Subject: Re: How Hard do Democrats Fight RFK, Jr. Appointment_Q
This isn’t how it went. Republicans actually looked at data on transmission rates and on the rates of infection in schools in places like Europe and on the quarantined cruise ship and said… hold on a sec. We’re doing a lot of damage for little benefit ESPECIALLY after the vaccines came out.

That's exactly what I said. The Democrats and Republicans reached different conclusions on how to balance avoided illness vs. the damage caused by NPI measures. A complicated and difficult question under any circumstances, made especially so by the fact that there was massive uncertainty about both sides of that equation. To an approximation, Democrats generally leaned towards landing on the side of trying to avoid illness spread as much as possible - to use your formulation, that even "little benefit" is worth a great deal of cost when death is on the line. Republicans landed differently, believing that the "lot of damage" was not worth the "little benefit."

They also disagreed on the empirical questions of how much avoided illness you got with any particular NPI protocol - and how much damage was caused by those NPI measures. But fundamentally, they also disagreed on where to strike the balance as well.

My point still stands - those positions are now very much baked into the political philosophies of the parties, which vastly reduces the ability of the federal government to steer pandemic response. Blue states are going to go hardcore fighting disease spread regardless of what RFK Jr. might want to do; red states are going to minimize NPI restrictions even if there's a Democrat in the WH and a fervent pandemic fighter heading the HHS.