So we should look at countries where states spent less on preventing Covid and observe very high death rates, on the order of 5,000 per million, while countries that sacrificed more should have death rates much lower. A cursory look at the data find the difference is much smaller. A few hundred deaths per million is plausible, but differences of 1 thousand per million are clearly not observed. Mexico and Sweden are famous for their feeble responses but are only at 800 / million.
If you phrase the question as “if no one had done anything” than the current Covid response always looks like the best policy. But arguing that spending 10% less attention on Covid and more on Tobacco globally would have cost lives is almost impossible, because we are spending 1,000 times the effort on Covid as Tobacco. So the percentage change in Tobacco effort would be 10,000%. For this money we could go to heavy smoking countries and double their state budgets in exchange for Tobacco regulation.
So we should look at countries where states spent less on preventing Covid and observe very high death rates, on the order of 5,000 per million, while countries that sacrificed more should have death rates much lower. A cursory look at the data find the difference is much smaller. A few hundred deaths per million is plausible, but differences of 1 thousand per million are clearly not observed. Mexico and Sweden are famous for their feeble responses but are only at 800 / million.
If you phrase the question as “if no one had done anything” than the current Covid response always looks like the best policy. But arguing that spending 10% less attention on Covid and more on Tobacco globally would have cost lives is almost impossible, because we are spending 1,000 times the effort on Covid as Tobacco. So the percentage change in Tobacco effort would be 10,000%. For this money we could go to heavy smoking countries and double their state budgets in exchange for Tobacco regulation.