wbj

I'm watching the ongoing debacle with regards to AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine with a certain sense of vindication. When the vaccines were first approved, I was deeply troubled, for a very simple reason: they are experimental, and experimental medicines almost always have unexpected side effects. These may be safer than the diseases they treat, but they may not be, and until the vaccines are fully assessed for safety, we don't know. We cannot know whether they are safe or not at this point in time.

The very fact that so many countries approved AstraZeneca and then withdrew it overnight tells me that the findings are worse than we're being told, since we're being told that the blood clotting was what is expected. If so, the fact so many regulators pulled it is strange. Far more likely is that there is something there that hasn't come out yet.

I'm well aware that this places me strongly outside of what is considered acceptable these days, but I think these vaccines are all very risky, and the more people who get them, the worse the potential outcomes become. Let's imagine, just for a moment, that one of the vaccines has a nasty side effect afflicting around a percent of people who take it. This would be extremely mild compared to the worst case scenario, but it would be typical for an experimental pharmaceutical. If, furthermore, as often happens, the first symptoms of a problem don't show up for a year or even longer, then it would be literally impossible for anyone to have detected this with any of the Covid-19 vaccines yet.

The problems are that modern medicine is staking its entire claim to legitimacy on these vaccines, and if anything goes wrong, the consequences will not be limited to these vaccines. The anti vax movement has already been given a massive boost by the combination of the experimental nature of these vaccines and the medical establishment insisting that these are as safe as any other vaccine: lots of people are hearing that and wondering about other vaccines. If it turns out that even just one of them has horrific side effects, then a full blown crisis of legitimacy for modern medicine will follow.

This is not something that I want. I am only alive today because of modern medicine: because I was born very prematurely I needed help in order to survive when I was first born, and had an infection as a child which would have killed me without antibiotics. I am firmly aware of the benefits of modern medicine, but I'm also well aware that a reflexive distrust of doctors is a logical response to what could happen.

Imagine if over the next few years the news covers an extraordinary rise in Early Onset Alzheimer's, and even starts to cover a new condition, Very Early Onset Alzheimer's, afflicting people in their 20s, teenagers, and in at least one case, a four year old girl. Families are devastated, watching their loved ones drift away. The explanation first starts spreading on the alternative news sites, but these patients all received one of the Covid vaccines. At first the doctors deny it as mere speculation, and it takes a few years, but eventually the company responsible for that vaccine confirms that their data shows this happening to their experimental group.

After being told repeatedly these vaccines are perfectly safe, and there are no possible risks, how could anyone trust anything their doctor, or the mainstream media, told them afterwards? How could anyone trust the regulators for medicines, or for food safety? The ensuing crisis of legitimacy would be one for the record books, and frankly, I don't want to live through it. At this point though, it just keeps getting more and more likely.

Although I believe we're living through a long decline in our civilization, one which has been ongoing for more than a half century at this point, I have hope for the future of our major urban areas. In 2050, I expect most of the large cities in North America to be doing better than they are today, not despite of, but because of this decline. There will be exceptions (ex: New York will likely be dealing with quite damaging sea level rise), but overall, most cities will soon begin to recover as they are cured from a terrible affliction: suburbs.

The problems with suburbs are manifold, but they boil down to three major problems for their host city: the first is that they create a large number of people who are outside the city centre, but who regularly commute to the city, thus increasing the number of people the core must be able to handle, without providing money to the core the same way that people who live there do; the second is that they take a disproportionate share of the well paying jobs, and this results in an increase in the poverty rate in the urban core; finally the third problem is that they are quite good at taking control of local planning for their benefit, and in the process harming the city core.

The cure for suburbs is actually quite simple: they depend on car culture, and if something happens which makes that impossible, they will very quickly descend to their eventual fate: the ring of slums which will surround most cities mid-century. This arguably should already be well under way, but there are a variety of tactics which are being used to funnel money out of the cities and into their suburbs. One example has to do with public transit in the Toronto area: trips into Toronto from surrounding areas provide funding solely to those areas; while trips from Toronto out to the surrounding areas results in money going to both Toronto and the other region's public transit. The result is that the suburbs end up with more funding for the same services.

Meanwhile, oil, a necessity for car culture, is heavily subsidized, and the same is true of the automobile industry itself. All of this provides a transfer of wealth away from cities and to the suburbs. The reason is quite simple: without these massive subsidies, suburbs would not be viable. The results, however, of allowing them to fail would be horrific, and violate a number of our culture's taboos (one of the big ones being letting the well off suffer); and so everything that can be done to keep suburbs alive is being done.

Sooner or later, this will fail, the suburbs will fall apart, and when this happens the cities, no longer being suffocated by their suburbs, will begin to recover. There will be crises as this happens of course, but for the cities, there is light at the end of the tunnel.