In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevitably result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms, is foundational to public policy debates — except when it comes to COVID, where it has been bizarrely declared off-limits.
If we treated car safety the same absolutist way that we treat COVID safety, we would ban automobiles.
In the above video (min 22) Greenwald points out that we are entirely ignoring the mental health damage being done by lockdowns, especially the mental distress and damage caused when children are prevented from attending school in person. That said, don’t ignore the small total deaths by COVID among children, even in the era of the Delta Variant.
[Supplemented August 31, 2021] Krystal and Saagar of Breaking Points discuss the insanity of the refusal to conduct cost-benefit analyses re COVID issues. This is the same point made by Glenn Greenwald and it is a excellent discussion. Go to 18 min mark:
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