Society ‘unlucky’ COVID did not kill children, says vaccine utopian

Author and neuroscientist Sam Harris Friday lamented that COVID-19 did not target children because that would have led to higher vaccination rates. 

The atheist made the remarks on the Uniting America podcast with John Wood, Jr in which he imagined a utopia without “vaccine skepticism”. 

In one way, we got very lucky that COVID wasn’t worse than it was, right? It could have been much, much worse. It could have been ten times as deadly or, you know, 50 times as deadly and we would have lived through – or many of us wouldn’t have lived through – something truly awful. 

But had COVID been worse – you know, just enough worse to really get our attention, to really be undeniable – we would have had a different political conversation around it. There wouldn’t have been the same kind of vaccine skepticism. Brett Weinstein would not have been releasing 80 straight podcasts on the dangers of the vaccine if a few variables were changed. 

Harris put forth a scenario in which COVID-19 was deadly for children, saying there would be no patience for “ignorance”. 

I mean, just think about—leave COVID exactly as it is, but just make it preferentially dangerous to children rather than to old people, right? You just flip that around, the variable of age. If kids were dying by the hundreds of thousands from COVID at a rate of whatever it was, you know, one percents, say, but it was pretty much all kids – we would have had a very different experience, right? And the patience, there would have been no f*cking patience for vaccine skepticism, right? And everyone would have recognized that this is not ‘my body, my choice’, this is ‘you’re not gonna kill my kids with your ignorance’, right?

Harris then proposed changing one more variable in his hypothetical COVID scenario, which is that the COVID shots would be effective at stopping transmission of the virus.  

In that case, Harris said, “the patience for [vaccine skepticism] would have been non-existent", and said society is “unlucky” that the virus did not target children. 

“So in some sense we got unlucky at how benign this was and how mysterious it could yet seem, because you could run the argument, ‘well, did he die from COVID or with COVID? He was 80-years-old,’ right? That was the situation we were in. 

Harris clarified that while “I’m not saying I wish for those things,” at least society would not have been “fragmented” around the vaccine variable if children were dying and the vaccine stopped transmission. 

This is not the first time Harris used imagery of dead children to make a point. 

Last year, the author said “he wouldn’t care” if Hunter Biden had dead child corpses in his basement because it would pale in comparison to President Donald Trump’s corruption. 

“At that point Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared,” Harris said on the Triggernometry podcast in August. 

Whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is – you could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand he’s getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden’s deals in Ukraine or China – it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It’s like a firefly to the sun. 

It doesn’t even stack up against Trump University. Trump University as a story is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden’s laptop, in my view.

The author conceded that there was “a Left-wing conspiracy” to deny Trump the presidency, which involved censoring the New York Post’s bombshell story involving Hunter Biden’s laptop and his father’s corruption, but it was worth it. 

That doesn’t answer the people who say it’s still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to shut down the New York Post’s Twitter account. That’s a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump – absolutely it was, absolutely. But I think it was warranted.