The United States suffered through two lethal waves of contagion in the past year and a half. The first was a viral pandemic that killed about 1 in 500 Americans — typically, a person over 75 suffering from other serious conditions. The second, and far more catastrophic, was a moral panic that swept the nation’s institutions.
Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom — and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. We still have no convincing evidence that the lockdowns saved lives, but lots of evidence that they have already cost lives and will prove deadlier in the long run than the virus itself.
A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness. In April 2020, John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya and other colleagues reported that the fatality rate among the infected was considerably lower than the assumptions used to justify lockdowns.
Merely by reporting data that didn’t fit the official panic narrative, they became targets of unfair online attacks by other scientists and the press. Stanford University was so cowed by the uproar that it subjected the researchers to a two-month fact-finding inquiry by an outside legal firm. The inquiry found no evidence of wrongdoing, but the smear campaign sent a clear message to scientists: Don’t question the lockdown narrative.
Editors of research journals fell into line, too. Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins with 350 publications to his name, submitted a critique of lockdowns to more than 10 journals and finally gave up. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard, had a similar experience with his article, early in the pandemic, arguing that resources should be focused on protecting the elderly.
Kulldorff joined with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford to issue a plea for “focused protection,” called the Great Barrington Declaration. They urged officials to divert more resources to shield the elderly while reopening business and schools for younger people. Though tens of thousands of other scientists and doctors went on to sign the declaration, the press caricatured it as a deadly “let it rip” strategy and an “ethical nightmare.”
Fortunately, a few leaders adopted the focused-protection strategy — most notably, in Florida. After locking down last spring, Gov. Ron DeSantis reopened businesses, schools and restaurants early and rejected mask mandates. If Florida had simply done no worse than the rest of the country during the pandemic, that would have been enough to discredit the lockdown strategy. But the outcome of this experiment was even more damning: Florida’s age-adjusted COVID mortality rate is lower than that of all but 10 other states.
“It was utterly immoral to conduct this society-wide intervention without the evidence to justify it,” Bhattacharya says. But the lockdown proponents were undeterred by the numbers in Florida, or by similar results elsewhere, including a comparable natural experiment involving European countries with the least restrictive policies. Sweden, Finland and Norway rejected mask mandates and extended lockdowns, and they have each suffered significantly less excess mortality than most other European countries.
Why did so many go so wrong for so long? The elite panic was due to two preexisting pathologies. The first is what I have called the Crisis Crisis, the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians. To keep audiences frightened around the clock, journalists seek out Cassandras with their own incentives for fearmongering: politicians, bureaucrats, activists, academics and assorted experts who gain publicity, prestige, funding and power during a crisis.
The second pathology underlying the elite’s COVID panic is the politicization of research — what I have termed the left’s war on science, another long-standing problem that has gotten much worse. Just as the progressives a century ago yearned for a nation directed by “expert social engineers,” today’s progressives want sweeping new powers for politicians and bureaucrats who “believe in science,” meaning that they use the left’s version of science to justify their edicts.
This experience should be a lesson in what not to do and whom not to trust. Don’t count on mainstream journalists and their favorite doomsayers to put risks in perspective. Don’t expect those who follow “the science” to know what they’re talking about. Science provides a description of the world, not a prescription for public policy, and specialists in one discipline don’t have the knowledge or perspective to guide society.
John Tierney is a contributing editor of City Journal, from which this column was adapted.