From
Andrew McCarthy:
Having finally discovered federalism, perhaps President Biden could take the next step and discover liberty. If he did, he’d accomplish more of what he wants — higher vaccination rates and lower incidence of serious illness and death, fewer disruptions and better economic performance — by trusting Americans to care for themselves. Trying to strong-arm reluctant people into compliance with increasingly irrational protocols is not working on them, and it is strangling all of us.
The CDC
reports COVID hospitalization rates in the U.S. by age group for all of 2020 and 2021:
6 comments:
I don't think McCarthy is entirely or even mostly wrong, but there are some assertions here that I don't see the evidence for. On what basis does he think he will get more vaccinations if they stop insisting? Trusting people to take care of themselves is a great libertarian idea, and may be worth it even when people don't take care of themselves, but I know people who didn't take care of themselves and died of covid. One also infected at least one other person. I did spend my career working with people who would not care of themselves, most of them nonpsychotic, and the havoc the wreaked on those around them.
Andrew acknowledges that we only have preliminary evidence for covid settling in to flu-number status, and maybe pretty soon, but then for the rest of the essay speaks as if that has essentially already happened and we should pretend it has. He founds his relative dangerousness numbers on what he believes what will happen, seemingly discarding what has happened and even what is happening now. Are there many more risky things? Well, we had a 16% increase in deaths in America in 2020 over 2019, and that number held throughout 2021. When was the last year we had a 16% increase in death?
Fauci, Biden, and the CDC are floundering, true. I am not trying to defend their abrupt changes that seem clearly in response to varying political pressures rather than science. But that doesn't mean everyone who deplores that is right in their own solutions.
There are people who are a danger to themselves and/or others, and we sometimes grit our teeth and resolve to lock them up for their or our good. It's not a basis for a structure for society at large.
McCarthy is speculating that easing off on unpopular or unconstitutional mandates would lead to better results. His case is that what we're doing now is clearly not working in the way we hoped or predicted, and is arousing a counterproductive rebellion along with a massive failure in public confidence in the pronouncements by our would-be leaders. He may be wrong. We may decide at some point that we should simply have institutionalized everyone, because so many people can't take care of themselves and we know best, but then who's left to do the building and caring and supervising?
My vote would be for continuing to declare extreme cases incompetent and appoint guardians for them, but leave everyone else free to decide for themselves--even in the certain knowledge that they may cause their own deaths and even put the rest of us at some finite risk--pretty much the way we did with HIV and every other infectious disease.
Even if it's completely impossible to establish with evidence that treating people like grownups would improve the situation medically, it's also completely impossible to establish with evidence that the nanny-state approach is improving the situation medically. If it's a toss-up, I vote for a free society. The very vulnerable have many strategies to protect themselves without bending the entire society to their will.
The simpler answer is that the original restrictions "aren't working" because the Delta variant is more deadly and direct comparisons have to be applied with discounts. That possibility has more explanatory power than the other speculations. The data just fits nicely on the deaths we've seen.
I'm not sure that's a simpler answer. It's too easy to keep assuming that strategies are effective even if they don't achieve their predicted goals, by positing that the problem just keeps getting harder in unexpected ways. The fact remains that the strategies aren't working, and therefore that it's harder and harder to justify their real cost. The cost, at least, isn't a disappearing target, always threatening to appear but never quite making it.
I use the thought experiment of bloodletting as a medical therapy. If a 19th century doctor let blood and the patient didn't get well, he could always argue that the disease was turning out to be more intractable than he expected--but it wasn't evidence that bloodletting was helping. What's necessary is to step back and consider the hypothesis that the blood-letting simply isn't an effective approach to the problem, instead of making excuses for its failure. If we stopped mandating a lot of things and hospitalizations or deaths shot up, there'd be good reason to suppose that we got it wrong and that the discontinued practice were helpful, but that's not what's happening. Different states have adopted different approaches, but hospitalizations and deaths are not conveniently demonstrating that the states doing the "right" things are getting better results.
We desperately want effective strategies, but that doesn't make our strategies effective. They either show results or they don't.
But these strategies do actually show some results when you compare apples to apples. And I still don't know of evidence that we would get more vaccinations if we weren't irritating people about them. I think school districts found out that was false decades ago.
This is not to say I don't take your point. There has to be a place where we abandon even what seem like common-sense solutions if we don't see results. But when we have common sense solutions - vaccination, not sharing air - and some results - far fewer among the vaccinated when it is apples to apples, variation in state outcomes - then I can't see why we say "Oh that's not working enough" and abandon it. Especially when those people talk about how irritated they are and how much they don't like their opponents rather than the data. McCarthy's key case "We would get more vaccinations without such insistence" has no evidence for it and some evidence against it, as far as I can see.
That should be "far fewer symptoms. I was going to say "deaths" but erased it ( even though it's true and never replaced it).
Post a Comment