What Biden and other officials are doing is like sticking a 15 mph sign on the highway.
What Biden and other officials are doing is like sticking a 15 mph sign on the highway.
O n the highways in South Florida, the speed limit is generally 55 mph. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t matter: Everyone blows right through going 80 or 90, and I’ve yet to see anyone get a ticket. When the speed limit is set so preposterously low that nobody bothers to abide by or even enforce it, it is the same as having no speed limit.
That is how the new mandates should be viewed — and resisted — until sanity comes back to the setting of Covid-19 policy. I come to this conclusion reluctantly, because democracy depends on people’s allegiance to the rule of law. We have an obligation to follow rules that have been duly enacted — whether or not we like them, whether or not they comport with our understanding of the Constitution.
Moreover, there are no absolute rights at stake here. There is no absolute right to personal freedom, no absolute “right to choose,” just as there is no absolute right to public safety. Those rights must be balanced against each other, and sometimes sweeping mandates and lockdowns are warranted.
“Hard cases make bad law,” the saying goes, and there’s no denying that Covid presented a hard case.
Covid-19 is clearly several times more deadly than the common flu. And the common flu is a prolific killer — normally the eighth leading cause of death in the United States. And yet, to prevent some of the 40,000 flu deaths that can occur in a typical year, people who know they’re sick don’t even stay home from work or wash their hands, much less wear masks. There has never been a vaccine mandate for the flu, nor could such a mandate ever be implemented.
On the other hand, Covid-19 is not nearly as deadly as, say, the virus in Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), which spreads like the flu but causes severe encephalitis, with a case fatality rate of 20 percent, about 100 times more lethal than the flu. As the movie plausibly dramatizes, such a pandemic could bring about a total collapse of social order in a matter of weeks, with the possibility of leaving tens of millions dead in just a few months. To stop the spread of a virus like that, it might be necessary to impose martial law, complete with military cordons around outbreak areas and shoot-on-sight curfews.
In other words, Covid sits somewhere between the two extremes where either personal liberty (in the case of the flu) or public safety (in the case of Contagion) must carry the day. Hence, arguments that treat either personal freedom or public safety as absolute priorities are of no help here.
The right policies depend on a rational balancing of the costs and benefits of various courses of action, based on what we know about the risks — and when we know it.
At the start of the pandemic, when little was known about the terrifying new virus, and it was still theoretically possible to stop its spread, sweeping lockdowns were justifiable, at least for a short while.
But it became clear quite early on that the people who are really at risk of severe disease from Covid are highly concentrated in a few relatively small groups: the elderly and those with other serious health conditions. Hence, just weeks into the pandemic, health measures should already have been focused on protecting those specific populations and letting everyone else go back to normal as quickly as possible.
Instead, most Western democracies — outside Scandinavia at least — insisted on pervasive lockdowns. In some places, governments seemed to lose their minds, throwing the full weight of the law, with its monopoly on violence, against people who strayed far from home or tried to engage in “nonessential” activities. The images from Australia have been simply terrifying.
In the United States, schools remained closed through the summer of 2020 and into the new school year, as health officials and public-school teachers’ unions ignored the overwhelming evidence that children have little to fear from Covid-19 and insisted on lockdown measures with far greater risks to the health and welfare of children. The emergency temporary measures, it seemed, might not be so temporary.
Fast-forward almost two years. The virus has spread to every corner of the world, and it’s here to stay: In other words, it has become fully “endemic” (rather than “pandemic”). The vaccines and therapeutics developed at great cost and with astonishing speed are now available to everyone. The percentage of the population that is either vaccinated or naturally immune from recovery is well in excess of what we thought necessary to achieve “herd immunity.”
With vaccines and therapeutics, the overall fatality rate of Covid-19 is declining rapidly. In other words, it is becoming much more like the flu. But the Biden administration, and its allies in state government and teachers’ unions across the country, are insisting on restrictions far more severe than is warranted by any rational assessment of the risk. The U.S. generally is not moving back into full-blown lockdowns, but Europe is experimenting, and a range of other mandates remain the preference of policy-makers in America.
Even worse, by reimposing restrictions because of new variants that appear to be no more severe than existing strains, they are creeping toward making those measures permanent, because now that the virus is endemic, there are likely to be new variants every year. The temporary emergency measures are looking more permanent all the time.
Remember “herd immunity”? It turns out that the virus spreads even among the vaccinated. Reinfections among those who have already gotten sick and recovered are very rare, according to the CDC, which means that natural immunity could still support “herd immunity.” But that is contrary to the government’s policy of pervasive vaccination, so herd immunity has disappeared as a goal of Covid policy.
In fact, part of the justification for the continuing vaccine mandates and mask mandates is precisely that the vaccinated can still get sick and infect others. And it is true that while the vaccinated are at much lower risk of severe disease — the vast majority of hospitalized Covid-19 patients now are unvaccinated — they can still infect others. But that demolishes the main justification for vaccine mandates, namely that your choice to remain unvaccinated can impact other people’s health. If you can infect others whether or not you are vaccinated, and the only difference is a much lower chance of getting severely sick if you do get vaccinated, then vaccination is a choice whose consequences fall mostly on the decider. I strongly believe people should get vaccinated, but there is no public-health justification for a legal vaccine mandate.
Some people respond, reasonably enough, that with the vast majority of hospitalized Covid patients unvaccinated, people should get vaccinated if only to avoid imposing the costs of their treatment on society. The argument is persuasive at one level: America’s system of health care combines the worst elements of every possible approach, including the socialization of the costs of routine care. But using the unintended consequences of prior socialist impositions to justify further socialist impositions is a move you can make in lots of situations. And it would make the requirement that hospitals treat patients regardless of cost a warrant for general government intrusion into your lifestyle.
Which brings me to the biggest fallacy in the current vaccine and mask mandates: They totally ignore the reciprocal nature of the freedoms being exercised. The major problem with people not wearing masks in movie theaters is that there are other people in that same theater who fervently wish everyone was wearing a mask. But if the latter are so worried about getting Covid, why didn’t they just stay home? Movie theaters are not an essential activity, and more important, being in an enclosed space with a large number of other people for hours on end creates considerable risk of transmission that mask-wearing can attenuate a little bit, but not reliably. And the same may largely be said of vaccine mandates.
The current mask and vaccine mandates, the appalling treatment of young children in schools, the arbitrary travel restrictions, and the like have moved so far beyond any rational basis that the rules themselves are arguably worse for the rule of law than disobedience of them.
What President Biden and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio are doing is the equivalent of setting the speed limit on the highway to 15 mph without any plan for effective enforcement. It’s time for people to ignore that false speed limit and use their own judgment in driving safely, until Covid-19 policy is back in the hands of sensible people.