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The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe
WHAT JUST HAPPENED? The human cost of the emergency response to COVID-19 has far outweighed the benefits. That’s the sobering verdict of a trio of scholars—a biologist, a statistician, and a philosopher— in this comprehensive assessment of the worst panic-induced disaster in history. As the media fanned the flames of panic, government officials and a new elite of scientific experts ignored the established protocols for mitigating a dangerous disease. Instead, they shut down the world economy, closed every school, confined citizens to their homes, and threatened to enforce a regime of extreme social distancing indefinitely. And the American public—amazingly enough—complied without protest. Modestly but relentlessly focused on what we know and don’t know about the coronavirus, Douglas Axe, William M. Briggs, and Jay W. Richards demonstrate in this eye-opening study what real experts can contribute when a pandemic strikes. In the early spring of 2020, the panic of government officials, the hysteria of the media, and the hubris of suddenly powerful scientists produced a worldwide calamity. The Price of Panic is the essential book for understanding what happened and how to avoid repeating our deadly mistakes.
287 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 13, 2020
177 people are currently reading
638 people want to read
About the author
Douglas Axe
10 books51 followersDouglas Axe was much more interested in the physical and engineering sciences than he was in biology-- until as a graduate student he began to see how life is an example of extraordinary engineering. From that point on he became intrigued by the possibility of using science to make the connection between design and biology clear. His pursuit of this science did make the connection more clear, but equally clear was the need to describe the results in terms that would make sense to everyone. His first book, Undeniable-- How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, aims to do just that.
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December 1, 2020
A hard-nosed, clear-eyed look at the COVID pandemic. I have worked in disaster response for a decade, so I was not shocked by the way that the COVID pandemic was handled. Normally, the WHO and UNISDR and UNICEF get involved as soon as there is global attention (and therefore lots of funding). Normally, they screw stuff up. Go look at the post-response review on the Aceh tsunami response, the Haiti earthquake response, etc. The bigger the disaster, the worse the damage done by the response. Costs skyrocket which makes it hard to buy needed supplies and increases the possibility of corruption. Measurement accuracy goes way down as organizations seek more funding to deal with skyrocketing costs. So the number of victims always, always gets exaggerated. It's no longer just fatalities, or injuries, but displaced or affected. That's normal, standard disaster response stuff. The number of rules goes way up and local initiative and autonomy goes way down as press coverage reaches a saturation point (and focuses on newsworthy stuff), as corruption rises from points one and two, as international experts step in who already know everything. Good people work in the UN, but humans respond to incentives, and the disaster response cycle is always the same. The incentives are just all wrong.
But normally, there is enough other interesting stuff going on in the unaffected parts of the world that people lose interest, the money dries up, the UN goes away, and we can get start recovering from the disaster response. My Acehnese friends who survived the response will tell you that Aceh could have recovered from the disaster, but the disaster response .... that caused permanent damage. That is the case that Richards, Briggs, and Axe are making. That the COVID response is worse than the disaster, based on standard disaster response mistakes expanded to global proportions.
This book is the first real work that I've seen that examines the cost of this response. A response so widespread that people never got bored, the panic never ended, and as a result the money never dried up. It is clear and well-argued, from a statistical and economic perspective, as well as a philosophical perspective. The book loses a single star from some politically-motivated jabs that reduce the credibility of the work. I take no consideration of the veracity of these claims. Perhaps such jabs are unavoidable at this point in the political history of the United States, but I am trying to hold to my standards.
If you don't have time to read this book, at least read Ioannidis, J.P.A., n.d. Global perspective of COVID-19 epidemiology for a full-cycle pandemic. European Journal of Clinical Investigation e13421. https://doi.org/10.1111/eci.13423. Ioannidis is a kind of patron saint for skeptics of expert opinion. Ioannidis became one of the most renowned statisticians in the scholarly world (not the press, the world) with 300,000+ citations in peer-reviewed journal articles. His fame was built on the article "Why Most Published Research Findings are False" in PLoS 2005. That article sparked something called the "replicability crisis", which churned through medicine, psychology, economics, etc, creating waves of epistemic doubt. Because it turns out Ioannidis was right, more than half of studies in medicine could not be replicated. Most researchers are over-certain, and don't understand statistics as well as they think they do. If that was and is true about research done without the pressures (political, temporal, or emotional) of a pandemic, what do we think about research done during it?
To this book I would add that technocrats and development experts love love LOVE benevolent (and not so benevolent) dictatorships because it allows them to make the most change the fastest, without bothering with pesky democracy or convincing the masses. Experts often believe that they already have all the answers, normal people are just not smart enough to understand them. Ideas, like forbidding parents from raising their own children or locking people up indefinitely to prevent a disease, that would never pass the test of democracy can still be implemented by a dictator in a poor country. Unfortunately, the results of these misguided policies speak for themselves, though the expert tends to blame the implementing country for not doing it right. Haven't you heard that during the pandemic? "Things are going bad, therefore you must not be doing what we tell you". It could not possibly be the case that the plan of the technocrats was never going to work anyway. After all, they are experts.
These aren't new strategies. This is all old hat to international development workers. Read The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good or the The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by NYU's William Easterly or anything by Robert Chambers for an international development look at the same kinds of issues faced here.
Here are a few of my favorite quotes:
"In 2005, Ferguson predicted that up to 200 million people could die from the bird flu. “Around 40 million people died in the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak,” he told The Guardian. “There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.” As things turned out, 440 people died from the bird flu from 2003 to 2015.6 In other words, Ferguson’s prediction was off by a factor of nearly 500,000! But once again, the powers that be didn’t hold that against him.
Early efforts to raise alarm about the huge costs of the public and government response to the coronavirus were met with outrage. What sort of heartless brute weighs dollars and cents against human lives?! The dilemma was reduced to a mental cartoon: scales with stacks of cash on one side, and old folks on the other."
It was not about millions of poor people dying from COVID-19. It was about millions of poor people dying from the response to COVID-19. “Hunger,” the story noted, “is already rising in the poorest parts of the world, where lockdowns and social distancing measures have erased incomes and put even basic food items out of reach.”
Some models—naturally less exciting to reporters and less favored by experts pushing drastic mitigation efforts—said the coronavirus would be like most other viral outbreaks, probably like a really bad flu year. The virus would come and then it would go. Those scenarios suggested that the best strategy would be to protect the vulnerable while allowing the population at large to acquire herd immunity; extreme measures would likely do more harm than good.
But this was not what the leaders of most countries wanted to hear. Elites don’t tend to welcome the news that the best thing they can do is stand aside, that their gifts are unwelcome and their interference may even cause harm. So they didn’t hear it. The non-alarmist models were right in the wrong direction.
But normally, there is enough other interesting stuff going on in the unaffected parts of the world that people lose interest, the money dries up, the UN goes away, and we can get start recovering from the disaster response. My Acehnese friends who survived the response will tell you that Aceh could have recovered from the disaster, but the disaster response .... that caused permanent damage. That is the case that Richards, Briggs, and Axe are making. That the COVID response is worse than the disaster, based on standard disaster response mistakes expanded to global proportions.
This book is the first real work that I've seen that examines the cost of this response. A response so widespread that people never got bored, the panic never ended, and as a result the money never dried up. It is clear and well-argued, from a statistical and economic perspective, as well as a philosophical perspective. The book loses a single star from some politically-motivated jabs that reduce the credibility of the work. I take no consideration of the veracity of these claims. Perhaps such jabs are unavoidable at this point in the political history of the United States, but I am trying to hold to my standards.
If you don't have time to read this book, at least read Ioannidis, J.P.A., n.d. Global perspective of COVID-19 epidemiology for a full-cycle pandemic. European Journal of Clinical Investigation e13421. https://doi.org/10.1111/eci.13423. Ioannidis is a kind of patron saint for skeptics of expert opinion. Ioannidis became one of the most renowned statisticians in the scholarly world (not the press, the world) with 300,000+ citations in peer-reviewed journal articles. His fame was built on the article "Why Most Published Research Findings are False" in PLoS 2005. That article sparked something called the "replicability crisis", which churned through medicine, psychology, economics, etc, creating waves of epistemic doubt. Because it turns out Ioannidis was right, more than half of studies in medicine could not be replicated. Most researchers are over-certain, and don't understand statistics as well as they think they do. If that was and is true about research done without the pressures (political, temporal, or emotional) of a pandemic, what do we think about research done during it?
To this book I would add that technocrats and development experts love love LOVE benevolent (and not so benevolent) dictatorships because it allows them to make the most change the fastest, without bothering with pesky democracy or convincing the masses. Experts often believe that they already have all the answers, normal people are just not smart enough to understand them. Ideas, like forbidding parents from raising their own children or locking people up indefinitely to prevent a disease, that would never pass the test of democracy can still be implemented by a dictator in a poor country. Unfortunately, the results of these misguided policies speak for themselves, though the expert tends to blame the implementing country for not doing it right. Haven't you heard that during the pandemic? "Things are going bad, therefore you must not be doing what we tell you". It could not possibly be the case that the plan of the technocrats was never going to work anyway. After all, they are experts.
These aren't new strategies. This is all old hat to international development workers. Read The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good or the The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by NYU's William Easterly or anything by Robert Chambers for an international development look at the same kinds of issues faced here.
Here are a few of my favorite quotes:
"In 2005, Ferguson predicted that up to 200 million people could die from the bird flu. “Around 40 million people died in the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak,” he told The Guardian. “There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.” As things turned out, 440 people died from the bird flu from 2003 to 2015.6 In other words, Ferguson’s prediction was off by a factor of nearly 500,000! But once again, the powers that be didn’t hold that against him.
Early efforts to raise alarm about the huge costs of the public and government response to the coronavirus were met with outrage. What sort of heartless brute weighs dollars and cents against human lives?! The dilemma was reduced to a mental cartoon: scales with stacks of cash on one side, and old folks on the other."
It was not about millions of poor people dying from COVID-19. It was about millions of poor people dying from the response to COVID-19. “Hunger,” the story noted, “is already rising in the poorest parts of the world, where lockdowns and social distancing measures have erased incomes and put even basic food items out of reach.”
Some models—naturally less exciting to reporters and less favored by experts pushing drastic mitigation efforts—said the coronavirus would be like most other viral outbreaks, probably like a really bad flu year. The virus would come and then it would go. Those scenarios suggested that the best strategy would be to protect the vulnerable while allowing the population at large to acquire herd immunity; extreme measures would likely do more harm than good.
But this was not what the leaders of most countries wanted to hear. Elites don’t tend to welcome the news that the best thing they can do is stand aside, that their gifts are unwelcome and their interference may even cause harm. So they didn’t hear it. The non-alarmist models were right in the wrong direction.
May 13, 2022
Everyone should read this. The authors set out an honest and enlightening appraisal of the whole pandemic debacle. They have shown how “experts” have inculcated fear and enabled the breakdown of society to bolster their own reputations with little or no expertise to support their allegations.
Me personally, I never bought into the narrative from the get go; never took any experimental injections either.
I am interested however in uncovering all the lies, fear mongering and deceit that we face on a daily basis and I'd like to be informed from other sources--other than the corporate media.
I enjoyed this read and I learned more, that's exactly what I wanted.
Me personally, I never bought into the narrative from the get go; never took any experimental injections either.
I am interested however in uncovering all the lies, fear mongering and deceit that we face on a daily basis and I'd like to be informed from other sources--other than the corporate media.
I enjoyed this read and I learned more, that's exactly what I wanted.
November 18, 2020
Excellent. No matter where you are on the divide of the virus in the so-called pandemic you should read this book.
November 1, 2020
I'm biased because I was against the lockdown scam from the very beginning. This books encapsulates the big government evil we are suffering through. It explains how experts wrought havoc upon the world and the evil of big media. Everyone who can read, should read this book.
October 24, 2020
Balanced Perspective
The authors certainly have a point of view. Why this is refreshing is that they do not claim that they have the answers. Instead they meticulously source and support their observations presenting alternative points of view. The data and analysis are sound. In the end they humbly persuade and present a compelling case.
The authors certainly have a point of view. Why this is refreshing is that they do not claim that they have the answers. Instead they meticulously source and support their observations presenting alternative points of view. The data and analysis are sound. In the end they humbly persuade and present a compelling case.
January 11, 2024
Simply excellent
December 13, 2020
Fantastic. Highly recommended.
October 20, 2020
A brilliant book. An absolute must-read. This destroys the case for the extreme measures (the lockdown) that has devastated our economy.
Read
August 5, 2021CAUTION: The lockdown saved many more lives than its costs (we may never know how many or at what cost) and this book tries to make the case that the lockdowns were an overreaction. I find that completely revulsive. Coming from an author who is connected to the Heritage Foundation you can trust this is conservative right-wing propaganda. Putin would be proud! If you want an alternative view of science and facts, why Trump stayed such outrageous non-science based statements then here is your manual for disbelief.
Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.
Aug 2021: We now know the true cost of not adhering to stricter lockdowns as India reports 10X's less than expected mortality. This pandemic is not over, not by a long shot. Until the world is vaccinated we are in for some turbulent times as variants mutate and eventually might trick the vaccines into insignificance. The virus is also starting to attack younger and healthier people. And those anti-vaxxers are now overcrowding hospitals denying everyone else of their medical service.
FACT USA: 4% of the world's population accounts for 25% of world's COVID 19 deaths and it's getting worse, not better. WHY?
This book explains the Pandemic policy deniers. I wanted to see how anyone could make the Covid 19 pandemic insignificant. The obvious conservative bias makes the point that the WHO is a Chinese & Gates owned or controlled UN organ and that the misinterpretation of the numbers causes panic which fuels clicks and Political division. The same arguments made for climate change denial are implemented here. Science and experts are blind to any opposing views, even ones not based upon science, and this creates a wave of falsehoods fuelled by fake and anti-Trump liberal media.
We still know too little about this disease but caution is not panic and just because every other sentence, or so it seems, has this word panic does not mean we have panicked? Clearly, no country tests enough and it may be months before the 15-minute tests are widely available and months more before anyone can get a vaccine shot or two shots if they work? Testing makes projection models more accurate but to rely on no models, to not prepare for the worst-case scenario is immoral and dangerous. Pandemic fatigue is setting in and this book gives the no maskers every excuse not to protect their fellow citizens. What people do for themselves is their concern as long as it does not put careworkers, family, and community at a higher risk.
The diatribe against computer modeling: The author claims that models misrepresented the threat and because they are inaccurate they are to be ignored? Folks, we shut down, hard and well, and this cut contagion infection while we drove a vaccine, PPE and test production and learned how to cope.
The exponential explosion is hard to accurately predict but I would always error towards caution than risk tens or hundreds of thousands of lives. Today, we know many countries either lie or cant report accurate mortality and everyone still tests too little. I would guess 3m will have died of Covid 19 in 2020. In the next 2-3 years? We do not know. If a responsible administration had been in power in the USA and held respect and world leadership then this crisis would have been largely averted by now. Instead, we have a continuing nightmare and a global economic disaster.
The USA is headed for 250,000 to 300,000 mortality by the end of 2020. By the time vaccines arrive, and they work, and are distributed to achieve herd immunity we may be well into 2021. So, early predictions were inaccurate because we had so little testing capability. Infections soared because we had a late intervention, improper PPE supplies and Trump closed the flow of travel from China when, in fact, mist infections came from Europe. The UK was 3 weeks too late, the USA over 2 months.
I would rather believe 98% of all scientists and medical experts than fringe conspiracy theorists.
The Lancet is a highly respected British medical journal that claims India's mortality if under-reported by 5X so 500,000 dead. If this is even partly true, the figures for global mortality exceed several million already so what we see in dashboards is understated. This book claims the opposite.
Could the fact that COVID 19 affects the aged, minorities, obese, and the already infirmed more than others (whites?) be one reason for the deniers?
NYT OCT 16, 2020: "The report notes that of the 114,411 coronavirus-related deaths reported to the C.D.C.’s National Vital Statistics System during that time frame, slightly more than half were white; about a quarter was Latino and nearly 19 percent were Black, figures that are far higher than their portion of the general population (about 18 percent for Latinos and 13 percent for blacks).
Regardless of race and ethnicity, those aged 65 and older represented the vast majority — 78 percent — of all coronavirus deaths over those four months."
Without lockdowns and hygiene/face coverings the fatalities could have been many times higher. Does this book claim that we should have only isolated the most likely to be harmed? Frankly, only 4% of humans are actually healthy. But to make the case that the economy saves more lives than the virus kills is a new form of euthanasia and I will read this to understand how people can even think like this.
Firing the pandemic team, defunding WHO, castigating the one organization which has saved tens of millions of lives in its history is perhaps the greatest crime for. the WHO, as flawed as any organization, serves the poorest best.
There is a chapter about whether lockdowns work. Sweden of course is hailed by the right but comparing Sweden to, say the UK, is a fool errand. Sweden can be compared with Norway and Denmark combined and to date, as every country sees an increase in infections but younger now than in wave 1, Sweden has 5X the death rate of its Scandi neighbors.
The UK initially followed Sweden and delayed lockdown for 3 weeks which cost thousands of lives.
The cost? We have no idea but it is already unprecedented and huge. What if we had done what the author considers reasonable as what has been done before? Well, we do not know yet which is a problem but to err on a libertarian view, a. mortality of many millions could be lost. Is it worth the gamble? The hard right says the economy is worth it.
With at least another 2-3 years ahead of us, the only panic I see is from the author who strings together a lot of doubts and no clear solution.
Now if you want to read a quality effort: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.
Aug 2021: We now know the true cost of not adhering to stricter lockdowns as India reports 10X's less than expected mortality. This pandemic is not over, not by a long shot. Until the world is vaccinated we are in for some turbulent times as variants mutate and eventually might trick the vaccines into insignificance. The virus is also starting to attack younger and healthier people. And those anti-vaxxers are now overcrowding hospitals denying everyone else of their medical service.
FACT USA: 4% of the world's population accounts for 25% of world's COVID 19 deaths and it's getting worse, not better. WHY?
This book explains the Pandemic policy deniers. I wanted to see how anyone could make the Covid 19 pandemic insignificant. The obvious conservative bias makes the point that the WHO is a Chinese & Gates owned or controlled UN organ and that the misinterpretation of the numbers causes panic which fuels clicks and Political division. The same arguments made for climate change denial are implemented here. Science and experts are blind to any opposing views, even ones not based upon science, and this creates a wave of falsehoods fuelled by fake and anti-Trump liberal media.
We still know too little about this disease but caution is not panic and just because every other sentence, or so it seems, has this word panic does not mean we have panicked? Clearly, no country tests enough and it may be months before the 15-minute tests are widely available and months more before anyone can get a vaccine shot or two shots if they work? Testing makes projection models more accurate but to rely on no models, to not prepare for the worst-case scenario is immoral and dangerous. Pandemic fatigue is setting in and this book gives the no maskers every excuse not to protect their fellow citizens. What people do for themselves is their concern as long as it does not put careworkers, family, and community at a higher risk.
The diatribe against computer modeling: The author claims that models misrepresented the threat and because they are inaccurate they are to be ignored? Folks, we shut down, hard and well, and this cut contagion infection while we drove a vaccine, PPE and test production and learned how to cope.
The exponential explosion is hard to accurately predict but I would always error towards caution than risk tens or hundreds of thousands of lives. Today, we know many countries either lie or cant report accurate mortality and everyone still tests too little. I would guess 3m will have died of Covid 19 in 2020. In the next 2-3 years? We do not know. If a responsible administration had been in power in the USA and held respect and world leadership then this crisis would have been largely averted by now. Instead, we have a continuing nightmare and a global economic disaster.
The USA is headed for 250,000 to 300,000 mortality by the end of 2020. By the time vaccines arrive, and they work, and are distributed to achieve herd immunity we may be well into 2021. So, early predictions were inaccurate because we had so little testing capability. Infections soared because we had a late intervention, improper PPE supplies and Trump closed the flow of travel from China when, in fact, mist infections came from Europe. The UK was 3 weeks too late, the USA over 2 months.
I would rather believe 98% of all scientists and medical experts than fringe conspiracy theorists.
The Lancet is a highly respected British medical journal that claims India's mortality if under-reported by 5X so 500,000 dead. If this is even partly true, the figures for global mortality exceed several million already so what we see in dashboards is understated. This book claims the opposite.
Could the fact that COVID 19 affects the aged, minorities, obese, and the already infirmed more than others (whites?) be one reason for the deniers?
NYT OCT 16, 2020: "The report notes that of the 114,411 coronavirus-related deaths reported to the C.D.C.’s National Vital Statistics System during that time frame, slightly more than half were white; about a quarter was Latino and nearly 19 percent were Black, figures that are far higher than their portion of the general population (about 18 percent for Latinos and 13 percent for blacks).
Regardless of race and ethnicity, those aged 65 and older represented the vast majority — 78 percent — of all coronavirus deaths over those four months."
Without lockdowns and hygiene/face coverings the fatalities could have been many times higher. Does this book claim that we should have only isolated the most likely to be harmed? Frankly, only 4% of humans are actually healthy. But to make the case that the economy saves more lives than the virus kills is a new form of euthanasia and I will read this to understand how people can even think like this.
Firing the pandemic team, defunding WHO, castigating the one organization which has saved tens of millions of lives in its history is perhaps the greatest crime for. the WHO, as flawed as any organization, serves the poorest best.
There is a chapter about whether lockdowns work. Sweden of course is hailed by the right but comparing Sweden to, say the UK, is a fool errand. Sweden can be compared with Norway and Denmark combined and to date, as every country sees an increase in infections but younger now than in wave 1, Sweden has 5X the death rate of its Scandi neighbors.
The UK initially followed Sweden and delayed lockdown for 3 weeks which cost thousands of lives.
The cost? We have no idea but it is already unprecedented and huge. What if we had done what the author considers reasonable as what has been done before? Well, we do not know yet which is a problem but to err on a libertarian view, a. mortality of many millions could be lost. Is it worth the gamble? The hard right says the economy is worth it.
With at least another 2-3 years ahead of us, the only panic I see is from the author who strings together a lot of doubts and no clear solution.
Now if you want to read a quality effort: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
May 5, 2021
This book is a must read. This is an intelligent, readable, and well-written book. It's a refreshing voice of reason full of common sense and sound information which is hard to come by in the midst of much governmental overreaction and overreach so prevalent during this Covid-19 pandemic.
February 3, 2021
An unflinching and sober look at the real cost of the past year. This is a cool drink of water for those who have been skeptical of the response to COVID-19. Science only says what scientists say.
The only negative is that it was published in July, 2020, and feels like the data is not complete. I’d love to see them release another edition analyzing where we are now, with a renewed look at masks and the new vaccine. Highly recommend to those asking the question...”what just happened to us last year?”
The only negative is that it was published in July, 2020, and feels like the data is not complete. I’d love to see them release another edition analyzing where we are now, with a renewed look at masks and the new vaccine. Highly recommend to those asking the question...”what just happened to us last year?”
October 24, 2020
It isn't mainly about being factually right or wrong, it's about being visibly aligned with the right people, and more than that, it's about being seen to disapprove of the wrong people.
The Price of Panic is an excellent recounting of the hysterical and unprecedented reaction to the coronavirus pandemic. It openly exposes the motives , biases and unscientific reactions of bureaucrats, "health experts", journalists and social media "influencers". It shows that sky-is-falling group think has lead to over-reported and sensationalized statistics that are far from reality.
This book is sure to be controversial but absolutely worth a read; even if you disagree it is one of the few dissents that hasn't been censored (yet). You'll undoubtedly see reviews (longer than some doctoral theses) that attempt to tear it down because The Price of Panic doesn't disapprove of the right people. Just remember, those reviewers are also likely the same people who sit alone in their car wearing n95 masks and latex gloves. Science can often take a backseat to signaling one's virtue.
The Price of Panic is an excellent recounting of the hysterical and unprecedented reaction to the coronavirus pandemic. It openly exposes the motives , biases and unscientific reactions of bureaucrats, "health experts", journalists and social media "influencers". It shows that sky-is-falling group think has lead to over-reported and sensationalized statistics that are far from reality.
This book is sure to be controversial but absolutely worth a read; even if you disagree it is one of the few dissents that hasn't been censored (yet). You'll undoubtedly see reviews (longer than some doctoral theses) that attempt to tear it down because The Price of Panic doesn't disapprove of the right people. Just remember, those reviewers are also likely the same people who sit alone in their car wearing n95 masks and latex gloves. Science can often take a backseat to signaling one's virtue.
November 21, 2020
The panic over the virus has caused more harm than the virus.
September 1, 2021
Definitely a thought-provoking and stimulating argument against the current covid hype in the media. Media has a huge role in stimulating and fostering narrative among the crowds, its only objective is more attention and it does seem to have cashed in on the covid fear in a big way. The problem with the popular narrative is that it is very difficult to go against which is why most people do not bother arguing against it. But now we have the luxury of a few years of Covid data with us, which should enable us to make far better-informed decisions, but we are still swayed easily by fear generated by the media.
November 27, 2020
An interesting read that has good points but I'm not very sure where I actually stand in this madness. I have no stern point of view in this madness I just listen and do what I'm told and hopes for the best
December 20, 2020
Really good - well-researched, and well-written. This C.S. Lewis quote in the concluding chapter pretty much sums up this pandemic mess: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their conscience.” Yes. Yes, they do.
December 18, 2020
The authors write about the COVID epidemic, largely looking at the effectiveness of measures taken against the disease. The book was written in May 2020. Now that it is December and we are well into a second spike in infections, it is surprising that the authors have not updated the book.
The book includes a very good chapter on models. They look at the Imperial College model and the unbelievable track record of Neil Ferguson. Models have become a problem and the authors observe that you can't get more out of a model than you put in. Models are never any better than their assumptions. In the Imperial College model the team had to surmise that no natural immunity existed.
The use of masks and social distancing are shown to have a questionable basis. Similarly, lockdowns do not really work the way they have been implemented in the West. The authors look at the infection rate curves for a number of countries and U.S. states, identify the points where mask requirements and lockdowns were implemented, and show that no reduction in infection rate results from these impositions.
Lockdowns are quizzical as they were initially rejected by politicians as being unacceptable to Western societies where freedom is apparently so highly valued. This stance has completely reversed. Not only are politicians now increasingly imposing lockdowns, it is with complete support from the citizens. The authors explore possible reasons for this including the tendency for the left wing to favour government for fixing anything, the desire of politicians to illustrate that they are concerned, the concern for others, and of course the basic fear in the populace of the virus.
A look at Taiwan, Sweden, Japan and South Korea - countries that did not lockdown - shows that in some cases the death rates were low, but some were quite high. While a number of factors can be examined, it is not clear why the death rate varies so much among countries.
The authors examine the costs of the lockdowns - an issue that is little discussed. They try to estimate the cost to the economy of lockdowns in the U.S., arriving at $1 trillion a month. They estimate that 40 million Americans have lost their jobs, as of May, due to lockdowns.
One physician, Nicole Saphier made some back-of-the-envelope calculations. “As unemployment approaches 20%, each 1% rise can result in 3.3% spike in drug OD [overdoses]/ 1% increase in suicides (National Bureau of Economic Research). If unemployment hits 32%, ~77,000 Americans may die as a result. Will economic fallout mortality be greater than the virus itself?” The authors state that doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek say they have seen more deaths by suicide during this quarantine period than deaths from the COVID-19 virus.
Another major cost is the cancellation of elective surgery. In Ontario, thirty-five patients died in March and April waiting for heart procedures. Over half of all cancer diagnosis and treatment sessions, such as chemotherapy, are not being done.
The authors question how much the "experts" actually know, suggesting that we should be balancing expert advice with common sense.
They also see the global elite and government using covid as an opportunity to institute change in their favour, as in the Great Reset proposed at the World Economic Forum. The response to the coronavirus surely marked the fastest and most sweeping growth of state power in history.
The book includes a very good chapter on models. They look at the Imperial College model and the unbelievable track record of Neil Ferguson. Models have become a problem and the authors observe that you can't get more out of a model than you put in. Models are never any better than their assumptions. In the Imperial College model the team had to surmise that no natural immunity existed.
The use of masks and social distancing are shown to have a questionable basis. Similarly, lockdowns do not really work the way they have been implemented in the West. The authors look at the infection rate curves for a number of countries and U.S. states, identify the points where mask requirements and lockdowns were implemented, and show that no reduction in infection rate results from these impositions.
Lockdowns are quizzical as they were initially rejected by politicians as being unacceptable to Western societies where freedom is apparently so highly valued. This stance has completely reversed. Not only are politicians now increasingly imposing lockdowns, it is with complete support from the citizens. The authors explore possible reasons for this including the tendency for the left wing to favour government for fixing anything, the desire of politicians to illustrate that they are concerned, the concern for others, and of course the basic fear in the populace of the virus.
A look at Taiwan, Sweden, Japan and South Korea - countries that did not lockdown - shows that in some cases the death rates were low, but some were quite high. While a number of factors can be examined, it is not clear why the death rate varies so much among countries.
The authors examine the costs of the lockdowns - an issue that is little discussed. They try to estimate the cost to the economy of lockdowns in the U.S., arriving at $1 trillion a month. They estimate that 40 million Americans have lost their jobs, as of May, due to lockdowns.
One physician, Nicole Saphier made some back-of-the-envelope calculations. “As unemployment approaches 20%, each 1% rise can result in 3.3% spike in drug OD [overdoses]/ 1% increase in suicides (National Bureau of Economic Research). If unemployment hits 32%, ~77,000 Americans may die as a result. Will economic fallout mortality be greater than the virus itself?” The authors state that doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek say they have seen more deaths by suicide during this quarantine period than deaths from the COVID-19 virus.
Another major cost is the cancellation of elective surgery. In Ontario, thirty-five patients died in March and April waiting for heart procedures. Over half of all cancer diagnosis and treatment sessions, such as chemotherapy, are not being done.
The authors question how much the "experts" actually know, suggesting that we should be balancing expert advice with common sense.
They also see the global elite and government using covid as an opportunity to institute change in their favour, as in the Great Reset proposed at the World Economic Forum. The response to the coronavirus surely marked the fastest and most sweeping growth of state power in history.
May 28, 2021
The reader of the audio book sounded like an overly caffeinated infomercial salesman, which drove me nuts and made the whole thing seem like propaganda. Which is too bad because the content was a needed corrective to many of the over-the-top reactions to the Covid-19 virus. Unfortunately, the authors published this so early into the pandemic that much of the data and some of the predictions they make are now quite obviously wrong or out of date, which means the rest that they got right will likely be dismissed. Not sure how this will hold up over time, but I’d say the final chapter has the most staying power because it addresses some of the key principles to remember if this should ever happen again.
January 19, 2021
Toward the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic (or, at least, the beginning of government responses to it), Stanford medical scientist John Ioannidis published an article pointing to the obvious fact that governments guided by experts were making decisions without much knowledge of the virus. Ioannidis didn't advise no response, but suggested that data should both guide the initial response and alterations to it. For this, Ioannidis has been denounced as a right-wing provocateur, a position for which he would seem to be over-credentialed.
Ioannidis' concern that data be used to understand the virus and the proper response to it is shared by the authors of The Price of Panic, but whereas Ioannidis was speaking prospectively, this book is a retrospective on the panicked measures adopted by governments around the world, and here at home. In order to reach their conclusions, however, the authors tread ground through the reason the panic spread in the first place, the limitations on expert knowledge, the broader view of life not accounted for by specialists, and the proper role of government, even in an emergency. On all these scores, they find sensationalism, unwarranted deference, metaphysical weakness, and preference for comforting tyranny over risky freedom at the root of our problems.
The primary analytical, rather than philosophical, target of the book are the lockdown measures enforced widely across the globe, and on this point the authors do a great deal to dispel the myth of the lockdown as savior. Such measures, as everyone who thought about the topic for very long knew at the time, merely traded some costs for some presumed benefits, and the costs rose quickly as the lockdowns were extended and politicians with their cadre of experts moved the goalposts for ending them. As the authors show, the data about the lockdowns are imprecise (science being less conclusive than the "TRUST THE SCIENCE!" adherents of scientism typically allow for), but they note that there is no clear evidence that the lockdowns reduced the spread of the coronavirus (a goal distinct from the original one of merely "slowing" the spread), and that there were a host of observable costs associated with them that were arguably worse, or will be over the long run, than the disease itself.
In none of their arguments do the authors discount the seriousness of the pandemic, nor do they cast aspersions on the motivations of experts and politicians, who are assumed in the book to be acting primarily out of goodwill and a desire to understand and control the disease (though it is allowed that this is probably less true of politicians). Clearly, the intent is to convince the reader to be skeptical of apocalyptic models and arguments for extreme levels of government control. Indeed, the most pressing reason for the book seems to be to warn against repeating the lockdown mistake, and this goal, laudable as it is, limits the overall effectiveness of the book. Clearly, in order to be published in time to have its desired effect, the authors had to cut off their statistics at some point in the summer, likely some time in June. This makes reading the book seven months later an exercise in mentally updating numbers that are now out of date. Not that this has a discernible effect on the arguments presented, but it does make the book already slightly outdated. Hopefully a revised edition will be released.
It's doubtful that most people who will enjoy this book have not encountered or thought of the arguments presented in it before, though it is helpful to have them combined in one resource. As for the book's detractors, one of the more humorous negative reviews I came across condemned it for being written by "non-experts," which ironically only buttresses one of their primary points: that despite the limited scope of their expertise and their propensity toward self-contradiction and error, experts still enjoy an unjustifiably unassailable perch from which to impose their view of the world and their levels of acceptable risk. Sadly, it seems that the dominant mentality in our world and our country is one of total deference to the rule of experts. So long as that is true, books like The Price of Panic, no matter their data and good sense, will have an uphill battle.
Ioannidis' concern that data be used to understand the virus and the proper response to it is shared by the authors of The Price of Panic, but whereas Ioannidis was speaking prospectively, this book is a retrospective on the panicked measures adopted by governments around the world, and here at home. In order to reach their conclusions, however, the authors tread ground through the reason the panic spread in the first place, the limitations on expert knowledge, the broader view of life not accounted for by specialists, and the proper role of government, even in an emergency. On all these scores, they find sensationalism, unwarranted deference, metaphysical weakness, and preference for comforting tyranny over risky freedom at the root of our problems.
The primary analytical, rather than philosophical, target of the book are the lockdown measures enforced widely across the globe, and on this point the authors do a great deal to dispel the myth of the lockdown as savior. Such measures, as everyone who thought about the topic for very long knew at the time, merely traded some costs for some presumed benefits, and the costs rose quickly as the lockdowns were extended and politicians with their cadre of experts moved the goalposts for ending them. As the authors show, the data about the lockdowns are imprecise (science being less conclusive than the "TRUST THE SCIENCE!" adherents of scientism typically allow for), but they note that there is no clear evidence that the lockdowns reduced the spread of the coronavirus (a goal distinct from the original one of merely "slowing" the spread), and that there were a host of observable costs associated with them that were arguably worse, or will be over the long run, than the disease itself.
In none of their arguments do the authors discount the seriousness of the pandemic, nor do they cast aspersions on the motivations of experts and politicians, who are assumed in the book to be acting primarily out of goodwill and a desire to understand and control the disease (though it is allowed that this is probably less true of politicians). Clearly, the intent is to convince the reader to be skeptical of apocalyptic models and arguments for extreme levels of government control. Indeed, the most pressing reason for the book seems to be to warn against repeating the lockdown mistake, and this goal, laudable as it is, limits the overall effectiveness of the book. Clearly, in order to be published in time to have its desired effect, the authors had to cut off their statistics at some point in the summer, likely some time in June. This makes reading the book seven months later an exercise in mentally updating numbers that are now out of date. Not that this has a discernible effect on the arguments presented, but it does make the book already slightly outdated. Hopefully a revised edition will be released.
It's doubtful that most people who will enjoy this book have not encountered or thought of the arguments presented in it before, though it is helpful to have them combined in one resource. As for the book's detractors, one of the more humorous negative reviews I came across condemned it for being written by "non-experts," which ironically only buttresses one of their primary points: that despite the limited scope of their expertise and their propensity toward self-contradiction and error, experts still enjoy an unjustifiably unassailable perch from which to impose their view of the world and their levels of acceptable risk. Sadly, it seems that the dominant mentality in our world and our country is one of total deference to the rule of experts. So long as that is true, books like The Price of Panic, no matter their data and good sense, will have an uphill battle.
December 2, 2020
Outstanding.
November 20, 2020
I'd like to refute their points but I can't. We made a huge mistake demanding measures and lockdowns. The best we can do now is not repeat the mistake.
Full review on my blog: https://nouw.com/cwidmann/bookreview-...
Full review on my blog: https://nouw.com/cwidmann/bookreview-...
November 26, 2020
"Americans have become too fearful, too fragile. But as we have seen, that's just part of the story. The other part is that falliable experts have gained far too much power over the commanding heights of culture. Even when they meant well, they didn't know what they pretended to know. Worse, they used the pretense of knowledge to turn not just our fears, but also our good intentions against us."
People need to read this book.
People need to read this book.
September 5, 2021
A refreshing perspective look back at the COVID-19 response. The authors do an awesome job of showing short sighted, foolish, or duplicitous many of the responses and restrictions were.
The biggest issue (through not fault of their own) was that this was released in October of 2020, so a lot of the statistics are old data.
The biggest issue (through not fault of their own) was that this was released in October of 2020, so a lot of the statistics are old data.
March 23, 2021
Interesting viewpoint, but redundant on information. Considering that the pandemic was not even a year in when it was published, I took some of the statistics and studies with a grain of salt.
May 3, 2021
Against the Brave New Normal
Both the title and the subtitle of the book give an excellent description of the authors’ aims. They are certainly not denying the reality of the coronavirus pandemic and that it kills people. But they want to remind us that pandemics happen and have happened, even of this severity and even within the lifetime of many today. What sets this one apart is the topic of the book, one which all three authors felt urgently needed to be addressed as soon as possible, and so, releasing the book in July of 2020, they ran the risk of a rushed publication because they were convinced that clear-cut issues had rapidly emerged that did not require more time and indeed could not wait. By addressing these things while the pandemic was still unfolding, they hoped to provide some corrective advice that hopefully would be heeded such that the massive mistakes that had already been made would not be repeated.
This pandemic has left, and is still leaving, a massive imprint in history that will never be forgotten. And yet, as recently as 1968/69 we had the Hong Kong Flu, a pandemic of similar proportions, when you adjust for population increase, and nobody remembers it . So why is Covid-19 so different? Why has it had the shattering impact upon the world that neither the Asian Flu of 1958 nor the Hong Kong Flu of a decade later had? The authors give several reasons.
First, there was an unhealthy and naïve reliance upon untested computer models. The actual model that was adopted early on predicted an infection death rate of 3.4% and 2.2 million Americans dead, which would make it equivalent to or worse than the Spanish Flu of 1918. But when actual data started coming in, these numbers turned out to be massively wrong: the observed infection death rate was in fact looking more like somewhere between 0.13% and 0.26%. And even that far smaller number is highly skewed toward older people with co-morbidity. So if you’re young, you’re about 1000 times less likely to die of Covid than if you’re over 70.
The second reason for the panic was what the authors call “the tyranny of experts.” The problem wasn’t expertise, but that select individuals such as Anthony Fauci were given disproportionate influence to affect policies far outside of their narrow field of expertise. Ignored were the other experts who disagreed with them and argued against lockdowns. And this is no fringe group. As of this writing 14,000 medical and public health scientists and 43,000 medical practitioners have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, a document expressing criticism of the “one size fits nobody” lockdown policy, advocating instead more reasonable measures like those that have been used in the past and what some countries, like Taiwan and Sweden, have implemented successfully this time around.
Well, even if the lockdowns were a mistake, you’d think that surely they did some good. Unfortunately, upon analyzing the reported data, the authors conclude that the lockdowns were essentially all pain and no gain . They can see absolutely no change in the plotted curves of Covid cases and deaths over time when lockdowns were begun and when they ended. So not only did beginning lockdowns have no effect , but neither did ending them result in spikes in cases and deaths.
And to make it even worse, we could have known that lockdowns, masking, and social distancing don’t work – from a comprehensive study produced a few months before the pandemic even started, by the World Health Organization itself, no less. This study was of influenza, but similarities with the novel coronavirus are apparently sufficient that it could serve as a proxy for the coronavirus. And yet the conclusions of this thorough study went out the window in the tidal wave of fear and confusion that resulted from the perfect storm of relying on unproven models promoted by a few select government officials.
So what were the costs of the pandemic?
1. The lockdowns in the United States cost its economy about $1 trillion dollars a month . This isn’t just a sterile number, but translates directly into human well-being. Tens of thousands of small businesses were permanently wiped out, and this number may have reached into the hundreds of thousands by now. Small businesses are vulnerable in a way that larger ones are not, and what the lockdowns effectively did was to cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, which is basically guaranteeing just a few giant actors on the economic stage. Combine that with 41 million new jobless claims in May 2020 – that’s a lot of lives devastated.
2. Mental health costs are impossible to quantify, but one study predicts 75,000 deaths of despair in the United States due to the lockdowns alone, over and above the usual number of these tragic deaths. And one public health expert estimated that the length of recovery may be to up to nine years for young children who have been traumatized by their training to look at their neighbors not as neighbors but as possible carriers of deadly diseases who might kill them. That prolonged, heightened sense of fear and anxiety is not normal and the long-term effects are unknown.
3. Then there’s the study in June, 2020 that estimated that there were likely about 80,000 missed cancer screenings due directly to the lockdowns. So about 80,000 people have cancer that didn’t get treated on time because it was missed, because they couldn’t go to the doctor.
4. At any time in history, there’s always going to be a segment of the population right at the edge, just over the line in terms of absolute poverty. And it’s likely that about a billion people moved out of absolute poverty, globally, since 1990. Half that many may return to the prior state just this year because of the lockdowns. And so this is why it makes no sense that this became a Left – Right issue, because this is a matter of the global poor who are going to suffer. The U.N. food programme was urging the West not to lockdown, because the interruptions of the food supply chains going from the developed West to the poor countries could have catastrophic consequences, resulting in perhaps 300,000 deaths per day (their estimate) due to extreme poverty and starvation, over and above the “normal” expected rate, due completely to the lockdowns.
5. And then there is the issue of freedom and liberty. This is harder to quantify and therefore more subtle, but it may have the longest reaching effects. We have seen an unprecedented ratcheting up of government power and a subsequent loss of liberty and freedom. I say “ratcheting up” because history shows us that the tendency is always in one direction – once power is grabbed by the government, it doesn’t want to relinquish it. Freedom and liberty historically are not the default conditions in the world, but have to be cultivated and carefully preserved. The default is authoritarianism and tyranny, even if “soft” tyranny. And we are seeing the beginnings of that.
If you get the uneasy sense of being the proverbial frog in the pot of heating water, you might pay attention to your instincts. A test case, something of a canary in a coal mine, is the following scenario that happened just a fifteen-minute drive from my home in Edmonton, Alberta. There a church decided, for the spiritual health of its members, to worship as churches have done for two thousand years. By politely declining to limit attendance to 15% capacity, to wear masks and to social distance, this church incurred the wrath of the State. The pastor was imprisoned for 35 days in solitary confinement in a maximum security facility, and the church building itself was occupied by the State. Under cover of darkness (a good indicator of illegitimacy) the State erected two concentric chain-link fences around the church building and stationed police and security there to keep worshippers out. Now they have to worship in secret without disclosing their location. This sounds like Communist China. You may disagree with the church’s decision, but I’m sorry, you’re going to have a very hard time making a case that this is in any way consistent with a healthy society. Something is very wrong . With religious liberty in the rear-view mirror (it’s always the first to go) we are clearly on the road to serfdom .
Anthony Fauci has said that in his view we should never go back to shaking hands. He wants this to remain the new normal. That’s of course crazy talk, but it shows the extremely narrow vision he has for a healthy society. It’s a perfect example of the tyranny of experts. Because life in a flourishing society is about more than mere safety. Of course safety is important, but when safety is taken to be the only thing that matters, you end up with… this . We are currently not a flourishing society: we are depressed, unemployed, and, in quiet, unnoticed corners of the world, people may be starving to death because of this.
We hear politicians support these extreme policies as worth it “if they save just one life.” And this should beg the question: Do they mean one net life, or do we save one life and kill a thousand because of the policies?
And so this book was written against the brave new normal. It’s a scary thought that we may be at a cross roads where today, and not tomorrow, the future of a free society hangs in the balance. This, of course, depends entirely on the compliance of citizens. Well, one hopeful sign of a citizen push-back happened just as this book was going to press. The mayor of Los Angeles decreed that there were to be no fireworks for the Fourth of July. But the citizens had other ideas and lit up the skies with a wonderful display of civil disobedience, in an extended celebration of freedom from oppression.
May these displays be multiplied many times over.
Both the title and the subtitle of the book give an excellent description of the authors’ aims. They are certainly not denying the reality of the coronavirus pandemic and that it kills people. But they want to remind us that pandemics happen and have happened, even of this severity and even within the lifetime of many today. What sets this one apart is the topic of the book, one which all three authors felt urgently needed to be addressed as soon as possible, and so, releasing the book in July of 2020, they ran the risk of a rushed publication because they were convinced that clear-cut issues had rapidly emerged that did not require more time and indeed could not wait. By addressing these things while the pandemic was still unfolding, they hoped to provide some corrective advice that hopefully would be heeded such that the massive mistakes that had already been made would not be repeated.
This pandemic has left, and is still leaving, a massive imprint in history that will never be forgotten. And yet, as recently as 1968/69 we had the Hong Kong Flu, a pandemic of similar proportions, when you adjust for population increase, and nobody remembers it . So why is Covid-19 so different? Why has it had the shattering impact upon the world that neither the Asian Flu of 1958 nor the Hong Kong Flu of a decade later had? The authors give several reasons.
First, there was an unhealthy and naïve reliance upon untested computer models. The actual model that was adopted early on predicted an infection death rate of 3.4% and 2.2 million Americans dead, which would make it equivalent to or worse than the Spanish Flu of 1918. But when actual data started coming in, these numbers turned out to be massively wrong: the observed infection death rate was in fact looking more like somewhere between 0.13% and 0.26%. And even that far smaller number is highly skewed toward older people with co-morbidity. So if you’re young, you’re about 1000 times less likely to die of Covid than if you’re over 70.
The second reason for the panic was what the authors call “the tyranny of experts.” The problem wasn’t expertise, but that select individuals such as Anthony Fauci were given disproportionate influence to affect policies far outside of their narrow field of expertise. Ignored were the other experts who disagreed with them and argued against lockdowns. And this is no fringe group. As of this writing 14,000 medical and public health scientists and 43,000 medical practitioners have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, a document expressing criticism of the “one size fits nobody” lockdown policy, advocating instead more reasonable measures like those that have been used in the past and what some countries, like Taiwan and Sweden, have implemented successfully this time around.
Well, even if the lockdowns were a mistake, you’d think that surely they did some good. Unfortunately, upon analyzing the reported data, the authors conclude that the lockdowns were essentially all pain and no gain . They can see absolutely no change in the plotted curves of Covid cases and deaths over time when lockdowns were begun and when they ended. So not only did beginning lockdowns have no effect , but neither did ending them result in spikes in cases and deaths.
And to make it even worse, we could have known that lockdowns, masking, and social distancing don’t work – from a comprehensive study produced a few months before the pandemic even started, by the World Health Organization itself, no less. This study was of influenza, but similarities with the novel coronavirus are apparently sufficient that it could serve as a proxy for the coronavirus. And yet the conclusions of this thorough study went out the window in the tidal wave of fear and confusion that resulted from the perfect storm of relying on unproven models promoted by a few select government officials.
So what were the costs of the pandemic?
1. The lockdowns in the United States cost its economy about $1 trillion dollars a month . This isn’t just a sterile number, but translates directly into human well-being. Tens of thousands of small businesses were permanently wiped out, and this number may have reached into the hundreds of thousands by now. Small businesses are vulnerable in a way that larger ones are not, and what the lockdowns effectively did was to cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, which is basically guaranteeing just a few giant actors on the economic stage. Combine that with 41 million new jobless claims in May 2020 – that’s a lot of lives devastated.
2. Mental health costs are impossible to quantify, but one study predicts 75,000 deaths of despair in the United States due to the lockdowns alone, over and above the usual number of these tragic deaths. And one public health expert estimated that the length of recovery may be to up to nine years for young children who have been traumatized by their training to look at their neighbors not as neighbors but as possible carriers of deadly diseases who might kill them. That prolonged, heightened sense of fear and anxiety is not normal and the long-term effects are unknown.
3. Then there’s the study in June, 2020 that estimated that there were likely about 80,000 missed cancer screenings due directly to the lockdowns. So about 80,000 people have cancer that didn’t get treated on time because it was missed, because they couldn’t go to the doctor.
4. At any time in history, there’s always going to be a segment of the population right at the edge, just over the line in terms of absolute poverty. And it’s likely that about a billion people moved out of absolute poverty, globally, since 1990. Half that many may return to the prior state just this year because of the lockdowns. And so this is why it makes no sense that this became a Left – Right issue, because this is a matter of the global poor who are going to suffer. The U.N. food programme was urging the West not to lockdown, because the interruptions of the food supply chains going from the developed West to the poor countries could have catastrophic consequences, resulting in perhaps 300,000 deaths per day (their estimate) due to extreme poverty and starvation, over and above the “normal” expected rate, due completely to the lockdowns.
5. And then there is the issue of freedom and liberty. This is harder to quantify and therefore more subtle, but it may have the longest reaching effects. We have seen an unprecedented ratcheting up of government power and a subsequent loss of liberty and freedom. I say “ratcheting up” because history shows us that the tendency is always in one direction – once power is grabbed by the government, it doesn’t want to relinquish it. Freedom and liberty historically are not the default conditions in the world, but have to be cultivated and carefully preserved. The default is authoritarianism and tyranny, even if “soft” tyranny. And we are seeing the beginnings of that.
If you get the uneasy sense of being the proverbial frog in the pot of heating water, you might pay attention to your instincts. A test case, something of a canary in a coal mine, is the following scenario that happened just a fifteen-minute drive from my home in Edmonton, Alberta. There a church decided, for the spiritual health of its members, to worship as churches have done for two thousand years. By politely declining to limit attendance to 15% capacity, to wear masks and to social distance, this church incurred the wrath of the State. The pastor was imprisoned for 35 days in solitary confinement in a maximum security facility, and the church building itself was occupied by the State. Under cover of darkness (a good indicator of illegitimacy) the State erected two concentric chain-link fences around the church building and stationed police and security there to keep worshippers out. Now they have to worship in secret without disclosing their location. This sounds like Communist China. You may disagree with the church’s decision, but I’m sorry, you’re going to have a very hard time making a case that this is in any way consistent with a healthy society. Something is very wrong . With religious liberty in the rear-view mirror (it’s always the first to go) we are clearly on the road to serfdom .
Anthony Fauci has said that in his view we should never go back to shaking hands. He wants this to remain the new normal. That’s of course crazy talk, but it shows the extremely narrow vision he has for a healthy society. It’s a perfect example of the tyranny of experts. Because life in a flourishing society is about more than mere safety. Of course safety is important, but when safety is taken to be the only thing that matters, you end up with… this . We are currently not a flourishing society: we are depressed, unemployed, and, in quiet, unnoticed corners of the world, people may be starving to death because of this.
We hear politicians support these extreme policies as worth it “if they save just one life.” And this should beg the question: Do they mean one net life, or do we save one life and kill a thousand because of the policies?
And so this book was written against the brave new normal. It’s a scary thought that we may be at a cross roads where today, and not tomorrow, the future of a free society hangs in the balance. This, of course, depends entirely on the compliance of citizens. Well, one hopeful sign of a citizen push-back happened just as this book was going to press. The mayor of Los Angeles decreed that there were to be no fireworks for the Fourth of July. But the citizens had other ideas and lit up the skies with a wonderful display of civil disobedience, in an extended celebration of freedom from oppression.
May these displays be multiplied many times over.
June 16, 2022
I just checked off a book from my 2022 Gospel eBooks reading challenge. It was a themed challenge where I read "a book written in light of Covid-19."
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Wow, this was a really great read and if I had my way it would be mandatory reading for people in government (so that they can make better decisions during the next pandemic). It was written by a biologist, a statistician, and a philosopher. This book is essentially a debriefing of the Covid-19 pandemic, detailing how it spread, how leaders responded, what models/authorities they relied on for their decisions, and a look at the aftermath from the paths that different countries took. It doesn't have a narrow focus on North America, but covered how many different countries responded (they praise some and criticized others). The authors argue that we got tyranny due to fear and panic, and the public abrogated their responsibility to authorities ("they know best" mentality) without questioning the evidence. The conclusion is that those who went the lockdown route did far more harm than good. Nothing is argued from sheer philosophy but is rather evidence based detailing statistics, as well as direct and secondary consequences.
The thing I found most surprising is that this book was released in Oct 2020. It is so well researched that I couldn't understand how they put this together so quickly, while the events were still unfolding. One takeaway from this book that hasn't left my mind is the value incentive for doctors/medical practitioners. If they under-predict harm and things turn out to be much more catastrophic, that is malpractice and they lose all credibility (or worse). Whereas if they overpredict harm, foretelling a catastrophic scenario that doesn't come to pass, few blame them for things turning out better than expected (and they have a built-in excuse that their recommendations being heeded was what made things better). This value incentive to overpredict must be kept in mind, especially when we foolishly turn to health authorities alone for recommendations. Health is one component, but it's not the only. We should never trust a single narrow profession for decisions that affect all of life.
No matter if you were skeptical or fearful during 2020, pick up this book to get a full debriefing on the pandemic so that we can learn together from past mistakes and do better next time. Because yes, there will be a next time.
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Wow, this was a really great read and if I had my way it would be mandatory reading for people in government (so that they can make better decisions during the next pandemic). It was written by a biologist, a statistician, and a philosopher. This book is essentially a debriefing of the Covid-19 pandemic, detailing how it spread, how leaders responded, what models/authorities they relied on for their decisions, and a look at the aftermath from the paths that different countries took. It doesn't have a narrow focus on North America, but covered how many different countries responded (they praise some and criticized others). The authors argue that we got tyranny due to fear and panic, and the public abrogated their responsibility to authorities ("they know best" mentality) without questioning the evidence. The conclusion is that those who went the lockdown route did far more harm than good. Nothing is argued from sheer philosophy but is rather evidence based detailing statistics, as well as direct and secondary consequences.
The thing I found most surprising is that this book was released in Oct 2020. It is so well researched that I couldn't understand how they put this together so quickly, while the events were still unfolding. One takeaway from this book that hasn't left my mind is the value incentive for doctors/medical practitioners. If they under-predict harm and things turn out to be much more catastrophic, that is malpractice and they lose all credibility (or worse). Whereas if they overpredict harm, foretelling a catastrophic scenario that doesn't come to pass, few blame them for things turning out better than expected (and they have a built-in excuse that their recommendations being heeded was what made things better). This value incentive to overpredict must be kept in mind, especially when we foolishly turn to health authorities alone for recommendations. Health is one component, but it's not the only. We should never trust a single narrow profession for decisions that affect all of life.
No matter if you were skeptical or fearful during 2020, pick up this book to get a full debriefing on the pandemic so that we can learn together from past mistakes and do better next time. Because yes, there will be a next time.
December 21, 2020
Everyone should read this book. Some great statistics and perspective on past pandemics. They have their point of view but pretty unbiased overall. It lays out the path that lead most of the world to needless panic and points out lessons we need to learn from this catastrophic handling of things in 2020.
January 2, 2021
Important reading for understanding what's gone on in 2020 and what's going to happen in 2021... Read it & discuss.
January 15, 2021
This is a book that I hope will outlive its subject matter as a case study of the damaging effects of technocracy and blind faith in narrow expertise.
May 30, 2021
Excellent.
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