I think a lot of libertarians used vaccine skepticism as an excuse not to pick a side.
*No vaccine skeptic ever stopped me from getting a vaccine.* The only people who stopped me from getting a vaccine were the DEM elected officials that gave it to 30 year old teachers who weren't teaching months before they allowed my sick 75 year old father to get it.
Libertarians should have strongly opposed vaccine mandates because even if this vaccine is safe, the breadth of medical interventions that the powers that be may advocate is not necessarily safe. You can see this with the trans stuff.
Since the vaccine didn't stop transmission there was no case to be made for mandates. We also found out that vaccination rates didn't do anything to get rid of NPIs, so that idea was a non starter too.
Finally mandates make approval of vaccines controversial. If everything not forbidden is mandatory, then there is an incentive to forbid things were one otherwise wouldn't care what others do.
> Since the vaccine didn't stop transmission there was no case to be made for mandates.
Bans on drunk driving don't stop car collisions either. There's a good libertarian case to be made for things that significantly reduce the risk of third-party harms, even if they don't stop them fully.
> Finally mandates make approval of vaccines controversial. If everything not forbidden is mandatory, then there is an incentive to forbid things were one otherwise wouldn't care what others do.
Bans on drunk driving are pretty effective against curtailing drunk driving. At a minimum by taking the license of offenders away.
Similarly, we have lots of prohibitions on drinking to reduce the odds of drunk driving. For instance, most sporting events can't serve alcohol during the last 30% or so of the game so people can sober up. People have studied the impact and it works.
But its pretty clear that vaccine mandates did very little to stop the spread empirically.
So we've got a large cost and a low benefit to such mandates.
The obvious go to on vaccination would have been to link vaccine uptake with freedom from NPIs, but the opposite happened. Vaccine mandates and NPI mandates both lined up on the same side of the political spectrum, so you got fewer NPIs where you had lower vaccination rates.
Personally, I consider this a major fuck up by the vaccine mandate boosters. It was obvious they didn't actually want people to get the vaccine and had no intention of rewarding them, they just wanted to punish and posture. In the end they ended up punishing themselves the most, well not as much as children or the working class that they had power over but you get the point.
What does the data reveal about the mortality risk of Covid? What does the data reveal about vaccine outcomes?
It seems to me the greatest obstacle to understanding is lack of agreement on what is accepted data. For the data I accept shows Covid is not a high risk disease and that the vaccine has little to no personal benefit and it yields a disastrous population impairment.
Government policy on Covid and the government and corporates policy on the jab has been disastrous. Only ignorance and pride - belief in the dogma - sustains a defense of these policies.
> the vaccine has little to no personal benefit and it yields a disastrous population impairment.
Can you say something about where you find data that shows these things? Everything I've seen suggests that vaccines reduce risk of infection by 30-80% over various time frames, even if you ignore the further reduction of serious outcomes from infection, and I haven't seen anything that suggests any sort of population impairment from vaccination. (I presume you mean something worse than a day of fever after getting the shot.)
1) The protection against infection is very short lived. Perhaps mere weeks if you're not up to date on the latest variant. I myself had a breakthrough infection not that long after my booster.
2) The protection against serious disease is pretty decent, and is the #1 reason to get the jab. However, healthy young people aren't at risk for serious illness, so it's either not important or in the case of some groups like children probably net harmful.
3) Immunity from the disease is better than immunity from the jab, so unless you are high risk its probably best to just go and get the disease at some point. I don't see any value in constantly getting boosters in the hope of never getting it, and I think children would probably be better off getting the disease than the jab.
4) The jab makes you sick. In the case of my wife and I, very very sick. Like worse than having COVID felt. That strikes me as messed up. Not only does it reduce the value of getting boosters to not get sick, but it sets off alarm bells for me that this is the only vaccine I've ever gotten that made me feel awful.
5) Invisible Sun notes below that the jab really only teaches your body about the spike protein, not the entire virus. I think there is some value to introducing your body to that but this idea that people should constant be priming themselves to fight spike proteins (usually out of date ones) seems reckless.
What we got in reality is that the public mostly followed a pretty rational approach to vaccines on their own. Most old people got them. A majority of middle aged people got them. Young people and children were reluctant to get them. Many of the people that didn't get them likely had COVID before they were available anyway.
Uptake on the first booster was decent but fell off significantly after that. I consider the 1st booster to be a completion of the initial course. Normally you would have gotten the 2nd shot six months after the first but they made it a month to rush the trials.
The main population impairment is the jabs promote immune resistant variants. This information is being squelched in the US but doctors elsewhere are discussing it. What has been acknowledged even in the USA is that natural immunity is magnitudes better than the jab. And given natural infection is highly unlikely to be injurious, it makes little sense for most people to be jabbed.
And based on recent polling, there is bipartisan acknowledgement the jabs cause injury & death.
Can you elaborate on what constitutes a "kook" in regards to vaccine skepticism? I've found a number of libertarian, vaccine skeptical folks who are clearly more data driven than any of our public health mouthpieces. I defy anyone to read El Gato Malo' substack (or humbly, my own) and label us a kook. You may disagree with us, but there is nothing kooky about our analyses.
I think he's probably referring to people who think the vaccine is meant to depopulate the world or whatever, and not the nuanced people who say it's dumb for a 5 year old to get it.
Given that supermajorities of old people of all political persuasions got the vaccine, its hard to argue that vaccine skepticism is a big issue. Who really cares if a relatively healthy 30 year old gets the vaccine or not.
And in children I'm not even convinced the vaccine is a good thing, especially if they have already had COVID.
Rather than say "next pandemic" I would just say "next crisis". It's probably too soon to re-run the same script.
But that there will be another crisis within 10 years I'm confident of. And I do think the broad outline of government overreach, moral panic, and budget busting emergency spending will all be on the table again with a new set of justifications.
When that crisis comes do you want people like De Santis calling the shots or Gavin Newsome.
That's really the only question of relevance. We can't predict the crises, but we can predict if a default attitude towards freedom will be in play. Curtailing the power of the laptop class that did this too us is the #1 issue.
I think the war on terror was a fiasco, but the neocons that lead it aren't the face of the Republican Party anymore. If the Reps nominate a neocon again I'll react to that.
Currently, defense hawkishness is more associate with DEMs. I will credit Biden for pulling out of Afghanistan which I consider the bravest presidential action I've seen in twenty years, but overall DEMs are hawks trying to start WWIII.
And while War on Terror was a tragedy, it mostly didn't effect me beyond the defense spending. The people who paid the price were mostly in the Middle East, and the DEMs have fucked up the Middle East plenty too.
COVID definitely affected me so I care about it a lot more.
What are the reps going to do to me? Make it slightly harder to kill my own baby? Tell me I can't become a meth addict? The horror. DEMs locked me in my house and told me not to breath the fucking air while they spent so much money the currency got fucked.
There's a lot about this post that I find unsatisfactory. Bryan posits two "camps," and says one is represented by Cowen and Tabarrok and the other by Klein, Magness, and Boudreaux. I think that those two sets of individuals can be used to distinguish two different character types or outlooks, but I think that Bryan's characterizations of those two character types are both highly unsatisfactory, even misleading, and in multiple ways.
A better title for the post: Covid Policy: Hindsight on the Reaction of Four of My GMU Econ Colleagues and Phil Magness.
Tyler was pro-NPI, so that put him in the direct conflict with the anti-NPI camp.
Let's get real BTW. Masks (including when a "mandate" was lifted but it was still mandatory on all public property including schools) and school closures where the big issues. And I would include in school closers anything that made school effectively closed if still open (testing and quarantine, absurd distancing requirements, and of course masks).
These continued pretty much until March 2022 in a lot of places.
Cowen was really bad on this stuff, especially masks.
COVID tyranny was what started me down the path to libertarianism from conservatism. I always had a distaste of government, but thought it was a necessary evil that did important things. COVID restrictions opened my eyes to the immense power of government to completely ruin lives in an instant though. What made my freedom being instantly revoked even worse though was the fact that I could see it was completely political in nature. You could take a cursory glance at COVID deaths per million data and see that NPIs didn't make any noticable difference at all. Even conceptually masks made no sense and there are numerous pre-COVID RCTs that showed they didn't work (which is why we were told they didn't work at the start).
When inflation started to happen I became interested in the truth about why, because obviously the MSM isn't truthful. I started reading about economics and found Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. Since then I've probably read about 20 books, Basic Economics being the first. Once I found out that not all libertarians are purple haired weirdos screaming about normalizing hookers and heroin (cough, cough Reason) I was on board.
I agree with the tech freedom people as well, and I think vaccine skeptics are incorrect (although I see how they could easily be led to believe the things they do because of their anger at the NPI people). Any "libertarian" who supports lockdowns and forced masking isn't actually a libertarian. They are the same as a Normie from either party who vociferously pushes freedom for things they like and rationalizes why freedom for things they don't like are bad. In fact their "libertarianism" is just pure virtue signaling to show how wonderful and tolerant they are. I guess they're consistent in that at least while they virtue signal in their masks.
The #1 issue during covid was whether your state/county had a republican governor/legislature. If it did you got through covid with substantially more freedom.
You can follow that down the line to every institution. Why were childrens museum’s pushing masks till march 2022 and indoor playgrounds weren’t. One was left coded and one wasn’t.
At the individual level the only people that I saw fight the mandates were conservatives. The people running my religious preschool flat out refused the state mask mandate.
Libertarians either supported NPIs (Cowen) or were basically limp wristed and ineffective compilers. When push came to shove libertarians generally chose their class affiliation over supposed principals.
I would say the big loser of the last two years was persuasions. All that debate and barely anyone got persuaded of anything. Whoever had the edge in power just shoved it down people’s throats and power was all that mattered.
Oh yeah, Republicans and conservatives were vastly superior to leftists, fake libertarians who are really just libertine or cowards that don't want lumped in with icky anti-science Trumpers. What made me librarian is that the principles are supposed to be applied to everything and not just things your "side" supports. Republicans also just want to expand state power and use it themselves. I didn't it to be eliminated or greatly reduced
A lot of libertarians dropped the ball when it came to COVID. Many of us (including me) initially fell for the panic, and I am incredibly grateful to the contributors at AIER who helped me understand the errors in my thinking.
While leading libertarian thinkers tend to have a firm grasp on economics and philosophy, it seems very few have a good understanding of health and immunology. Gaining greater understanding of these subjects is what convinced me to go from pro-NPI to anti-NPI to “kook”. Understanding the subject and then hearing contradictions from the “experts” in government and academia only increased my skepticism of it all, and led me to value freedom more and trust government less.
I think everyone gets a mulligan for whatever they believed in Spring 2020. If your not someone that follows this COVID just came out of nowhere and you were getting told all sorts of crazy things.
Myself, it took a maybe two months before I finally came to the conclusion that:
1) It didn't transfer on surfaces
2) It was basically zero risk outdoors
3) The mortality rate and its age gradient
Maybe if I was a doctor or following the right people on Twitter I could have figured that out marginally faster, but once I knew those three things by Summer 2020 I was "let it rip."
If COVID had just been a two month holiday where everyone kept getting paid and all of the NPIs were removed and schools were open after that I don't think anyone would have cared that much.
I think libertarians didn't take a strong enough stand against moral panic.
My company implemented a number of COVID hysteria measures, some of which cost people their jobs. Once the moral panic subsided they reversed all of them, but many peoples lives were still permanately effected.
There seems to be an idea in libertarianism that "private entities" should be able to do whatever they want and not get judged. I think libertarians should just acknowledge that any institution with an HR department is de facto a government agency. They are functionally bound by the CDC guidance as any government department. I would have liked to have seen more pushback against this, even if merely moral, not just some blanket "they can do whatever they want".
What you got during the pandemic was essentially a purge of anyone who won't follow the rules, no matter how absurd. That isn't going to make society more libertarian.
What got rid of COVID NPIs was protests and elections.
Officials kept them in place until some external event made it politically untenable. The less subject to political pressure a person or institution was, the longer they kept it in place. Protests helped end the initial western lockdowns and most importantly China's lockdowns, and the elections in Nov 2021 basically sealed the deal on pandemic restrictions generally in the west (left leaning areas waited until Omicron was over in March to save face, but the second Youngkin got elected COVID in schools was on the way out).
Libertarians were out to lunch on this. Even where their opinions matched those of protestors or potentially helpful elected officials they were derisive. COVID protestors were seen as prole rubes unworthy of support and probably counter productive. And electoral politics....how drole. GMU is located in Virginia and basically every single libertarian issue (COVID, academic freedom, etc) was front and center in the Nov 2021 election and nobody had the balls to participate.
GMU libertarianism was ineffective because it focused on the one thing it want to focus on (which is the least costly personally for GMU academics), making blog posts and tweets and hoping that it convinces progressives to do what they want them to do. Insane progressives kept on being insane though, so this was pissing into the wind. COVID ended when outside forces (protestors, right wing voters) forced it to end.
And I know you guys are going to hate me for this, but COVID should have ended in 2021 with the vaccine and instead we got another year of NPIs because a DEM was president and wanted to prove that Fauci-ism was right the entire time unlike Drumpf, then lost the battle with Delta/Omicron.
Spot on in my opinion. NPIs became completely political midway through 2020 and were held in place because of broad Normie support. Of course, reenforced through a constant stream of propaganda from the doding MSM.
I don't think there was broad normie support. It's like that video of the pilot announcing that the airline mask mandate is over, and everyone takes off their masks and shouts for joy. Were all those normies supportive of the mask mandate when they were dutifully wearing their masks?
I think it became political, and on the left it had broad support because of politics. But without mandates I think that social pressure would have broken down as some citizens saw their fellows acting in freedom and copied them. It didn't surprise me when COVID polls and election results didn't match up, with revealed preference showing pro-freedom and polls showing social desirability bias.
What did amaze me is the level of moral panic and cowardice in the entire largely leftist professional class. I will never get over going to a playground near DC in sweltering heat and seeing 99% of children in masks, when even an hour away the opposite was true.
I think towards the end a majority of people did start to get sick with it, resulting in things like the plane video. The sample size of people who are willing to ride on a packed plane (given that it appears to be a claustrophobic tin can even though it's extremely safe due to the powerful ventilation) may have been anti-mask in general. But overall I do agree, when the political winds shifted the mandates lifted. I also think there was a healthy chunk of social desirability bias going on. Wanting to fit in as well as not be one of those free-DUMB loving right wingers.
Like in so many other issues, there was a clear socio-economic class split among libertarians on this issue. More affluent, highly educated CATO, Tabarrok, Cowen types were quite happy with lockdowns, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, and basically with most other things pro-establishment on covid. These people were probably personally pretty scared of covid, and were minimally adversely affected by these policies (e.g. they didn't miss a paycheck, they had comfy homes and stable relationships, I'd venture to guess, etc.). The more "poorly educated", less affluent, libertarian unwashed masses were vehemently against all of these policies, in no small part because they were much more likely to be adversely affected by them (losing their jobs because of lockdowns or for not wanting to take the vax, their kids dropping out of school, their relatives succumbing to addiction, etc.).
Like in so many other issues, the unwashed rabble got this mostly right, the elites mostly wrong (including on the issue of the efficacy of the vaccines, which was wildly oversold, to put it mildly). It's almost like we're selecting our elites specifically for their lack of critical thinking & questioning skills.
I'm completely confused at why this was even a split in the first place. If you believe that paranoia hypochondriacs banned vaccines and tests for no reason, why allow them to ban social gatherings? Similarly, if you don't trust the state to mandate vaccines, you shouldn't trust them to ban them either. I guess the latter can still believe that a vaccine is not effective in some ways, but someone like that should still be ok with others choosing to take the vaccine for themselves.
What behaviors may a government impose on the citizenry? What are the social consequence if those impositions are based on reckless, erroneous thinking? What happens to the legitimacy of government if a critical mass conclude the government is a clown show?
Can you appreciate the phoniness of "mask mandates"? Under no scientific standard does a "face covering" mitigate viral transmission. And while government and institutions can mandate face coverings, they cannot in any reasonable way regulate the fit and quality of that covering. The result is the vast majority of mask wearing is useless. It is a charade. The essence of American mask policies for Covid was to promote a superstition for the primary purpose of sustaining the "emergency" of Covid, not for protecting people from Covid.
I'm sympathetic to both camps. More so to the "freedom from the fight" camp after the vaccines than before. My biggest issue with them (the NPI skeptics) though is that few will admit to the tradeoff they are making. You are one of the few exceptions Bryan. I know it's not good PR to say "Yes, we may have a few hundred thousand more deaths, but full freedom is still better and worth it.", but it would be the truth at least. What I instead saw is massively underestimating the risk of Covid constantly until it was no longer tenable (people insisting on death rates of <0.1% when already more than that had died; also insisting every time that no future Covid waves would come).
This camp was just full of motivated reasoning like that. There is no way to actually do "Focused Protection". The only way that would actually work is creating full on bubbles (like the NBA did) for all nursing homes. That would not have been done. So it was again not admitting to the trade-off.
Do you have any evidence of the non-NPI camp underestimating the risks?
As anecdote, I would put myself firmly in Bryan’s camp, that both sides are right, but that’s going to come off as non-NPI to most people. I guessed a little under 300,000 US related deaths attributed to COVID the first year of its introduction (to equalize down to 5 digits over the course of a few years). If I remember correctly, the real number was ~400,000 that first year. So I was off, but not by significant magnitudes (I do remember several mainstream sources predicting deaths in the millions).
Hi Joe, I didn't save any specific tweets or articles. I guess it's possible I'm mixing up the general Covid-sceptic camp with the more serious anti-NPI libertarians.
I remember the original predictions of millions of deaths were about a scenario of just continuing business as usual with no behavioral changes. So the actual death counts being lower after lockdowns were actually implemented does not seem like evidence of the prediction being wrong. The better argument would be that voluntary behavioral changes would have also reduced the death count below the predicted number. That arguments also cuts against lockdown sceptics though as it suggest we would have had a lot of the damage to the economy and general wellbeing as well in that scenario through voluntary behavioral changes.
There’s always a bunch of excuse making when someone makes a prediction and it turns out wrong. You can always point out some contingency that makes your prediction invalid, so you’re not technically wrong.
We’ll never truly know how large of an effect behavioral differences made to the death rate, but I tend to discount such excuses as a general rule.
I agree people in the non-NPI camp underestimated it. I don't know if this serves as a counter balance to the gross overestimate by the mainstream or the argument would've been better had it been more nuanced.
It may also be a bit of a strawman, too. The best of the non-NPI camp didn't do this. I didn't see Cowen's arguments, so I'm not sure if he was better than the NPI people who seemingly tried to rationalize ways that COVID was equally as dangerous to a healthy 25 year old or school aged kid as it was to a 65 year old.
Your predictions for the next pandemic seem to assume it will be about the same level of infectiousness/deadliness as Covid. What makes you so optimistic? The next pandemic could well have a lethality rate of over 25% (like if bird flu becomes human to human transmissible) and then the personal freedom position will just be silly.
Bryan's point is that many people will be willing to advocate lockdowns and other authoritarian policies even at much lower levels of lethality, and anyone who favours smaller government and individual liberty should be hostile to this.
Frankly even if you convinced me of very high lethality, putting any trust in the government with our liberties would be hard. A 'request' to behave in a certain way is more likely to succeed than a 'demand'.
Plus, NPIs did little to nothing and people voluntarily limited their movement. If 70% of people voluntarily limit themselves then how much gain can you possibly get by pseudoscientifically commanding the other 30% to do things like "be home before 11:00 and wear a cut up t-shirt on your face"?
Let’s say it had higher lethality, but there was no hope of a vaccine for a long time? Or the vaccine only brought the lethality down the the level of pre vaccine covid?
How long would you put up with Chinese style lockdowns?
I dunno, I think at some point even if the risk is bad you have to move on.
Why would the personal freedom position be silly? You are treating it as axiomatic that NPIs had some massive benefit that would override the disgustingly large violation of liberty.
Until Omicron hit, countries like New Zealand, Korea and Taiwan did a great job controlling Covid cases with NPIs. So yes, they did have a massive benefit. But even if you think Covid was too benign to warrant the actions they took, presumably there’s some level of virus infectiousness/lethality, where you would support them.
It seems reasonable to believe that the reason for their success was NPIs, especially after it's been drilled into your head for years that they are massively important. That is until you ask why other countries who did the same or very similar things had a totally different result.
Our World in Data created a Stringency Index which is a measure of how strict the collection of policies a country took were. If you plot Stringency Index against deaths per million from COVID it looks like a shotgun blast. In fact there's actually a small correlation between stringency and death (back when I did this in 2021).
If you do the same with latitude, obesity rate or median age (and probably other population characteristics) you actually find a correlation between them and COVID deaths per million. So right away it becomes evident that these are much stronger explanations than NPIs. Therefore I believe it's much more likely that some combination of population characteristics, geography, etc are likely the reason for these countrys' success than NPIs which did not at all correlate.
I will add that there may be more sophisticated statical analyses showing small benefits from NPIs, but someone claiming that they had massive benefits and completely stopped viral spread has an immense burden of proof to overcome.
You seem to be conflating government regulation of NPIs with actual use of NPIs. What you want is strong encouragement of effective NPIs, with very little actual exercise of state force to punish people.
I’m not sure what the alternative hypothesis is for why some countries had so few Covid cases (not deaths) is, if not NPIs.
I haven’t looked at the stringency index, but I can believe what you say about it. But I am a believer in smart measures, not stringent ones. NZ, for instance, made it very hard to enter the country unless people heavily quarantined, which kept cases low and people were largely able to live their lives without masks and without lockdowns. When such countries had brief spikes, they locked down hard and quick, squashed the curve instead of flattening it, then got back to normal life.
The alternative is that they are islands on the far side of the world, and that made things possible that weren’t possible in Europe or North America.
Still, I don’t think the hell of what AZ did, which was worse than America, was worth even zero deaths. I honestly just do not value the lives of sick old people very much.
If the virus killed children I might have a different attitude, but is also have a different attitude about snake bites if they felt like kisses and made me lose 20 pounds.
“If the virus killed children I might have a different attitude”
This was my initial point. It’s overly optimistic and lazy to plan for the next pandemic, thinking it will have the same basic characteristics as this one. Maybe it will be mild and you’ll want to spend it fighting the tyranny of public health, but maybe it will be more like bird flu and you’ll have a different attitude entirely.
I think a lot of libertarians used vaccine skepticism as an excuse not to pick a side.
*No vaccine skeptic ever stopped me from getting a vaccine.* The only people who stopped me from getting a vaccine were the DEM elected officials that gave it to 30 year old teachers who weren't teaching months before they allowed my sick 75 year old father to get it.
Libertarians should have strongly opposed vaccine mandates because even if this vaccine is safe, the breadth of medical interventions that the powers that be may advocate is not necessarily safe. You can see this with the trans stuff.
Since the vaccine didn't stop transmission there was no case to be made for mandates. We also found out that vaccination rates didn't do anything to get rid of NPIs, so that idea was a non starter too.
Finally mandates make approval of vaccines controversial. If everything not forbidden is mandatory, then there is an incentive to forbid things were one otherwise wouldn't care what others do.
> Since the vaccine didn't stop transmission there was no case to be made for mandates.
Bans on drunk driving don't stop car collisions either. There's a good libertarian case to be made for things that significantly reduce the risk of third-party harms, even if they don't stop them fully.
> Finally mandates make approval of vaccines controversial. If everything not forbidden is mandatory, then there is an incentive to forbid things were one otherwise wouldn't care what others do.
This is a much more powerful point.
Bans on drunk driving are pretty effective against curtailing drunk driving. At a minimum by taking the license of offenders away.
Similarly, we have lots of prohibitions on drinking to reduce the odds of drunk driving. For instance, most sporting events can't serve alcohol during the last 30% or so of the game so people can sober up. People have studied the impact and it works.
But its pretty clear that vaccine mandates did very little to stop the spread empirically.
So we've got a large cost and a low benefit to such mandates.
The obvious go to on vaccination would have been to link vaccine uptake with freedom from NPIs, but the opposite happened. Vaccine mandates and NPI mandates both lined up on the same side of the political spectrum, so you got fewer NPIs where you had lower vaccination rates.
Personally, I consider this a major fuck up by the vaccine mandate boosters. It was obvious they didn't actually want people to get the vaccine and had no intention of rewarding them, they just wanted to punish and posture. In the end they ended up punishing themselves the most, well not as much as children or the working class that they had power over but you get the point.
What does the data reveal about the mortality risk of Covid? What does the data reveal about vaccine outcomes?
It seems to me the greatest obstacle to understanding is lack of agreement on what is accepted data. For the data I accept shows Covid is not a high risk disease and that the vaccine has little to no personal benefit and it yields a disastrous population impairment.
Government policy on Covid and the government and corporates policy on the jab has been disastrous. Only ignorance and pride - belief in the dogma - sustains a defense of these policies.
> the vaccine has little to no personal benefit and it yields a disastrous population impairment.
Can you say something about where you find data that shows these things? Everything I've seen suggests that vaccines reduce risk of infection by 30-80% over various time frames, even if you ignore the further reduction of serious outcomes from infection, and I haven't seen anything that suggests any sort of population impairment from vaccination. (I presume you mean something worse than a day of fever after getting the shot.)
1) The protection against infection is very short lived. Perhaps mere weeks if you're not up to date on the latest variant. I myself had a breakthrough infection not that long after my booster.
2) The protection against serious disease is pretty decent, and is the #1 reason to get the jab. However, healthy young people aren't at risk for serious illness, so it's either not important or in the case of some groups like children probably net harmful.
3) Immunity from the disease is better than immunity from the jab, so unless you are high risk its probably best to just go and get the disease at some point. I don't see any value in constantly getting boosters in the hope of never getting it, and I think children would probably be better off getting the disease than the jab.
4) The jab makes you sick. In the case of my wife and I, very very sick. Like worse than having COVID felt. That strikes me as messed up. Not only does it reduce the value of getting boosters to not get sick, but it sets off alarm bells for me that this is the only vaccine I've ever gotten that made me feel awful.
5) Invisible Sun notes below that the jab really only teaches your body about the spike protein, not the entire virus. I think there is some value to introducing your body to that but this idea that people should constant be priming themselves to fight spike proteins (usually out of date ones) seems reckless.
What we got in reality is that the public mostly followed a pretty rational approach to vaccines on their own. Most old people got them. A majority of middle aged people got them. Young people and children were reluctant to get them. Many of the people that didn't get them likely had COVID before they were available anyway.
Uptake on the first booster was decent but fell off significantly after that. I consider the 1st booster to be a completion of the initial course. Normally you would have gotten the 2nd shot six months after the first but they made it a month to rush the trials.
The main population impairment is the jabs promote immune resistant variants. This information is being squelched in the US but doctors elsewhere are discussing it. What has been acknowledged even in the USA is that natural immunity is magnitudes better than the jab. And given natural infection is highly unlikely to be injurious, it makes little sense for most people to be jabbed.
And based on recent polling, there is bipartisan acknowledgement the jabs cause injury & death.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1609962218367361027
"How likely is it that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths?"
- IT'S LIKELY -
DEM: 51%
IND: 42%
GOP: 56%
All ADULTS: 49%
Can you elaborate on what constitutes a "kook" in regards to vaccine skepticism? I've found a number of libertarian, vaccine skeptical folks who are clearly more data driven than any of our public health mouthpieces. I defy anyone to read El Gato Malo' substack (or humbly, my own) and label us a kook. You may disagree with us, but there is nothing kooky about our analyses.
I think he's probably referring to people who think the vaccine is meant to depopulate the world or whatever, and not the nuanced people who say it's dumb for a 5 year old to get it.
Given that supermajorities of old people of all political persuasions got the vaccine, its hard to argue that vaccine skepticism is a big issue. Who really cares if a relatively healthy 30 year old gets the vaccine or not.
And in children I'm not even convinced the vaccine is a good thing, especially if they have already had COVID.
Rather than say "next pandemic" I would just say "next crisis". It's probably too soon to re-run the same script.
But that there will be another crisis within 10 years I'm confident of. And I do think the broad outline of government overreach, moral panic, and budget busting emergency spending will all be on the table again with a new set of justifications.
When that crisis comes do you want people like De Santis calling the shots or Gavin Newsome.
That's really the only question of relevance. We can't predict the crises, but we can predict if a default attitude towards freedom will be in play. Curtailing the power of the laptop class that did this too us is the #1 issue.
After 9/11 having a republican president didn't prevent similar overreacting.
2000: War on Terror
2010: Great Recession Reaction
2020: Pandemic
So about every ten years we get a "crisis".
I think the war on terror was a fiasco, but the neocons that lead it aren't the face of the Republican Party anymore. If the Reps nominate a neocon again I'll react to that.
Currently, defense hawkishness is more associate with DEMs. I will credit Biden for pulling out of Afghanistan which I consider the bravest presidential action I've seen in twenty years, but overall DEMs are hawks trying to start WWIII.
And while War on Terror was a tragedy, it mostly didn't effect me beyond the defense spending. The people who paid the price were mostly in the Middle East, and the DEMs have fucked up the Middle East plenty too.
COVID definitely affected me so I care about it a lot more.
What are the reps going to do to me? Make it slightly harder to kill my own baby? Tell me I can't become a meth addict? The horror. DEMs locked me in my house and told me not to breath the fucking air while they spent so much money the currency got fucked.
They are going to war with China first. That's the next crisis
There's a lot about this post that I find unsatisfactory. Bryan posits two "camps," and says one is represented by Cowen and Tabarrok and the other by Klein, Magness, and Boudreaux. I think that those two sets of individuals can be used to distinguish two different character types or outlooks, but I think that Bryan's characterizations of those two character types are both highly unsatisfactory, even misleading, and in multiple ways.
A better title for the post: Covid Policy: Hindsight on the Reaction of Four of My GMU Econ Colleagues and Phil Magness.
+1
Tyler was pro-NPI, so that put him in the direct conflict with the anti-NPI camp.
Let's get real BTW. Masks (including when a "mandate" was lifted but it was still mandatory on all public property including schools) and school closures where the big issues. And I would include in school closers anything that made school effectively closed if still open (testing and quarantine, absurd distancing requirements, and of course masks).
These continued pretty much until March 2022 in a lot of places.
Cowen was really bad on this stuff, especially masks.
Yes, this was not close to Bryan's usual standards,
COVID tyranny was what started me down the path to libertarianism from conservatism. I always had a distaste of government, but thought it was a necessary evil that did important things. COVID restrictions opened my eyes to the immense power of government to completely ruin lives in an instant though. What made my freedom being instantly revoked even worse though was the fact that I could see it was completely political in nature. You could take a cursory glance at COVID deaths per million data and see that NPIs didn't make any noticable difference at all. Even conceptually masks made no sense and there are numerous pre-COVID RCTs that showed they didn't work (which is why we were told they didn't work at the start).
When inflation started to happen I became interested in the truth about why, because obviously the MSM isn't truthful. I started reading about economics and found Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. Since then I've probably read about 20 books, Basic Economics being the first. Once I found out that not all libertarians are purple haired weirdos screaming about normalizing hookers and heroin (cough, cough Reason) I was on board.
I agree with the tech freedom people as well, and I think vaccine skeptics are incorrect (although I see how they could easily be led to believe the things they do because of their anger at the NPI people). Any "libertarian" who supports lockdowns and forced masking isn't actually a libertarian. They are the same as a Normie from either party who vociferously pushes freedom for things they like and rationalizes why freedom for things they don't like are bad. In fact their "libertarianism" is just pure virtue signaling to show how wonderful and tolerant they are. I guess they're consistent in that at least while they virtue signal in their masks.
I went he opposite way.
The #1 issue during covid was whether your state/county had a republican governor/legislature. If it did you got through covid with substantially more freedom.
You can follow that down the line to every institution. Why were childrens museum’s pushing masks till march 2022 and indoor playgrounds weren’t. One was left coded and one wasn’t.
At the individual level the only people that I saw fight the mandates were conservatives. The people running my religious preschool flat out refused the state mask mandate.
Libertarians either supported NPIs (Cowen) or were basically limp wristed and ineffective compilers. When push came to shove libertarians generally chose their class affiliation over supposed principals.
I would say the big loser of the last two years was persuasions. All that debate and barely anyone got persuaded of anything. Whoever had the edge in power just shoved it down people’s throats and power was all that mattered.
Oh yeah, Republicans and conservatives were vastly superior to leftists, fake libertarians who are really just libertine or cowards that don't want lumped in with icky anti-science Trumpers. What made me librarian is that the principles are supposed to be applied to everything and not just things your "side" supports. Republicans also just want to expand state power and use it themselves. I didn't it to be eliminated or greatly reduced
A lot of libertarians dropped the ball when it came to COVID. Many of us (including me) initially fell for the panic, and I am incredibly grateful to the contributors at AIER who helped me understand the errors in my thinking.
While leading libertarian thinkers tend to have a firm grasp on economics and philosophy, it seems very few have a good understanding of health and immunology. Gaining greater understanding of these subjects is what convinced me to go from pro-NPI to anti-NPI to “kook”. Understanding the subject and then hearing contradictions from the “experts” in government and academia only increased my skepticism of it all, and led me to value freedom more and trust government less.
I think everyone gets a mulligan for whatever they believed in Spring 2020. If your not someone that follows this COVID just came out of nowhere and you were getting told all sorts of crazy things.
Myself, it took a maybe two months before I finally came to the conclusion that:
1) It didn't transfer on surfaces
2) It was basically zero risk outdoors
3) The mortality rate and its age gradient
Maybe if I was a doctor or following the right people on Twitter I could have figured that out marginally faster, but once I knew those three things by Summer 2020 I was "let it rip."
If COVID had just been a two month holiday where everyone kept getting paid and all of the NPIs were removed and schools were open after that I don't think anyone would have cared that much.
I think libertarians didn't take a strong enough stand against moral panic.
My company implemented a number of COVID hysteria measures, some of which cost people their jobs. Once the moral panic subsided they reversed all of them, but many peoples lives were still permanately effected.
There seems to be an idea in libertarianism that "private entities" should be able to do whatever they want and not get judged. I think libertarians should just acknowledge that any institution with an HR department is de facto a government agency. They are functionally bound by the CDC guidance as any government department. I would have liked to have seen more pushback against this, even if merely moral, not just some blanket "they can do whatever they want".
What you got during the pandemic was essentially a purge of anyone who won't follow the rules, no matter how absurd. That isn't going to make society more libertarian.
What got rid of COVID NPIs was protests and elections.
Officials kept them in place until some external event made it politically untenable. The less subject to political pressure a person or institution was, the longer they kept it in place. Protests helped end the initial western lockdowns and most importantly China's lockdowns, and the elections in Nov 2021 basically sealed the deal on pandemic restrictions generally in the west (left leaning areas waited until Omicron was over in March to save face, but the second Youngkin got elected COVID in schools was on the way out).
Libertarians were out to lunch on this. Even where their opinions matched those of protestors or potentially helpful elected officials they were derisive. COVID protestors were seen as prole rubes unworthy of support and probably counter productive. And electoral politics....how drole. GMU is located in Virginia and basically every single libertarian issue (COVID, academic freedom, etc) was front and center in the Nov 2021 election and nobody had the balls to participate.
GMU libertarianism was ineffective because it focused on the one thing it want to focus on (which is the least costly personally for GMU academics), making blog posts and tweets and hoping that it convinces progressives to do what they want them to do. Insane progressives kept on being insane though, so this was pissing into the wind. COVID ended when outside forces (protestors, right wing voters) forced it to end.
And I know you guys are going to hate me for this, but COVID should have ended in 2021 with the vaccine and instead we got another year of NPIs because a DEM was president and wanted to prove that Fauci-ism was right the entire time unlike Drumpf, then lost the battle with Delta/Omicron.
Spot on in my opinion. NPIs became completely political midway through 2020 and were held in place because of broad Normie support. Of course, reenforced through a constant stream of propaganda from the doding MSM.
I don't think there was broad normie support. It's like that video of the pilot announcing that the airline mask mandate is over, and everyone takes off their masks and shouts for joy. Were all those normies supportive of the mask mandate when they were dutifully wearing their masks?
I think it became political, and on the left it had broad support because of politics. But without mandates I think that social pressure would have broken down as some citizens saw their fellows acting in freedom and copied them. It didn't surprise me when COVID polls and election results didn't match up, with revealed preference showing pro-freedom and polls showing social desirability bias.
What did amaze me is the level of moral panic and cowardice in the entire largely leftist professional class. I will never get over going to a playground near DC in sweltering heat and seeing 99% of children in masks, when even an hour away the opposite was true.
I think towards the end a majority of people did start to get sick with it, resulting in things like the plane video. The sample size of people who are willing to ride on a packed plane (given that it appears to be a claustrophobic tin can even though it's extremely safe due to the powerful ventilation) may have been anti-mask in general. But overall I do agree, when the political winds shifted the mandates lifted. I also think there was a healthy chunk of social desirability bias going on. Wanting to fit in as well as not be one of those free-DUMB loving right wingers.
Like in so many other issues, there was a clear socio-economic class split among libertarians on this issue. More affluent, highly educated CATO, Tabarrok, Cowen types were quite happy with lockdowns, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, and basically with most other things pro-establishment on covid. These people were probably personally pretty scared of covid, and were minimally adversely affected by these policies (e.g. they didn't miss a paycheck, they had comfy homes and stable relationships, I'd venture to guess, etc.). The more "poorly educated", less affluent, libertarian unwashed masses were vehemently against all of these policies, in no small part because they were much more likely to be adversely affected by them (losing their jobs because of lockdowns or for not wanting to take the vax, their kids dropping out of school, their relatives succumbing to addiction, etc.).
Like in so many other issues, the unwashed rabble got this mostly right, the elites mostly wrong (including on the issue of the efficacy of the vaccines, which was wildly oversold, to put it mildly). It's almost like we're selecting our elites specifically for their lack of critical thinking & questioning skills.
I'm completely confused at why this was even a split in the first place. If you believe that paranoia hypochondriacs banned vaccines and tests for no reason, why allow them to ban social gatherings? Similarly, if you don't trust the state to mandate vaccines, you shouldn't trust them to ban them either. I guess the latter can still believe that a vaccine is not effective in some ways, but someone like that should still be ok with others choosing to take the vaccine for themselves.
I have posted
Call for Affirmers of the Safety of the Covid Vaccines
here:
https://dklein780.medium.com/call-for-affirmers-of-covid-injections-safety-92768f324e06
The contention that a mask mandate is a "horror" undermines all your good points. <sigh>
What behaviors may a government impose on the citizenry? What are the social consequence if those impositions are based on reckless, erroneous thinking? What happens to the legitimacy of government if a critical mass conclude the government is a clown show?
Can you appreciate the phoniness of "mask mandates"? Under no scientific standard does a "face covering" mitigate viral transmission. And while government and institutions can mandate face coverings, they cannot in any reasonable way regulate the fit and quality of that covering. The result is the vast majority of mask wearing is useless. It is a charade. The essence of American mask policies for Covid was to promote a superstition for the primary purpose of sustaining the "emergency" of Covid, not for protecting people from Covid.
I'm sympathetic to both camps. More so to the "freedom from the fight" camp after the vaccines than before. My biggest issue with them (the NPI skeptics) though is that few will admit to the tradeoff they are making. You are one of the few exceptions Bryan. I know it's not good PR to say "Yes, we may have a few hundred thousand more deaths, but full freedom is still better and worth it.", but it would be the truth at least. What I instead saw is massively underestimating the risk of Covid constantly until it was no longer tenable (people insisting on death rates of <0.1% when already more than that had died; also insisting every time that no future Covid waves would come).
This camp was just full of motivated reasoning like that. There is no way to actually do "Focused Protection". The only way that would actually work is creating full on bubbles (like the NBA did) for all nursing homes. That would not have been done. So it was again not admitting to the trade-off.
Do you have any evidence of the non-NPI camp underestimating the risks?
As anecdote, I would put myself firmly in Bryan’s camp, that both sides are right, but that’s going to come off as non-NPI to most people. I guessed a little under 300,000 US related deaths attributed to COVID the first year of its introduction (to equalize down to 5 digits over the course of a few years). If I remember correctly, the real number was ~400,000 that first year. So I was off, but not by significant magnitudes (I do remember several mainstream sources predicting deaths in the millions).
Personally, I think the innumeracy of the NPI camp was far worse, e.g. Cowen claiming that age adjusted death rates don’t matter: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-20/covid-19-is-more-serious-for-the-elderly-so-what#xj4y7vzkg
Hi Joe, I didn't save any specific tweets or articles. I guess it's possible I'm mixing up the general Covid-sceptic camp with the more serious anti-NPI libertarians.
I remember the original predictions of millions of deaths were about a scenario of just continuing business as usual with no behavioral changes. So the actual death counts being lower after lockdowns were actually implemented does not seem like evidence of the prediction being wrong. The better argument would be that voluntary behavioral changes would have also reduced the death count below the predicted number. That arguments also cuts against lockdown sceptics though as it suggest we would have had a lot of the damage to the economy and general wellbeing as well in that scenario through voluntary behavioral changes.
There’s always a bunch of excuse making when someone makes a prediction and it turns out wrong. You can always point out some contingency that makes your prediction invalid, so you’re not technically wrong.
We’ll never truly know how large of an effect behavioral differences made to the death rate, but I tend to discount such excuses as a general rule.
I agree people in the non-NPI camp underestimated it. I don't know if this serves as a counter balance to the gross overestimate by the mainstream or the argument would've been better had it been more nuanced.
It may also be a bit of a strawman, too. The best of the non-NPI camp didn't do this. I didn't see Cowen's arguments, so I'm not sure if he was better than the NPI people who seemingly tried to rationalize ways that COVID was equally as dangerous to a healthy 25 year old or school aged kid as it was to a 65 year old.
Your predictions for the next pandemic seem to assume it will be about the same level of infectiousness/deadliness as Covid. What makes you so optimistic? The next pandemic could well have a lethality rate of over 25% (like if bird flu becomes human to human transmissible) and then the personal freedom position will just be silly.
Bryan's point is that many people will be willing to advocate lockdowns and other authoritarian policies even at much lower levels of lethality, and anyone who favours smaller government and individual liberty should be hostile to this.
Frankly even if you convinced me of very high lethality, putting any trust in the government with our liberties would be hard. A 'request' to behave in a certain way is more likely to succeed than a 'demand'.
Plus, NPIs did little to nothing and people voluntarily limited their movement. If 70% of people voluntarily limit themselves then how much gain can you possibly get by pseudoscientifically commanding the other 30% to do things like "be home before 11:00 and wear a cut up t-shirt on your face"?
Let’s say it had higher lethality, but there was no hope of a vaccine for a long time? Or the vaccine only brought the lethality down the the level of pre vaccine covid?
How long would you put up with Chinese style lockdowns?
I dunno, I think at some point even if the risk is bad you have to move on.
Why would the personal freedom position be silly? You are treating it as axiomatic that NPIs had some massive benefit that would override the disgustingly large violation of liberty.
Until Omicron hit, countries like New Zealand, Korea and Taiwan did a great job controlling Covid cases with NPIs. So yes, they did have a massive benefit. But even if you think Covid was too benign to warrant the actions they took, presumably there’s some level of virus infectiousness/lethality, where you would support them.
It seems reasonable to believe that the reason for their success was NPIs, especially after it's been drilled into your head for years that they are massively important. That is until you ask why other countries who did the same or very similar things had a totally different result.
Our World in Data created a Stringency Index which is a measure of how strict the collection of policies a country took were. If you plot Stringency Index against deaths per million from COVID it looks like a shotgun blast. In fact there's actually a small correlation between stringency and death (back when I did this in 2021).
If you do the same with latitude, obesity rate or median age (and probably other population characteristics) you actually find a correlation between them and COVID deaths per million. So right away it becomes evident that these are much stronger explanations than NPIs. Therefore I believe it's much more likely that some combination of population characteristics, geography, etc are likely the reason for these countrys' success than NPIs which did not at all correlate.
I will add that there may be more sophisticated statical analyses showing small benefits from NPIs, but someone claiming that they had massive benefits and completely stopped viral spread has an immense burden of proof to overcome.
You seem to be conflating government regulation of NPIs with actual use of NPIs. What you want is strong encouragement of effective NPIs, with very little actual exercise of state force to punish people.
I’m not sure what the alternative hypothesis is for why some countries had so few Covid cases (not deaths) is, if not NPIs.
I haven’t looked at the stringency index, but I can believe what you say about it. But I am a believer in smart measures, not stringent ones. NZ, for instance, made it very hard to enter the country unless people heavily quarantined, which kept cases low and people were largely able to live their lives without masks and without lockdowns. When such countries had brief spikes, they locked down hard and quick, squashed the curve instead of flattening it, then got back to normal life.
The alternative is that they are islands on the far side of the world, and that made things possible that weren’t possible in Europe or North America.
Still, I don’t think the hell of what AZ did, which was worse than America, was worth even zero deaths. I honestly just do not value the lives of sick old people very much.
If the virus killed children I might have a different attitude, but is also have a different attitude about snake bites if they felt like kisses and made me lose 20 pounds.
“If the virus killed children I might have a different attitude”
This was my initial point. It’s overly optimistic and lazy to plan for the next pandemic, thinking it will have the same basic characteristics as this one. Maybe it will be mild and you’ll want to spend it fighting the tyranny of public health, but maybe it will be more like bird flu and you’ll have a different attitude entirely.
As an aside, I called for compensation for the takings of people's labor caused by the lockdowns: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3567003