Ezra Klein writes:

If the C.D.C. had recommended better masks from the beginning, how many people would have worn them and for how long? If the Biden administration had flooded stores with cheap rapid tests, would people have used them? If boosters had been pushed earlier, and more loudly, would the United States no longer trail peer nations in vaccinations?

Put differently: How much would getting our pandemic policies right have mattered?

It’s easy to speak as if policy smoothly reshapes reality. I’m more guilty of that than most. But policy lies downstream of society. Mandates are not self-executing; to work, policies need to be followed, guidance needs to be believed. Public health is rooted in the soil of trust. That soil has thinned in America.

That isn’t to absolve policymakers of responsibility for their mistakes, but it is to wonder about the power they actually wield, in a country that led the world in vaccine development but lags Chile, Vietnam and Brazil in vaccine deployment. A recent interview with Michael Bang Petersen, a Danish political scientist, drove that point home for me. “In Denmark, people are in favor of vaccines, with more than 81 percent of adults doubly vaccinated, but also very opposed to vaccine mandates,” he told The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. “There are no political parties in Parliament that are loudly advocating for vaccine mandates.”

You know what’s better than a vaccine mandate? A society that doesn’t need one. [Continue reading…]