The “Let It Rip” Canard: Reflections on Jay Bhattacharya

Early in the Covid period, the skeptics of government closures and universal quarantines were denounced as favoring a policy of “let it rip.” The phrase has been in use since the 19th century. It is apparently drawn from experience with steamships. When you released power to its maximum extent, it made a ripping sound. 

The implication is that when you let it rip, you let go of all controls and just wait to see what happens. 

Think about the application to infectious disease, at least in the context of the debate over lockdowns. The theory is that if you don’t force people to stay home, force businesses to close, and force schools and churches to shut down, people will mindlessly move about here and there and cause infection to spread wildly. No one will have a clue about what to do about it. 

The implication is that people are unbearably stupid, lack all personal incentive to protect themselves, and somehow cannot but be as reckless as possible. There will be no strategies, no methods of mitigation, no therapeutics, no limits on the spread of incurable sickness. 

We need geniuses like Anthony Fauci to give us police-enforced guidance in order to stay safe from the consequences of our own choices. We don’t have brains. We don’t have habits born of experience. We don’t have any social mechanisms embedded in our traditions. We don’t have anything. 

We are worse than an anthill, which at least has a rules-based order born of instinct. In this view, human behavior is purely randomized and rote, moving about here and there, fully unable to process information about guidance, lacking completely in any capacity to be careful, wise, or otherwise govern ourselves. 

This is the essence of the push for lockdowns. Anything less than totalitarian control of the human population amounts to utter chaos in which the virus rules us all whereas the geniuses at the controls of government power know all things. This is the essential worldview of all those who said that lockdown opponents merely want to let the virus rip. 

This was of course the core criticism of the Great Barrington Declaration of which NIH Director-nominee Jay Bhattacharya was the main author. It advocated no such thing as “let it rip.” Instead, it called for public health to recognize the existence of human intelligence and consider the costs of overriding it with police-state edicts that ruin businesses and lives. It came out six months after lockdowns began and already revealed themselves to be devastating. There should not have been anything even slightly controversial about the statement. 

And yet truly there was something about those times that tempted intellectuals toward grave extremes of utopian thinking. Remember the “Zero Covid” movement? Talk about insane. 

I just read an outrageous paper in Frontiers of Health (date March 2021!) that claimed to have the magical solution to Covid. The plan would defeat the disease in “one day” by ordering simultaneous universal testing, forcing all positive tests to isolate, and monitoring all public spaces with concentration camp guards. The authors proposed this seriously, forgetting that a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir cares nothing for such antics. To have signed one’s name to such a suggestion should confine one to a lifetime of ill repute as an intellectual. 

There is also the slight problem of human rights and freedom. But, hey, anyone who yammered on about those topics was then accused of being an advocate of “let it rip.” 

The truth is that we do have intelligence and brains. Older people have always known to avoid large crowds in flu season. Pick up any geriatric magazine and you can discover that this is true. Even our habits of the season reflect that. Intergenerational family units tend to stay indoors as we enter winter months and get out and about in the spring when threats of infectious disease die down. “Focused protection” is embedded in the habits of the calendar year. 

We are also capable of reading data on risk demographics. We knew from February 2020 that Covid posed a medically significant risk mainly to the aged and infirm. There was never a serious risk associated with beach parties or schooling. We knew this at least intuitively, and vast numbers of people also knew to disregard the crazy fear-mongering from the top that was designed to prepare the population for the shot. 

Society knew better than its managers. It is this way in every sector of life in a world in which society is trusted as the primary manager of itself. 

It’s true in economics. Now that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are pushing for radical deregulation of all things, the same critique is being offered. They merely advocate that enterprise “let it rip.” It’s the new name for laissez-faire, another smear term from the 19th century. 

But in the same sense that people have the intelligence to judge disease risk, society generates systems and institutions that put limits and guardrails up for enterprise too. The existence of rivalrous competition with easy entry and exit keeps prices, profits, and costs toward an equilibrium. Producer accountability is instilled with user ratings, reputation, and strict liability (unless you are a vaccine maker enjoying full indemnification). 

People forget that the best institutions assuring quality and safety are not government agencies but private services like Underwriters Laboratory, which has been around since the 19th century, long before the federal government had a single agency regulating even food quality. Remove the regulations, abolish the agencies, and competent and well-run private institutions would appear in every area, the same as professional credentialing now. 

Trusting people to manage infectious disease based on realistic risk assessments is no different from trusting property owners, workers, prices, and markets to work out the best possible solutions to the problem of scarcity in the material world. It doesn’t mean full throttle come what may any more than not locking down means zero control over our health. 

In other words, this whole phrase has been deployed against the idea of freedom itself. In fact, the proponents of lockdowns were not opposed to smearing that word too, spelling it as freedumb. 

Early on in the pandemic response, I was interviewed in Germany and the person asked what the best rhetorical strategy would be to push for a reopening. I suggested they campaign for freedom. The response: that is not possible because the word itself has been discredited. My response: if freedom is discredited, we have no cause of hope at all. 

The legacy of Jay Bhattarcharya’s actions during Covid – joining what felt like a half-dozen of us immediate critics of these awful policies – is not only his attention to science and facts; it is also a reverence for the idea of freedom itself, which really means to trust that society can manage itself with the best-possible outcomes apart from the dictates of pretentious and powerful people at the top. 

In a beautiful irony, Jay now inherits the position of the man who called him a “fringe epidemiologist” and called for the censors to do a “quick and devastating takedown” of his work. It’s been a very long journey lasting nearly five years, but here we are, the man who led the opposition to the worst-imaginable public health policies now in a position to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again. 

Savor this moment: it’s a rare one when justice prevails. As for accountability and the truth about what happened in those dark days, there is a good phrase for what should happen to the information flows that should now happen: let it rip.