> All of the US politicians who obstructed a proper pandemic response back in March have his and 350k others' blood on their hands.
What about all the other big EU countries that have comparable death rates? (The UK, France, Spain, Italy, etc.) And what about the countervailing economic devastation caused by lockdowns?
How much “blood” does Fauci and the CDC have on their hands for lying about masks early in the pandemic?
Moralizing public policy like this is one of the worst ideas we’ve had in the last few decades and we need to goddamn cut it out.
> Moralizing public policy like this is one of the worst ideas we’ve had in the last few decades
Amen. Politicizing and protesting mask wearing is the dumbest thing Republicans could have done to their own agenda of keeping the economy going. I really don’t get it. What our leaders should have been asking us to do is wear a mask to go out shopping safely. At least Fauci admitted it was a mistake to say early on not to get masks, at least his statements were aimed at protecting COVID responders, and at least he corrected it fairly early on.
The way I read that whole situation with Fauci, it seemed like there was a presidential order not to encourage mask wearing. The CDC should've know better; in fact, I think they did. I'm by no means involved in the medical field, but simple physics tells me that a layer of stuff between me and another person means less of my gems get to them. If you're a professional in that area of study, I imagine there's zero doubt that masks are the right choice. No downside, only upside. By similar logic, Fauci knew. Then at some point it seemed like he realized he would probably get fired no matter what he said, so he grew a pair and started speaking truth.
Yes, it was incredibly stupid. But so was people throwing around "blood on your hands" rhetoric every time someone mentioned the very legitimate need to reopen the economy. I remember American media flipping out over Trump saying we can't stay locked down forever, and then watching Germans nod soberly along while Angela Merkel said the exact same thing.
We've become addicted to moralizing political decisions. Reagan unfortunately is responsible for a lot of that, also Gingrich. But since Obama Democrats have run with that tactic too.
Angela Merkel is taken seriously because she's a serious person. Americans flipped out over Trump because he was in complete denial about the crisis. He had no credibility when he talked about reopening because he was also calling covid-19 the sniffles and inventing ridiculous new "treatments" on the spot. It wasn't wrong to be alarmed.
I take your point, but the pandemic is different from the economy as a whole†, with different incentives. It is probably possible to keep society running with total indifference to COVID-19, pretending that its death toll is essentially the same as a bad flu. Over a million people would die, but society can metabolize a million deaths without really skipping a beat.
Preventing as many of those deaths as is reasonably possible requires sacrifice and expenditure, and really the only incentive we have to undertake that is moral.
I don't think the problem is that "blood on their hands" is moralizing, but rather that it's hackneyed, shrill, and unpersuasive.
Sorry that you don't like my writing style. Next time I will rephrase "have blood on their hands" as: "have committed manslaughter through their wilful negligence in dealing with the pandemic back in March when it was obviously going to start killing people".
Really, I don't think it's hackneyed or shrill to decry so many deaths. Unless you also think memorializing the September 11 terrorist attacks is also hackneyed and shrill.
What about all the other big EU countries that have comparable death rates?
The US actually is fairly unique in that excess mortality never returned to baseline.
For example, Belgium is one of the European countries that was hit hardest: Mid-April, twice the number of people died per week than the average of 2015-19. The numbers were back to normal a month later (until the next wave hit in August).
In the US, deaths also peaked mid-April. But while deaths were up by a factor of 'only' 1.5, excess mortality never went back to normal for all of 2020.
There's widespread criticism of the pandemic response in England, France, etc.
Are you just objecting to the phrase? It seems obvious enough that Trump is responsible for much of the failure in the US, failure that exacerbated the death toll. If he had done sensible things instead of dancing around talking about injecting bleach, it's painfully likely it would have made a difference. And then the choices about who led the response. Why was Kushner involved at all? He had no obvious experience to suggest he should be making decisions (and had pretty much already demonstrated incompetence).
Yes, I am, which is why I referred to “moralizing” above. Public policies kill people directly or indirectly. If you reduce GDP growth by 0.5% you can convert that to a body count.
Rhetoric like saying people have “blood on their hands” is just an attempt to emotionalize the issue. And it destroys our political debate and discourse.
The people who make the policies have morals that leak into them.
Is it moral to force people into work without protection and no recourse against their employer when they get sick and their family member dies? Sounds like we should make a moral judgment against that policy and the ones who made it to me.
Covid death rates seem pretty uncorrelated with wealth the world over. As to the US being exceptional—it is in many respects, but quick and coordinated societal and government response has never been one of those things. There is a long-standing joke that “Americans will eventually do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.”
Fauci should've been fired for his original comments on masks. Outrageous! His backpedaling comment on why he chose those words was even worse. Given how long he's been in that role, I believe there are powers at work keeping him in, from Big Pharma or something else.
But I really want to know who decided to abandon HHS' plan to mail masks out to every household. If that person or team can be held accountable, I can overlook Fauci's addiction to being a TV star.
