Back in 2019, there was outrage among the public that Boeing had built an dangerous airplane that in 500,000 flights had killed precisely . . . (checks notes) . . . precisely zero Americans. (Two international crashes.)
Matt Yglesias has some interesting comments on the lack of outrage over the botched vaccine rollout:
What’s striking to me, however, is that not only hasn’t the AstraZeneca vaccine been approved for use even on a special “right to try” basis, but that there is absolutely no movement in favor of such approval. And that’s not because Americans lack the know-how or will to protest things. Just during the past twelve months, we’ve seen big stop-the-steal rallies, huge anti-racism protests, and several rounds of protests against non-pharmaceutical interventions. The takeaway from the anti-lockdown protests was that Americans are too individualistic to abide by prolonged business closures. The takeaway from all three rounds of protests is that Americans of diverse ideological backgrounds have profound mistrust of America’s governing institutions. This is a country so taken with the spirit of liberty that we can’t get people to endure the relatively minor inconvenience of wearing a mask while out and about.
The minority of libertarians who aren’t deeply invested in being Covid denialists would like you to believe that the fussbudget FDA is standing between you and the AstraZeneca vaccine. But it’s clear that the American people are absolutely not prepared to let public health experts tell them what they can and can’t do. If people were clamoring for faster approvals, we’d get them. But there’s no Covid Era version of ActUp demanding access. If public health bureaucracies ask people to change, a large share of the population declines to do it. If they try to force people to change, you get significant resistance. But if they block change, then the public is fine with that.
Even if you are not convinced on the AstraZeneca issue, there are many other areas where outrage is the appropriate response. Why didn’t the federal government go all out subsidizing the manufacturing of vaccines in case they work? Alternatively, why not encourage production using free market price signals. We did neither.
Why wasn’t there a plan for distributing the vaccines? Israel had a plan; why didn’t we develop one over the past 10 months? Alternatively, why not use market incentives to speed up delivery of the vaccines? We did neither.
Again and again, we see failures that cannot be justified from either a libertarian or a statist perspective. And yet there are no street protests. Why not?
You might say the issue is complex, hard to understand. But Boeing jets are complex machines, hard to understand. Statistics are hard to understand—do two crashes out of 500,000 flights represent a good or bad safety record?
I suspect the actual explanation lies elsewhere. The experts told the public to be outraged over the Boeing 737 Max. The experts did not tell the public to be outraged over the vaccine fiasco. Instead we were told that “Operation Warp Speed” was a huge success. In one respect it was—the vaccine was developed rapidly. But experts also needed to point out that once the vaccine was invented back in January, we’ve stumbled from one fiasco after another. The experts did not do so (with a few exceptions in the blogosphere) and hence most Americas don’t even know that it’s been a huge mess. At least this is what I find when I speak with average people.
I’m outraged that experts are not whipping up outrage among the general public.
READER COMMENTS
Garrett
Jan 27 2021 at 4:19pm
It might slowly build. I suspect people whose loved ones die of COVID in the next 6 months will look back and feel outraged.
Philo
Jan 27 2021 at 4:53pm
Maybe. But those whose loved ones died in the previous six months will never connect the dots, and blame the government(s).
Kailer Mullet
Jan 27 2021 at 5:14pm
I’m outraged about the inconsistent risk preferences. April 2020: we must lock down now, sure there will be unintended costs, but we don’t have time to waste. January 2021: we can’t rush vaccine approvals, sure many lives may be saved, but there might be unknown side effects.
Tom
Jan 27 2021 at 5:29pm
On a slightly related note, the recent stock market silliness with GameStop is another sign that populist trolling is the movement of the day. Instead of being outraged by institutional incompetence, the focus is on making fools of institutions and experts.
Fazal Majid
Jan 27 2021 at 8:28pm
It’s not that different from the well-known trolley car dilemma. People judge sins of omission and commission very differently.
Since mRNA vaccines were never fielded on a large scale before, there were no statistically significant values to establish a sound bayesian prior for risks of an untested vaccine vs. mostly known risk of death from contracting the coronavirus (none of that applies to the AZ vaccine, which is not mRNA based, I know).
I hope policymakers revise the framework to account for the downside of delaying vaccine approval in the future, but I am not optimistic, given how packed Congress is with lawyers and other mostly scientifically illiterate people, or even people who understand logic is a mathematical discipline, not something to be twisted with rhetoric to achieve your preferred political aims.
Jose Pablo
Jan 27 2021 at 10:08pm
“Not so rational” voters have (at least) two very well-defined biases (thank you Bryan!): anti-market and anti-foreign.
I am outraged by how politicians all over the world pay tribute to these biases when designing the Covid19 responses (although I do understand the incentives behind “courting” voters).
I.e., politicians (even newly elected Presidents that claim to be “driven by science”) seems to believe that the prevalence of the virus, among people who have tested negative in the previous 3 days arriving in an international flight, is higher that among my non-mandatorily tested neighbors.
So, people arriving in international flights (the detail of the flight being “international” is all relevant, the virus doesn’t flight domestic) should be banned from entering the USA, but my not-tested neighbors can freely move around.
“Driven by science” he says.
MarkW
Jan 28 2021 at 7:56am
we’ve seen big stop-the-steal rallies, huge anti-racism protests, and several rounds of protests against non-pharmaceutical interventions
All of those were red vs blue team protests of one kind or another.
Why didn’t the federal government go all out subsidizing the manufacturing of vaccines in case they work? Alternatively, why not encourage production using free market price signals. We did neither. Why wasn’t there a plan for distributing the vaccines? Israel had a plan; why didn’t we develop one over the past 10 months?
How often have we seen protests erupt over general governmental incompetence (as opposed protests rooted in political tribalism)? It seems like the former almost never happen. Now if one tribe was pushing for the AZ vaccine now! and the other was loudly denouncing them as Nazis willing to perform experiments on people just like Mengele, then we might get some outrage and protest action (but even in that case, I’m not at all sure we would get the vaccine approved any faster).
Jose Pablo
Jan 28 2021 at 9:41am
That’s a good point, no “identity politics” at play in the vaccine debate.
When I am not trying to “signalling” which group I belong to, outrage is out of place.
Dylan
Jan 28 2021 at 10:07am
Scott,
Off topic, but I’m curious if the performance of Gamestop and related stocks recently have caused any reevaluation of your efficient markets stance? Is this an example of markets incorporating new data?
Scott Sumner
Jan 28 2021 at 1:39pm
No.
Scott Sumner
Jan 28 2021 at 9:51pm
I meant no on the EMH question. I can’t comment on the other question.
RPLong
Jan 28 2021 at 10:59am
Perhaps one of the reasons why Americans are so deeply skeptical of what the experts tell them is because experts like Yglesias routinely get things flat-out wrong. Mask-wearing is an excellent example of this. Yglesias repeats something that is a complete fabrication. Mask-wearing in the United States is about 80%, pretty much as high as it is anywhere.
How much of Yglesias’ argument relies on an inaccurate canard about how foolish, liberty-loving Americans won’t listen to what’s good for them? When that canard doesn’t check out, how persuasive is the rest of what Yglesias says?
Scott Sumner
Jan 28 2021 at 1:41pm
You said:
“Mask-wearing in the United States is about 80%, pretty much as high as it is anywhere.”
Talk to an East Asian who is living in America. You’ll get a very different view. They are horrified by our culture.
Henri Hein
Jan 28 2021 at 2:25pm
I have many Chinese and Japanese friends. My own wife is Chinese (imported, not American-Chinese). I would not describe any of them as horrified. Your main point remains valid: the cultures are indeed different. Just wanted to point out their reactions vary.
RPLong
Jan 28 2021 at 3:41pm
Maybe that’s what Yglesias did. Maybe he talked to an East Asian who is living in America.
But Phil Magness took the matter a little more seriously than that. I’ve shown you what his data are. But okay, sure, I’ll talk to my next-door neighbor about it, too.
Scott Sumner
Jan 28 2021 at 9:52pm
Just to be clear, I do not agree that mask wearing in the US is comparable to East Asia, adjusted for risk. (Of course there are parts of East Asia with virtually zero Covid.)
RPLong
Jan 29 2021 at 9:44am
That much is clear. What is less clear is what data you’re basing that disagreement on. From the sounds of it, you’re basing that on casual conversations. If there is a problem with Magness’ data, I’d love to know about it.
jj
Jan 28 2021 at 2:06pm
The most basic, simple statistics are too complex for what most people are willing and able to understand. Most people could understand if they applied effort but they don’t (for “complex” reasons, har har).
Experts do guide public opinion but it would take a unified front to overcome the simplest, most obvious reaction.
On vaccine safety: small risks are meaningless (and can take on any meaning) without doing (simple!) statistics.
On airplane safety: when the airplane falls out of the sky, everybody dies.
BC
Jan 29 2021 at 12:34am
Outrage is provoked by perceptions of bad intentions more so than bad results. People perceived Boeing as a “greedy” corporation, who deliberately cut corners for profits. The BLM people view police actions, and broader society’s sympathy for police, as motivated by racism. The anti-NPI protestors view the NPI proponents as nannies that are obsessed with micromanaging people’s lives. The stop-the-steal rallies were a little different as they were primarily about not accepting election results. Similarly for complaints about “voter suppression” in 2016 by the way. In both cases, though, the protestors do view the election winners as too ill-intentioned to hold elective office.
Most people do not view government regulators as ill intentioned, deliberately withholding vaccine approval for some evil reason. Even libertarians don’t view the particular people that are regulators as the problem. Rather, libertarians view government regulatory systems as inherently structured to produce bad outcomes (due to incentives and distributed information, for example) regardless of the specific people in charge. That tends to mute outrage. How could one be outraged at a person that does what one would expect most people to do in the same situation? Note, outrage is typically directed at people — CEOs/shareholders, police, governors — rather than systems and processes. Libertarians criticize “the FDA”, not the specific people at the FDA in charge of vaccines, who remain largely nameless. Inanimate systems and processes don’t have intentions, people do.
Nick
Feb 1 2021 at 12:41pm
The delayed vaccine rollout doesn’t hit on culture war topics or prescient pictures like planes crashing, so the normal political organizers have nothing to gain by jumping in with protest campaigns. I fear the intellectual types here and on MR advocating for AZ approval lack the will and ability to create such a protest campaign. Without political consequences tied to expeditated approval, our leaders don’t seem interested in going out on a limb if they are even aware of the issue.
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