Policy

In response to this hypothetical scenario, governments panicked, ignored their own pandemic preparedness plans and adopted high-risk strategies that imposed restrictions on individual liberty never seen before. These countermeasures caused major harms and collateral damage, including loss of lives from delayed medical care and the medium-term aftereffects of increased unemployment and increased extreme poverty (for example the World Bank found that  ‘the pandemic led to 97 million more people being in [extreme] poverty in 2020’).  

Readers will recall the ban on singing of all kinds during the lockdowns and even after they were lifted because singing was supposedly a ‘transmission risk’. Turns out, this typical piece of Covid hysteria was based on a flawed study.

The CDC should stop treating us like we are stupid. Give us the data – all of the data, not just cherry-picked data – to allow us to make informed decisions about how to conduct our lives. 

Each of these cut corners has since created policy controversies and uncertainty that better trials would have avoided. Because of the pressure to produce a vaccine within 130 days, President Biden’s pandemic plan will likely force randomized trials on future vaccines to cut the same corners. This policy effectively guarantees that lockdowns will return to the U.S. in the event of a new pandemic.