You are misconstruing Hanson. He's not saying that we should mass-variolate tomorrow. He just wants it to be legal for such experiments to be tried (including e

You are misconstruing Hanson. He's not saying that we should mass-variolate tomorrow. He just wants it to be legal for such experiments to be tried (including experiments with unproven vaccines). There are doctors and domain experts who are willing to try this approach, and there are volunteers who are willing to be infected. The problem is that our institutions have made such trials illegal. It looks like at least half the population will contract this disease over the next couple of years. Around 0.5% of those will die. If we wait until an extremely safe vaccine is mass produced, far more lives will be lost than if we use methods that the authorities consider unsafe. The main issue seems to be that people attribute COVID-19 deaths to nature, while they blame any experimental immunity deaths on the researchers. It's the same logic that anti-vaxxers use. Yes, some vaccines do have side-effects and every once in a while, someone does die from them. But that's a far better outcome than the disease itself, so we accept the tradeoff. As I said, in this emergency, around 0.5% of people infected will die. That means that a treatment with a 0.1% mortality rate would reduce overall deaths by 4x! That's a far more effective intervention than say... ventilators (which only reduce mortality by around 20%). Yet no government will allow volunteers to get a treatment with such a high mortality rate, so we're all stuck with "natural" infection and its 0.5% mortality. This is peacetime thinking in the middle of a war. It should be clear by now that our institutions have failed us. The CDC & FDA forbade researchers from testing for a month. It's only because some researchers decided to break the law that we discovered community spread when we did.[1] The Surgeon General repeatedly told the public that masks don't work.[2][3] The WHO said the same thing.[4][5] If we judged these institutions by the same standard that people in this thread are using for Robin Hanson, we'd want to drastically curtail their power and allow for more experiments. That's exactly what Hanson is proposing. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de... 2. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160 https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321... 3. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1245697453413851136 https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12456974534138511... 4. https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234095938555260929 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234095938555260929 5. https://twitter.com/WHOWPRO/status/1243171683067777024 https://twitter.com/WHOWPRO/status/1243171683067777024