Streetwise Professor

The whirling COVID dervishes have taken another spin:

? CDC Director said today August 6th that “what they (Coronavirus vaccines) can?t do anymore is prevent transmission.”

So… What’s the logic of treating the people vaccinated against COVID-19 better than those who are not vaccinated such as at NYC restaurants? cc @MarkLevineNYC pic.twitter.com/j0F03ASSro

— Yossi Gestetner (@YossiGestetner) August 6, 2021

Did you catch that? The “anymore” part?

The “anymore” sticks out like a sore thumb. That implies that once upon a time vax could prevent transmission, but now it can’t. So . . . . what has changed to make vax suddenly ineffective against transmission?

I’m guessing “nothing.” If it can’t prevent transmission now (although it can mitigate symptoms), it didn’t before now.

So why the lie? No doubt to try to explain away the turn in the CDC’s mask recommendation. Before: vax, no mask! Now, vax–mask! Because transmission!

Dr. Walensky apparently doesn’t realize that she has now just totally blown up the rationale for vaccine mandates, or any social coercion for vaccination. (Or maybe she does, but figures that she’ll just come up with another BS rationale later in order to spin her way out of this.)

Specifically, if vaccination does not affect transmission, there is no “externality” from not being vaxxed. Your impact on others is exactly the same, vaxxed or not. Which implies that the benefits of vaccination are fully internalized, specifically, by reducing the severity of symptoms and the risk of death that you incur. Your decision to get vaxxed, or not, has zero impact on anybody else: the risk you pose to others is independent of your decision. Which means that getting vaxxed should be a completely personal choice even under a strict utilitarian calculus.

It should also be noted that if the vax protects one against severe adverse consequences of infection, the externality argument is weak anyways. Under this hypothetical, you can protect yourself against others by getting vaccinated, so you shouldn’t care what they do. You decide to assume the risk, or not. Either way, others are not imposing an external cost on you, so (a) you shouldn’t care what they do, and (b) you have no business or right demanding that they get vaccinated.

The externality argument is also weak (of course) if the vaccine doesn’t work.

To emphasize: the CDC, before whom we are supposed to cower in unquestioning obeisance, has just decreed that there is no justification whatsoever to mandate, coerce, or even suggest that you get vaccinated in order to protect others. But, no doubt, Dr. Walensky, the rest of the CDC, and the administration, will continue to demand, shrilly, that you get vaccinated, and will inch–or lunge–towards imposing mandates. The only justification for this is absolute paternalism, or (similarly) a belief that your body and soul belong to the state, and not to you.

Arguendo ad externality should always be viewed with skepticism in any event (as any close student of Coase should recognize): the concept is frequently sloppily invoked to justify various coercive policies. But here, there is not even an externality fig leaf for a mandate–by the CDC’s own admission.

Too bad John Candy has passed on. Otherwise he could host another Farm Film Report Celebrity Blow Up, starring Rochelle Walensky. It would have been a good’n.

She did it! She blowed it up good! Real good!