Conspiracy theorists might be wrong about vaccines but they were dead right about trans fats so think about that

It happened before, it can happen again.

It seems to me that even the most devoted champions of COVID-19 vaccines should be trying to figure out what they’re going to do if the skeptics end up kind of right about the shots. I mean, those of us who were derided for being initially skeptical about the efficacy of these things—we’ve kind of been proven very right about that, haven’t we? Many people are on their fourth individual injection of Pfizer’s shot. Four shots of a single pharmaceutical in less than two years seems very clearly a sign that the medicine itself is of low functional quality and offers minimal protection from the virus. Do you get four polio vaccinations every 18 months?

It’s worth pointing out that suspicions over the vaccine’s efficacy were less about traditional deep-state conspiracy theories and more about just honestly assessing the situation: These drugs were absolutely rushed to market, barely tested, and crafted under the weight of intensely politicized pressure as well as an insanely strong profit motive. Does that sound like the kind of environment in which good, effective pharmaceuticals are made? Or does it sound like a recipe for shoddy science and third-rate drugs?

But what if it goes beyond merely ineffective shots? What if the vaccines are actually causing widespread, often fatal issues in patients, particularly among younger recipients? The Florida surgeon general was absolutely roasted earlier this month when he amplified claims that the vaccine carries with it a massively outsized death risk for younger males; as the Washington Post put it, those claims were “swiftly condemned by medical and public health leaders,” with experts arguing that heart problems from the shot are only seen in “rare cases.” Rare, of course, is a relative term—and in any event it feels like a pretty big leap from “Everybody absolutely needs to get this vaccine and there’s nothing to be worried about” in January of 2021 to “Oh yeah some of you young healthy men may die, but not very many” now. How different do you think the analysis will be a year from now?

I know it’s tempting to dismiss these concerns because of a not-unreasonable belief that the modern medical system has enough redundant safeguards built into it to prevent the sort of large-scale catastrophe the likes of which could be at play here. Whenever I hear this kind of argument, though, I like to think about the history of trans fatty acids, or “trans fats,” that much-hailed saturated-fat replacement that gained immense popularity in the early decades of the 20th century and persisted well into the 21st. Medical officials in those years were vastly overstating the dangers of saturated fats, particularly animal fats, and a quack coalition of doctors, health gurus and prudes decided that vegetable oils were the solution. They figured out that if they blasted vegetable oil with hydrogen, they could make it shelf-stable and texturally comparable to butter or lard at room temperature; these fats were deemed safe to eat, and so people started eating them. I mean, doctors, public health experts, regulatory authorities, neighbors, co-workers, friends, family—everybody knew this was the safer way to eat, so everybody started eating that way.

Well, surprise: It turned out these artificial trans fats were, you know, deadly. A bunch of people died from them, like tens of thousands of people annually in the U.S. alone. They were just straight-up poison. Eventually most nations, including the United States, moved to ban them. But maybe the most unbelievable part (which also happens to be the most believable part) is that there were concerns about the safety of these ghoulish oils going back to the 1950s. For decades prior to the 1990s it was only a small number of doctors and a disparate coalition of health-conscious granola mothers that were properly suspicious of this stuff. As you can imagine, their concerns were ignored and they were dismissed as deluded nutjobs. Then one day everyone figured it out.

Imagine that! The point, of course, is that when you have a combination of health hysteria, extreme profit motive and bad science, you’re likely going to find yourself with bad solutions that end up hurting people. You might argue that this could never happen again, or at least not with something like the COVID vaccines. But why? Of course it could easily happen. There’s nothing in principle stopping the vaccines from being subject to the same toxic factors of fear, greed and incompetence. As the computer scientist Werner Vogels put it: Everything fails all the time. There’s no logical reason to think it can’t happen here.

In the meantime there are unsettling signs emerging. Spain is reportedly seeing a 94% increase in deaths of unknown cause relative to 2019; Alberta was reporting a similar spike earlier this year, as was the United Kingdom over the summer. These are pretty disparate countries so it’s not unreasonable to assume that if you see this trend in three divergent countries it’s likely present in others as well. In any other environment, researchers might consider “that brand-new untested drug that millions of people have received four doses of” to be a prime suspect in that spike. We’re not officially allowed to do that for some reason, though, so most people are just whispering about it. At least for now.