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Opinion In pursuing vaccine makers, DeSantis puts pandering before governing

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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By Megan McArdle
Columnist |
Updated December 21, 2022 at 8:00 a.m. EST|Published December 21, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EST



Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s petition for a statewide grand jury to investigate Pfizer and Moderna for “wrongdoing in Florida with respect to Covid-19 vaccines” is a political stunt, not a serious legal argument. This sort of pandering was probably inevitable, given still-simmering public anger over the pandemic. But that doesn’t make it any less depressing to read, especially given the low quality of the arguments.


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Of the public health community’s hopes that vaccines would reduce transmission, the petition says, “It is impossible to imagine that so many influential individuals came to this view on their own. Rather, it is likely that individuals and companies with an incentive to do so created these perceptions for financial gain.”
What limited imaginations the DeSantis legal team seems to have! I find it quite easy to imagine public health officials working from a combination of desperate hope and humanity’s past experience developing vaccines to virtually eliminate many deadly diseases. I also find it easy to imagine that their initial hopes might have been dashed by the emergence of more transmissible covid variants.






But then, I don’t really need to imagine it, since — apparently unlike whoever drafted this document — I was alive in 2020 and 2021 and watched the process in real time. Presumably their extreme youth also explains the poor quality of their research, their out-of-context quotations and … but no, there’s no point in dissecting it further because the purpose of this document isn’t to make an argument. It’s to make DeSantis president by exploiting populist rage about the pandemic.


Such rage, as I say, was probably unavoidable after such a singular catastrophe — much as the left became consumed by conspiracy theories about bankers in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. I spent the years after that fruitlessly arguing for a less dramatic thesis that fit better with the facts. That while there was a lot of sloppy paperwork, and some flimflammery, on the fringes of the mortgage markets, these things were a colorful sideshow to the main event, which was that everyone — home buyers, bankers and regulators — thought a sustained nationwide decline in home prices wasn’t possible because, after all, that hadn’t happened since the Great Depression. It was the same kind of thinking that made a pandemic seem impossible in March 2020.
I mostly failed to get anyone to even consider this argument for stupidity over malice. (Even now I predict that this column will generate a number of angry emails about my shilling for the banksters.) Fundamentally, humans are hardwired to look for intentionality in the world around us, a safety mechanism that keeps us on the lookout for predators. And since it’s safer to mistake a stick for a venomous snake than the reverse, our brains err on the side of seeing agency even when it’s not there, which is why someone — naming no names — once spent 15 minutes sneaking up on a coat rack that totally could have been a burglar.











Naturally, then, when there’s a disaster, we look for chicanery rather than chaos and contingency. And if we look hard enough, we’ll find it — even when it’s obvious that the key culprit is a virus.
Conservatives concede the virus, of course, but blame most of the suffering on experts who pushed bad policy and dangerous vaccines. And in fairness, they’re often right on policy — long school closures, in particular were a massive error and one that DeSantis, to his credit, didn’t persist with.
But like the left-populists before them, these populists aren’t content with an acknowledgment that various officials made mistakes under conditions of great uncertainty, or even that some of those folks were arrogant jerks who said misleading things to win internal political battles or manipulate the public into following advice we otherwise would have ignored. No, it must be a conspiracy by villains trying to line their own pockets, the sort of villains who will allow some enterprising politician to play the hero. Which is to say, the sort of villain we can punish.











After something terrible has happened, no one wants to hear that maybe all we can do is try to pick up the pieces and put our lives back together as best we can. We want to believe that we can exact justice for our suffering, because that means we have some control over the situation. Enough, even, to prevent it from happening again.
And so, ironically, DeSantis is ignoring a somewhat plausible covid conspiracy theory, the possibility of a lab leak and a Chinese government cover-up. Instead, he is asking a grand jury to investigate the pharmaceutical companies over which he actually has some jurisdiction (and no matter that they gave us what is still our most potent covid-fighting tool). It is the best — and the worst — metaphor for our era: a triumph of proximity over plausibility, of politics over policy, and of pandering over patriotism. And very possibly it will become the launching pad for America’s next president.

 
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