Vaccines?  Focused protection?  Not if you ask the fine libertarians at the Brownstone Institute.

Pre-COVID, who would have thought that a significant part of the libertarian thought collective would go anti-vax?  Not me.  But I stand corrected.  From a recent blog post at the illustrious Brownstone Institute:

The people whose directives you are following talk a lot about “pseudoscience,” always accusing those of us who disagree with their directives of pushing it. But you know what pseudoscience actually is? It’s putting forth a premise that cannot be disproven.

For example: “my COVID would have been worse without my vaccine.” “More grandmas would have died if we would not have locked down, worn masks and taken vaccines.” These two assertions can actually be easily refuted (look at the nations that did not lock down, and the health of the unvaccinated).

Words fail me.

Moving on, last week Brownstone Institute founder Jeffrey Tucker published this on the CDC’s COVID tracking system:

There is no remorse at the CDC. Far from it. The model of virus control deployed over the last 27 months is now part of normal operations. It wants it institutionalized. 

The bureaucracy has now codified this into a new online tool that instructs cities and states precisely of what they are supposed to do given a certain level of community spread. The new tool doesn’t say lockdowns as such but the entire model of containment via masks and distancing is baked in, and it can be easily expanded at will. 

Oooh, sounds scary.  Road to Serfdom, anyone?  I mean, the CDC has no actual authority here, but still very scary, right?  And then there’s this (no indent; bullet points are selective quotations from the CDC, the rest is Tucker):

As for “additional precautions” we know what that means: lockdowns. Even now, the suggestions are to 

  • Follow CDC recommendations for isolation and quarantine, including getting tested if you are exposed to COVID-19 or have symptoms of COVID-19
  • Implementing screening testing or other testing strategies for people who are exposed to COVID-19 in workplaces, schools, or other community settings as appropriate
  • Implement enhanced prevention measures in high-risk congregate settings 
  • Consider setting-specific recommendations for prevention strategies based on local factors

We’ve seen this movie before. It’s a recipe for full government control of life. [End quote.]

Sure, full government control of life.  You would think a learned libertarian intellectual like Tucker would be more familiar with the reality of life under totalitarian government, but whatever.  The point I want to focus on here is that Tucker evidently opposes “enhanced prevention measures in high-risk congregate settings.”  But protecting people in high-risk congregate settings is essential to “focused protection” which was a central element of the Great Barrington Declaration.  (The GBD made two basic recommendations – eliminate all “lockdowns” immediately, and protect the vulnerable while the virus rips through the population creating “herd immunity”.)

As I have noted previously, focused protection was a con