Has it all gone too far?
Has the cure already been worse than the disease?
These are not the advocates to make that case, and theirs are not the arguments.
Trump, the GOP, the usual nutbags, growing and ever louder segments of the right wing noise machine, and this guy.
Tucker Carlson doesn't think America should let medical experts make coronavirus decisions
As far as that goes, he's right.
Decisions are for elected officials.
The role of experts is to advise.
In this case, medical experts advise of the direct public health consequences of various courses of action or inaction while (say) economists advise of the economic consequences and (say) military people advise of the national defense consequences, etc.
And "bear any burden, pay any price" truly is advice as stupid when it's about minimizing the direct harms caused by this virus as it was when originally made about America's role in the Cold War.
It is certainly true that some measures to mitigate the direct damage of the virus might be more damaging than the damage they are meant to avoid.
And it could be true that we are already there.
But nobody alleging it is so has yet made a legitimate and persuasive argument that it is so.
A shrug and "we don't really know" is not that.
Particularly when uttered by an ignorant non-expert whom nobody would in any event ever expect to really know.
No comments:
Post a Comment