Clear thinking, honesty key for next pandemic
Some time in the future, there will be another pandemic. Here are two very useful things to keep in mind when it happens again.
One might think that it was perhaps in the best interest of our country to slightly exaggerate the mortality rate of COVID-19 or the effectiveness of the vaccines. If an infectious disease seems scarier than it is, we might be able to avoid many more deaths because individuals will be more willing to comply with safety restrictions and to take the vaccine.
Anthony Fauci was guilty of a white lie when he initially recommended against masking to avoid a shortage of masks, which were needed by hospitals. The first thing to note about this is the objectionable level of paternalism involved.
But setting that aside, we can question whether this white-lie strategy is actually in our best interest. There’s a strong case to be made that it isn’t. When people start noticing inconsistencies in what officials are telling them, there is an inevitable erosion of confidence in the advice of the experts. For better or worse, once experts are thought of as liars, even their sensible and objectively accurate advice is brought into question.
There’s no doubt that at least part of the misinformation produced by experts was a result of the unprecedented nature of the pandemic. Sometimes, the experts just didn’t have the answers and this caused them to guess. When they later contradicted themselves, it caused a loss in public trust. The right approach would have been to publicly acknowledge the uncertainty behind the recommendation and make it clear that they could change as more evidence was gathered.
The lesson here is that experts and the government should tell the truth. So much of our knowledge of the world comes from what the experts tell us. It’s absolutely necessary that the public maintains a certain level of respect for the opinions of physicians, scientists and economists. We can’t pore through the data ourselves so we need to trust experts so that we can make reasonable decisions about our safety. Once the public becomes overly skeptical of expert opinion, they turn to dubious fringe theories, which can have disastrous consequences.
Another question many have asked is, does the government have the right to force us to use vaccines or to implement a lockdown? Well, strictly speaking the United States never implemented compulsory vaccinations. But you could very easily argue that when you are restricted from participating in the goods of society by refusing the vaccine, it is just another form of coercion precisely because it imposes a costly penalty.
A substantial segment of the population argued that the lockdowns and vaccine requirements were unjustified because COVID deaths were exaggerated and mostly affected those of old age or with several comorbidities. Why should the rest of us have to lock down and take the vaccine?
This was by far one of the most bizarre sorts of arguments that were seriously advanced during the pandemic. I take it that those who think that this is a good argument are being guided by some libertarian intuition. Something like what is known as the Non-Aggression Principle: it is wrong to force others to do something against their will. It’s wrong to coerce people against their will and so it’s wrong to force others to quarantine or to take the vaccine.
The problem is that this principle is clearly false. Unless you just love dirt roads, we need to coerce people into paying taxes to fund infrastructure and the other goods of society. We also need to use coercion to enforce laws, particularly when it involves violent criminals. Of course, someone who refuses to take the vaccine or to obey safety restrictions is not quite like a violent criminal.
But the rationale is the same, that is, the government duty to protect public safety. This duty isn’t unrestricted.
For example, the government would not be justified in locking the country down in the name of public safety because some people die of food poisoning after eating at a restaurant.
The question is specifically about whether the imposition of risk is unreasonably high. You see, just because the virus is probably not going to kill you doesn’t mean that you should be allowed to impose the risk of death on the elderly or those with preexisting health conditions. With over a million deaths, COVID was the third leading cause of death in the U.S. In other words, the imposition of risk was significant and certainly high enough to warrant some safety restrictions.
This doesn’t mean that all of the government responses to the pandemic were justified. It’s likely that a subset of them were not. I’m only arguing against the thought that restrictions went too far either because death projections were overly pessimistic or because young and healthy people were at a much lower risk of death. The government would be justified in jailing a drunk driver even if they were themselves relatively safe riding in a tank.
In future pandemics, whether a lockdown or vaccine requirement is justified depends on whether failing to implement them would impose excessive risk to public safety and whether the economic costs outstrip the benefits, not on whether you yourself are at risk.
Rafael Perez is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail. com.