Maybe I can help bring you together...
The problem is that you need to be aware of when these experts start wandering outside their field of study. Epidemiology tells you how a disease spreads, the rates of infection and possible prevention techniques. What it does NOT tell you is how to make policy recommendations for government.
This is where Fauci completely jumped the shark. Risk is an individual calculation. To put this in economic terms, Fauci (and his ilk) is suffering from the pretense of knowledge. They cannot possibly know the competing factors of each individual to understand which prevention measures are better for them - understanding that some prevention measures may do more harm to the individual than good.
Had Fauci remained within his field of study and informed the public of his understanding of the epidemiology of this pandemic, then maybe he'd garner more respect. As it stands, he succumbed to the folly of most in the intelligentsia and thought since he was so informed in one arena, he could make wide-reaching edicts that affected other arenas of individual lives.
You could take the exact same epidemiological information and draw completely different policy recommendations. For example: inform the public that the best survival strategies are to boost their immune systems to fight off the virus, encourage regular exercise, encourage nursing homes to isolate the vulnerable, or simply stress reducing techniques that boost your immune system (as opposed to fear which lowers people's immune system). It would not be difficult to argue that these policy recommendations would have saved more lives and would not have had the economic destruction of Fauci's recommendations.
It's very important that when relying upon the "experts", you recognize where their expertise lies and when they have moved beyond their expertise.
You're quite right that policy prescriptions about covid must rely on certain assumptions about risk tolerance, which are subjective. Likewise, the state must, as in other circumstances, make assumptions about time preference. For instance, it is not objectively wrong to value next week over all other futures; on a very high time-preference view, there is no reason to oppose having the Fed print and send to each American $1 million, or $1 billion, etc; that would be a
fun week (but with very un-fun consequences that people of varying time preference might view and discount differently). Similarly, if it were known that a week without covid restrictions would both result in great fun and then, later, massive death, or that there were some probability of that outcome, one could argue, either on time preference or risk tolerance grounds, that such a policy would be benevolent: or not, depending on one's preferences. However, those extremes aside, which are generally insane, the state should apply a reasonable time preference and a reasonable risk tolerance in setting its policies. And, if the state weren't also fixing prices in credit markets, it would actually be possible to know what those reasonable figures are, but I digress.
So, the long and the short of it is that I will make my own judgments as to risk tolerance or time preference.
All I need Fauci et al to do is tell me what is in fact, to the best of their knowledge, likely to happen.
And they do a good job of that, IMO.
