Excellent Megan McArdle column in the Washington Post tracing how we have swung from one form of insanity on vaccine policy to another with barely a pause in between:
In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe.
But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.
In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.
…Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.” Only after a backlash did sanity prevail.
…That 2020 committee meeting was one of many widely publicized mistakes that turned conservatives against public health authorities. It wasn’t the worst such mistake — that honor belongs to the time public health experts issued a special lockdown exemption for George Floyd protesters. And of course, President Donald Trump deserves a “worst supporting actor” award for turning on his own public health experts. But if you were a conservative convinced that “public health” was a conspiracy of elites who cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives — well, there was our crack team of vaccine experts, proudly proclaiming that they cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives.
This is one of the reasons we now have a health and human services secretary who has devoted much of his life to pushing quack anti-vaccine theories.
I recall this episode well. Nate Silver and Matt Yglesias deserve credit for publicizing the insanity and stopping it–although similar policies continued at the state level.
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