I seriously doubt most readers are all that vested in a SOHO debate on whether some COVID vaccine mandates are justifiable (the debate, which I clipped in Saturday's post, is available here) Megan McArdle "won" the debate. If you are not familiar with Oxford-style debate rules, (besides the organization of opening and closing statements, rebuttals, any cross-examinations, and audience questions to debaters), the winner is decided in the biggest differential in beginning and ending votes of a side by in this context audience members, Now, granted, I was somewhat vested in this debate because I knew and liked Ilya Somin and I happen to agree with the position he took--which is highly unpopular, especially among libertarians.
I do think that Somin had the heavier lift, especially in a venue (NYC) where the outgoing mayor has imposed his own unpopular private sector employer mandate. Oddly, that topic didn't surface during the debate, although Somin did repeat what he had recently written, that he thought the Biden mandates on federal employees and the military were defendable, that there were constitutional issues with hie OSHA vaccine policy mandate on large employers. And I think he is precisely correct on that score.
Nevertheless, on my debate scorecard on quite objective grounds, putting aside my personal feelings and opinions, Somin won the debate going away, and it wasn't even close. I don't have a problem with being outnumbered by people who disagree with me. I'm already outnumbered as a libertarian, and within the libertarian community I'm outnumbered on issues like abortion (I'm pro-life).
I had been somewhat familiar with Angela McArdle, a paralegal and LP activist/chair and multiple time nominee for Congress from southern California. I was trying to remember where I had recently seen her when it struck me she had been on Tom Woods' insufferably boring 2000th episode. (Woods had responded to a recent critical email where I criticized his Ron Paul worship and anti-vaxxer rubbish by canceling my email subscription and saying that he doesn't argue with "midwits". My understanding is that 'midwit' is a pejorative referring to someone of mediocre intelligence with an inflated ego. I do realize, of course, that Woods has a partnership with Ron Paul having delivered history courses for Paul's homeschooling curricula. Woods is always self-promoting; sooner or later he'll remind you he has 2 Ivy League degrees, from Harvard and a PhD from Columbia. I don't see a biography listing his career in academia, but I once stumbled across an older article listing him at the time on the faculty of a New York community college. History is probably a tough area to break into professionally; there's a reason I didn't pursue a PhD in my first loves, philosophy and mathematics. I know Brion McClanahan teaches at a community college. Ironically I think Woods initially was also a math major. I don't feel the need to promote my own record. One Dartmouth recruiter was impressed by my selection to doctoral consortia at DSI and ICIS, and a University of Washington faculty member from their technical communication program invited me to apply for a then unlisted faculty position, based strictly on my interdisciplinary publications. It seems every day I get notices of citations of journal articles and book chapters I wrote over 2 decades ago, never mind international professors asking for reprints. In my IT career as a developer and DBA I've turned around projects and solved problems other professionals couldn't; I recall one fellow programmer coming to me and asked me to read his own code because he forgot what he had done patching it 2 weeks earlier. I remember one student got freaked out when I answered his unspoken question, like I was the Amazing Kreskin. So Tom Woods with his Ivy League condescending snobbery can make his petty insults because he's not man enough to deal with criticism.)
I have to say McArdle gave one of the worst debate performances I've ever seen or heard (Trump was also fairly bad); I haven't seen every SOHO debate but probably the last dozen or so. For the most part I think I sided with the eventual winner. She immediately starts out with this purported vaccine horror story. Her whole presentation includes anti-vaxxer rubbish. At one point she's explicitly bringing up this "experimental vaccine" reference. In fact, both mRNA vaccines went through trials before emergency use approval last year, and Pfizer won full FDA approval by August. And there was yet another time where she attempted to contrast her purported health industry bona fides against a respected law school professor. (I'm mildly amused that a paralegal has the audacity to compare herself to Somin.) Somin is a bit too nice a guy to rip McArdle apart (I, for one, do not suffer fools gladly). He does point out neither of them is a credentialed epidemiologist and calls out McArdle for using unvetted data from an open database on purported vaccine side effects. And he repeatedly and correctly pointed out that by far serious hospitalizations and deaths are disproportionately from the unvaccinated.
McArdle is laughably hypocritical in accusing the government and health industry of fear-mongering while she is out there spinning antivaxxer crackpot conspiracy theories. She was out there ranting ideological talking points. And I think I would have taken a somewhat different approach than Somin, stressing the non-aggression principle from downstream propagation, antivaxxer freeloading off herd immunity, etc. Somin does bring up the precedent of Washington's smallpox inoculation mandate during the Revolutionary War (Washington himself caught the disease as a young adult, bearing lifelong scars on his nose) This was before Jenner's milestone and modern delivery systems, and the process often involved inserting a puss-soaked thread into an incision to the patient. Mass inoculation led to the effective elimination of the disease. At one point in the debate, McArdle tries to argue smallpox had mutated to an ineffective, harmless form; I don't know if she invented this rubbish on the fly or had read it from some antivaxxer source.
I don't have a transcript of the debate or I would refute each of McArdle's lies in detail. One I particularly recall was her alleged link of a vaccine shot to miscarriages. Now there are numerous studies refuting this allegation, but let me simply cite this closing statement from a New England Journal of Medicine piece:
Our study found no evidence of an increased risk for early pregnancy loss after Covid-19 vaccination and adds to the findings from other reports supporting Covid-19 vaccination during pregnancy.
