One of the curiosities of this current battle against the conscientious deniers of the COVID vaccine is the placement of public policy as a new kind of science. In horse sense, it seems reasonable enough, if economists can claim their guidance as science, then why not public policy experts, who often work alongside the economists? Science acquires its own gravity, it often has the ability to silence dissent if pulled from the ass with sufficient gravitas.
In his recent opinion piece, Jonathon Meer suggests that these conscientious deniers of the most recent bit of Genetically-Engineered miracle to be bestowed upon our unworthy butts should hold responsibility for their medical costs, should they contract the lab-leak du-jour after having refused the vaccine. He ends his new public policy suggestion with “Real adults take responsibility for their decisions.”
Apparently, in Meer’s newly scientific worldview, buoyed by measurements of a vaccinated populations with few if any control groups, that these fully insured Americans just finished licking their wounds having broken into the Capitol, and now hordes of these ungrateful dimwits now either recover in hospitals or die on the public largesse that allows them to soak in vast societal benefits in their natural, unvaccinated state.
It surely would take a tenured professor of public policy, pulling in a sweet hundred grand per year, with a pension and solid health insurance to suggest that a portion of his fellow Americans are anything less than “real adults.” Meer seems ignorant of the reality that unlike his fellow full-time employees in higher education, tens of millions of Americans actually have not a dot of health insurance. Too broke to afford the market insurance, but slightly too wealthy to qualify for public aid, these “real adults” have to navigate a life where their daily decisions tie directly to their health. Some of them choose not to risk the fallout from the genetically-engineered solution, because if the free vaccine they receive from their corner pharmacy happens to make them ill eventually, they will have little recourse. Many of these people trust the whims of Mother Nature more than they trust the historically-established follies of the pharmaceutical industry, and they lose their jobs and even family connections because of their idealism.
When your science is public health, one need not worry about things like functionalized carbon and protein structures below the Kelvin barrier, they need not worry about torsional stresses on the RNA backbone, they need not worry about the kind of things that kept Frances Oldham Kelsey in a state of constant attack against an initially belligerent pharmaceutical industry that dismissed concerns of “hesitancy” which is exactly the word that Meer used in his opinion. Those who decided to ignore their feelings of “hesitancy” with Thalidomide had a markedly increased chance of giving birth to children that were unvaible, or pharmaceutically-mangled for the rest of their lives.
Like many children who want to keep their birthday cake beautiful, but also devour it, Professor Meer wants to shift the burden of the unvaccinated away from those who are vaccinated, while simultaneously using this population as the de facto control group for this new class of genetically-engineered vaccines and then thrust them further into poverty and public dependency by taking away their jobs. Professor Meer has obtained his ability to look at the unwashed masses of conscientious objectors of the new Genetically Modified Organisms due to his wealth. Should mRNA technology prove unreliable or even dangerous the as-yet untested long-term, he will still luxuriate in public-enabled health. But what of the uninsured, and people in Developing Nations who don’t have access to the level of healthcare that Professor Meer takes for granted? They’ll drop like beheaded sea bass, same as they usually do, same as they did when a laboratory leak of GMOs pinpointed their broke-asses with surgical precision and killed some four million people.
Professor Meer adopts a fairy tale cost metric where these unvaccinated have actually pulled dollar bills out of his pocket, and Professor Meer has clearly stated that he doesn’t want to share, he writes “But why should the vaccinated bear those financial costs?” Again, his position of luxury ignores the reality that is in in fact those without any health insurance at all who have subsidized his lifestyle, while his employer is able to deduct their significant contribution to the costs of his public health from their taxable revenue. Even a regular for-profit company is able to do this, let-alone a non-profit institution. This cost of insuring people like Professor Meer then falls to everyone who pays taxes, including the uninsured and those who choose not to receive injection of genetic engineering.
Meer fails because he doesn’t have the tools of science to apply to his argument. Without the benefit of long-term data, he has very little actual guidance to the economic outcomes of this global rollout of genetic engineering. Like 1950s policy designed to bridge society to the post-nuclear apocalypse world, his theories to what comes after the GMO are unmeasured.