But Does it Work?
Covid Mandate Edition
When it comes to public policy, so often those in charge are so eager to enact their ideas, they never stop to check whether their policies actually work. A recent example in the news is a story in the New Yorker questioning “What if Trigger Warnings Don’t Work”
Trigger warning and safety culture in general has become all the rage on college campuses. They aim is to better serve students by protecting them from words and images which may provoke negative reactions, but new reserach from Harvard shows these policies might do more harm than good. They should have just asked me, after reading the fantastic book “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt the fact trigger warnings don’t work just seems obvious.
Other example might be affirmative action policies. Some might think they are well meaning and good in theory, but as Thomas Sowell says, “The dirty little secret about affirmative action is that it doesn’t work.” He goes on to explain that these policies have both postive and negative effects, but the negative effects just get ignored by those seeking to enact these policies. If we faced the facts we’d see that affimative action “does little or nothing for most of the groups supposedly benefiting.”
These examples get me thinking about the policies our leaders have enacted to battle Covid, in particular the mask and vaccines mandates. Our leaders seem so eager to put these polcies into place, have we actually taken the time to see if they actually work?
Our friends in Northern Europe provide us with a great example:
Below is a graph showing daily Covid ICU patients(per capita) since the beginning of summer among all Northern European nations for which there is data. Just ONE of these nations currently has a mask mandate and is also the only nation with a vaccine passport required for entry.
All of the other countries either dropped whatever mask mandates they had this summer or never mandated masks to begin with. None of the other nations currently mandate vaccines for entry or for any internal purposes.
Can you figure out which country currently has the mandates?
Well, if you guessed Germany, you'd be correct!
That's right, the country that currently has the highest Covid ICU levels in Northern Europe, is also the only country in that region of the world still clinging to a mask mandate, and also the country leaning the farthest into vaccine mandates/passports.
So do these mandates work? Doesn't look like they do, does it...
These mandates are a major violation of our civil liberties, but we are told they are vital and necessary to keep us safe. If they are so vital, how is an example like the one above even possible? Shouldn't we be more sure these violative measures truly are needed before we mandate them?
Will the US learn from this?, that's doubtful as not even the counties on this list can. Within the UK, Scotland and Wales begin vaccine mandates for crowded events in the coming days and weeks, and England and Northern Ireland haven't ruled them out either.
Maybe, instead, these nations ought to wait first and see if it makes a difference elsewhere. Like say for instance in Israel, the country that might be going the farthest down the covid mandate path.
Welp... Anyway 0 and 2...