Focused protection was never the point
As I noted previously, Congress has somehow failed to provide funding for COVID vaccines and treatments. This is a major policy error, an error that could kill many tens of thousands of people if not corrected.
You might think that spending on vaccines and treatments would be something we could all agree on, regardless of our other differences on COVID policy. After all, even libertarians who oppose mask and vaccine mandates and social distancing rules claim to believe in “focused protection” and “protecting the vulnerable”, and vaccines, anti-virals, monoclonal anti-bodies all protect the vulnerable. They do so effectively and cheaply.
Yesterday I searched the following websites for “paxlovid” or “congress spending covid” in the past 30 days to try to find articles advocating for spending on vaccines and treatments:
- The American Institute for Economic Research
- Café Hayek
- The Brownstone Institute
- Collateral Global
- Reason
These are the organizations that publicized the Great Barrington Declaration and advocated for “focused protection”.
I found only one article, at Reason, that acknowledges that spending on vaccines and treatments is worthwhile. I certainly could have missed something – proving a negative is impossible – but funding for vaccines and treatments does not seem to be a priority for the people who have spent the past two years arguing for protecting the vulnerable.
This is not surprising. As I have said before, there’s not much evidence that the advocates of “focused protection” actually care about “protecting the vulnerable”.
For libertarians, classical liberals, and free-market conservatives, COVID was just another opportunity to undermine trust in government. This is their only priority. It is the only priority of their funders. They are so intent on discrediting government that they cannot even try to find common ground with those of us who think government has a constructive role to play in dealing with problems like the COVID pandemic. (Even the Reason article that acknowledges the benefits of spending on vaccines and treatments does not actually advocate for that spending. Most of the article criticizes spending that the author considers wasteful. We can debate the merits of other government spending on COVID; we may or may not agree. But failing to endorse spending that really will save lives is irresponsible. An earlier article at Reason criticized excessive spending by Congress; it mentioned proposed COVID funding but failed to state that this funding was justified.)
“Congress has somehow failed to provide funding for COVID vaccines and treatments.”
This is the problem with our political discourse. Replace with ” Senate Republicans kill funding for COVID vaccines and treatments.”
Not hard at all.
EMichael, I agree that Republicans deserve the lion’s share of blame for the funding failure. In this post I want to highlight the role played by conservative think tanks and libertarian ideology. I think (rightly or wrongly) that understanding the broader context and upstream influences on policy is important.
As I said in the prior post, I also think that Democrats should have foreseen this problem and provided funds for treatments and vaccines in earlier funding bills. That was an unforced error.
Perhaps. Never know what would have happened though. The Senator From The Fossil Fuel Industry might not have gone along with it, and we already know 50 Republicans would not have gone along with it.
Eric, I think it is even more malicious than this. I think libertarian & their paymasters believe the whole public health experiment of the last 150 years is wrong, an example of “softheartedness & Government bureaucrats using that softhearted thinking to amass power to mandate clean water and mass vaccination. This is implied that the victims of COVID were the “fat,” the persons with “co-morbidities,” who “don’t take of themselves,” so it was their own fault. There is an implied argument, especially now that the rich can have their own private water treatment facilities, that mass infectious disease would “thin the herd” & get rid of the “unfit.” These people follow the ideology of a sociopath (Ayn Rand) who created it to justify sociopathy.
I sometimes wonder if I am a little crazy, but it does seem that for the last half century or so whatever policy or implementation of policy that the GOP favors always is the one that costs more lives or causes more suffering in the end.
They have opposed things like school lunches with nutritious food, or free lunches for all kids because why – they prefer junk food or higher total administrative expenses, not to mention the hassle the kids face just getting lunch? They opposed things like needle exchanges or even Narcan availability to the general public – because they want more people to get aids or hep-c or die of overdoses? It never made sense to me unless they really preferred more people dying.
Now we have Covid-19, with the demonization of public health and public health officials, the 5G microchip enabled virus, and the calls to avoid the vaccine at all costs – it kills people. And yet the GOP supports and elevates the people who are arguably killing their own constituents with these and other lies. Why else unless you want the deaths to continue?
I really hope I am just crazy to think it, but more dead does seem to underlie an awful lot of GOP policy.