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I’m getting a surprising amount of push-back on my blog post that prompted Mr. S__ to e-mail me.
Mr. S__:
You charge me with being “irresponsible [and] even treacherous” for posting the video in which Konstantin Kisin offers explanations for why many people are skeptical of the Covid vaccines [2].
I plead not guilty.
Explanation is not endorsement. For example, in my teaching and writing I often explain how governments’ ability to borrow money combines with perverse political incentives to cause governments to spend excessively. But my explanation is emphatically no endorsement either of deficit financing or of profligate government spending.
The same logic applies to explanations of vaccine hesitancy. This hesitancy, being real, warrants rational explanation. And the reasons that Kisin offers for this hesitancy strike me as being far more plausible than the mainstream media’s lazy ‘explanation’ that vaccine hesitancy is rooted overwhelmingly in the stupidity and selfishness of knuckle-draggers prone to support Trump.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030