Sins of omission vs sins of commission

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

To be clear, public health officials are encouraging additional vaccinations. But they don’t seem to realize how much their own ostensibly “careful” rhetoric makes vaccination sound unappealing. “Not talking up the vaccines” is a sin of omission, not a sin of commission, and so it is tolerated and is not a major issue for public debate.

Should public officials be allowed, indeed encouraged, to treat sins of commission and omission so differently, as private citizens (myself included) typically do?

I live near Arlington National Cemetery, where approximately 400,000 veterans (and family members) are buried. I suspect they would not care so much whether their deaths were the result of errors of commission or omission. Did a commanding general order a hill to be charged that should have been left alone? Or did he make the mistake of not charging a hill that could have been taken?

Most citizens care about the total number of military casualties from a battle and are only modestly concerned about the details of the mistakes that caused them. That seems like the right and rational attitude. Perhaps it is also the correct attitude for the war against the coronavirus — that is, an overriding concern with casualties and outcomes, regardless of the kind of error that led to them.

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