Admitting You Were Wrong

Letters to America: the apology owed by US higher education

“You have to own your mistakes, otherwise your mistakes own you.” - Paulo Coelho

Dear US academics,

Until this century, two things were true of universities: that they were communities of scholars, and that these communities pursued attempts to understand everything (hence the common linguistic root with ‘universe’). On both counts, US universities have failed miserably. Alas, we are not yet ready to honestly re-evaluate what happened in the COVID-19 debacle, and partly this is because having made such ghastly mistakes there is a high price in pride to admitting failure. However, setting aside for now disputes over interpretations of the facts, I hope in this epistle to demonstrate how the US universities utterly failed in their duties as universities during this disastrous incident.

When President Trump announced ‘Operation Warp Speed’, many on the blue team were disgusted and vowed never to take the vaccine candidate being developed. Oddly, after the replacement of the buttocks sat in the Oval Office, many of these very same people became vociferous supporters of this very same vaccine candidate, its questionable origins now apparently forgotten. Yet the original opposition in this case was well-founded: any plan to develop vaccine candidates faster is inherently a commitment to sacrifice adequate safety testing for rapidity.

If you know anything about vaccines at all - and as academics, I sincerely hope you have at least a cursory understanding! - you must appreciate that safety testing requires time. Operation Warp Speed substituted extensive longitudinal studies for sheer volume of collected data. But side effects that take years to manifest cannot be demonstrated in studies taking months. On this point, there is no room for dispute. Whatever the status of other vaccines, each vaccine candidate is its own unique research project, and it takes at least ten years to adequately validate safety. This did not change as a result of executive order. Inherently, the modified mRNA vaccine candidates were risky.

In the Spring of 2021, a vast swathe of US universities announced that this rapidly developed vaccine candidate for SARS-CoV-2 was mandatory for their staff and students. I learned about this from the news, despite having a part-time position at a US university at the time. I wrote an impassioned letter to the president of that college, pointing out the ethical problems with this requirement, and also (because sometimes money is all that sways management) warning them that since the vaccine manufacturers had been rendered immune from liability, the university could be sued by students suffering side effects from this inadequately tested pharmaceutical. I was dryly informed that “the decision had already been made”. I resigned my post immediately.

The bizarre choice to attempt to halt viral transmission with a pharmaceutical whose approval data hadn’t entailed any testing of its effects on transmission could not have been attained through the involvement of the faculty of these institutions, since it happened so fast. It was boards of trustees and upper managements who made these over-swift resolutions. They did not feel it necessary to consult with their academic staff at all. This not only confirms that this decision was politically-motivated, it serves as a tacit admission that these institutions are not universities in the sense I traced above, since their collective knowledge was not to be applied to this question in any way.

Overnight, US colleges gave up their claim to be universities entirely. Firstly, because their scholarly skills were deemed irrelevant to answering important questions about the ethical and scientific dimensions of mandatory injection of inadequately tested vaccine candidates. But secondly because in so doing they also gave up the claim to be communities of scholars, revealing themselves to be mere profit-centres whose upper management disturbingly claimed to own the bodies of both staff and students. All this in a nation that once fought a bitter war to overturn the idea that people can be property...

Until US colleges can own up to this shocking mistake, they have no justification for claiming to be universities. Admitting this error will be difficult, not least because it will mean allowing that your political rivals had principled objections that you should have listened to and considered. But as Paulo Coelho warned, you must own your mistakes, or they will own you. As long as this mistake possesses you, your collective claim to be universities remains indefensible.

With unlimited love,

Chris.