I am interested in lag time, the gap between an event and a follow-up. I get information from Google News, CNN's Five Things, Numlock News, Writer's Almanac and Personal Information, which, despite the name, is a newsletter about national politics. I don't think I am well connected to any group nor am I a professional observer.
I tend to think personally and somewhat locally. I just checked and I see that I got a Covid vaccine shot in Feb. of 2021. We had waited some and kept an eye on local and national news from the internet about getting shots, wearing face masks, practicing social distancing and we thought we were following good advice about what to do to avoid a serious illness. I still feel that we proceeded sensibly.
Various reports about people being extremely interested in not getting any Covid vaccine come along regularly. I have read of people rejecting a shot even if they can't get a transplant they need. The whole business of a large group getting some medicine was played out, and probably is still being played out, around other medicines and other diseases. A friend reminded me today of the story of British doctor John Snow. In 1854, cholera was hurting people in London. As numerous histories have made clear, there was a general conception among many that diseases traveled on "bad air", "miasma", much like unpleasant smells. As Steven Johnson makes clear in his book "How We Got to Now", there was a slow chain reaction from Gutenburg's press to more books to more people wanting spectacles to better glass to microscopes to being able to actually see biologically important and dangerous life forms that had formerly been too small.
Gaps in time, lags between a discovery and knowledge of it being widespread, occur for all sorts of reasons. I didn't understand until recently that psychological and then political reasons, fashions, beliefs and doubts can all create lags in the spread of any phenomenon. Reading about the acceptance and non-acceptance of the smallpox vaccine has shown me strong parallels between today and 1798.
It is completely understandable, I think, that ideas need time to spread and to be accepted. A search turned up the date 1996 as a good one to stand for the eradication of smallpox, just about 200 years after Jenner. That is the sort of lag that can happen. I imagine that things have speeded up today but there are still lags.
