The use of universal lockdowns in the event of the appearance of a new pathogen has no precedent. It has been a science experiment in real-time, with most of the human population used as lab rats. The question is whether and to what extent lockdowns worked.
The social contract we practice with regard to the threat of infectious diseases is that we manage them intelligently while never trampling on the dignity of the human person. The payoff is that our immune systems get stronger, enabling all of us to enjoy longer and healthier lives – not just some of us, not just the legally privileged, not just those with access to platforms to speak but rather every single member of the human community.
Given that we humans have lived for millennia, and continue to live, with diseases caused by countless dangerous pathogens that have become endemic, what’s so special about Covid-19 that makes it one that we must literally eliminate?
Lockdowns provided a fantastic pretext for governments all over the world to do to their citizens what they wanted to do anyway, which is to restrict human rights and control every movement of the people. This time they could do it in the name of public health, and with the blessing of science.
Here Russ Roberts and I engaged in a close examination Covid-19 and the policy response. To what extent was this a normal response? What were the costs?
We are still struggling to get back what we lost in this dreadful year, and the party in power now looks back not with horror at the results of political panic but rather with a sense of opportunity for all that might be possible in the years ahead.
An Inside Look at the Lockdown Orders from March 2020 Read More
The ideal of the common good, inseparable from the ideal of freedom, has a noble heritage. It is worth recapturing before we find ourselves in endless cycles of tribal warfare, now even in the name of public health.
Whatever Happened to the Ideal of the Common Good? Read More
The single most important fact about the COVID pandemic—in terms of deciding how to respond to it on both an individual and a governmental basis—is that it is not equally dangerous for everybody. This became clear very early on, but for some reason our public health messaging failed to get this fact out to the public.
For the health of science and the country, we need an honest and thorough evaluation of Covid policies, not one that can be dismissed as a whitewash like the World Health Organization’s efforts.
SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL“Endemicity” is not a word that rolls off the vernacular tongue. Still, its new prominence in the halls of governments around the world is a huge ray of hope. It means that governments have at long last begun to regard the pathogen as potentially a manageable part
The Astonishing Failure of Government Virus Control Read More
We don’t really need JAMA to tell us that plugging up a child’s ability to breathe freely is a bad idea. You only need good sense and a slight capacity for empathetic compassion, a trait in short supply among policy makers these days.
A system that would severely damage human psychological health and thus, morality would be one that dramatically uproots every freedom that people had previously taken for granted. The phrase “unleash hell” comes to mind; that is literally what lockdowns did to this country. We see it in surveys of mental health and it manifests itself in crime and the general collapse of public morals.
