When Wokeness Kills
How equity trumped saving lives
Megan McArdle has a new piece in The Washington Post recounting a chilling episode from the early days of the pandemic. Faced with clear data on how to save the most lives, health officials instead opted for a policy that sacrificed lives in the name of equity. It’s a maddening, almost unbelievable example of how extreme wokeness can lead good people to do bad things.
Here’s an excerpt from the piece; you can read the whole thing here.
In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe.
But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.
In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.
Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.” Only after a backlash did sanity prevail.
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Related Reading From the Archive
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The entrepreneur and essayist Paul Graham has a fantastic new essay on the origins and evolution of wokeness. Below is my summary of the key points, along with a selection of excerpts. It’s only the bird’s-eye view, though, so I’d strongly encourage you to read the essay in full - almost every sentence is informative and…
Ten New Findings on Wokeness
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Welcome to my latest Linkfest: a collection of links to papers and articles that have grabbed my attention in the weeks since I published my last Linkfest. It’s been a particularly busy few weeks for new research, so I’ve got lots of great studies to share. Topics covered include how social media distorts our view of public opinion, the tendency to divide the world into vulnerable groups and invulnerable groups, sex differences in wokeness, six social-science myths, and some recent advances in AI.
Not very surprised. I somewhat reduced much of the Covid action by “professionals” against common sense and years of science to
1- money
2- power/control
3- virtue signaling.
That article addressed #3. I once read a report that showed who benefitted the most financially from the “vaccine” (that didn’t do what a vaccine does).
#1 Biden
#2 Trump
#3 Fauci
This was non-partisan scheming.
Maybe the most fascinating part of this discovery was that we have seen many choose money over people’s lives and power/control over people’s lives (still not ok, but historically present), but it is not so common to see someone choose virtue signaling over people’s lives.
The need to make themselves feel better about their miserable existence taking priorities over death of humans- just baffles me.