OK, Doomer
Maybe it’s too much to hope that government health experts have learned something in the past year about the massive unintended consequences of lockdowns and the paucity of evidence demonstrating their effectiveness. But Monday’s White House teleconference with the Biden Covid team could almost have been mistaken for a March 2020 event—complete with government doctors stoking fear, urging restrictions on liberty and not even bothering to address costs and benefits.
This column understands that infectious disease specialists focus on infectious disease. But roughly $4.5 trillion of new federal debt later, following a 29% surge in commercial bankruptcy filings, a rash of delayed non-Covid medical treatments, a lost year of classroom instruction for many students who will never get it back, and skyrocketing health claims related to self-harm among adolescents—especially in jurisdictions that maintained harsh lockdowns—it is not too much to ask disease specialists to consider the societal impact of their recommendations. Outside government, doctors generally understand they have a duty to first do no harm. Government doctors also have a basic responsibility to ensure that their public health proposals yield net benefits for society, and do not focus on one risk while ignoring all others.
On Monday government disease experts Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Rochelle Walensky reasonably and responsibly urged Americans to get vaccinated and to take care in avoiding infection. But they also went beyond reasonable admonitions, fearfully encouraging continued restrictions by state governments without even addressing the pros and cons, as if lockdowns have been proven to work and have no negative impact on public health.
The White House dubbed Monday’s teleconference a “Press Briefing by White House COVID-19 Response Team and Public Health Officials.” But like so many of the government responses of the past year, it was dedicated to the fear of Covid transmission and not to the general question of public health.
Dr. Walensky set the tone early in the discussion by saying, “I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom.”
Dr. Fauci made his case for “why we cannot pull back on our mitigation efforts.”
Then it was back to Dr. Walensky for another restrictionist pitch:
I think we are seeing that many of these states are opening up at levels that we wouldn’t necessarily recommend. I am working with the governors. I will be speaking with them tomorrow to try and buckle down on trying to refrain from opening up too fast, you know, in the context of the fact that we’re scaling up these vaccines.
Dr. Fauci agreed that “we are really doing things prematurely right now with regard to opening up.”
Dr. Walensky again promised in her communication with governors “to try and reinforce the need for these — for current restrictions to not open up.”
Yet what exactly is the scientific case against reopening and relying on individual judgment? To date, the two U.S. states with the highest total per capita Covid death tolls—New Jersey and New York—are governed by two of the most aggressive closers of activity and opportunity. You will also find the lockdowners among the states with high unemployment rates.
It’s well past time for government doctors to recognize there are consequences to their recommendations. Pediatrician Ari Joffe of the University of Alberta writes in the journal Frontiers in Public Health:
The lockdowns implemented in the name of public health entailed trade-offs that were not adequately considered... Lockdowns may prevent some COVID-19 deaths by flattening the curve of cases and preventing stress on hospitals. At the same time, lockdowns cause severe adverse effects for many millions of people, disproportionately for those already disadvantaged among us. The collateral damage included severe losses to current and future wellbeing from unemployment, poverty, food insecurity, interrupted preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic healthcare, interrupted education, loneliness and deterioration of mental health, and intimate partner violence. The economic recession has been framed as the economy vs. saving lives from COVID-19, but this is a false dichotomy. The economic recession, through austerity in government spending on the social determinants of health, can be expected to cause far more loss of life and wellbeing over the long-run than COVID-19 can. We must open up society to save many more lives than we can by attempting to avoid every case (or even most cases) of COVID-19. It is past time to take an effortful pause, calibrate our response to the true risk, make rational cost-benefit analyses of the trade-offs, and end the lockdown groupthink.
Dr. Joffe notes one cost-benefit analysis of the response to Covid-19 that “finds that lockdowns are far more harmful to public health (at least 5–10 times so in terms of wellbeing years) than COVID-19 can be.”
Is that the correct range? Let research continue and let the debate continue.
Government doctors who have been entrusted with enormous power should engage in this debate instead of ignoring it and pretending their guidance is cost-free.
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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”
