus influenzae type b infection during early childhood.
There is also the potential for mass vaccination to put evolutionary pressure on pathogens, as has been seen with the diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis (DTaP) vaccine, and the emergence of pertussis strains lacking pertactin, a key antigen component of the vaccine. According to CDC, such strains “may have a selective advantage in infecting DTaP-vaccinated persons.”
Population effects of vaccination must be considered in addition to their effects on individuals. Data suggest that the varicella (chicken pox) vaccine has not been cost-effective but has rather increased health care costs due to the inferiority of vaccine-conferred immunity. This is because mass vaccination appears to have shifted the risk burden away from children, in whom it is generally a benign illness, and onto adolescents and adults, who are at greater risk of complications. Due to the loss of immunologic boosting from repeated exposures, elderly people who had chicken pox as children are at greater risk of shingles. But rather than reconsider existing recommendations, policymakers respond to this problem by recommending a shingles vaccine for the elderly.
For full references and to view a second UN document that I authored titled “COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates Are Not About Public Health” (February 2022), see here. Among other points, I explained in the second document how the CDC had “tried to conceal from the public the fact that studies have confirmed that natural immunity is strong and superior to the immunity induced by COVID-19 vaccines.”
My warnings about the risk of “original antigenic sin”—also sometimes referred to more insipidly as “immune imprinting”—occurring with the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines proved prescient. Numerous studies have shown that this is a problem with these pharmaceutical products.
In a June 2023 article titled “More COVID-19 Vaccine Doses Results in Higher Risk of COVID-19”, I reported how studies had shown that the more doses of mRNA vaccines received, the greater the risk of infection with SARS‑CoV‑2 (which is the name of the coronavirus that is a necessary but insufficient factor in the pathogenesis of the clinical disease known as COVID‑19, and which virus was probably created in a lab as a result of risky “gain-of-function” research with funding from the US government).
In that article of mine from last year, I discussed how researchers from the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio had published a study in December 2022 that had made the elementary observation from the data that “natural immunity from prior infection is more robust than immunity acquired through vaccination.”
The US government, of course, has been very busy trying to deceive the public about that fundamental reality. The truth is that there are no greater purveyors of disinformation about COVID‑19 and vaccines than the government and the mainstream media. Recall, for instance, how the mRNA vaccines were sold to the public on the basis of the big lie that they would stop infection and transmission of SARS‑CoV‑2 (and how that lie was mindlessly parroted by major media doing policy advocacy masqueraded as journalism; not to mention how health care providers also got in the act of deceiving the public with government-approved disinformation).
I and others who tried to correct such officially sanctioned disinformation were systematically censored for it. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, recently admitted how Facebook censored true information under pressure from the Biden administration on the false grounds that it was “disinformation”. Among other examples, I was personally banned from LinkedIn for accurately reporting how the CDC’s August 2021 claim that the vaccines offered protection that was superior to natural immunity was contradicted at the time by virtually all of the non-CDC-originating medical literature and subsequently falsified by the CDC’s own data as reported by the agency’s own researchers in its own MMWR journal. Facts be damned!
As I further reported in my June 2023 article, a follow-up study by Cleveland Clinic researchers published in April 2023 found that the more prior vaccinations people had received, the greater their risk of infection with SARS‑CoV‑2, which added to the growing body of research finding negative vaccine effectiveness over time relative to remaining unvaccinated.
In other words, the study found that the more people adhered to the CDC’s vaccine recommendations to supposedly protect against COVID‑19, the more likely they were to test positive for COVID‑19.
Another study by Cleveland Clinic researchers published in November 2023 in PLOS ONE concluded that “adults ‘up-to-date on COVID‑19 vaccination by the CDC definition do not have a lower risk of COVID‑19 than those ‘not up-to-date’, bringing into question the value of this risk classification definition.”
On May 20, 2024, another study by Cleveland Clinic researchers was published on the preprint server medRxiv, which was another follow-up to their previous series of studies examining the effectiveness of mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines at preventing SARS‑CoV‑2 infections among the clinic’s own health care personnel.
Specifically, the study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of the 2023 – 2024 COVID‑19 vaccine formulation, which targeted the “XBB” variant of SARS‑CoV‑2, whereas the dominant lineage of the virus during that season turned out to be the “JN.1” variant. They found an overall vaccine effectiveness of just 23%. However, they additionally found, once again, that receipt of more vaccine doses previously resulted in a relatively greater risk of SARS‑CoV‑2 infection than zero or just one prior dose.
As the study authors concluded,
Consistent with similar findings in many prior studies, a higher number of prior vaccine doses was associated with a higher risk of COVID‑19. The exact reason for this finding is not clear. It is possible that this may be related to the fact that vaccine-induced immunity is weaker and less durable than natural immunity. So, although somewhat protective in the short term, vaccination may increase risk of future infection because the act of vaccination prevents the occurrence of a more immunogenic event. Thus, the short-term protection provided by a COVID‑19 vaccine comes with a risk of increased susceptibility to COVID‑19 in the future.
The authors further observed that “the wisdom of vaccinating everyone with a vaccine of low effectiveness every few months to prevent what is generally a mild or an asymptomatic infection in most healthy persons, needs to be questioned.”
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In other words, the Cleveland Clinic researchers concluded what I have been saying since before the vaccines were even available, which is that, before any decision regarding vaccination can be reasonably made, it is essential to conduct an individualized risk-benefit analysis in which the opportunity cost of natural immunity is fully taken into consideration.
When will that lesson ever be learned by government bureaucrats who wield the power of a monopoly on violence to enforce their policy aims? The answer to that rhetorical question is “never”, which is why government bureaucrats should never be trusted with such power in the first place.
If there is just one overriding lesson of the COVID‑19 lockdown madness and its coerced mass vaccination endgame, it is that the so-called “public health” establishment is completely unworthy of our trust.
So, the question becomes: When will the lesson ever be learned by the American people that the government incessantly lies to them about everything? Let us hope that the answer to this question is not “never”.
This article was originally published at JeremyRHammond.com.
