The Opportunity Costs of Having a Big Debate

Relitigating every expert consensus is going to be exhausting.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

As the Trump 2.0 transition moves merrily along, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is re-acquiring the muscle memory of political life under Trump 1.0. One of the recurring problems is that unrelenting geyser of bullshit that makes it extremely difficult to focus any intellectual firepower on any one particularly objectionable thing. Pete Hegseth’s sexual assaults indiscretions and heavy drinking distract from his complete lack of managerial experience — not to mention the dubious qualifications of Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence, not to mention the absurdity of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.

This does not mean Trump will succeed in getting all of his nominees confirmed by the U.S. Senate. It does mean, however, that litigating each transgression that Trump and his MAGA minions commits will be exhausting.

For Trump’s supporters, however, this has all been great. Last month, the Guardian’s Chris McGreal reported on how Trump voters really want to see the federal government disrupted:

In the American heartland, they’re excited. Finally, say voters who put Donald Trump into the White House for a second time, they are about to get the president they wanted all along.

Even as leading Democrats decry Trump’s cabinet nominations as “agents of his contempt, rage and vengeance”, the former and future president’s supporters are interpreting the selections as evidence that he has finally broken free of the Washington establishment….

Neil Shaffer, chair of the Republican party in Howard county, Iowa, which twice voted for Barack Obama but has swung ever more to Trump with each passing election, has never been an enthusiast for the former president even if he voted for him three times.

“This time around I was still a little lukewarm on the whole thing but I’m very impressed with the people he’s surrounded himself with, especially Tulsi Gabbard and Bobby Kennedy and Elon Musk. With each one of these people there’s a big, big part of their appointment that is reforming and streamlining,” said Shaffer, who works in water conservation for the state.

“I like the idea of bringing people from outside government to look at this with eyes from the real world not Washington DC. Washington DC is not the real world. It’s a made-up puppet regime of dark shadows. You’ve got the military-industrial complex, big pharma, big agriculture pulling all the levers. They want all that money. It’s why we got the way we are with our food. I’m actually mystified that he’s this well organized, that all these names are coming out so quickly.”….

Bo Copley, a former miner in West Virginia who now works as a salesman, said he was disappointed that Trump did not behave with more dignity during his first term. He’s not confident that will change but thinks the former president has learned from other mistakes, principally in who he appoints to positions of power.

“Opponents would consider them radical but for the people who support him, he’s putting people in place who will help him get the job done. There are people that would shake up the establishment in Washington DC. We’re not looking for lobbyists to be in these positions. We’re not looking at people from big pharma to be in these positions,” he said.

The most disruptive part of RFK Jr.’s ascension has been his hostility to vaccinations. RFK Jr. has articulated the belief, for example, that vaccines are the cause of autism. Last summer he told Fox News host Jesse Watters “I do believe that autism does come from vaccines.” Trump’s nominee to be the next head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention holds this same belief. In recent interviews Trump has said something similar. And last week we learned that “the lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine,” according to the New York Times’ Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg.

These are not examples of vaccine skepticism — they are literally attempts at vaccine denialism. But I would be willing to bet that the folks in the Guardian story would be enthusiastic about this kind of disruptive behavior. This is certainly what Republican Senator-elect Jim Banks told CNN’s Manu Raju over the weekend, stating, “This country is ready for a big debate about vaccines.”

A lot of prominent Trump supporters are big fans of the “let’s have a debate!” approach to challenging epistemological givens. Surely, they argue, if the proponents of the expert consensus are correct, they should not be afraid to debate that point in a transparent manner.

Now in some instances there might be some probative value in agreeing to such discourse. But when it comes to vaccines and public health, there are two big problems.

First, even agreeing to a debate can be spun as a political concession. The very structure of a debate is that both sides possess at least some validity to their positions. There are times, however, when the science is sufficiently settled such that the debate can be closed.

On the polio vaccine, for example, the Washington Post’s Philip Bump provides the following:¹

From 1910 to 1950, more than 376,000 Americans were afflicted with polio, with nearly 49,000 dying from the paralyzing disease. Then, in 1955, the polio vaccine was announced and approved. From 1956 to 1970, there were about 41,200 infections and about 2,000 deaths. From 1971 to 2000, 287 cases and 102 deaths. Since then? Essentially nothing at all.

This is why polio is such a good example. There was a lot of polio, with 1 out of every 2,700 Americans infected in 1952. Then there was a vaccine, and now there’s hardly any polio at all. So little, in fact, that one case that was identified in New York in 2022 earned national news headlines.

The man who contracted polio then was unvaccinated.

Similarly, the scientific research on whether vaccines are the cause of autism has also been settled. The Washington Post’s Lauren Weber, Lena H. Sun, and David Ovalle explained this during their assessment of myriad RFK Jr.-promoted conspiracy theories:

Because signs of autism may appear around the same time children receive the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, some parents mistakenly link the two events. Vaccine safety experts, including those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics, agree that the MMR vaccine is not responsible for recent increases in the number of children with autism.

A 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine concluded there is no link between autism and vaccination. Dozens of studies published in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals have also disproved the notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism.

The New York Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg provides an even more comprehensive rundown:

The theory that vaccines cause autism gained currency in 1998, after a British researcher published a medical journal article that purported to find a link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and autism. That article has since been retracted, and its author has been stripped of his medical license.

Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that there is no link, including a 2012 vaccine safety review by the Institute of Medicine, now known as the National Academy of Medicine, that stated, “the M.M.R. vaccine is not associated with autism.” A national study in Denmark in 2019 came to the same conclusion. Yet as recently as August, in an interview with the libertarian commentator John Stossel, Mr. Kennedy asserted, “autism is caused by vaccines.”

These are not debatable propositions. As Bump wrote, “That debate has been had. It was had decades ago, in fact, yielding enormous, undeniable health benefits.”² MSNBC’s Steve Benen adds:

At first blush, a regular person might not see Trump’s comments as especially problematic. He said he supports research and getting a definitive answer to the underlying question. What’s wrong with that?

What's wrong with that is we already have a definitive answer to the question. Trump is talking about tasking an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist with pursuing a line of inquiry as if the matter is unresolved, but qualified public health officials have known better for many years.

Agreeing to a debate on this topic is like agreeing to a debate about whether the Earth is flat. Even if there is no scientific evidence to support such an outdated worldview, the idea that a debate should be had can be enough to sow doubts about the current consensus. The entire upside to the debate strategy rests with the the conspiracy theorists.

The second problem with agreeing to a debate is that it is not cost-free. Energy and time spent on defending concepts like, “vaccines are good” cannot be devoted to other questions of public policy. Instead, advocates pushing crackpot ideas get to extend the Overton Window. Even if, for example, the debate about the polio vaccine goes nowhere, it becomes more politically acceptable to say, “sure, some vaccines are important, but surely reasonable people can agree that we should continue to ask questions about health risks to our children from so many vaccines.”

Another way to look at it: writing this newsletter means I did not write about events in Syria or South Korea or Russia or France. Those places are closer to my wheelhouse. But instead, I devoted an hour or so to relitigating a settled debate because some folks think that anything and everything should be debated.

This is all consistent with my thesis in The Ideas Industry that the barriers to entry for stupid ideas have been lowered but the barriers to exit for these same ideas have become too high.

None of this is surprising. But it is costly and tedious.

1. The idea of ending the polio vaccine was so preposterous that it actually rousted Mitch McConnell from his torpor.

2. Full disclosure: both of my children are on the autism spectrum and if it was up to me I would deploy Leslie Jones anytime I heard someone spout the “vaccines cause autism” horseshit that was discredited two decades ago.