Vax Morality and Novak’s Morality

Champion tennis player Novak Djokovic has been in the news during the Australian Open tennis championship in January 2022. Not for winning the championship, but for not being allowed to play. He reached Melbourne for the tournament on invitation and was later forced out of the tournament and was deported without playing a game as he was unvaccinated. Djokovic has now publicly announced his decision not to take the Covid-19 vaccination. He is deeply convinced about the decision and is willing to bear the costly consequences of even missing the upcoming French Open and Wimbledon Championships where he is the defending champion.

This is a very interesting development as the decision comes from an illustrated world champion with 20 Grand Slam trophies in his showcase or wherever he has kept them. He has been world No.1 for a record 360 weeks and still has more tennis in him to reach or break new world records. It is interesting that Djokovic is not making an emotional spot reaction but a thoughtful decision. It is also interesting to note that he is not an anti-vax campaigner nor is he in the pro-vax camp. He is just using his freedom of choice whether to have a medicine or not.

Covid-19 pandemic has brought in several new rules and new ways of public behaviour. Since it was a global health emergency people, experts and nations were learning new things by trial and error. While the World Health Organisation was giving some studied guidance, people and nations around the world tried their own immediate and local coping mechanisms in the absence of an effective cure against the Coronavirus. What you can’t cure has to be prevented. Logical. So, pharma and vaccine companies worked overtime to come up with vaccines that may prevent the spread of the virus. And to their credit several vaccines came up in a relatively short time and the authorities approved the use of such vaccines with limited clinical trials.

The vaccine morality has divided the world broadly into two categories- the pro-vax and anti-vax camps. Pro-vax folks advocate that vaccination is essential for everyone and those who do not get vaccinated harm themselves and others. While the anti-vax people advocate that these vaccines are not yet proven regarding their efficacy and long-term negative side effects and hence oppose any vaccine mandates. Novak’s declaration has brought in a third possibility of vax-neutrals who retain their freedom of choice while neither joining the pro or anti-vax groups. This third category of people are not making their choice based on data analysis nor do they oppose anyone. Yet they want to exercise their freedom of choice.

Let’s examine this a bit further.

Most, if not all the currently available vaccines against Covid-19 are not really vaccines by the very definition of vaccines. A vaccine is a preventive medicine that will protect the vaccinated from a disease or infection for one’s lifetime or a defined period, say for 10 or 15 years. None of the Covid-19 vaccines claim to prevent the occurrence or recurrence of Covid-19 for the vaccinated person. On the contrary there have been plenty of instances of vaccinated people contracting the Corona virus and spreading the virus to others. So, if the vaccine is neither protecting the vaccinated person from the disease or from becoming a virus carrier what great reason is there to mandate vaccination on every thinking adult?

Okay, the pro-vax camp may still say that even though the vaccine may not prevent the disease, it will still add some immunity in the vaccinated person and reduce the chance of death due to Covid-19. But then, there are many other means of improving immunity and general health without the vaccines. Eg., there are many ethnic or local plants and foods that boost immunity. Should we mandate all of them? No. Instead, provide information on all such options and let people choose what is best for them.

Let’s come back to the morality of it. Most of the moral codes are aimed at protecting the freedoms and encouraging the duties of individuals to have a safe social co-existence of a community or a larger society. That is a fair proposition without which no society can function effectively. In the recent past we have seen several discussions around vaccine equity, vaccine nationalism and vaccine patenting etc., All of that have valid moral grounds but all those grounds have been breached by companies and nations. There was no system to ensure that the rich and poor nations had the same access to vaccines or medicines and the same kind of inequity was seen among people within nations. There was no system of a liberalised patent system for these ‘emergency use’ vaccines to make them available for everyone in the shortest time. And, of course, there were huge differences in the pricing and the vaccine schedules. However, like in many other social crises such inequities are to be expected. Therefore, the summary of all these is that moral codes emerge in a social context and they do evolve rather than staying unchanged.

Well, the majority of us (me included) would take the easy path of going with the flow. Will trade off personal choices for peace, harmony, and personal convenience. So, we all stood in the queue and took the vaccine shots, twice and some even four times. Most of us belong to the pro-vax camp. Novak chose a new morality around the vaccine. And he has every right to do so and let’s respect it. Djokovic may not have all the data, but he still has the freedom of choice to inject a medicine into his body or not. One can agree or disagree with him. But let us grant him the right and wish him well. Let’s not slam him, vax or no-vax, grand slam or no grand slam!

‘There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.’- Arthur Conan Doyle

Statistics, AI, and the Champion’s Mind

 

Watching the 2022 Australian Open Men's final match between Rafael Nadal and Daniil Medvedev was a treat to any sports lover. Or for that matter for anyone who likes exciting entertainment. That it was a duel between two high ranking tennis professionals with great skill and grit is just understating facts. So many comments and commentaries have already been made about this exciting match with a nail-biting finish at the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on the 30^th January 2022. This piece is not about the match; rather this is about how our minds get conditioned and confused with statistics and collective intelligence or lack of it.

Behind the fascinating game is a curious play of statistical probability that has played differently in the minds of people and at different times of the match. Well, before the starting of the match vast majority of spectators have gone with Nadal as the winner looking at his track record and the fact that there was no Djokovic added to their belief. Surely there were some people who have placed their bets on Medvedev looking at the way he has fought big battles on the world tennis circuit in the recent years. Moreover, Medvedev was seen as younger, taller and a strong underdog while Nadal was seen as coming back after long injury break and a good 10 year older than his youthful opponent at the finals.

The mind map of spectators changed a bit after Nadal lost the first set without much of a fight. Some doubts would have creeped into the minds of some people but still most of them kept their faith in Nadal. In the minds of most spectators the pendulum almost fully swung into Medvedev’s court after his straight second set win, though this set was harder for both. In a match that needs three out of five sets to win one way to look at the statistics is that Medvedev’s probability has already crossed the 66.6%, ie., two out of three. For the moment, only very few people would look at even giving Nadal the remaining 33.3% probability of winning the remaining three sets. Because that is a difficult proposition, and the mind looks for easier options based on ‘historical data’ which is coloured often by the ‘recency effect’ of the latest set of data. For most of us future is just a scoping of the past and present to a longer timeframe with minor changes.

The confirmation bias is almost completely tilted in favour of Medvedev when the score board showed 0-40 (offering three breakpoints to Medvedev) in the very first game of the third. At this point the tournament’s AI was giving Medvedev 96% chance of winning. Afterall, what is the need to suspect the AI? Unlike human brains the AI has no bias!

Really? No. AI too is biased by a program that works on statistical algorithms created by humans. Or that is how it works mostly as of now.

Well, after Nadal won the third set people started suspecting the AI. And of course, the AI too would have started revising the calculations, just like the Google Maps re-routing the way after a wrong turn taken by the driver. And then goes the fourth set to Nadal and statistically the odds are even now! But the spectators’ minds have almost tilted towards Nadal as that is the outcome most of them wanted anyway. They wanted to go with a champion who is going to create a historic record and not with an upstart young player, however powerful he may be.

Now the question is what would have been Nadal’s state of mind during this dramatic match at various stages swinging from deep despair to high hopes? We wouldn’t know that. I would imagine that with a champion’s mind Nadal would never have given up hope. In fact, during the entire match there was no significant reaction from Nadal to indicate that he has given up on the match. On the contrary, he kept playing despite all the odds and probably an aching body.

At the end of the long match, Nadal could barely walk to the presentation podium. In fact, we saw him sitting down during the presentation ceremony out of sheer fatigue and pain on his legs. A great champion’s mind cannot be constrained by statistics and AI. True champions will junk all statistics if they don’t help boost their winning chances.

Well, all this is based on what we saw on the final day of the tournament. There could be a lot of ‘what if’ scenarios that would have changed the outcome and the analysis. We do not know whether the tournament would have gone this way if Djokovic was part of the tournament. What if by sheer stroke of a couple of missteps by Nadal or smart flukes by Medvedev the fifth set would have gone in favour of Medvedev? All these could be possibilities.

Statistics normally deals with larger number of events or historical data from which we derive certain probability calculations. These probability calculations keep changing as the data set changes. Yet, the probability calculations can go wrong in real life situations. Why? Any Probability number that is less than 100% always leaves a chance of going wrong. For instance, 99.9% probability of winning still leaves a chance of losing. Luck often plays at the margin. That brings us to the realm of possibilities. What is possible may not have occurred in the past at all, yet it could just emerge in the future. And the future could be the next moment or after a million years.  

Nadal did not allow statistics to come in the way of his determination. For him what he imagined appeared more real than what appeared on the score board during the game.

‘Everything you can imagine is real.’- Pablo Picasso