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Left, Right, and Center has changed up the panel again and so I'm back to listening to it. And they've currently got Megan McArdle, who is my favorite of their regular rotation of Republicans-- she's the only one who can consistently make me go "Yes, that is a point someone should consider." I don't often agree with her proposed solutions to these things, but I think about the points she raises.
And I do listen to this show because I want the weekly reminder that there are a lot of opinions in the country, many of which are people who don't agree with me.
That said, the show is fast shaping up into one that generally does badly on science. Hardly unusual for journalism-- even actual science journalism often gets science very, very wrong-- but it is a scientific fact that vaccines do not make the risk profile of COVID into something similar to the flu, which the center panelist (the center!) claimed in so many words in this week's episode. The correct policy response to the risk profile of COVID is a reasonable thing to debate (I tend to support stronger restrictions than anyone on the panel does) and thinking we should just pay the costs as a society of straight-up returning to normal is... well, terrible, but it's a political opinion... but it's disingenuous to base that on false descriptions of the science, especially with delta. And saying just blanket saying vaccines make it safe for kids to return to school and people saying otherwise is just hysteria is also ignoring a number of objective scientific facts-- kids can't be vaccinated yet and we know even vaccinated people can spread delta, so how, exactly, do you think vaccines are a silver bullet here?
If you want to make an argument that the risks of lost school are worse than the risks of COVID, well, there've been a number of people making that argument-- some of them even using actual research into mitigation strategies--but you need to acknowledge the base-level science and start from the correct premises.
"We're not seeing a lot of deaths from delta" is also disingenuous, because deaths are a lagging indicator. If there's no spike in a couple of months, then you can say it's not causing a ton of increased deaths.
And I do listen to this show because I want the weekly reminder that there are a lot of opinions in the country, many of which are people who don't agree with me.
That said, the show is fast shaping up into one that generally does badly on science. Hardly unusual for journalism-- even actual science journalism often gets science very, very wrong-- but it is a scientific fact that vaccines do not make the risk profile of COVID into something similar to the flu, which the center panelist (the center!) claimed in so many words in this week's episode. The correct policy response to the risk profile of COVID is a reasonable thing to debate (I tend to support stronger restrictions than anyone on the panel does) and thinking we should just pay the costs as a society of straight-up returning to normal is... well, terrible, but it's a political opinion... but it's disingenuous to base that on false descriptions of the science, especially with delta. And saying just blanket saying vaccines make it safe for kids to return to school and people saying otherwise is just hysteria is also ignoring a number of objective scientific facts-- kids can't be vaccinated yet and we know even vaccinated people can spread delta, so how, exactly, do you think vaccines are a silver bullet here?
If you want to make an argument that the risks of lost school are worse than the risks of COVID, well, there've been a number of people making that argument-- some of them even using actual research into mitigation strategies--but you need to acknowledge the base-level science and start from the correct premises.
"We're not seeing a lot of deaths from delta" is also disingenuous, because deaths are a lagging indicator. If there's no spike in a couple of months, then you can say it's not causing a ton of increased deaths.
