Who was really for “focused protection of the vulnerable”?

Yes I do mean during the Covid-19 epidemic.  As a follow-up post to Alex’s, and his follow-up, here are some of the effective measures in protecting the vulnerable, or they would have been more effective, had we done them better:

1. Vaccines, including speedy approval of same.

2. Prepping hospitals in January, once it became clear we should be doing so.  That also would have limited lockdowns!  And yet we did basically nothing.

3. Speeding up and improving the research process for anti-Covid remedies and protections.

4. First Doses First, when that policy was appropriate, among other policy ideas (NYT).

5. Effective and rapid testing equipment, readily available on the market.

If you were out promoting those ideas, you were acting in favor of protecting the vulnerable.  If you were not out promoting those ideas, but instead talked about “protecting the vulnerable” in a highly abstract manner, you were not doing much to protect the vulnerable.

And here are three actions that endangered the vulnerable rather than protecting them:

5. Publishing papers suggesting a very, very low Covid-19 mortality rate, and then sticking with those results in media appearances after said results appeared extremely unlikely to be true.

6. Maintaining vague (or in some cases not so vague) affiliations with anti-vax groups.

7. Not having thought through how “herd immunity” doctrines might be modified by ongoing mutations.

Keep all that in mind the next time you hear the phrase “protecting the vulnerable.”