Analogies and Covid-19
Lately I’ve seen this video by JP Sears popping up on my Facebook feed (it was preceded by this video ). Some people seem to think it’s awesome. I can explain exactly why it isn’t .* The problem is with the analogy. Life jackets are intended to save one person alone - and only when that person is immersed in deep water. By contrast, vaccines are intended to stop the spread of disease in society (in which we all live most all of the time, barring wilderness isolation, quarantine, etc.). All analogies are faulty. But if you absolutely need one, you’re better off comparing apples to pears than apples to, I don’t know, refrigerators . Accordingly, a more apt comparison to the Covid-19 vaccines would be the smallpox vaccine. Okay, it concerns a very different disease - but at least it is a vaccine (against a virus too). Yes, smallpox is the more deadly/dangerous disease - by far. However, Covid-19 does kill (at around 10x the rate of influenza, accordi...