COVID-19 Vaccination Decision Logic from the 17th Century
Blaise Pascal, a French thinker from the 1600s, made many contributions to academia throughout his life. One of his most famous contributions is widely known as Pascal’s Wager. The basic argument of Pascal’s Wager is basically that we can construct a payoff matrix for the belief (or lack thereof) in God. The matrix is constructed as such:
From this matrix, goes the argument, we can conclude that we should believe in God – the expected value from believing in God is higher than not believing in God (due to the infinite reward if you believe in God and God exists and infinite cost if you don’t believe in God and God exists). There are a number of problems with this argument – the same argument could be applied to the God from any religion, not any specific deity. Additionally, some would argue that you cannot choose to believe in God based on the possibility of a reward; that belief in God should be based on faith alone. Though this game is different than the games we looked at in class (because it is effectively a one-player game rather than a two-player game), we can still use a decision matrix to analyze payoffs in a similar fashion.
Recently, in an article published in the Johnson City Press, a man by the name of Bill Usher calls upon Pascal in making his decision to get the vaccine. He constructs a similar matrix, as follows:
According to this matrix, and applying the same logic applied to Pascal’s Wager, we should get the vaccine because the potential costs/benefits if the Delta variant is actually dangerous are so large that they dominate the costs/benefits of the situations where Delta is a scam. Although I do personally agree with the conclusion drawn from this matrix, I find the argument questionable – people who believe that Delta is a scam would probably argue that there is some danger to getting vaccinated which changes the risk-reward/cost-benefit calculus. There are also potential externalities associated with getting vaccinated – when I get vaccinated, I reduce the risk of infection/serious illness to those around me as well. In fact, perhaps you could use a graph of my social network to mathematically model how each individual getting vaccinated changes the risk of COVID-19 for the rest of the population!