The covid echo chamber is alive and well on the libertarian right

Don Boudreaux has reprinted a few paragraphs from a George Will column under the heading:  George Will explains that RFK, Jr., is what people get “when trust in government collapses.”  Here are the quoted paragraphs, my bold:

Indifference to evidence, and an appetite for startling hypotheses, are well-known characteristics of cranks. Kennedy is a man-child incubated in an era saturated by social media, which are a banquet for perpetual adolescents hungering for affirmations of shocking beliefs, and indignant when contradicted.

Many normal Americans are understandably still smoldering about the behavior of some senior public health officials and institutions during the pandemic. Their clanging but mutable certitudes were brandished as excuses for the bullying that these officials obviously enjoyed doing. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offered spurious “public health” reasons that helped teachers unions avoid teaching and extort additional benefits from compliant state and local governments. And the National Institutes of Health anathematized those who wrote and subscribed to the Great Barrington Declaration. It correctly argued for pandemic measures that target the most vulnerable — not children, but the elderly and those with co-morbidities.

…..

An aroma of lunacy surrounds Kennedy’s enthusiasm for smashing the crockery of widely accepted scientific propositions that have been validated by scores of millions of lives saved. Nevertheless, many Americans are now indiscriminately skeptical, in reaction against the recent authoritarian dogmatism of, and censorship by, “experts.” They consider Kennedy’s aroma a breath of fresh air.

This is an incredible piece of gaslighting.  Will acknowledges that it is Trump who nominated RFK, and that it is Senate Republicans who may confirm him, but then somehow manages to lay the blame for RFK on government “experts” (in scare quotes, naturally) misbehaving during covid. 

Let’s focus on the claims I bolded above.

Will believes (or at least tells his readers) that the Great Barrington Declaration was correct, no qualifications needed.  But this is simply wrong.  The Great Barrington Declaration was a half-baked, highly contestable policy proposal that was passed off as self-evident by its authors, just as Will is doing in his column.

There were many problems with the GBD, but let’s focus on just one:  At the time the GBD was released, in October 2020, vaccines were already in clinical trials.  There were genuine doubts about the efficacy of “focused protection” to keep vulnerable people safe when community spread was high, and it certainly would have taken some time to put focused protection into place.  As a result, it was reasonable to think that broader, less targeted measures to tamp down the virus should be kept in place until vaccines were available for the elderly and immune compromised.  (The most plausible argument against doing this was that efforts to broadly suppress the virus through social distancing were ineffective, but this also was far from clear.)    

Why does Will assert with such confidence that the Great Barrington Declaration was correct?  It’s possible that Will knows the argument he is making is ridiculous and just doesn’t care.  But it’s also possible that Will is ignorant of the rather straightforward points I made above, because he gets his news from right-wing sources.  Boudreaux, for example, regularly posted tendentious and misleading arguments about covid, including arguments that encouraged vaccine hesitancy, just as he is now uncritically reproducing Will’s ridiculous claims about the GBD (see, for examples, here, here, here, here, here, here).

This gets to Will’s claim that Americans are skeptical of government because of the dogmatism of “experts”.  I agree that public health officials would have been well advised to emphasize that their advice was uncertain and subject to change, and I agree with Will’s broader point that experts have made lots of mistakes over the past few decades (Vietnam, Iraq, the list goes on).  It is plausible to think that these errors have contributed to declining trust in government.

But people like Will and Boudreaux also have agency.  They have spent decades telling people that government officials are self-serving incompetents or worse.  They attacked government officials during covid with the clear purpose of undermining trust in government.  People distrust government and experts because Republican politicians, conservative media, and libertarian ideologues tell them to. 

Apparently Will and Boudreaux have learned nothing from our experience with covid, or from the nomination of RFK.  A  modest proposal:  they should spend less time marinating in the libertarian echo chamber and more time on Angry Bear.