Natural Immunity Is an Opportunity Cost of COVID-19 Vaccination

In economics, the term “opportunity cost” is used to refer to any potential benefits that are lost because of a decision to do one thing instead of another.

For example, if you spend $20 each month for a subscription to the New York Times, that’s twenty bucks you will no longer have available on a monthly recurring basis to instead support independent journalism that debunks the lies and deceptions propagated by the mainstream media. ?

The French economist Frédéric Bastiat provided a famous illustration of the importance of considering opportunity costs in his 1850 essay What is Seen and What is Not Seen, in which he provided the example of a shopkeeper whose window is broken, and who therefore must pay a glazier to fix his window. According to the mainstream economists of Bastiat’s day, that property destruction represented economic growth because “Look! A new job was created!”

Bastiat explained why this conclusion was a non sequitur fallacy: had the shopkeeper’s window not been broken, he could have otherwise spent the money required to fix the window on something else. The job created because of the window destruction does not represent economic growth. Instead, it represents an economic loss because, if the window had never been broken, the shopkeeper would have had both his window and the money that he could have otherwise spent more productively.

If you think the argument Bastiat was countering is ridiculous and has no relevance for today’s world, recognize that it’s the same fallacy inherent to such still-popular myths as that the government’s spending on World War II ended the Great Depression.

In brief, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t end the depression, it prolonged it and helped make it “Great”. Reducing unemployment by drafting young men to be shipped off to fight and die in a destructive war is no substitute for productive labor in civilian sector jobs. The gross national product (GNP) estimates were practically meaningless given the absence of real market prices due to massive government intervention and shift to a wartime economy. And considering that government spending contributes to GNP, it again matters how money is spent given opportunity costs: diversion of resources toward destructive ends represents economic loss since in the absence of war that money would have otherwise been put to far more productive uses. In sum, the statistics used to support the myth create only an illusion of wartime prosperity, when in fact people’s standard of living was still suffering, and it was the end of the war and return home of soldiers that finally ended the slump and drove a period of true economic growth.

To further illustrate the point, take this response by New York Times columnist and Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman to the destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001:

Ghastly as it may seem to say this, the terror attack—like the original day of infamy, which brought an end to the Great Depression—could even do some economic good. . . . If people rush out to buy bottled water and canned goods, that will actually boost the economy.

Paul Krugman’s conclusion that the 9/11 attacks could spur economic growth was fallacious because he was ignoring the fact that those panicked consumers, in the absence of the terrorist attacks, could have otherwise put their money toward more productive ends. He was basically saying that any spending is good for economic growth, but that’s just not true. It matters how the money is spent.

As I have been observing for many years, public vaccine policymakers utilize the exact same logical fallacy when it comes to their ostensible evaluation of the risks versus benefits of the pharmaceutical products known as “vaccines”—and the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines are certainly no exception to that rule.