In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe.
But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.
In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.
Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.”
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Waiting for an analysis of the long term costs of taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”
