In this blog, I’ve done many posts criticizing the way our regulators inhibited an effective response to Covid-19. They discouraged mask wearing, they discouraged Covid testing, they put up all sorts of regulatory and legal hurdles that dramatically slowed vaccine development, authorization, etc.
Today, our biggest problem is that only 55% of Americans have received even a single dose of a Covid vaccine. Why is there so much resistance to the vaccines? Undoubtedly there are many factors, but Matt Yglesias identifies one especially inexcusable mistake made by the FDA:
I vaguely recall someone being accused of “hate speech” for accurately quoting the Bible, word for word. I wonder if Facebook will eventually ban someone for accurately explaining the FDA’s views on vaccine safety?
PS. In April of last year, I said we under-reacted to Covid at first, but would overreact by the end of the pandemic. It looks like my prediction is coming true:
L.A. County will require masks indoors amid alarming rise in coronavirus cases
It seems increasingly likely that the delta variant of Covid is so contagious that almost everyone will either get vaccinated or get Covid. If so, let’s just get it over with as soon as possible. Vaccinate those who want it, and let the virus run wild among the remainder.
READER COMMENTS
john hare
Jul 20 2021 at 4:29am
I think your last sentence sums up the best response both for disease control and freedom. Not a real popular view with as individual responsibility seems to be less popular lately.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Jul 20 2021 at 6:35am
Who is the “we.”
FDA should give full approval. Who knows how much it would help overcome vaccine hesitancy/rejection, but it can’t hurt. [Sort of like converting supplemental unemployment insurance into a job finding bonus.]
Ditto for vaccinations of children
PH officials/politicians/celebrities should keep keep telling people to get vaccinated, emphasizing that by so doing they are protecting other people
Encourage those vaccinated people who care for other people, depending on local prevalence and % unvaccinated, to consider taking low cost protections against infecting others like mask-wearing indoors and avoiding crowds.
[I still think Scott makes too much of the short period during which in the effort to discourage wearing N95 masks, wearing low cost masks was also discouraged, certainly in relation to other errors like promoting the surface transmission hypothesis, failure to push for a test, trace, and isolate strategy early on.]
Alan Goldhammer
Jul 20 2021 at 7:19am
Yglesias has no clue about what he is talking about. I don’t know where Moderna stands, but Pfizer has applied for a full approval of their vaccine. It is up to the company to apply for licensure, the FDA cannot do this unilaterally. All three vaccine manufacturers who have emergency use authorization continue to collect data on those who were enrolled in their clinical trials. The are doing serological testing for the persistence of COVID-19 antibodies and monitoring for adverse reactions to the the vaccines.
Is this a serious statement? Did you notice what happened last winter in terms of hospitalizations? The same thing is happening right now with the delta variant. Maybe the new libertarian credo should be, “I don’t care what happens to thee as long as it doesn’t happen to me.”
Jon Murphy
Jul 20 2021 at 7:59am
I guess I don’t understand where you think Yglesias is going wrong. He’s stating a fact: the FDA hasn’t given full approval yet because safety data are still being collected. You then point out that safety data are still being collected by the vaccine manufacturers.
So, where is Yglesias going wrong?
Your glib response assumes people have no information whatsoever about the virus. But note what Scott actually said:
This is not a statement of blind ignorance, but rather of personal responsibility. Those who fear the virus can get vaccinated (and thus spread benefits to the rest of us). Those who judge their risks from the virus to be low do not. It’s a rather basic understanding of individual knowledge and intelligence.
For some of us, the risk of the vaccine is far greater than the risk of the virus. For example, I nearly died from the vaccine, and if my father wasn’t around I probably would have. But my personal risk from the virus is very low. I am a student working on a dissertation. When lockdowns happened, my life did not change. Even the ER doctor said it didn’t make sense for me to get the vaccine.
Note bene: I still my personal story not for some anti-vaxx reason but rather to demonstrate that individuals know more about their own personal situations than all the experts in the world. And they do not make decisions based on ignorance.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Jul 21 2021 at 8:35am
What is being left out here is that vaccines protect other people not just the vaccinated.
JFA
Jul 21 2021 at 11:33am
But those other people whom a vaccine would protect indirectly can also get direct protection by getting vaccinated. See my comment below for considerations about children.
Jon Murphy
Jul 21 2021 at 6:57pm
Irrelevant to my point
Scott Sumner
Jul 20 2021 at 12:26pm
So what is your suggestion for preventing Covid cases in the unvaccinated? Do social distancing from now until the end of time? That’s not going to happen. If you have an alternative suggestion, I’d love to hear it.
Tom
Jul 21 2021 at 1:33am
If we can take measures so that Delta hits all the unvaccinated over months instead of weeks, there’s a strong chance that many, if not most, of the hesitant may get vaccinated.
A slow motion catastrophe allows people some opportunity to change behaviour in a way that an instant catastrophe does not.
Mark Z
Jul 20 2021 at 1:16pm
Either the FDA could (or congress could change law to make the FDA) relax its requirements for full approval, which would help pave the legal way for employers, schools, etc. to require employees, students, customers, etc. to get vaccinated. Why not do that? It seems that there’s a mentality here where, on the one hand, things are so extremely desperate right not that we ought to consider eroding the 1st amendment or even compelling people to get vaccinated by force… but not so desperate that we can consider relaxing FDA drug approval requirements, which I guess are really the most sacred thing in America.
JFA
Jul 20 2021 at 4:39pm
Pfizer began the approval process on May 7 and Moderna began it on Jun 1.
John Alcorn
Jul 20 2021 at 8:10am
If vaccination is effective for individuals, then wouldn’t three circumstances suffice to justify a fully voluntary approach to vaccination?:
1. Ready access to vaccination for anyone who wants it.
2. Freedom of health insurers to charge risk-based premiums, based also on individual vaccination status.
3. Exemption of organizations from liability for contagion.
Andre
Jul 20 2021 at 11:26am
Risk should be based on antibody status, not on vaccination status.
John Alcorn
Jul 20 2021 at 3:47pm
Point taken.
Mark Z
Jul 20 2021 at 1:25pm
Maybe also allow employers to require employees to waive the right to sue in the event of adverse effects from the vaccine along with requiring them to get vaccinated. My concern here is that with a large employer that requires thousands of people to get vaccinated, a few will likely by chance have medical issues that putatively resemble some side effect, and with a bit of post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, a few ambulance-chasing lawyers, and an innumerate judge (all three of which exist in excess), it could easily lead to a very expensive frivolous law suit.
Andre
Jul 20 2021 at 1:39pm
The law of large numbers means there will be some adverse events, not just “putative” adverse events.
I don’t understand why everything needs to be black and white. For tens of millions of Americans, this vaccine is medically unnecessary, and for more than a handful of them, it is potentially deadly. The vaccine can both save hundreds of thousands of lives and kill some people.
Scott Sumner
Jul 20 2021 at 5:11pm
You said:
“I don’t understand why everything needs to be black and white. For tens of millions of Americans, this vaccine is medically unnecessary”
I hate to see this sort of misinformation. It would be better if almost everyone were vaccinated.
robc
Jul 20 2021 at 9:39pm
If you are under 40, not obese, and not immuno-compromised, the risk of covid is so negligible as to be approximately zero.
There is a reasonI had to wait until 50 to get the Shingles vaccine.
Andre
Jul 20 2021 at 11:34pm
Medically unnecessary for the person.
It isn’t misinformation. Only about 500 Americans have died from Covid under age 20 – in a population of over 80 million – and a good percentage of them were at the low and high ends of the range. For the range as a whole, the death rate is approximately 1 in 160,000 – and I’ll bet most of those were sickly people to begin with.
I think vaccine demands to establish herd immunity, for a virus of so little threat to the young and healthy, are immoral. Particularly when the vaccine has long been widely available to those who are actually vulnerable and want it.
More people under 20 drown in pools and hot tubs every year than died in these two peak years of Covid. Should we ban all swimming pool access for minors? Why not? They pose a greater threat than Covid does (along with many other causes of death).
Also, we’re in an environment where, as far as I can tell, the government and the entire medical establishment have zero interest in whether someone has already developed immunity. I tried getting antibody testing over a year ago. Nothing available. I haven’t heard that that has changed. If it has, they’re putting no money into advertising it.
Scott Sumner
Jul 21 2021 at 12:43pm
You are ignoring externalities, and you are ignoring severe illnesses, which is itself a very bad thing to have.
Monte Woods
Jul 20 2021 at 11:24am
Today, our biggest problem is that only 55% of Americans have received even a single dose of a Covid vaccines.
Do you suppose natural immunity vs those vaccinated ought to be included in any meaningful discussion of the problem?
MikeP
Jul 20 2021 at 1:55pm
If so, let’s just get it over with as soon as possible. Vaccinate those who want it, and let the virus run wild among the remainder.
Interestingly, with a couple small changes, this is what we should have been doing all along.
Vaccinate those who want vaccination, even before FDA approval, protect those who want protection, and let the virus run wild among the remainder.
robc
Jul 20 2021 at 3:33pm
No need for the small changes, it should have been the idea all along.
Dave Smith
Jul 20 2021 at 2:34pm
The comments on Twitter were disappointing. Almost no one got Matt’s point. Idiocy is the ONLY reason some think others don’t get the shot.
My 18-year-old son, wife, and I got our first shots on January 5th. (My state had extensive categories of those who’d qualify that early.) I admit I had my doubts reading through the paperwork I got that clearly stated that “there is no FDA approved vaccine for COVID-19. I had the same doubts as my 15-year-old daughter (who was the first in line the day she was able to get vaccinated) got the shot.
I believe in experts, but the burden of proof is on them to convince me. And too many experts believe that they are above the need to explain things clearly. Add that to the bureaucratic mess we have, and the result is what we have now.
robc
Jul 20 2021 at 9:44pm
If I was 71, I would have been first in line to get it. At 51, I was mostly indifferent, I got it when it was easy and convenient. If I was 31, I wouldnt get it.
I think all 3 of those decisions would be rational and are non-contradictory.
D.O.
Jul 20 2021 at 3:19pm
Communicable diseases is a hard case for libertarian/individual liberty cause. Unvaccinated people put themselves at risk, which might be fine, but also everyone else, both unvaccinated and vaccinated, if vaccine effectiveness against delta is not as good as against earlier variants. And nobody knows how many new variants there are going to be. Public health safety measures might be needed if there are serious outbrakes and covid cases among vaccinated will rise. Luckily, it seems that deaths among vaccinated people are really rare so that “sovereign citizens” cannot do much damage even if, as can be expected, government response will be both burdensome and inefficient.
MikeP
Jul 20 2021 at 3:52pm
Communicable diseases is a hard case for libertarian/individual liberty cause.
Communicable diseases weren’t a hard case for individual liberty in 2019. The WHO, the CDC, and every public health organization knew exactly what to do: Ask the sick to stay home. In no circumstance did they imagine quarantining exposed individuals, not to mention unexposed individuals.
The only thing that made a hard case for individual liberty in 2020 was the almost cheerful acceptance by media and government of a patently authoritarian reaction based on abysmal modeling and worst case assumptions that admitted no discussion and no cost-benefit analysis.
Anonymous
Jul 23 2021 at 2:51pm
Most diseases are not highly transmissible when the bearer is pre-symptomatic.
MikeP
Jul 23 2021 at 5:28pm
There are two kinds of people in the world:
People who believe that a differentiator with worse specificity gives less reason to abrogate people’s rights.
The other kind of people.
Jon Murphy
Jul 20 2021 at 4:03pm
Not really. Lots have been written
Scott Sumner
Jul 20 2021 at 5:13pm
D.O. Yes, there are externalities, and may not be optimal. But in this case the “libertarian” approach would have been far better than what was actually done.
MikeP
Jul 20 2021 at 8:02pm
Communicable diseases is a hard case for libertarian/individual liberty cause.
Incidentally, let’s all start with the realization that the reaction experienced with SARS-CoV-2 could not have happened in 1980, 1990, or probably even 2000 — just as nothing like this reaction happened in 1957, or even 1918.
The elites who made these decisions, and the journalists and commentators who enabled them, could not have worked from home in 1980. So they would not have allowed workplaces, commuting, and travel to be shut down.
We have to ask ourselves: Where in the social contract does it say that improvements in technology that allow authoritarians to lock themselves down suddenly and without debate entitle authoritarians to lock everybody down?
If you can answer that question, then we can start talking about how communicable diseases are a hard case for individual liberty. Because communicable diseases apparently aren’t much of a hard case for anybody when the elites actually have to leave their house for a paycheck.
D.O.
Jul 20 2021 at 9:31pm
I do not doubt that many lock down measures were unnecessary or excessive, at least in not very densely populated areas. But we had people asserting their right not to wear masks in closed spaces, which was a reasonable measure. Libertarians ckaum that allowing private decisions for groups of people (for example, I have a freedom not to associate with unvaccinated people) is sufficient and no governmental coercion is required. Maybe. But in practice we do have governments and they do make all sorts of rules. Behaving irresponsibly only because government overreached and other people are not going to use the full force of their private association rights and exclude free riders (and in many cases are probably prohibited by the same overreaching government to do so) is a poor advertisement for the cause of freedom. At least that’s my opinion.
Monte
Jul 21 2021 at 3:36am
The Public Health Crisis (PHC) has become our constitution’s kryptonite. Many freedoms and liberties guaranteed therein were made subordinate to the PHC. How long before racism, wealth inequality, and misinformation, like the covid pandemic, are declared PHCs? It wasn’t that long ago that pre-WWII Germany considered Jews to be a threat to Volksgesundheit (public health). It’s certainly plausible that our nation could experience a similar regression. When all other remedies fail (voting, lawsuits, peaceful protests, etc.), acting irresponsibly for the cause of freedom seems like the most responsible thing to do.
Jon Murphy
Jul 21 2021 at 6:58pm
It’s not clear why you think “Communicable diseases is a hard case for libertarian/individual liberty cause”
ee
Jul 21 2021 at 12:09am
I’d like to slow down transmission until my kids are vaccinated
JFA
Jul 21 2021 at 5:12am
As anyone 12 and over can get the vaccine, I (as a vaccinated person and a parent of kids younger than 12) am not really willing to submit to further restrictions on my or my kids’ activity. I dealt with it for a while, but now that everyone who faces a significant risk from Covid has an easy way of protecting themselves, I honestly don’t care how much the fire rages among the unvaccinated.
Forestalling any argument against staying fully reopen because younger kids are unable to get the vaccine (while also noting that the main justification for all the restrictions before the vaccine was to protect the old people (though as soon as we had the vaccine, I started seeing articles about how vaccinated grandparents shouldn’t visit their grandkids because they could potentially still give the kids Covid)): I am aware that kids <12 remain unable to get the vaccine, but the evidence shows that Covid is on par with the flu for kids (there are generally more hospitalizations and about the same number of deaths (with variation from season to season) from flu during the months of flu season than there have been from the 16 months of Covid; hospitalizations and deaths per case are comparable between flu and Covid in those < 18). RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) kills 500 kids a year and hospitalizes about 80,000 kids a year. Over the past 16 months, Covid has killed 335 and hospitalized ~17,000 people under the age of 18 (note that some research suggests that kids’ hospitalizations from Covid are over counted since many were hospitalized for reasons unrelated to Covid but tested positive (and were asymptomatic) after being admitted to the hospital). We don’t shut down schools, make everyone wear masks, or place large restrictions on movement to protect kids from those other respiratory illnesses. Hell… in many places, kids (especially those over 4) aren’t even required to get vaccinated for flu.
Maybe the additional risk of Covid is just a tipping point for many parents, but I suspect that it’s the newness of Covid that is driving all the calls to “do everything to protect the kids”. Now that everyone who faces significant risk from Covid has access to a vaccine (that is highly effective), why should we do anything less than go back to normal and let people make their own life choices.
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