Thread by @benjaminwittes

.@Liz_Wheeler is accusing me lying about her position on smallpox vaccination mandates in our recent @Newsweek debate. All I can do is lay out the record clearly, and let readers decide whether I am mischaracterizing what she said—or whether she is.

https://twitter.com/Liz_Wheeler/status/1427762522657071123

At timestamp 20:44 of the podcast, I posed Ms. Wheeler the question of a vaccine mandate for smallpox. Smallpox killed about 30 percent of people it infected. It was wiped out through a worldwide program of vaccine mandates. I asked her: Was that wrong?
art19.com/shows/the-deba…

And if it wasn't wrong, then aren't we really arguing not about whether mandates are ever appropriate, just about when they are—ie, whether COVID is more like flu (where we don't require vaccination) or more like smallpox (where we did)?

I fully expected Ms. Wheeler to concede that a mandate was appropriate with smallpox and that the difference here is the relatively low lethality of the virus. To my surprise, that's not the position she took. Here's what she said, at timestamp 22:15.

She then went on to discuss the Tuskegee experiments, and how my position would lead to coercive measures to prevent obesity. She circled back to my smallpox question at timestamp 24:32 as follows:

Rather surprised by this concession that Ms. Wheeler would not favor a vaccine mandate even in the case of smallpox, I brought it up later in the debate. She then accused me of mischaracterizing what she had said. See the exchange beginning at timestamp 44:40.

So I posed the questionagain. At no time did she concede that a vaccine mandate was appropriate in the case of smallpox—despite subsequent invitations to do so. (See exchange at timestamp 50:00, for example.)

Once again, I invite her to do if I am misunderstanding her views.