Stephen Macedo
Appearances
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
I mean, I think there was a general social fixation on the number of deaths, the spread of cases. We developed a kind of tunnel vision of the one indice that public health officials were focusing on was sickness and death from COVID. And these other matters were not highlighted by political leaders or by public health officials.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
I don't see how it is if there are significant costs involved, including in the currency of life. These policy choices always involve a variety of values. And we have to not simply focus on the one indice of saving lives, I think.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
You know, look, early on, I think that the initial lockdown orders and those conditions of uncertainty and so on may have made some sense. But we learned things over the summer that should have helped inform the strategy and that should have at least been more vigorously debated.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
The success of the public health measures always depended upon public buy-in, public willingness to comply, a public willingness to trust and to go along. And there wasn't enough public deliberation about these matters. Too much power was accorded to narrow experts in public health and epidemiology in particular.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
There should have been a wider conversation simply involving many more people with broader expertise, but it also should have involved ordinary people in the public who, after all, being the ones asked to make sacrifices in their own lives—
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
To adopt policies which always involve trade-offs across values, risks, how much are we willing to give up to not visit an elderly relative in the hospital, to not have a funeral, to not be allowed to attend church on Sunday. These sorts of public questions don't have scientific answers.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
They're value judgments about which ordinary people have a certain expertise about their own lives and what matters to them. And they should have been involved as well in the deliberation about these measures. Mm-hmm.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
So maybe I'll just say a couple of words about that to start with. I actually had started to work on a larger project on several topics on which I thought progressives were not paying enough attention to arguments coming from the other side. And that included immigration, abortion, and then COVID as well. And as soon as I...
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Well, they were three scientists from Stanford University, Harvard University, and Oxford, well-known, well-established scientists with excellent publication records. They were concerned about the costs of the closures. They were concerned about the disproportionate burdens being borne by essential workers and schoolchildren. And they attempted to start a conversation about
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
They were arguing that rather than keeping the whole of society closed, rather than keeping schools closed for children at very little risk from COVID, we should be focusing protection on the vulnerable parts of the population.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
And by October 4th, when that document was published, we had good evidence to suggest to know that there was highly uneven vulnerability across the population, age being the principal factor.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Much, much higher. And what they suggested was focusing protection on the vulnerable. And how did they suggest doing that?
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
gotten deeply into it, it was clear that the COVID policy issues themselves, the COVID crisis itself was large enough. And moreover, that people were not engaging in critical reflection and the sort of reckoning we've tried to do. So this is meant to be in part a book about policy choices, policy deliberation, and in many ways, policy mistakes perhaps that were made during COVID.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Well, when the declaration came out a few days later, the great band of people were charged with adopting a herd immunity strategy to let the virus rip through the population. And that would cost hundreds of thousands of lives. We have now the email by Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, in effect, Dr. Anthony Fauci's boss.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
He said in his email to Dr. Fauci and others, the document from the three fringe epidemiologists is getting a lot of attention. Even a co-signature from a Nobel Prize winner, people were signing this declaration online. And he said there needs to be a quick and devastating takedown.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
But there's also a larger kind of institutional question in the background and principled question in the background, which is how did the institutions function, which is supposed to be helping us to catch mistakes and correct our mistakes, to seek the truth on difficult matters. How did they function under COVID? And I mean, of course, journalism, science, and the academy more broadly.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Well, there's some evidence that the non-pharmaceutical interventions of various sorts, lockdown measures, school closures, etc., reduce somewhat the spread of the virus. But even the optimistic reports that emphasize that and call that success do not show evidence of significantly reduced death. So the virus evidently spread efficiently enough so that even if
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
the spread of infection could be reduced, say, 15%, that did not yield significant benefits in terms of death and disease.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Yes. You know, the lockdowns had lots of holes in them. The social distancing measures were very porous. A third of workers had to keep working as essential workers to keep the rest of us well fed, the electricity on. So it really was not possible to lock down the entire economy or the workforce.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
And so the biggest theme that runs through the book, I think, is that these, as we call them, truth-seeking institutions did not function as well as they should have during COVID. That there was a premature policy consensus. There was an unwillingness to re-examine assumptions. And there was an intolerance of criticism and divergent points of view that emerged fairly quickly in the pandemic.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
and that hurt us, that hurt our policy responses, that hurt our ability to course correct over the course of the pandemic as we learned more and had greater reason to course correct.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
I was just going to add one, which is the tremendous expenditures on COVID relief. Now, some of that was going to be necessary, but Francis has pointed out that the initial expenditures were equivalent to the New Deal and the— So the—
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Right. It's very hard to say for sure what will succeed in raising trust in the institutions in our society that are in the business of pursuing the truth, science, science journalism, the academy, and so on. But we should try to behave in a more trustworthy fashion and hope that greater trust follows from that.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
We need a franker conversation about what happened and how we can do better the next time around.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
I guess I would say that we need to consider the costs as well as the hoped-for benefits of policies that are adopted, especially these kinds of non-pharmaceutical interventions, social distancing measures, and so on. And we need to have
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
wider and more tolerant deliberation about these matters and not repose as much authority in narrow experts who have tunnel vision very often, who admitted after COVID to having tunnel vision. Francis Collins admitted quite frankly in July 2023 that public health officials, including himself, focused way too narrowly on a narrow set of public health outcomes.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Right. And in light of that quotation, how can we not? How can we not look back? It's an invitation to have a reckoning. Right. How could we not have the reckoning given what Francis Collins has said?
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
we'll be right back here's what else you need to know today
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Well, my experience was not unusual. I was in New Jersey, a blue state, and I went along with the messaging. I was busy with doing other things. Of course, we kept teaching online and doing our research online. But I didn't really investigate skeptically during the height of COVID itself in 2020, 2021. I started working on this book in 2022.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
and, frankly, have been kind of shocked on almost a daily basis in researching the book at the things I'm coming across and discussing with Francis. So, for me, it's been a kind of voyage of discovery, and I've been very surprised at what, you know, we've uncovered.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Well, there were a number of pre-COVID pandemic planning documents anticipating a respiratory pandemic such as COVID turned out to be. One of them was published just in the fall of 2019, shortly before the COVID pandemic broke out. That was by the World Health Organization. It surveyed the range of non-pharmaceutical interventions, social distancing measures, school closures.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Yeah, so it's everything other than vaccines and drugs. The whole suite of measures from hand washing, mask wearing, personal hygiene, staying apart, closing schools, restricting businesses, restricting public gatherings, not letting people go to church and so on.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Absolutely. Things that are often lumped under the word lockdown. And so those measures had been contemplated before they were investigated. That was the major subject of these pre-COVID pandemic plans. Obviously, getting a vaccine as soon as possible and administering it was something on which there was a consensus. But the controversial part of the policy was the non-pharmaceutical measures.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Well, they were quite controversial because one of the things that the plans emphasize is that they would be costly, that keeping children out of school would lead to learning losses and other detriments to health and well-being, including mental well-being, from children being isolated.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Business closures, likewise, could have consequences in terms of human well-being for those who own businesses, who depend on that businesses for a livelihood, economic well-being. Loss can lead also to psychological loss and family conflicts and so on. Isolating human beings who are social creatures will have a whole series of knock-on effects that the pre-pandemic planning documents discuss.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
And these matters had been studied, and they found that there was a lack of good evidence, an absence of certainty around the effectiveness of these measures.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Yes, especially reducing morbidity and mortality, that is to say serious illness and death.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Well, yeah, the World Health Organization was one study, but there was another one in 2019 by Johns Hopkins, which came to similarly skeptical conclusions about these various non-pharmaceutical interventions, school closures, mask wearing, and so on and so forth.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Earlier, in 2011, the UK government did a pre-pandemic planning document and similarly argued that in times of modern transportation around the world, these non-pharmaceutical interventions could not be counted on to significantly slow the spread of a virus. And so I would say that that was the dominant view.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
There were, of course, mathematical modelers who were prominent in the George W. Bush administration. They were more optimistic, not based on huge amounts of data, but based on scientific modeling projections. They believed that these measures could work.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Well, one factor was the fact that China locked down and the World Health Organization sent a team to China. And they issued a report after just spending a week there. And it was a fulsome endorsement of the Chinese approach. They said that China has shown the world the way to suppress a virus. Never been done before, but it's been done by China.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
And they endorsed the strategy without qualification for around the world.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Well, you're expressing some skepticism about the extent to which we should regard the Chinese approach as a model given the features of its system and their inconsistency with Western civil liberties, freedom of dissent, and so on. And that's a perfectly good question. None of that is evident in the World Health Organization report. They don't emphasize those sorts of things at all.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
They pay no attention to the fact that Chinese had authoritarian powers to require people to be— bolted into their apartments in some cases. Literally, right. Yeah. And then Italy had the first national lockdown in the world.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Not a democracy, right. So they showed it was possible. I mean, Italy showed that a Western population was willing to go along with a national lockdown. And that, I think, had a demonstration effect.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Another factor was the report that came out of Imperial College London, the optimistic modeling projections about non-pharmaceutical interventions. That's Neil M. Ferguson. His report projected something like 2 million deaths in the United States by August 2020.
The Daily
Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
The reporter around the world, one of the most influential, it looks like, reports that was ever issued. And it was that that Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx carried into Donald Trump's office, leading to a news conference on March 16th that recommended school closures and other measures.