Hard headed debate with evidence, logic, and reason - leading to still debatable conclusions

I keep meaning to doing an update as to what I think is happening with Covid-19 and our reaction to it.  Not because I have any special insight but because a two to five years from now, I will want a marker as to what I was thinking at what stage in the spiral.  

I haven't not gotten around to that post yet though I think my leit motif remains valid "We still don't really understand what is going on with Covid-19."  Though there are a few things clear now which were not clear at the beginning.

In the meantime though, as if to highlight both how uncertain our knowledge is and how disputed it is, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has a post, The real conspiracy theory.

Read it here.  No, this was not a conspiracy in the strictest, most intentional sense (it didn’t need to be!), but it did kill thousands of people and manipulate our politics…

C’mon, people, let’s not be afraid to admit this one.

There is a little bit of performative art to Cowen's post sometimes and he also is prone to irony and obscure jargon.  But I think this post reads straight.

The issue under contention is reached by clicking through to the Nate Silver tweet and then to the original Garrett Jones thread.  The observation is that a large number of public health "experts" most of them aligned with the Democratic Party, signed a letter to the CEO of Pfizer on September 25th, 2020, encouraging him to slow down the deployment of the Pfizer vaccine until after the election.

Whether the vaccine development and deployment was rushed is an entirely fair issue which has gained some additional traction given the FDA(?) request that all trial data remain secret for 57 years.  Smart and conscientious people can disagree with whether the vaccine was deployed too quickly (saving lives when we were losing a few thousand a day but at the cost of exacting a toll on a small percentage of people such as myocardia among young men) or too slowly.

Whether the advocacy letter from Democratic allies, injecting political considerations (the November election) into a medical issue, had any effect is also debatable.  What is less debatable is that it was another instance of an effort to politicize medical practice.  

Cowen's post (nor Nate Silver's) is in itself not especially revelatory though they are useful reminders of what DID happen despite the constant reframing that keeps happening.  What I found interesting was not the post but the responses from the Marginal Revolution readers.  

They are a bright, accomplished, and opinionated bunch encompassing Classical Liberals (conservatives), Libertarians, left leaning Classical Liberals, a very small number of socialist/woke ideologues, and many establishment types including from academia, media, and government.  Overall, though, they almost certainly lean center right.

There are already 153 comments and as usual, apart from occasional firebrands, they are information laden, informed by strong opinions and trenchant in nature.  Marginal Revolution commenting has the nice feature where readers can vote up or down individual comments, allowing one the ability to read the room.

There is strong disagreement among the commenters whether there was actually a politically motivated effort to delay the vaccines.  The excellent thing is that those are informed commenters and they are mustering all sorts of evidence pro and con.  Very substantive evidence.

This is exactly what public debate ought to look like when the establishment (State, academia, mainstream media, and technology platforms) aren't trying to shut down free speech and vigorous debate.  In this instance, I think those arguing that there was a clear case of politicization of public health have a difficult challenge.  The politicization almost certainly occurred but it seems to me to have been an emergent order phenomenon rather than a coordinated conspiracy.  Additionally, the timelines are pretty tight so making a clear and convincing case is inherently challenging.