Marketplace of Ideas in COVID Responses

One way of gauging the current diversity of cultures is to consider the range of responses countries made to the COVID-19 pandemic.120 There was, of course, some diversity, from the ultrastrict lockdowns in China to the more moderate response in Sweden. But the range of responses was far more limited than it could have been. For example, both the Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were designed by mid-January 2020 over the course of a few days.121 Not a single country allowed human challenge trials of the many vaccines developed in 2020, where willing volunteers would be vaccinated and then deliberately infected with the coronavirus in order to very quickly test the vaccine’s efficacy. Not a single country allowed the vaccine to be bought on the free market, prior to testing, by those who understood the risks, even on the condition that they report whether they were subsequently infected.

William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future (August 16, 2022)

• marketplace of ideas