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On the one hand, science saved lives. Less than a year after the virus was identified, the United States had created and tested vaccines. Then it determined how to mass-produce, mass-distribute, and mass-administer them at no cost to the public—without a preexisting infrastructure in place for mass-vaccinating adults. COVID vaccines are estimated to have saved at least 3.2 million lives in the U.S. alone. These accomplishments offer hope for how quickly we can respond to the next pandemic.
On the other hand, public health officials had inadvertently leaned into a libertarian left hook. About 30 states have now passed laws limiting health authorities from imposing protective measures without permission from state legislators. “One day we’re going to have a really bad global crisis and a pandemic far worse than COVID, and we’ll look to the government to protect us, but it’ll have its hands behind its back and a blindfold on,” Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, told the Washington Post. “We’ll die with our rights on—we want liberty, but we don’t want protection.”
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