By jonathon @Adobe Stock
Hidden Somewhere in the Night
The main responsibility of the public-health system, in a pandemic, submits John Fund in NRO, is to keep people calm and society functioning.
Our public-health officials did the opposite. Intentionally.
The hysteria they generated led to hundreds of thousands of non-Covid excess deaths, massive economic and social harms, and, worst of all, an unprecedented disaster in education.
A Tardy Mea Culpa? Better Late than Never
Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic and now an adviser to President Biden, recently made a remarkably frank confession:
If you’re a public-health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. It doesn’t matter what else happens. So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered from. . . .
This is a public-health mindset. And I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mindset, and that was really unfortunate. It’s another mistake we made. Okay.
During Britain’s independent public inquiry into its Covid response, prime minister, Rishi Sunak has presented a highly flawed picture of how Britain was plunged into a lockdown that greatly influenced the American decision to follow suit. Inquiry leaders appear to want the record to show that lockdowns should have started earlier and been more severe.
John Fund maintains that the Covid inquiries demonstrate that the “expert science” relied on by leaders in Britain and the U.S. was often disastrously short-sighted. That’s why it should be a scandal that the Covid-policy postmortem in most countries is now mainly focused on burying government mistakes and avoiding accountability.
Dr. Atlas, the Designated Punching Bag
An old quip: War is too important to be left to the generals.
Then is Public Health too important to be left to the doctors?
Dr. Scott Atlas, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force under President Donald Trump, emphatically opposed any element of the lockdowns.
One WSJ reader notes that Dr. Atlas became the “designated punching bag” for anyone who was aligned with the government’s lockdown plan.
Even more disturbing was the reaction of Dr. Atlas’s colleagues at Stanford University, who had no reservations about ostracizing and condemning him for his honest and forward declarations.
How long will we wait to hear their apologies?
