(2021-07-20) Yglesias Let's Get More People Vaccinated

Matthew Yglesias: Let's get more people vaccinated. One great piece of news about life in the United States of America in July of 2021 is that widely available mRNA Covid-19 vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna are highly effective.

Another great piece of news is that while children under 12 are not yet eligible for vaccination, the virus has never been a significant threat to children’s health. American society needed children to abide by certain restrictions on their activities because kids can transmit the virus and we needed to protect more vulnerable members of society. Today, however, the vulnerable can be protected by the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines

Overprotective parents may respond to Delta outbreaks in ways that are harmful to their unvaccinated kids’ education and emotional well-being.

America’s already frayed civic fabric is not well-suited to another round of contentious debates about non-pharmaceutical interventions.

it doesn’t make sense to have a purely libertarian view of this. Vaccination involves meaningful externalities. The Delta risk to my vaccinated self or to my kid is extremely low but not zero.

The aggregate burden on our healthcare system and our healthcare workers is also a big deal.

Long story short, we should be trying to get more people vaccinated

I think the truth is we’ve barely tried.

The FDA should approve the vaccines

To me, the most striking, glaring, and obvious problem with the current state of the U.S. vaccine rollout is that the Food and Drug Administration has not given official approval to any of the vaccines that we are using. Instead, they have been given Emergency Use Authorization

If you just listen to what anyone is saying about the Covid vaccines, they are endorsing them. The acting director of the FDA and her Trump-era predecessor are encouraging people to get vaccinated.

They are not saying you are allowed to get vaccinated, they are saying you should get vaccinated. Indeed, that’s not just their medical advice to you — it’s their stated belief (and I agree) that getting vaccinated is a pro-social means of safeguarding your entire community.

right now if someone says to you “look, the mayor and the president don’t want to mention this, but these are experimental vaccines that the FDA hasn’t even approved,” that’s not misinformation — that’s true.

there are clearly lots and lots of people who are not hard-core right-wingers who still haven’t gotten vaccinated, and I think part of it is that progressive America is not actually aligning around this in an appropriate way.

Low-hanging vaccine mandate fruit

Another issue about the lack of authorization is that many institutions, including the U.S. military, believe they legally cannot or should not mandate a vaccine that is available exclusively under EUA. There turns out, inconveniently, to not really be any case law on this.

We ought to tread somewhat cautiously with mandates. But “somewhat cautiously” still means “bolder than what we’re currently doing.”

The military, in particular, is a big lever. Servicemembers are routinely required to get vaccinations, including annual flu vaccines, and the military is not an institution where individualism is a core value.

solidly blue states could make vaccines mandatory for K-12 teachers, staff, and eligible students without too much fuss.

The CDC’s current rules on international travel feature a testing requirement that should be switched to a vaccination requirement.

OSHA has been fairly derelict throughout this whole pandemic in terms of specifying Covid-safe work conditions. They ought to tighten the screws around ventilation, provision of quality masks, and other relevant criteria while also making clear that vaccination is a good alternative form of compliance.

We should also forcefully address the concern that vaccine side effects will force you to miss a day of work by finding a way to interpret the special Covid paid leave law as covering vaccine recovery.

To the extent that one of the things we want to say is that over and above your personal preferences, you are doing good for society by getting vaccinated, then we ought to pay people to get vaccinated.

This program in D.C. where you get a $51 gift card seems good to me, and I only wonder why it isn’t more broadly publicized.

But this brings up another example of the utility of full authorization.

You can’t market off an EUA

My big point about this is that the elite discussion of vaccine resistance seems a little bit perversely focused on the hardest problems.

Somehow Los Angeles County is reacting to Delta by trying to re-impose a county-wide mask mandate but hasn’t mandated vaccination for its own sheriff’s department.