The Covid Reckoning

PART 1: THE BIG PICTURE

“Trust but verify” was a phrase popularized by Ronald Reagan during treaty negotiations with the former Soviet Union. While the phrase is often used somewhat lightheartedly, it’s inherently cynical because if you have to verify, you don’t actually trust.

Imagine trying to live your life that way. Though it would be sad, it’s possible to regularly check your spouse’s phone and email for clues they’re being unfaithful. But few have either the time or skills to check that bridges we cross are safe, that our homes are built to code, or that every surgeon or pilot is fully qualified and ready for the task. Civilization itself is only possible when there is some base level of trust in the experts we rely on and the civil institutions that govern them. Of course we pass laws and create processes and procedures to provide checks and balances, but even the most cynical or paranoid ultimately live with some level of trust that the system works the way it’s supposed to.

That trust has been broken. It will not be easily nor quickly regained.

For most of us, until three years ago, public health institutions operated entirely in the background of our lives, making sure restaurants were clean, our food and water were safe, and our waste properly treated or disposed. We trusted that our medicines and medical procedures were safe, effective, and backed by hard evidence. Physicians depended on their professional institutions to collect, review, and objectively distill vast amounts of data and research to help them stay current in their fields.

And then… suddenly these vital — and heretofore mostly trusted—institutions became central to our lives and the lives of our children, and we learned we cannot trust any of them.

Government officials seized power and trampled liberties earned in blood over centuries. Public health agencies like CDC, NIH, and FDA ignored decades of evidence and their own pandemic planning; dismissed, attacked, and censored dissenters; ignored their own rules; and issued broad, powerful, and costly guidance and “recommendations” affecting hundreds of millions of Americans and billions worldwide. Physician groups, most notably the American Academy of Pediatrics, rejected the principles of evidence-based medicine in favor of partisan political advocacy. Despite repeated claims to the contrary, these usurpations of authority and power weren’t because the evidence (aka science) changed but because science became “The ScienceTM”.

It’s time.

It’s well past time for government, public health officials, and the other supposed medical “experts” to acknowledge — and publicly apologize for — their profound failures over the past three years. While many think we should uncritically forgive and move past this disaster, trust in public health and foundational institutions is too important and too much harm has been done to that trust to just let it go. Reconciliation is most durable when predicated on honesty and truth. I touch on the concept in my previous post The End Game.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, neither honesty nor truth seem to be forthcoming from those who did so much harm to so many and to the trust of those they were sworn to serve.

In just the past few weeks, Dr. Anthony Fauci (NIAID), Dr. Rochelle Walensky (CDC), Randi Weingarten (AFT - nation’s largest teacher’s union), and Xavier Becerra (U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services) gave interviews or made testimony before Congress that was dissembling at best or outright false.

Fauci said that masks help “maybe ten percent.” This is the same Anthony Fauci who insisted in March 2020 that masks were useless (because that’s what decades of research showed), then spent the next three years insisting they were our best defense, even for children on whom they were never tested. His first claim of uselessness is the only one supported by high quality evidence in actual humans. Despite the truth of his first statement, he later said it was actually a lie he told the public to protect the limited supply of masks for health care workers. Fauci also claimed he never recommended to shut anything down yet here he is saying exactly that.

A “noble lie” is still a lie.

In a nation of ostensibly free citizens governed under a system “of the people, by the people, for the people,” the noble lie is a civic obscenity. It treats the People as subjects too simple-minded to be trusted with the truth.

Fauci also insisted that he and the institution he headed for nearly four decades didn’t fund gain of function research — using genetic engineering techniques to increase the virulence and/or transmissibility of pathogens — on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. He testified before Congress to that effect and called Sen. Rand Paul a liar for saying otherwise. Fauci’s denials were false then — he lied — and the evidence continues to mount that not only did his agency fund such research but that the scientists working on it at Wuhan were the first humans infected with SARS CoV-2 from their lab in November of 2019. Turns out the “lab leak” origin of Covid wasn’t a “racist right-wing conspiracy theory” our government and media overlords worked so hard to discredit and censor but by far the most likely cause. That’s only one of many such “conspiracies” that turned out to be true.

Randi Weingarten claimed she worked to get kids back in school when the record is clear she colluded with CDC and others to promulgate guidelines that made normal in-person schooling possible only in places that rejected her demands, none of which was based on good evidence.

Rochelle Walensky testified before Congress that CDC, under her leadership, didn’t conduct any controlled trials of masks because the question “lacked equipoise” — meaning there was no question they worked so why bother with trials. This in spite of not only well-known and well-supported questions about it throughout the pandemic but decades of research published by CDC itself concluding they didn’t work.

She then testified that her public statements, in which she said that people who got the the mRNA vaccines didn’t transmit Covid (which formed the ethical foundation for vaccine mandates), wasn’t false because they did stop transmission of the Alpha strain of SARS CoV-2. But her testimony was as false as her previous statements because such an endpoint wasn’t part of the trial data. Email uncovered by a public records request also showed she, and Fauci, knew about breakthrough infections at the time so the lie was even worse because both of these “experts” were all over TV saying if you got the vaccine, you wouldn’t get infected or transmit the virus to others. Her agency’s rationale for Covid vaccine boosters for children ages 5-11 provides an excellent window into their evidence-free decision-making process.

Sec. Becerra testified before Congress that his department didn’t force toddlers to wear masks for two years despite the fact that they did just that by enforcing a mask mandate on kids two years and older for any Head Start program that received federal funding. No masks, no money, no program. It’s the same sort of legalized extortion his department and public health officials used to force schools to close, impose mask and vaccine mandates, quarantine millions of healthy kids, and diminish the future prospects of a generation of children for a disease that always was and remains no more risk to them than the flu (see Table 1 linked below). The Secretary also couldn’t answer for any evidence of benefit from masking toddlers because no such evidence exists.

These recent statements are unsurprising simply because they are par for the course of the last three years — evidence be damned. I acknowledge there were risks associated with what we didn’t yet know. But there was far more that was known that those in power and authority simply chose to ignore, obfuscate, or outright lie about, starting with “15 days to flatten the curve,” which Deborah Birx, (White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under President Trump), admitted in her memoir was necessary to open the door for all of the restrictions that followed. In April 2020, I wrote a poem titled “Our Rulers have no Plan,” but Birx’s admission revealed otherwise. Not only did Birx lie, she was practically giddy about her plans while introducing Fauci on national TV on that fateful day in March 2020 to announce the shutdown recommendations.

The madness really began with policies predicated on a deeply flawed model promoted by the World Health Organization that predicted a 3.4% fatality rate, which, if true, might have actually justified some of the policies.

But it wasn’t true. It was never true. The actual risk was always orders of magnitude lower. And the massive restriction of liberty and imposition of government control over and censorship of the People was never justified.

I’ve stated publicly that I don’t believe the vast majority of those who have dedicated their lives to medicine and public health intended to do harm during the pandemic. If I were asking for criminal prosecution, intent matters. I’m not, so it doesn’t. What matters is the evidence. And the “Sagan Standard” - named after the famed science communicator Carl Sagan, simply stating that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” - should apply to the quality of evidence required for imposing on billions of people the most disruptive public health interventions in history.

The evidence never supported most of the restrictions, mandates, coercion, and censorship imposed on previously free people. The evidence never supported lockdowns, extended school closures, masks, “social distancing,” quarantines of healthy people, vaccine mandates, etc, etc, etc. The lack of evidence manifested itself in such absurd and arbitrary distinctions where families were denied the right to gather for the funerals of loved ones but massive protests over the death of George Floyd were deemed essential. The list of experts and pols ignoring their own restrictions is far too long to list, though a quick search online will quickly return dozens of examples.

And all of this was couched in the language of totalitarian governments throughout history. Claims that the restrictions on liberty were necessary “for your safety” and the “othering” of fellow citizens — official declarations blaming “the unvaccinated” or the maskless for disease, with all of the associated penalties for non-compliance — were a profound abuse of power and, again, unsupported by the evidence.

Those who claim this is all Monday-morning quarterbacking either weren’t paying attention to the objective evidence at the time or they are trying to divert attention from their own mistakes. The fact is we knew a great deal more early in the pandemic than the “experts” wanted us to believe. The “fog of war” excuses are just that — excuses. Even if we accept those excuses for the first few weeks, they don’t hold up at all thereafter, especially as anyone following the data could see that the models used to justify the extreme measures were so deeply flawed as to be useless for policy-making. That they continued to be used and endlessly hyped by media reports was evidence of little more than pure fear-mongering. The insistence that it was all necessary to protect hospitals also didn’t hold up. In the overwhelming majority of the country, hospitals weren’t overloaded, they were empty as elective procedures were cancelled and Covid fear kept people out of emergency departments. Treatment for heart attack and stroke symptoms is some of the most effective emergency care ever developed — saving lives every day. Such care plummeted during the shutdowns and more people died as a result.

At the start of the response to the pandemic in March 2020, we already knew from Lombardi, Italy, the first Western city hit hard by Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, that the risk was highly age-stratified and largely spared children. This action plan from UK dated March 3, 2020 details what would have been a rational response that U.S. officials surely had in hand at the time too. The age-stratified risk was immediately confirmed from experience from our own hard hit cities like NYC, Detroit, and Seattle. That’s a fact that has never changed in the more than three years since. Despite censorship of such claims, Covid was and remains a similar risk to children as the flu (see spreadsheet below), a disease for which we have never closed schools for more than a few days or ever forced children to cover their faces, stay six feet away from their friends, or eat their lunches outside in the cold. Worse still, we have never — ever — treated children as little more than disease vectors and convinced them they’d kill their parents or grandparents just by being around them — claims that were never supported by good evidence.

Regardless, until three years ago, the cultural expectation — and evolutionary instinct — was for parents to prioritize the needs of their children over their own. And it was those expectations and instincts that governments, media, and their designated experts exploited through an exaggerated and often dishonest fear-mongering propaganda campaign, a campaign that, sadly, continues to this day.

Just how badly the experts broke normal parenting is demonstrated by this OpEd in the New York Times from February 2021. (The link is to a non-paywalled archive but subscribers can find it here.) The important perspective when reading this piece is that the child never had symptoms — he wasn’t sick — but his parents locked him in a room, made him fear for his life and the lives of his family. Similar stories played out in millions of homes.

While we already know some of the profound costs, it will be many years before we know the full extent of the harm such reckless messaging and restrictions have done to this generation.

The U.S. was a global outlier in restoring schooling, with many districts closed to full in-person school for more than a year. Even when schools finally reopened, it was often under conditions of such evidence-free absurdity as to be almost unimaginable. Students in band cut holes in their useless masks or were stuffed into tents to play their instruments. School personnel spent thousands of hours looking through surveillance video to see which students passed within the invisible and arbitrary 6’ barrier of a positive “case” that would require healthy kids to be sent home for weeks of quarantine. Equally evidence-free “hybrid” school was invented and mandated by newly powerful but profoundly unqualified county health directors. There was no evidence to support either the efficacy or cost of any of these actions but compliance was enforced by what amounted to legalized extortion as failure to do so would result in forced school closure or the quarantine of even more healthy students. The U.S. was, and remains, a global outlier in forced masking of young children and in the recommendations to vaccinate children for Covid.

Rather than respond rationally and direct the majority of our response to those most at risk, our designated experts and public health officials did exactly the opposite and imposed the most burdensome and longest-lasting restrictions on kids. Worldwide, more than one billion children— that’s billion with a “b” — were forced out of school. Since remedial education has never worked at scale, the cost of that loss will last a lifetime for tens of millions of them with the cost borne most heavily by those of the least means. The wealthy worked from home and provided tutoring for their children while those of lesser means delivered their food. Ironically but unsurprisingly, those who claim to care the most about inequality bear much of the responsibility for policies that have caused such a massive increase of it.

Public health interventions should be the least costly, least restrictive, and least coercive possible to achieve clearly articulated and objectively measurable outcomes. Our public health and government leaders and institutions failed to even aim at any one of those targets. It was instead a steady barrage of ready, fire, aim. They abused the Precautionary Principle beyond recognition by considering only the hypothetical benefits while utterly ignoring any known or potential risks and costs.

Broadly stated, the Precautionary Principle holds that when faced with a novel risk, the absence of scientific certainty should not preclude precautionary action. Fair enough. Few would argue there should have been no public health interventions for Covid. Prior to Covid, fewer still would have argued that potential costs and risks from the interventions should never have even been considered. A common metric used to determine if a particular intervention was warranted was the Quality Adjusted Life Year. It is a multidisciplinary measure that takes into account both the costs and potential benefits of a proposed intervention. No such accounting was ever produced when lockdowns were first imposed nor has any record of contemporaneous assessments ever been shown since. We’re now left with only forensic accounting which shows the devastating costs and dearth of benefits.

While all of these policies and restrictions were being imposed, there were voices of dissent, including from many previously well-regarded and credentialed public health experts, just a tiny sample of whom are referenced throughout this post. Frighteningly, in moves straight out of some of the most well-known dystopian novels like George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, rather than engage in public debate, government authorities instead engaged in censorship, ad hominem attacks, active collusion with private entities, and even the proposal to create a real-life Ministry of Truth. In one of the earliest cases, Francis Collins, head of the NIH wrote an email to Anthony Fauci where he set out to conduct a “swift and devastating takedown” of the Great Barrington Declaration and its authors. That the principles of the GBD have been largely proven correct three years later is little consolation.

In the original Top Gun movie, there’s a scene where Maverick’s commander explains that “a good pilot is compelled to evaluate what’s happened so he can apply what he’s learned.” That sense of introspection is deeply embedded in aviation and is one of the many things I love about being a pilot. It used to be integral to science, medicine, and public health. The past three years have unfortunately shown that the people we needed to trust to navigate through the greatest public health challenge in more than a century didn’t even know how to use a compass, let alone the tools of their own professions.

What of claims of more than one million Covid deaths in the U.S. and more than seven million worldwide? It would take another entire post to fully examine those claims. Regardless, public health isn’t about death or illness from just one cause; it’s about overall or “all cause” mortality and morbidity. Those of us who questioned the wisdom of and evidence for the massive social, medical, and economic disruptions being forced on billions were pilloried for doing so.

As all-cause mortality data begins to emerge, it is clear our concerns were warranted. California and Florida had virtually opposite pandemic responses and virtually identical age-adjusted all-cause mortality. Sweden’s response was the least restrictive of all the Nordic and European Union nations, with no lockdowns or mask mandates, no school closures, and no restrictions on kids under 16 at all. Their all-cause mortality stands out only for being below average.

From the start of the pandemic, public health and government authorities imposed untested and unproven restrictions and mandates on hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. and  billions around the world with little to no consideration of physical, emotional, civic, or economic costs. They operated on the basis of fear rather than facts. They imposed the greatest burden on children, who were at the least risk, and who will bear that cost for the rest of their lives. They engaged in propaganda while violating Constitutional liberties to crush dissent. They corrupted the fundamental principles of science and medicine, and far too many scientists and physicians went along. And because of all of these failures, their actions likely cost as many lives as they might — might — have saved. Those costs will only continue to add up in the years ahead.

Too much damage has been done and too much trust has been lost to simply forgive and forget. We must have a public reckoning. Our public institutions are too important to civil functioning to allow them to go on as they are. Since they have refused to reform themselves, change will have to come from outside their cloistered walls. Non-partisanship and full transparency must be formally and functionally embedded in their charters. There is far more that’s required to prevent similar failures from happening again and that will be a topic for another part of this series.