Lessons Public Health Officials Should Learn from the COVID Pandemic But Probably Won't

Last week was the four-year anniversary of when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. For those who have been reading this blog, you will know that I have been highly critical of the government's response to the pandemic. That is why it was nice to read this report from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity that is entitled "COVID Lessons Learned: A Retrospective After Four Years." The co-authors of this report include Steve Hanke from Johns Hopkins, Casey Mulligan from the University of Chicago, and former Trump advisor/current health policy fellow at Stanford University Scott Atlas. Here is a list of the lessons that they thought to be most important. 

1. Leaders should calm public fears, not stoke them. This is good advice even when it is not a pandemic. If we exaggerate fears without considering the costs, we get the catastrophic impacts that fear-obsessed decisions wreak, as we will see in subsequent points. 
2. Lockdowns do not work to substantially reduce deaths or stop viral circulation. This was established epidemiological knowledge and was part of pandemic guidance provided prior to the pandemic. Leaders and decision-makers across the world ignored the advice and gave into panic. Unsurprisingly, lockdowns did little to reduce COVID deaths. If anything, lockdowns increased excess deaths.  
3. Lockdowns and social isolation had negative consequences that far outweighed benefits. Sadly, I called this one in May 2020, as well as pointing out in April 2020 how the lockdowns would adversely affect the economy. Lockdowns ended up causing or exacerbating multiple negative consequences, including deteriorating mental health, increased child and domestic violence, greater food insecurity, widened economic inequality, social polarization, unhealthy lifestyle choices, and erosion of liberal democracy. 
4. Government should not pay people more not to work. Here is another one I called in early 2020.  The more the government pays to stay at home, the less likely they will want to work. As I wrote in 2023, that ended up being the case, much like it was during the Great Recession. 
5. Shutting down schools was a major policy mistake with tragic effects on children, especially the poor. I expressed my issues with school closures in July 2020. It turns out that school closures ended up doing considerable harm to children. Even the Left-leaning New York Times got around to admitting as much this week. 
6. Masks were of little or no value and possibly harmful. I was mildly for a temporary face mask mandate at the beginning of the pandemic, even in spite of conflicting information. That is because there was at least mechanistic plausibility that they could work, which is better than the lockdowns (See Point #2) or school closures (See Point #5). But my support waned to the point of being against the mandates. Then I was against using face masks to fight COVID because it became clear that face masks were ineffective in slowing the spread of COVID.  
7. Government should not suppress dissent or police the boundaries of science. Attempts to shut down discussions under the guise of "fighting information" not only led to the erosion of scientific inquiry, but also democratic norms. 
8. The real hospital story was underutilization. As the authors bring up, the real issue was that hospitals were underused because hospitals were doing as little as possible to treat non-COVID disease. Postponing preventative disease in 2020 has created problems to this day. A whole slew of preventible diseases went undiagnosed, which has resulted in a backlog that still affects our public health systems.
9. Protect the most vulnerable. It was clear as early as March 2020 that COVID had a profound differential in risk between the elderly and the immunocompromised versus everyone else. We should have had differential protection for the vulnerable while allowing everyone else make their own choices based on their own risk tolerance so we can avoid the societal disruptions and havoc that the blanket mandates caused. 
10. Warp Speed: Deregulate but don't mandate. There were considerable regulations that existed prior to the pandemic that made our response to COVID worse. That is why it was nice to see the government cut red tape to make the vaccines happen. As the authors bring up, "the original vaccine was well-matched to then-circulating variants, and there was a sharp drop-off in hospitalizations and deaths." In spite of the earlier vaccines' success, the government had no business mandating vaccines, especially since the vaccines did nothing statistically significant to stop COVID transmission. 

As you can tell from this list, public health mandates in response to the pandemic were one fiasco after another. Former NIH Director Francis Collins eventually issued a mea culpa in which he realized he was too close-minded when it came to COVID restrictions. Fauci recently admitted that social distancing at six feet was bunk and that vaccine mandates increased vaccine hesitancy. Even so, I have not seen anything to suggest that public officials have asked the tough questions to the point of making significant change. I think in part, ego will play a role because it is difficult for a politician to admit they contributed to one of the worst peacetime public policy decisions in human history. Another factor is that it is election year and there are many other topics to focus on now that the pandemic it is in the rearview mirror. As much as I wish they would learn from past mistakes, I would not be surprised if a similar level of stupidity took over during the next pandemic.