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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Novak already had covid. Why did he need a vaccine?

I sometimes wonder if "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is an even more effective description of human psychology than it was intended to be.

In the technological explanation of how vaccines work, the fact that they resemble the disease-causing virii is a good thing: the closer a vaccine molecule resembles the virus, the more effective the antibodies we learn to produce in response to it will be in response to the virus. We can't make a vaccine resemble a virus perfectly, because we would like to have it be a lot less harmful than the virus, but a virus has a perfect resemblance to itself, so a priori we'd expect the virus to produce the most effective immune response. There are possible second-order complications we might discover, but with Covid-19 we didn't. The benefit of a vaccine isn't "you're more likely to get better immunity than from an infection", it's just "you're much less likely to be debilitated or killed in the process".

In the subconscious magical explanation of how vaccines work, the Law of Contagion imbues them with persistent magical links to other people/objects/contexts, giving them power independent of the mere molecules they're made of. Sometimes these bonds can be removed by a "formal cleansing, consecration, exorcism, or other act of banishing", as Wiki says, so the same molecules which when bonded to Trump's Vaccine Can't Be Trusted might later lose that non-material bond to evil Trump and be instead bonded to The Science, which Says Everyone Needs a COVID-19 Booster Shot—and Soon. But sometimes those bonds are more immutable: a vaccine can be bonded to Medicine and Health and The Science, but a virus is irrevocably bonded to Disease and Death. How could something bonded to Disease and Death make you less likely to get a repeated disease later? That's just not how magic works.

This is my new favorite explanation for the blinders phenomenon