I have a big new piece up at Arc Digital on libertarianism and the pandemic:

The COVID-19 pandemic had barely taken hold in the United States when principled libertarianism was reported to be among the early fatalities. “There are no libertarians in a pandemic,” Atlantic writer Derek Thompson quipped on Twitter on March 3. […]

But that doesn’t mean libertarians haven’t made valuable contributions to the discourse surrounding COVID. The “no libertarians in a pandemic” line was soon taken up by libertarians themselves as a sardonic response to numerous instances of government failure. In fact, libertarian criticism of the regulatory state has been frequently vindicated. Libertarians have developed ideas for how to compensate those affected by business closures, take better advantage of testing, and develop and distribute vaccines more rapidly. Libertarians can also rightly condemn some of the worst actors in the pandemic, from anti-maskers violating private property rights to the prison system’s oversight of the nation’s largest outbreaks.

There are libertarians in a pandemic, and it turns out they have some good ideas and insightful critiques.

I’ve also written a couple articles about Oregon’s vaccine rollout. A few weeks ago I covered the state’s lagging performance and a lack of flexibility that’s likely to result in wasted doses:

According to the COVID vaccine tracker maintained by Bloomberg, Oregon has administered only about a quarter of its vaccine inventory. That puts us near the very bottom of the country, ahead of only four other states. This week, the Oregonian also reported that one of Oregon’s health providers had allowed twenty-seven of those doses to go to waste because it was unable to find eligible healthcare workers to receive them. Twenty-seven doses is a tiny fraction of the state’s allocation, but every expired vaccine that goes into the trash instead of someone’s arm is a potential policy failure, so I was curious about how this happened and whether it’s likely to occur in the future.

And yesterday for Reason, I wrote about a legally dubious proposal from Oregon’s vaccine advisory committee to allocate vaccines explicitly by race:

The committee appears poised to prioritize allocation based on race, perhaps even ahead of those with chronic medical conditions. The Oregonian reports that when some members suggested prioritizing residents with relevant health conditions, a committee member representing a Native American group alleged that the committee was “dealing with our own conditioning of white supremacy as it is showing up in our decision making.” Black, indigenous, and other people of color (often abbreviated “BIPOC”) made the committee’s tentative list, with their priority vis-a-vis Oregonians at risk from chronic medical conditions to be determined later.

Also for Reason, I have a follow-up to my article on the FDA’s surprise fees on distilleries that produced hand sanitizer. That story went ridiculously viral, which thankfully brought about a happy ending: the agency was forced to reverse itself within a day.

Lastly, a reminder that you can receive regular updates and cocktail recipes from me in my Substack newsletter. It’s free and comes out semi-regularly. The latest revisits the Sloe Gin Fizz, legally permitted for the first time ever in Portland, Oregon, in a pitcher to go.