Mandates not needed in an information-drenched world

By Jackson Heller

If you still think that the issue of vaccination and masking is only a matter of science, you’d be dead wrong. Through social media, word of mouth, and other mass media outlets, practices like vaccination and masking are now seen more as social issues than a question of immunization and prevention of the spread of COVID.

Freakonomics, a nonfiction book written by a University of Chicago economist named Steven Levitt, takes on everyday issues with economics principles. In the second chapter, Levitt tackles a term almost intrinsically linked with all of the societal problems we’re faced with today, including COVID precautions:  unequal access to information, and how we’ve equalled it.

For example, 30 years ago one could hire a real estate agent to sell their house, simply because they did not know enough about the real estate market to sell the house themselves. Besides, why would they risk accidentally losing thousands of dollars selling a house on their own when there are people out there who are literal housing experts?

While a real estate agent may help us sell our houses, Stanford economist B. Douglas Bernheim reports that real estate agents sell their own houses for 3 percent more than they charge when selling their clients’ houses.This may not seem like a lot, but in a city like Chicago, where the study was conducted and the price of a middle class home may be upwards of $300,000, that’s a difference of $10,000 that the seller may miss out on. This is where unequal access to information hurts us. The fact that the seller had to hire someone to sell their house may have cost them $10,000.

You may be wondering what this has to do with an editorial about why people don’t mask. Simply, this isn’t the first time vaccinations have been disputed. Just ask Jim Carrey or Jenny McCarthy, who have been against vaccinations since even before COVID. Vaccines, and particularly the practice of being against vaccination, are a matter of information.

The strongest medical evidence is that there are chemicals in masks that might lead to health complications, but then again you might be crushed in a multi-car accident on your way to school, and you still get in your car every day.

A vaccine, admittedly, is something you inject into your bloodstream. If something goes wrong with the vaccine, that defective mix of chemicals is now in your bloodstream. That doesn’t sound great. The average person, whether vaccinated or not, does not know every little thing that was in the vaccine. However, they can employ the power of the internet to gain information that will lead them to get the vaccine with no complications whatsoever.

Remember the real estate agents I mentioned earlier? The gap between prices of real estate agent’s houses and their clients has shrunk significantly due to the widespread use of the internet. With the internet, the information about the price of our house that was once provided to us by one person, and one person only, can now be researched, found, and interpreted with some smart searching and a little reading.

The human brain, much like what we learn about a cell’s membrane in biology class, is selectively permeable, meaning it chooses what gets to enter and what doesn’t. Living in a first world country means that every time we open our school-issued chromebook we’re greeted with a wealth of information that zips about at the speed of light before our eyes. Unfortunately, most of us only really see what we want to see and disregard the rest.

We don’t have to be in the dark about vaccines. If you really think that getting the vaccine isn’t worth it, research it—not on social media websites like Twitter or Facebook, but real sources that you can attest to and that deliver unbiased, fair, information. 

If you could provide pro-vaxxers with factual, all-encompassing information that confirms that they have done nothing but inject toxins into their bloodstream and breathe into a napkin for a year, you would be a genius! It would be groundbreaking work!

What I’m saying is that we often misuse the massive caches of information we hold in our pockets. A fact we don’t agree with may be dismissed as an opinion. An opinion we don’t agree with may be dismissed as a fact. Facts may be dismissed altogether while unbridled opinions are let to ride free. Information is our friend.

We have the tools to make our own decisions. If you still have made the conscious decision not to get the vaccine or still wear your mask below your nose, think to yourself, why? Why have I made this decision, and where did I find the information to support it? When used correctly, the internet makes us just as smart as those real estate agents who are ripping us off or those doctors who are giving us shots, but ask yourself. Am I using it correctly?