Long time reader of The Economist here - nearly 200 years old, still going strong as a magazine with indepth coverage and reporting of the world (or "newspaper" as they call themselves).
They are very much a PMC outlet so I've generally not been surprised by their opinions on COVID, but the latest issue has really shocked me.
It's basically a paean to vaccine mandates and a lead story is "Why America Needs Vaccine Mandates", praising Biden and saying Republican opposition is completely wrong headed.
More than that it literally has the line somewhere (the subtitle to another article I think): "Coercion by governments has a role to play in public health".
I actually had to double-check I was reading the weekly email from The Economist and not something else.
How can they write a line like that with a straight face and claim to be newspaper promoting liberal Englightenment values??
It's like the ACLU (probably posted here before) which wrote reports in 2008/9 (swine flu time) and 2015 arguing strongly against vaccine mandates for many of the reasons we discuss here, but is now strongly *in favour* of coercive vaccine mandates and has filed a pro-mandate lawsuit arguing that vaccine mandates further freedom and written an op-ed in the New York Times making the same argument and quietly buried its own 2008 and 2015 reports (incidentally, the NYT op-ed was published a couple of days before the Biden vaccine mandate speech - somehow I don't think that was a coincidence).
The Economist
They are very much a PMC outlet so I've generally not been surprised by their opinions on COVID, but the latest issue has really shocked me.
It's basically a paean to vaccine mandates and a lead story is "Why America Needs Vaccine Mandates", praising Biden and saying Republican opposition is completely wrong headed.
More than that it literally has the line somewhere (the subtitle to another article I think): "Coercion by governments has a role to play in public health".
I actually had to double-check I was reading the weekly email from The Economist and not something else.
How can they write a line like that with a straight face and claim to be newspaper promoting liberal Englightenment values??
It's like the ACLU (probably posted here before) which wrote reports in 2008/9 (swine flu time) and 2015 arguing strongly against vaccine mandates for many of the reasons we discuss here, but is now strongly *in favour* of coercive vaccine mandates and has filed a pro-mandate lawsuit arguing that vaccine mandates further freedom and written an op-ed in the New York Times making the same argument and quietly buried its own 2008 and 2015 reports (incidentally, the NYT op-ed was published a couple of days before the Biden vaccine mandate speech - somehow I don't think that was a coincidence).