During the COVID-19 pandemic and societal panic, I reviewed ten books taking a critical look at the responses taken by this country’s politicians and public health officials. There was never any question regarding the severity of the pandemic! It was what the World Health Organization called “unprecedented in public health history.” But the many draconian and irrational policies—closing schools and churches, mandating masks and social distancing, waiting for a proven vaccine while ignoring possible therapeutics—seemed, to the scholars I reviewed, misguided and harmful. Now we are getting retrospective studies which should help us evaluate what happened and prepare for the next pandemic. Two journalists, Joe Nocera, and Bethany McLean, have written The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind (New York: Penguin Random House Publishers, c. 2023; Kindle Edition). The book’s title clearly indicates its message: those entrusted with authority to protect our health failed in almost every way, and despite its well-paid medical experts the United States dealt much more poorly with the epidemic than many other nations.
Nocera and McLean begin by citing a column in The New York Times by Bret Stephens declaring “the mask mandates did nothing.” Stephens noted that a British think tank (the Cochrane Library) specializing in “meta-analyses” found no evidence supporting wearing masks during the Covid hysteria. In fact, the Oxford University epidemiologist who led the study declared the lack of evidence was primarily the result of not doing trials. Shooting from the hip rather than carefully assessing the situation, governments acted like “headless chickens.” Though health care bureaucrats and leftist politicians have lambasted the Cochrane analysis, it became clear to Nocera and McLean that in “many ways, the mask controversy was a microcosm of the pandemic itself. During COVID-19, a mask wasn’t just a mask; it was a symbol of one’s politics. If you were a conservative, it was practically mandatory to scoff at masks as well as other mitigation measures like social distancing or lockdowns. If you were a liberal, you embraced them as lifesaving measures” (p. xi). So which side was right? The data favor the conservatives!
To provide a context for their conclusion the authors retell the history of the pandemic that hit America in 2020 when thousands of Chinese flew into the country carrying with them the deadly virus. In February the Center for Disease Control (the CDC) began distributing test kits designed to identify persons infected with the virus. “For reasons that have never been explained, the CDC decided to manufacture its own test kits, instead of sending them out to a third-party manufacturer, even though the CDC lacked manufacturing expertise” (p. 15). But these tests didn’t work well and a month later the United States still lacked any effective way to respond to Covid! This was an early indication of what would enormously compound the suffering Americans endured in months to come as a result of inept, cautious, turf-protecting bureaucrats. Relying on them the Trump administration, as well as the governors of the states, made equally misguided decisions. Shutting down all non-essential activities promised to slow the spread of the disease but precipitated calamitous consequences. The edicts “became equated with ‘following the science.’ It was anything but. Yes, there were computer models suggesting lockdowns would be effective, but there were never any actual scientific studies supporting the strategy. It was a giant experiment, one that would bring devastating social and economic consequences” (p. 33).
The social-distancing prescription was rooted in a decision made during the George W. Bush administration following the advice a few influential health care officials. They used a model built by a high school student, Laura Glass, “that was “developed with the help of her father, Robert, a scientist at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque,” suggesting “that simply keeping people away from each other was as effective in preventing infection as a vaccine” (p. 37). This proposal was endorsed by the Bush administration, though several scientists evaluating it opposed its implementation, saying: “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe” (p. 39). So it happened—a “manageable epidemic” became a national catastrophe.
It was also a worldwide catastrophe, fueled by “experts” such as Neil Ferguson, a famous epidemiologist who headed the infectious disease department at Imperial College London. He had built mathematical models designed to cope with pandemics such as the bird and swine flues in 2005 and 2009. Those “estimates were wildly off the mark,” but Ferguson still enjoyed world-wide respect and both President Trump and Anthony Fauci apparently feared that his dire warnings regarding Covid might be right. Given his experience Fauci surely knew “that lockdowns as a mitigation measure had no basis in science,” but he insisted on them anyway. Citing Ferguson and Fauci, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, moved quickly to fully lock down virtually everything deemed non-essential, making it the first state to do so. Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, however, “feared that a lengthy lockdown would level the economy” and that the people’s psyche would be harmed. Though he was savagely criticized by many, he kept his state relatively “open” during the crisis and it fared much better than California.
One reason requiring social distancing, lock-downs, and masks proved ineffective was they failed to tackle some of the real problems associated with COVID-19. In particular, it became early evident that the virus mainly attacked persons with underlying health issues such as old age, diabetes, kidney disease, and obesity. People in their 70s had 10 times the mortality as those in their 50s and 100 times as those in their 20s! Nursing homes were particularly vulnerable and recorded extraordinary numbers of deaths.
The elderly were quite susceptible while young folks rarely suffered. It would have made sense to require the elderly to stay at home but younger folks should have continued working and attending school. Yet there was no real effort to differentiate between these endangered groups.
Compounding the purely medical problems were financial developments that left the nation prostrate. Particularly affected were were the blue collar workers employed by “essential” businesses such as Walmart, Kroger grocery stores, and marijuana shops. Thousands of small restaurants were forced to close and little aid actually helped them. Congress appropriated lots of money, but as one would expect much of was misappropriated and misused. Hundreds of investigators tried to deal with the rampant fraud, but some $80 billion probably went to folks who gamed the system. “There were all kinds of ways to get one’s hands on the government’s pandemic funds illegally.” Indeed, The Christian Science Monitor called it the “biggest fraud in US history” (p. 394).
Thus the “dissidents” who questioned many of the restrictions imposed on the public appear quite clairvoyant. Jay Bhattacharya, recently appointed to head the National Institutes of Health, had long admired D. A. Henderson, who had helped eradicate smallpox in large part by persuading the public to cooperate with public health leaders. This Anthony Fauci failed to do. Wearing masks to restaurants but taking them off while eating or keeping kids at home when no kids were dying of Covid struck many folks as nonsensical! “Where the public health experts had failed most of all was what Henderson had always understood: they couldn’t control human behavior. As a point of comparison, Bhattacharya liked to use the example of Sweden. Sweden was controversial because it eschewed lockdowns and kept its society running. But when vaccines became available, ‘Sweden got 97 percent of adults to take the vaccine without any mandates,’ Bhattacharya said. ‘Why? Because people trusted the government. And the reason they trusted the government was that officials were honest with what they knew and what they didn’t know. And they didn’t force people to do things that were outside their capacity to manage” (p. 97).
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One of the most prominent “dissidents” questioning ways the COVID-19 pandemic was handled was Kentucky’s Senator Rand Paul. As a medical doctor he could delve into the data and from the beginning doubted the pronouncements of health care bureaucrats. He also found the journalists covering the pandemic sadly ignorant, able only to repeat what they were told by alleged experts. Thus the Washington Post “massively” misinformed the public, fueling the panic by misreporting the pandemic. In Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up (Washington, D.C.: Regnerry Publishing, c. 2023; Kindle Edition), Paul endeavors to show how the deadly virus originated in a Chinese laboratory that had been significantly funded by America’s Anthony Fauci. The head of the Center for Disease Control, Robert Redfield, early suspected this. A distinguished virologist who “was uniquely qualified to delve into the origin of COVID-19,” he insisted “the lab-leak hypothesis” should be taken seriously. Amazingly, he was abruptly excluded from the “Fauci led meetings concerning COVID-19” (p. 5). Fauci was determined to stamp out any hint that his “gain of function” research might have led to the world-wide pandemic!
Fauci insisted the Covid virus came from animals, probably bats. But thousands of animals in China have been tested and no animal host has been found. If the virus originated in bats it would have easily infected bats in labs, but it didn’t. Redfield suspected a lab leak because careful investigation showed that its genetic code was generally found in humans but not bats. When he saw this, Nobel laureate David Baltimore, a famous virologist and president emeritus of CalTech, told his “wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus” (p. 64). Though Fauci knew this (as emails now prove) he did everything possible to deny it. Almost as soon as the pandemic began, “all of those we might label Fauci’s ‘yes-men’ were frantically worried that COVID-19 came from a lab—worried because they all knew Fauci’s NIAID had been funding the Wuhan lab for years. COVID did not appear to be a product of nature. COVID appeared to be manipulated by scientists” (p. 15).
This Fauci could not abide, so he organized a “formal cover-up” to protect himself. This included the publication of an allegedly scholarly study, “Proximal Origin” written by Fauci’s associates. “The paper was used as justification by the mainstream media to either ignore or dismiss anyone arguing that COVID-19 might have come from the Wuhan lab. For the next year and a half, it would appear to the world that these scientists were united and had no doubt that the virus came from nature. Only a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit would finally reveal that all five of the authors of “Proximal Origin” had initially concluded, after reviewing the genetic sequence of COVID-19, that the virus was not consistent with natural evolution” (p. 43). Though hidden for a time by the nation’s media, we now know the truth, thanks to an internet group DRASTIC—-Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19. The Covid virus originated in the Wuhan lab. “The evidence for a lab leak is withering and relentless. No animals in the wet market had COVID-19. No stored blood had antibodies to COVID-19. COVID-19 didn’t struggle to infect humans as previous coronaviruses had. And the pandemic coincidentally started just steps away from the largest collection of coronaviruses in the world? Perhaps the simplest answer is the most accurate—that the virus was indeed a leak from one of the many experimental coronavirus labs in Wuhan” (p. 66).
Sadly: “The level of misinformation assailing the American people in 2020 was staggering” (p. 142). Senator Paul tried to correct this. He sought to help the nation understand surgical masks, noting that they had proved ineffective in “randomized controlled studies around the world,” including an early Danish publication. There was also “a large, randomized-controlled mask study of influenza from Vietnam that showed the cloth mask–wearing group had more infections than the control group wearing no masks. As Dr. A. A. Chughtai and his coauthors concluded, ‘Rates of infection were consistently higher among those in the cloth mask group than in the medical mask and control groups.’ I would point out that the pores of a surgical mask were six hundred times larger than the virus. But, to these young nonscientists, I was portrayed as the person who did not ‘believe the science’” (p. 120). So too he tried to persuade people that natural immunity to the virus would quickly develop. Neither the Trump administration nor Tony Fauci believed this, though in time it became clear that natural immunity was better than vaccines. Dr. Paul sought to get at the truth, but his “calls for a series of hearings on the danger of gain-of-function research, my entreaties to investigate the origins of the virus, my pleas for a major investigation of a virus that killed at least six million people worldwide were met only with resistance from the Democrats in charge. On my own, I was able to, under considerable duress, get the CIA, DOE, and FBI to give me briefings, but not one Democrat senator attended” (p. 56).
Much of Deception results from interactions between Senator Paul and Anthony Fauci in Senate hearings. As Fauci repeatedly testified Paul became persuaded he was lying, trying to protect himself and his friends. “Indeed, Anthony Fauci was turning out to be more of a disaster for the country than COVID itself.” (p. 193). He and his wife earned $750,000 a year and “his fortune doubled during the pandemic,” swelling to more than $10 million by 2021. (Some of this wealth came from getting million dollar honoraria from giving speeches). Consequently Senator Paul joins Robert F.. Kennedy, Jr. in thinking Fauci a devious Machiavellian who deeply damaged the United States. Consequently, this country, totaling four percent of the world’s population, suffered 14.5 percent of total COVID deaths. Therapeutic medicines were available that could have helped thousands of people, but these treatments were suppressed by Fauci and his Big Pharma collaborators.
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A former head of the FDA, Scott Gottlieb, wrote Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic (New York: HarperCollins, c. 2021; Kindle Edition). His experience with federal bureaucracies along with his medical expertise provided him a unique vantage point, though some of the text is overly-detailed and difficult for non-scientists to grasp. It’s also clear that he thinks things would have been better if he had been in charge! But what’s manifestly evident is this: America was not prepared to deal with the epidemic and manifestly failed to do so.
Gottlieb provides us a careful accounting of COVID-19’s outbreak and spread, embracing the theory that it probably originated in a Chinese bat. Certainly the coronavirus came from China, but responding to it was hindered by the Chinese government, which was trusted much too much by the World Health Association and its American allies The author explained why our testing mechanisms initially failed—largely as a result of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Center for Disease Control blundering around and failing “to roll out a diagnostic test that could screen for the coronavirus, leaving the country dangerously blind to its spread” (p. 62). Gottlieb devoted considerable sections of the book to the this issue—better tests more quickly developed and distributed would have significantly helped us deal with the coronavirus. But the CDC refused to work work with other labs, limiting “the agency to sequencing hundreds of cases a month when it was necessary to sequence many thousands of samples to understand the patterns of spread” (p. 246).
In addition, for nearly two months the nation’s premier health experts assumed COVID-19 was quite like the flu, when in fact it was significantly different and needed different strategies to address it. Thus there were detailed instruction regarding sanitizing surfaces and wearing gloves when such endeavors accomplished nothing since the virus spread through the air! “Americans wrongly shunned food deliveries, wiped down their groceries unnecessarily, and focused limited effort and resources on mitigating the wrong drivers of spread” (p. 212). “Social distancing” was curiously arbitrary, ranging from six feet in the U.S. to three feet in many other countries. Earlier flu epidemics had hit younger people the hardest, building a rationale for closing schools. But early on we knew younger folks suffered very little even if infected with Covid. School teachers, mainly young or middle aged, were at virtually no health risk, but the teachers’ unions forced the politicians to close school! Bars and restaurants were summarily closed, though persuasive data for such moves were never presented. Officials just had a “hunch” it would help! Masks, Gottlieb thought, helped some—but they needed to be the high-quality N95 rather than cheaper cloth devices.
Given what we should have learned during the epidemic, Gottlieb sets forth a number of suggestions for both health care professionals and political policy makers.
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One of the books published soon after the pandemic struck was The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Kindle Edition, c. 2020), written by Jay Richards (a business professor at the Catholic University of America), Douglas Axe (a biology professor at Biola University), and William Briggs (an economist who’s published over a hundred scholarly papers). Seeking to evaluate the evidence and analyze the repercussions of the pandemic, they sought “to sift prudence from propaganda.” And they wrote, George Gilder said, “the definitive account of the most egregious policy blunder in the history of American government.”
The authors doubted the doomsday forecasts that predicted the coronavirus would claim 40 million lives worldwide, including 2.2 million in the U.S., if nothing were done to slow the spread. It was as evident then as it is now that “these models were so wrong they were like shots in the dark. After a few months, even the press admitted as much. But by then vast damage had been done” (p. xiv). But the models’ proponents, rather than confessing and correcting their errors, “began to massage the data” and rationalize their declarations. In this they were aided by a “gullible, self-righteous, and weaponized media that spread their projections far and wide. The press carpet-bombed the world with stories about impending shortages of hospital beds, ventilators, and emergency room capacity. They served up apocalyptic clickbait by the hour and the ton” (p. xv).
Rightly assessed, the authors said, the COVID-19 pandemic could have been absorbed as part of life and addressed aggressively with every medical resource. But hysteria set in and we granted “emergency powers” to various authorities not because of “a catastrophe that had just happened, but rather a prediction about what might happen” (p. 17). Most predictions failed and we endured a “pandemic of panic” spurred along by semantic equivocations. For instance, it was decided to report that anyone dying with the virus would be identified as dying from the virus! Yet the CDC reported that in only 7 percent of the victims was the virus the sole cause of death! An Italian study of 355 COVID-19 victims showed that they “averaged 79.5 years of age and were in poor health. More than a third had diabetes, and just under a third had ischemic heart disease. A quarter had atrial fibrillation. A fifth had active cancer, and over a sixth had either dementia or a history of stroke. Of the 355 people, only three were in good health before catching the coronavirus” (p. 57). Inflating numbers proved popular in the media, so the numbers of positive tests were called cases and easily conflated with significant infections.
The authors examined public health policies (i.e. lockdowns, distancing, masks) and showed how problematic and potentially harmful they were. We had no evidence these endeavors actually helped curtail, much less vanquish, COVID-19. Yet we have ample evidence showing they harmed great numbers of people (students and middle aged adults who were hardly at risk of dying). And the harms were enormous!