When "Flatten the Curve" During COVID Meant Trading One Health Crisis for Another

During the COVID pandemic, "flatten the curve" became quite the mantra. It was the justification used for sweeping lockdowns in order to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. The fear was not merely widespread illness, but a collapse of the hospital system. As I explained last month, that nightmare scenario of hospitals overflowing with patients was more faulty modeling and prediction than reality.  

A recent COVID inquiry from the United Kingdom adds on another unpleasant layer. Not only were governments across the world acting in a draconian manner to a threat that by and large did not materialize. They did so in a way that reorganized healthcare to focus on COVID and incentivized everyone else to stay away, especially with the slogan of "Stay home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives." A few favorites from the inquiry report:

• People were also deterred from accessing healthcare....[because of] the public messaging that was intended to keep them safe ('Stay Home'), the fear of catching COVID-19 in healthcare settings, a feeling that they did not want to 'overburden' the NHS or because they were worried about attending appointments without a loved one being able to attend with them.
• Some non-COVID-19 patients had their diagnoses and treatments delayed to the point where their conditions became untreatable. 
• There was a decline in attendances at emergency departments and other healthcare settings for non-COVID-19 conditions, even for life-threatening medical emergencies such as heart attacks. 
• This suggests that the public messaging of Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives may have, inadvertently, sent the message that healthcare was closed. 
• Missed and late diagnoses and longer waits for treatment for colorectal cancer...resulted in 1,630 excess deaths from colorectal...cancer. 
• The increased rate of deaths in the community from heart attacks suggested that, during the pandemic, people with heart attacks were less likely to attend hospital and thus did not receive time-dependent heart attack treatments, which led to their death. 

If you read Section 9 of the inquiry, you can read a whole list of how this impacted non-COVID healthcare in the British healthcare system. Upon reading the report, it is tragic that this happened in the first place. It is not as if the cancelled procedures, missed treatments, reduced access, or people trying to avoid care was unpredictable. 

Some might be aghast at these findings, but this lamentably was foreseeable. I noted in May 2020 that the downstream effects of shifting healthcare towards COVID care and away from non-COVID were being severely underweighted. That is why it did not surprise me when it was found that the lockdowns caused excess deaths or evidence in 2022 made it clearer of the costs of delaying preventative care. In 2025, I pointed out how a series of health issues increased in prevalence during the pandemic and had not abated at that time. 

What this UK inquiry does is provide institutional confirmation that people did not seek or receive care when they should have, that diagnoses and treatments were delayed, and that patients in some cases presented too late for effective intervention. It also acknowledges that public messing unintentionally contributed to people avoiding this necessary healthcare. What makes it worse is not only that this occurred, but it persists into 2026. Data from the NHS shows that backlogs are still well above pre-pandemic levels.

There is a tendency to treat this all as unforeseeable, as if no one could see this coming. The sad truth is that it is not. Putting off routine care means that deferred care racks up. That is not wisdom in hindsight; that is basic arithmetic. What makes this outcome so uncomfortable for those who were cheering on the lockdowns is that the governments who were trying to keep their citizens safe latched onto such a narrow definition of safety that they ignored the tradeoffs. 

The result is a familiar and unfortunate pattern: fewer immediate hospital crises followed by years of backlogs, delayed diagnoses, and deterioration of healthcare systems. Once the emergency passed, so did the attention to the disastrous aftermath of the lockdowns, which is another reminder of why something as vital as our health should not be fully placed in the hands of the government, especially during a crisis.

COVID Lockdowns & School Closures and How the Children Did Not Developmentally Bounce Back

Sometimes it feels like the COVID-19 pandemic was yesterday, but the truth is that yesterday was the six-year anniversary that the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. We were told shortly after that the effects of the lockdowns would be short-lived and we could weather it because nothing was worse than COVID-19. We all know how that safetyism turned out!

In the years following the pandemic, researchers have been trying to discern what the tradeoffs of the lockdowns were. The body of research continues to grow and show how the lockdowns were far from being harmless, especially for children. 

Last December, I wrote about research that indicates that lockdowns may have contributed to language and social-cognitive delays in young children. A new study from the University of East Anglia (Johns et al., 2026) shows how the lockdown's effect on children is much worse than previously thought.

The new study did not simply compare outcomes before and after the pandemic. This study tracked the same children over time, allowing researchers to measure how quickly their cognitive skills developed and how entering school during the lockdowns affected that growth. Not only does the study show that the lockdowns caused lower growth in executive-function skills and that the impacts were more greatly felt by children in low-income households. That gap persists years after the lockdown and those students still struggle to catch up.

This study cannot tell us whether the delays from the COVID lockdowns are permanent because only time can tell. Even so, this study shows something fundamental. Lockdowns slowed the rate at which key cognitive skills developed during one of the most formative periods of childhood. 

Executive function, which includes such skills as self-control, attention regulation, and flexible thinking, normally grows rapidly when children first enter school and begin interacting regularly with peers. When those experiences are interrupted, development slowed. Even if some of that is made up, it is not as simple as doubling down efforts to make up for lost time. It simply does not work that way. And this is not a trivial development because it is executive function that plays a major role in academic and social success down the road. 

That is what makes this whole debate even more striking. Much like I brought up last December, lockdowns that disrupted children's lives so profoundly and had such adverse effects were often justified by people who spoke passionately about income inequality in the pre-COVID era. Yet policies that shut down schools and isolate children from an environment where they normally develop those skills was asking for trouble. 

Studies like this show that the costs of lockdowns were not temporary or merely inconvenient. The lockdowns are such a calamity where they still have caused considerable harm years later. Draconian COVID measures were not simply a matter of children missing a few classes. These children have been deprived of an important part of growing up and what it means to be a kid. 

Panic Over Data: What a New Study Reveals About the Main Rationale of COVID Lockdowns

In some respects, it feels like the COVID pandemic was a lifetime ago. However, it was only about six years ago that the World Health Organization (WHO) named the disease COVID-19. Aside from countries such as Sweden, humanity collectively freaked out and governments across the world implemented lockdowns in response to COVID-19. The rationale for the lockdowns was not simply that cases were rising, but that if something were not done to flatten the curve, the healthcare systems would be overwhelmed. 

It turns out that needing to implement lockdowns was even more unnecessary than previously thought. A recent study from the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society examined COVID policy, including the lockdowns (Wood et al., 2026). One of their main findings was that most countries reached peak COVID infection before the lockdowns were implemented. This led the authors to say that "the results imply that the full lockdowns were largely unnecessary."

"Largely unnecessary." If only someone warned us beforehand. And no, I am not only talking about when I wrote shortly before the lockdowns in the U.S. that we did not need lockdowns. It turns out that shortly before the pandemic, both the WHO and Johns Hopkins released pandemic guidance stating that there was no rationale for the lockdowns. The authors of this paper try to couch it by saying that the lockdowns might have kept those infection rates down. I have to disagree with that notion. Simply because the lockdowns coincided with the decline does not mean they caused it, as the paper already shows. Many people were already altering their behavior before the lockdowns went into effect. Imagine that: people can adapt to risk during a pandemic without being coerced into a lockdown. It is not as if there has never been a pandemic. These findings from the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society show that the lockdowns were not necessary because the curve for most countries was already bending before the lockdowns began. 

The major implication of this study is that the lockdowns were empirically unnecessary to reverse COVID waves. In other words, the major justification for the lockdowns was weak. The problem, though, is that the costs of the lockdown were neither weak, hidden, nor unpredictable. In April 2020 and May 2020, I covered many costs, whether that was economic devastation, neglected non-COVID healthcare, and social unrest. Sadly, I was right about the havoc that the lockdowns caused.

Rather than save lives, the lockdowns actually increased excess deaths. Lockdowns decreased the U.S. GDP by 5.4 percent and consumer spending by 7.5 percent, which came with an economic cost of $9.3 trillion to the U.S. economy. Then there is the widening global inequality; stunting the educational advancement of an entire generation of children; declining social-emotional skills; ruder people, greater fear, and more authoritarianism; higher obesity, greater substance abuse, and a backlog of healthcare issues; and increased political polarization, conspiracy thinking, mental illness, and violence. 

There is no shortage of the damage that the lockdowns caused. Lockdowns were necessary for nothing and costly for everything. What makes this lamentable is that it was predictable and unnecessary. Yet no one is being held accountable for this carnage, maybe because so many were complicit or because it is easier to avoid inconvenient truths than it is to ignore deleterious policy. So why do I bring this up six years later? 

Because there will be another pandemic and important decisions will need to be made for pandemic strategy. It is my hope that perhaps next time decision-makers can actually use evidence and basic risk assessment instead of fear, panic, and lockdowns that ruin millions of lives. Because let's be real: a policy that was unnecessary, harmful, and predictable should never have been applauded as "following the science."

Another Silent Cost of Lockdowns: Language and Social-Cognitive Delays That Threaten Children’s Potential

It is hard to believe that the COVID-19 pandemic began nearly six years ago. In some respects, it feels like it happened yesterday. I remember shortly before the lockdowns started to take effect in the United States, I wrote about how we should have relied more on voluntary social distancing instead of lockdowns. Unfortunately, politicians across the country (and indeed the world) panicked and imposed lockdowns in the name of "following the science," even in spite of the fact that pandemic guidance from the likes of the World Health Organization and Johns Hopkins was to not implement lockdowns. 

Children Paid the Price

Many warned that such unprecedented restrictions would come with considerable costs, myself included. Years later, the ramifications of those lockdowns are playing out. I wrote a three-parter on it earlier this year (see here, here, and here). What is sad is that children bore the brunt of these costs. I first discussed in 2022 how lockdowns, school closures, and other pandemic measures would impose heavy costs on children. Sadly, the evidence continues to mount. 

Scotland's Shock: The Lancet Study

A study published at the Lancet (Hardie et al., 2025) last month adds something more alarming to the ledger, even more so when I covered a British study in 2023 about lockdowns and social-emotional development. It examined the relationship between COVID-19 public & social health measures (PSHM) and developmental concerns among about 258,000 Scottish children. This is significant since it is the largest known analysis of population-level statistics to assess the relationship between PSHM and development concerns in Europe, which is a great sample size. What did the study find? The study's most pronounced findings were a reduction in language acquisition and social-cognitive skills. These delays were more pronounced in children from families with fewer resources, i.e., the poor. The proportion of toddlers flagged with at least one developmental concern increased by up to 6.6 percentage points compared with pre-lockdown trends.

Not an Isolated Incident: A Global Problem

You can say that this was an observational study, so it is not as good as an experimental study in respect to proving causation. You can also say that it was limited to Scotland, so you cannot extrapolate too much. Here's the thing. This is not the only study to find such delays:

• A cohort comparison study found that 3.5-5.5-year-old children tested after the lockdowns performed significantly worse on "false-belief" tasks (a measure of social cognition) the similar pre-pandemic children, even after controlling for age and language ability (Scott et al., 2024).
• A meta-analysis of 10 studies across six countries from the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics found significant impairment of language and communication skills in early childhood development (O'Connor et al., 2025).
• A cross-sectional study conducted in Turkey of 709 children found incidents of increased delays in linguistic and personal-social skills in children assessed during the pandemic relative to pre-pandemic (Özkan, 2025).
• A study from South Korea found that children aged 30-36 months during the pandemic had a higher risk of neuro-developmental delays in the communication and social interaction domains compared with pre-pandemic children, especially for those of low socio-economic status (Lee et al., 2024).
• A broad systemic review of lockdowns in the U.S. generally found detrimental effects on child development (Taylor et al., 2025).

Why Early Development Matters

There is increased evidence of the adverse effects that lockdowns and school closures had on early childhood development. This is serious because these sorts of delays are not temporary. Developmental psychology research suggests that early language and social-communication deficits correlate with persistent behavioral, social, and academic difficulties later in life. 

Socioeconomic Inequality Widened

As some of these studies indicate, the impact was disproportionately felt among lower-income households. That makes intuitive sense. Most people of low socioeconomic status are not part of the "laptop class." They faced greater economic stressors during the pandemic. For children in lower-income families, lockdowns were compounded by smaller living spaces, limited access to digital learning tools, heightened parental stress, and fewer extracurricular opportunities. When you couple the unequal starting point imposed by socioeconomic differences with delays in foundational developmental skills, this creates a feedback loop that magnifies inequality. 

The Left and the Lockdown Lovers

I remember a time before the pandemic when income inequality was a cause célèbre for many on the Left. During the pandemic, those on the Left were more supportive of strict COVID measures than those on the Right (Pew Research). I bring this up because there is a sad irony here. During the pandemic, there was a strong correlation between political leanings and support for lockdown policies. Many of those who decried income inequality before the pandemic were some of the most enthusiastic of the Lockdown Lovers. Yet they overlooked how these COVID measures widened the very gaps they claimed to oppose. In effect, the group of people most concerned with income inequality were the ones who supported interventions that deepened the intergenerational divide that they had opposed pre-pandemic.

Lockdowns: A Disaster for Children and Society 

This brings us to the tragic punchline. The Lancet study, with a growing mountain of research, shows that lockdowns simply did not slow down child development. They did so most for the kids whose families had the fewest resources to weather the pandemic. These early delays increase the likelihood of reduced educational attainment, higher rates of special educational needs, and potential long-term economic consequences. These early developmental delays can echo through a child's entire life, affecting academic achievement, social skills, mental health, and even future economic productivity, with consequences that could persist for decades. While not all children will experience these outcomes, these risks are real, measurable, and consequential. Meanwhile, the lockdowns and the subsequent developmental delays directly widened the socioeconomic gaps that had historically been derided by the Left. The "lockdowns should protect the vulnerable" narrative did not simply fail. It harmed the people it was meant to protect. 

To call the lockdowns a policy misstep would be a woeful understatement. They were one of the worst peacetime public-policy decisions enacted in human history because it was an unprecedented social experiment recklessly implemented with disastrous results and very few benefits. At this point, what we as a society can do is acknowledge the harm done, do our utmost to help the children whose developmental skills were delayed with mitigation and remediation programs, hold decision-makers accountable for their failures, raise awareness of how public policy enacted in an emergency and done in the name of fear can backfire, and make sure that we never hand over power to people who are so addicted to their moral superiority that they cannot even be bothered to do a basic risk assessment or cost-benefit analysis before wreaking havoc on the people they swore to serve and protect. 

Autism, Vaccines, and Why the CDC Cannot Be Trusted to Separate Fact from Fear

Having access to accurate and evidence-based healthcare information is an essential ingredient for a well-functioning society in the 21st century. People rely on trusted sources to understand risks and make well-informed decisions for their health and that of their loved ones. As such, even subtle shifts in public-health messaging can have seismic effects. For instance, last week the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) changed its website on "Autism and Vaccines." 

The CDC's update claims that "The claim 'vaccines do not cause autism' is not an evidence-based claim because the studies have not ruled out that infant vaccines cause autism." The CDC did not update the website because there was a shift in the research that found something completely different, such as the case with smoking not being good for your health. No, this was merely a shift in messaging from an HHS Secretary with an axe to grind when it comes to vaccines. Needless to say, the Autism Science Foundation, Infectious Diseases Society of America, and Scientific American did not react positively to the change, and rightfully so. Before delving into what this debacle reveals about the CDC, it helps to start with the scientific reality of vaccines and autism itself.

The Scientific Consensus on Vaccines and Autism

In case it is not clear, it behooves us to iterate that decades of rigorous research has studied the topic and found that vaccines do not cause autism, as the American Academy of Pediatrics has illustrated. The National Academy of Medicine reviewed epidemiological data and found no association or causal mechanism between vaccines and autism (Casadevall, 2016). More recently, a large Danish study covering over 1 million children show that there is no link between aluminum in childhood vaccines and autism (Andersson et al., 2025).

The Burden of Proof and the CDC's Messaging

This piece today is not a treatise on the science of vaccines and autism, but is in part to show that the CDC doing is a classic sleight of hand by shifting burden of proof. While the CDC may claim to act out of precaution, its phrasing shifts the burden of proof unfairly and creates unnecessary fear. If someone claims that vaccines cause autism, they must be the ones to present evidence of that claim. Decades of research have been conducted and consistently found zero association, which means that the burden was met and failed. By saying that the link "has not been ruled out," it has developed a standard so vague that anything is possible. By that "logic," that would mean that Bigfoot, Santa Claus, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster are unresolved scientific questions simply because there is no evidence that disproves their existence with absolute metaphysical certainty. That is not how evidence-based research works, and that is certainly not how the CDC should communicate risk, although the CDC shifted the burden of proof in such a fashion during the pandemic when it came to face masks. 

The CDC's History of Mistrust: The COVID Pandemic

Although the University of Minnesota said that the CDC is no longer trustworthy in light of this website change, I would argue that the CDC has not been trustworthy for a long while when it comes to disseminating evidence-based health information. If there was any time to show that the CDC could not be trusted with such a task, it was during the COVID pandemic. In 2021, I wrote a piece entitled Let's Go Back to Ignoring CDC and Federal Health Guidance Like We Always Have. As my piece shows, there were multiple missteps, but I will cover two today.

The first is with face masks. At the beginning of the pandemic, the CDC said face masks were unnecessary. Then in April 2020, the CDC did an about-face and pushed for face masks, even though the science did not change. I do not want to debate the details, but do want to point out that the CDC's approach increased public confusion while eroding trust when the guidance shifted. 

The second is about school closures. As I illustrated as early as July 2020, schools did not need to close down during the pandemic. The CDC went into fear mode instead of realizing that children have low COVID transmission rates. As a result, the school closures delayed children's educational attainment while eroding their social and mental health for a statistically insignificant benefit, especially relative to the costs.  

Other Historic Examples of CDC Risk Aversion and Bad Advice

The pandemic was not the only time that the CDC took missteps out of risk-aversion or fear. This trend has existed for a number of years and well before the pandemic. Here are a few examples of this phenomenon:

• Raw milk: The CDC has strongly warned against the consumption of raw milk. This zero-risk approach limits personal choice and voluntary risk management, which is something I advocated for in 2016.
• Blood donation of men who have sex with men (MSM): Since the 1980s, the CDC had consistently categorized MSM as a "high-risk" donor group and maintained conservative deferral recommendations even when modeling studies show that shorter deferrals would only minimally increase residual risk. By clinging onto the precautionary principle instead of assessing individual risk, what happened was that the CDC contributed to unnecessarily reducing the donor pool while increasing stigma of gay men.  
• Zika travel bans: In 2016, the CDC recommended a blanket travel ban for pregnant women. It didn't matter that a CDC study showed that risk was minimal above 2,000 meters (Cetron, 2016). As a result of this zero-risk approach, it ended up having an impact on tourism upwards of $63.9 billion.
• West Nile Virus (WNV): In the early days of WNV (1999-2002), the CDC's guidance was highly risk-averse, emphasizing worst-case outcomes while recommending extensive outdoor avoidance and large-scale pesticide spraying. Aside from the insecticide-related illness caused by the spraying, the large-scale pesticide spraying diverted resources from other more targeted and sustainable measures (e.g., larval source reduction, biological control, trap-based adult mosquito control).
• Tuberculosis (TB): In the 1990s, the CDC recommended TB screening for all healthcare workers. This policy led to widespread unnecessary testing, strained resources, and minimal additional benefit in low-risk groups (e.g., Larsen et al., 2002). As a result, it prompted later revision to a risk-based strategy instead of a one-size-fits-all approach. 

The Pattern of CDC Mismanagement

There are other examples of CDC incompetence. What I will say is that the CDC changing its "Autism and Vaccines" website is not an anomaly. It demonstrates how the CDC has mismanaged public health information over the years and how it is slow to update guidelines due to bureaucratic inertia. Recommendations should weigh both risks and benefits, and the CDC's embrace of the precautionary principle above all else shows that it is incapable of doing so. This behavior shows how a top federal agency can mislead millions on scientifically proven topics and how healthcare can become propagandized, whether it was with the COVID pandemic or the latest anti-vaccine crusade. 

When political influence seeps into scientific communication, it undermines public trust in scientific guidance. This certainly was the case when the Biden administration politicized the COVID vaccines, which resulted in the spillover effect of people having less trust in all vaccines. Plus, trust of various health authorities is in decline (KFF). The CDC's recent website change can make parents delay or avoid vaccines, which could increase the risk of preventable disease. More generally, this erosion of trust from the CDC can make matters more difficult in future disease outbreaks.

Recommendation: Reassessing CDC Authority

At a minimum, the CDC should have greater scrutiny and auditing to make sure its information with regards to health recommendations is accurate. However, I do not think that is sufficient given its history because the CDC has proven time and again that federal government health messaging cannot be taken at face value. The CDC should go back to its original role of tracking and containing outbreaks of diseases. The CDC's mission creep is costing lives because precaution without nuance creates harm, needlessly consumes resources, and erodes public trust. Having such a fallible institution in charge of providing evidence-based information is clearly not its forte. 

If the CDC should not be in charge of providing public health directives, who should be? There is the possibility of entrusting it to private organizations. Alternatively, local- or state-level public health agencies can be responsible. At least that way, accountability is higher since the impact is more localized. Why is that the case? 

Ultimately, public health guidance should be accurate, measured, and accountable. Centralizing authority in a single, risk-averse federal agency has shown time and again that even well-intentioned directives can produce harmful unintended consequences. By decentralizing responsibility, we can ensure that the guidance is closer to the populations it affects, is more transparent, and is more responsive to real-world risk (e.g., Rigby et al., 2024; Sessions, 2012). Only by aligning responsibility with accountability can we hope to provide public health recommendations that are both scientifically sound and practically effective, rather than by bureaucratic impulse or political whim. 

How Lockdowns and Other COVID Measures Have Caused Suffering, Even in 2025 (Part III)

This month commemorated the five-year anniversary of the COVID pandemic being declared. A lot of panic ensued. Nothing encapsulated the hysteria more than the lockdowns. I was against them before they were implemented and strongly voiced my issues with lockdowns in May 2020. I criticized lockdowns multiple times throughout the pandemic. I continue to do so five years later. Why? Because its effects remain with us. I have developed such a strong opinion that I ended up writing a three-part series. The first Part was about health costs. Part II focused on economic costs. Today, I am covering the political and social costs. 

Still reeling from woke politics that the lockdowns allowed. How did I go from lockdowns to woke political clout?  In June 2020, I wrote about how the lockdowns precipitated the George Floyd protests due to the lockdowns and social isolation. There has always been a Far Left presence in politics, but they were on the periphery of the political Left. That changed in 2020 because the woke Left toke advantage of the social chaos and found a way in when society was at its weakest. Those protests, in turn, became an inflection point that opened the floodgates for all things woke, whether that is identity politics, Critical Race Theory, identifying by preferred pronouns, or racism-perpetuating DEI initiatives. While Trump being re-elected signals an anti-woke impetus in politics, we still have a ways to go before undoing all the harm that the woke Left has done both in the United States and abroad. 

Lockdowns made people less sociable and ruder. As I brought up in the previous Part, adults now spend less time in social situations. That makes sense because the isolation of the lockdowns created habits that adapted towards isolation and disincentivized socializing. But the effects of the lockdowns went a step further. According to senior advisor Brian Michael Jenkins at the RAND Corporation, prolonged isolation increases irritability and aggression while diminishing impulse control. 

Survey data from Pew Research released this month shows that about half of Americans say that people have gotten ruder since the pandemic.  Jenkins also noted that in past pandemics and plagues, there was a social erosion and mistrust that was even passed down to descendants. When you combine mistrust along with the effects of prolonged isolation (e.g., anxiety, depression, stress), I would hazard to guess that this coarseness and fear-mongering will not go away anytime soon. Speaking of fear....

We live in a more fear-based world than we used to. As of date, there have been about 7 million reported COVID deaths (Oxford). Even if the United Nations' estimate of 14.9 million deaths or the Economist's estimate of 17.6 million were true, the COVID death rate was nowhere the death rate of the Spanish Flu, let alone the Bubonic Plague. 

It does not matter that there have been fewer than 1 million COVID reported deaths since April 2022, and that's assuming those were deaths from COVID instead of dying with COVID. It does not matter that Biden declared the end of the pandemic in April 2023, followed by WHO in May 2023. A Gallup poll from earlier this month shows that 40 percent of Americans believe that we are still in a pandemic. I expressed concern in May 2022 about how the obsession of wearing masks would lead to greater fear. 

The lockdowns resulted in more authoritarianism. Sadly, that fear is with us not only in terms of COVID. It persists with the politics of both sides of the political aisle, whether it is the Right clamoring against immigration, crime, and pornography; or the Left fear-mongering about how climate change will end the world or how democracy will cease to exist if their candidates are not in power. 

Authoritarianism is bred with anger and fear-mongering (e.g., Butler, 2013). The pandemic gave politicians across the world cover to increase their power in the name of public health and "Follow the Science." To quote a study from Economic Affairs (Andersson and Jonung, 2024) that I analyzed last year: 

The restrictions seem to have inspired growing polarization, conspiracy thinking, and protests and demonstrations in many countries. The lockdowns may thus have undermined liberal democracy and economic freedom. Freedom of the press was curtailed...In authoritarian countries, restrictions were used as a pretext for increased repression. Confidence in liberal democracy was undermined when citizens were locked up and prevented from moving freely in society.

Even in the "Land of the Free," there were lockdowns, the school closures, and a Biden administration that doubled down on failed policies and eroding civil liberties along the way. As Freedom House brought up in its detailed report entitled Democracy During Lockdown, government responses to COVID in multiple countries eroded the essential pillars of democracy (see below). 

Freedom House's 2025 Freedom in the World report shows that freedom and democracy across the world continue to decline. The Human Freedom Index, which was co-created by the Cato and Fraser Institutes, do not fare much better. Reading its 2024 report on the Human Freedom Index, human freedom recovered a wee bit post-pandemic but is still well below pre-pandemic levels. Freedom of expression, rule of law, and freedom of association and assembly took the largest hits. Even in the Western world, whether it is the United States or Europe, people are lamentably caring less and less for freedom of expression. 

It remains unclear as to whether we are taking "one step back after taking two steps forward" or, to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., the arc of moral universe still bends towards justice but is taking a detour. Time will tell on the long-term trajectory, but two things are clear. One is that the pandemic was an inflection point. For what it ends up being an inflection point for, we will have to wait. And two, at least for the foreseeable future, the trajectory of humanity is pointing in the direction of greater authoritarianism. 

How Lockdowns and Other COVID Measures Have Caused Suffering, Even in 2025 (Part II)

While the COVID pandemic might seem like a distant memory that started about five years ago, the truth of the matter is that we are still not over the impact of the lockdowns or other COVID measures. The fact that there are multiple impacts does not shock me in the slightest. I was against lockdowns before they started in the United States, and I was adamantly opposed once implemented because of the harm it was going to cause. This is hardly the "I told you so" I want to write, but here we are. I was thinking about this enough where I decided to write a multi-part blog series on how we still feel that impact to this day. 

Part I covered the health-related suffering, whether that was greater backlog in health services, higher obesity rates, higher rates of substance abuse, or less trust in public health experts. In Part III, I intend on covering the political costs that we still pay today. As for Part II right now, I will cover the costs related to the economy. 

School closures harmed the economic future of today's children. School closures meant that students were unable to effectively learn. In terms of academic achievement, students have still not recovered from the pandemic. As I pointed out in 2022, that loss in academic achievement and attainment will translate into diminished wages in the future. Not only will it reduce wages, but life expectancy, thereby diminishing their quality of life in the long-run. So much for the mantra "Think of the children!"

Lockdowns stunted our social skills and socializing, and by extension, can impact the economy. As I wrote in 2023, the lockdowns lowered children's social-emotional skills in comparison to the pandemic. That makes sense because childhood is a formative moment in one's emotional development and depriving children of socialization erodes social skills. While children were the most affected, they were not the only ones affected. 

According to a recent study from the Journal of the American Planning Association conducted by researchers at UCLA and Clemson University, people spend an average of 51 minutes a day less on out-of-home activities than they did pre-pandemic (Morris et al., 2024). This 51 minutes does not count the reduction of 12 minutes for daily travel. There also seems to have been at least some impact on college students, as well (Cerutti et al., 2024). Less socializing not only has impact on our mental health, but less socializing and going out can mean less economic growth. 

Increased poverty and income inequality, especially in developing countries. Before the pandemic in 2019, 37 percent of U.S. citizens could not cover a $400 emergency without needing to borrow or sell something (Federal Reserve). Economic insecurity was even more pronounced in developing countries, where 50 percent of households could not able to sustain basic consumption in the event of income loss for more than three months (Badarinza et al., 2019). As the World Bank illustrates (but does not explicitly state), having to endure lockdowns for multiple months exacerbated income inequality. 

As the International Monetary Fund points out, the ability to work remotely is highly correlated with education, and thus pre-pandemic earnings. This was more pronounced during the pandemic because those who worked remotely during the pandemic were able to maintain their financial status better than those who could not. As the IMF shows in another research paper (Fuceri et al., 2021), this trend impacted employment of lower-income households. Since it diminished the employment prospects of these individuals, the effects of lockdowns continue to exacerbate income inequality, and by extension, their future earnings. 

Federal debt made worse by policy choices. As I covered last year, the greater the COVID restrictions, the greater the budget deficit due to the economic downturn. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act cost over $2 trillion, with the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act costing $1.9 trillion. And that was just the COVID-related Federal spending in the United States during the pandemic. 

The trajectory of U.S. debt was already not in a good place before the pandemic. As I brought up during the pandemic, greater debt means more interest payments and less savings and investment for citizens. Because Trump is not showing any interest in reducing debt in any significant way, the federal debt gained during the pandemic combined with greater anticipated deficits will ultimately diminish quality of life for us all. Sadly, this was not a strictly U.S.-based phenomenon. Average global debt levels have increased by 12 percentage points as a result of profligate spending during the pandemic. 

How Lockdowns and Other COVID Measures Have Caused Suffering, Even in 2025 (Part I)

Tomorrow, on March 11, marks the five-year anniversary of when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 pandemic. China responded to COVID by implementing draconian lockdowns and the world has not been the same ever since. Who cares if there was no evidence for lockdowns and that the pandemic guidance set by such organizations as WHO and Johns Hopkins advised against lockdowns? With Sweden being the notable exception, the world followed suit in terms of locking down the economy. Did the lockdowns help with preventing more death? No, it did not. 

If anything, the lockdowns increased excess death, which is not a surprise when non-COVID healthcare was postponed in 2020 and lockdowns exacerbated mental health. Lockdowns also could not pass a sniff test when it came to a proper cost-benefit analysis, meaning that we ended up paying way more than we should have. While the lockdowns are a thing of the past that almost all of us would prefer to forget, the truth is that the effects of those lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) still live with us today. Since I live in the United States, I take this from a mostly U.S.-based perspective, but will cite other studies when available. In Part I, I want to cover the health-related costs that have reverberated as a result of the lockdowns.

There is still a backlog in healthcare created by the lockdowns. Only allowing hospitals to deal with COVID-related maladies was not a decision taken by the coronavirus, but a policy decision made by humans. Although the NIH does want to acknowledge it was a policy decision, NIH at least acknowledges that there is still a backlog in health services from the pandemic that we are still dealing with today (Pratt, 2024). In November 2022, I analyzed a study that showed that delaying preventative screening resulted in missing one million cancer screenings in Europe. There is no doubt that the delayed procedures and screening have resulted in a backlog that continues across healthcare systems in multiple countries to this day. 

Lockdowns exacerbated obesity rates. There was definitely an issue with obesity prior to the pandemic. However, obesity rates worldwide increased considerably (Nour and Atlinas, 2023), including the United States. With people stuck at home, many people changed their daily habits for the worst, whether that is less physical activity, worse dietary practices, or more sedentary activities (e.g., watching Netflix). That does not count the COVID-induced stress. Another study from the WHO confirmed this trend for children in Europe. The data from the United States indicates that those obesity rates have not declined since the pandemic, which is intuitive since it is not easy to shed those negative habits once started. Given the numerous negative health effects of obesity, this high obesity rate continues to put strain on healthcare systems all over the world.  

High substance abuse rates persist. Back in May 2020, I expressed concern about how the lockdowns were going to cause mental health issues. Sadly, I was right. To deal with the stress of the pandemic (including the lockdowns and the job losses incurred), 13 percent of Americans went to substances to try to ease their woes. A 2024 study from the University of South California found that the pandemic-era increase in alcohol use persists. A similar phenomenon happened with opioid usage, one that is prevalent enough where Trump used it as a pretext to start a trade war. Given that it is difficult to end substance abuse or addiction, it is understandable that high substance use rates would still be with us even after the stress of the pandemic is behind us. 

There unfortunately is less trust in public health institutions. Americans trust their doctors less than they did pre-pandemic. There is also more skepticism about non-COVID vaccines because of all the hullabaloo of trying to force people to take vaccines. With greater skepticism, there are now measles outbreaks. Measles vaccines are effective. Measles outbreaks should be a thing of the past, but that becomes more difficult when the mistrust with the COVID vaccines spills over into all vaccines. With all the half-truths, faux pas, and recommendations not based in science coming from Dr. Anthony Fauci, former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and the Biden administration about COVID, it is clear why, at least in a U.S. context, there is less trust when public health officials politicize a pandemic.

Don't you worry! I have more to cover in Part II. 

Public Health "Experts" Did Not "Follow the Science" During the Pandemic: 2024 Edition (Part II)

Misinformation was abound during the COVID pandemic. It did not come from the skeptics, but from the so-called public health "experts," as well as governments purportedly fighting misinformation to deflect from its own misinformation campaign. Speaking of which, the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations recently released a report criticizing "We Can Do This," which was a $900 million HHS advertising campaign aimed at promoting various pandemic measures. Whereas Part I of this blog series focused on the scientific aspects that had public policy implications (e.g., natural immunity), this Part will cover the misinformation from the U.S. federal government that was masquerading as science. More specifically, I will use the aforementioned House report to illustrate the misinformation.

Vaccine misinformation. It is true that the Pfizer vaccines were shown to be 95 percent effective at preventing disease. However, the Food and Drug Administration made clear in its December 2020 emergency use authorization announcement that they did not know how long the vaccines last nor that it would prevent COVID transmission (House, p. 8). As I pointed out in October 2022, the Pfizer CEO did not know either. This misinformation is significant because the CDC was pushing vaccines to get back to "a pre-pandemic normal," even saying that "you will not get COVID if you get vaccinated" or that "vaccinated people do not carry the virus." This argumentation was the basis for COVID vaccine passports and vaccine mandates, and yet it turned out to be unsubstantiated.

Face mask flip-flopping. At the beginning of the pandemic, the Surgeon General, the World Health Organization, and even Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man who claims that he represents science, were against the use of face masks (House, p. 10). In April 2020, the CDC did an about face and campaigned for mask wearing, even though there was zero scientific rationale for the about face. 

This reversal set the scene for other inconsistencies in messaging, a topic I covered as early as May 2021. By the end of 2020, the WHO had limited and inconsistent evidence on face masks for healthy individuals, which is hardly "following the science." Although the data were becoming clearer in 2021 about face masks' ineffectiveness at preventing COVID transmission, it took until January 2022 for the CDC to admit that cloth masks and face coverings do not work. It was not until December 2022 until Biden's former COVID coordinator Ashish Jha to finally admit that "there is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well." Yet CDC Director Rochelle Walensky showed that she does not care about scientific evidence or rigor by continuing to advocate for face masks in February 2023. 

Mask mandate on domestic and international travel. Shortly after entering the White House, Biden imposed a face mask for most forms of international and domestic travel (House, p. 13). You can read my December 2021 analysis on why face masks on airplanes was especially ridiculous. 

School closures. Children were not at an elevated risk of transmitting COVID, a reality I pointed out as early as July 2020. Yet school closures were an integral part to the CDC's response to the COVID pandemic. Not only that, the American Federation of Teachers' President, Randi Weingarten, worked with CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to prolong school closures (House, p. 14-15). Not only did the school closures do nothing to help with COVID transmission, but it harmed children in terms of educational attainment, lower future earnings, and shorter life expectancy.  

Conclusion. If you are a taxpayer in the United States, you should be livid. Taxpayers coughed up nearly $1 billion for the government to spread COVID misinformation that ended up harming Americans and upending millions of lives. There was no discussion about the balances between the costs and benefits or a proper risk assessment conducted. There was only fear-mongering in the name of public health. This merits repeating. The government did not have our best interest at heart during the pandemic. 

If we want the American people to have trust in public health officials, an inquiry asking tough questions and holding actors responsible would be a good start. There should also be better oversight over evaluating the safety of vaccines, as well as better data collection on adverse vaccine reactions. Transparency and accountability would be great hallmarks, as well. Finally, the government should not be in the business silence dissenting opinions, especially given how off-base the government was on a myriad of pandemic-related topics. It will take a lot of work to reform HHS in such a manner, but it beats not learning from this pandemic and having the government make the same stupid mistakes during the next pandemic.

Public Health "Experts" Did Not "Follow the Science" During the COVID Pandemic: 2024 Edition (Part I)

I know that there were presidential elections in the United States this week and the COVID pandemic seems like a distant nightmare we endured, but the truth is part of me still feels irate about what happened. I am not irate about the virus itself, but rather about how governments and so-called public health "experts" across the world reacted. Aside from "Stay at home" "flatten the curve," or "We're in this together," a popular mantra during the COVID pandemic era was "Follow the science." It was quite the clever linguistic ploy when you think about it. If you were against the face masks that did nothing, did not adhere to the lockdowns we knew were ineffective per pre-pandemic guidance, or spoke out against deleterious school closures, you were branded an anti-science kook. 

It turns out that the government officials and so-called "experts" who were advocating for stricter and stricter public health measurements were the ones not following the science. Yes, I was critical of lockdowns and school closures in 2020. It was in 2021 when I wrote a piece entitled When "Follow the Science" Meant Not Following the Science. You can read it here, but I criticized how "experts" were not following the science when it came to lockdowns, school closures, travel bans, cleaning surfaces, social distancing, restaurant & gym closures, and face masks. 

I want to highlight a few more to illustrate how the fear-mongering and the obsession with COVID-related costs ignored all the costs that stringent COVID policy had on us all. First, I want to point out a video by Umeå University research fellow Dr. Rachel Nicoll on following the real science and some of the highlights illustrated by her article at Daily Sceptic. Second, the U.S. Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations released a report late last month highlighting various moments of COVID misinformation from the U.S. government.  I am going to focus on Dr. Nicoll's comments in the Part and the U.S. House report in Part II.

Natural Immunity. It was annoying to hear during the pandemic about how "unprecedented" was because it was not. As a matter of fact, our previous knowledge on coronaviruses contributed to creating a vaccine so quickly. There were hundreds of coronaviruses prior to the pandemic, the two most famous being SARS and MERS. As Dr. Nicoll points out, about 50 percent of us had pre-existing immunity to COVID from prior common cold coronavirus infections. 

In 2023, I wrote about natural immunity and COVID. I illustrated how the choice to vaccinate was one of individual benefit, not societal. It made the vaccine mandates and vaccine passports unnecessary. Dr. Nicoll brought up other costs related to natural immunity. The public health measures implemented meant that the lack of interaction with others weakened our immune system. It is why we saw an explosion in cold and flu once COVID receded. Instilling fear and anxiety all did not help our immune systems, and nor did staying locked down and being deprived of sunlight and physical activity, the latter of which increased obesity in the U.S. by nearly 10 percentage points.  

COVID is airborne, but experts kept saying otherwise. One of the scientific debates during the pandemic about the nature of COVID was whether or not COVID was airborne. Droplets are larger; are released when you cough, sneeze talk, or breathe hard; and settle rapidly. Conversely, airborne particles become aerosolized, travel longer distances, and can stay in the air for a long time. 

In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) claimed that COVID was not airborne and went as far as stating that claims to the contrary were "misinformation." It took WHO until December 2021 to get around to admitting that COVID was airborne. Why so long? Think about it from a policy standpoint. The policy justification for lockdowns, school closures, and travel bans make more sense with a virus transmitted by droplets. Since COVID was an airborne disease, it made zero sense because the virus was going to reach us all eventually; and it pretty much did. My hypothesis is that like other pandemic public health measures, this was not out of concern of public welfare, but greater power. 

PCR Testing. Testing was supposed to be a preventative way of spreading COVID to others. By identifying who had COVID, we could have those individuals isolate while they recover from the illness. There was one problem with these tests. The cycle thresholds for the PCR tests were too high. The high cycle thresholds meant that it was ineffective at determining whether people were actually contagious. After all, you can still have some of the viral genetic material in your system weeks after the period of infection. In other words, these "false positives" unnecessary isolated a whole lot of people. This was especially cumbersome for those who were travelling when receiving their positive PCR test. 

People in the U.S. Trusting Doctors Less Is What Happens When Pandemics Are Politicized

While there has been much written about the U.S. presidential elections as of late, I want to turn our attention to a different topic. According to a 50-state survey recently published in the medical journal JAMA Network, trust in physicians and doctors dropped from 71.5 percent in April 2020 to 40.1 percent in January 2024. That is a 43.9 percent decrease in about four years (Perlis et al., 2024). The survey sample size of 443,455 respondents makes the findings of this research paper even more shocking. 

When respondents were asked why there was low trust, the main responses were financial motives over health care, poor quality of care and negligence, influence of external entities and agendas, and discrimination and bias. As was stated in the abstract of the research paper:

"Trust in physicians and hospitals has been associated with achieving public health goals, but the increasing politicization of public health policies during the COVID-19 pandemic may have adversely affected such trust." 

I do not think that is a "maybe." Politicization of the pandemic most certainly played a role. I was already worried that the pandemic began during the election cycle, especially when it entailed the potential reelection of a president as polarizing as Donald Trump. It only got worse from there.

Stay at home" was a popular mantra. That was later proceeded by "follow the science," even though the "Follow the Science" crowd was doing nothing of the sort. Public health officials embraced positions that were at odds with scientific evidence, some of which included the following: 

• They were ignoring the pandemic guidance that prominent health authorities released shortly before the COVID pandemic saying that lockdowns would be ineffective while causing considerable harm. 
• The government pushed the six-foot social distancing rule, although Fauci admitted earlier this year that it was not based on science and probably made up.
• School closures were implemented in many schools throughout the United States even though it was obvious in Europe as early as summer 2020 that they were unnecessary. 
• Public health officials have been unable to acknowledge the importance of natural immunity, the high costs of lockdowns that by far outweighed the benefits, or the fact that face masks did nothing of statistical significance to prevent COVID transmission.

While the aforementioned examples pertain more to public health officials and politicians, the sad truth is that such irresponsibility with touting "Follow the science" had a spillover effect on doctors and hospitals. In March 2024, I highlighted how COVID vaccine mandates caused people to be more skeptical of all vaccines. Some of the unintended consequences of the vaccine mandates included erosion of key principles in public health principles and erosion of trust in regulatory oversight. 

There was a certain reactance that became more potent as it became more obvious that what the public health and medical authorities were recommending was not based in science. I remember going to doctor's offices in 2022 and 2023 that would make you wear face masks or would have single-use pens, even though it was proven by Spring 2020 that surface transmission was not a prominent form of COVID transmission. 

I cannot say that I am surprised that more people are less willing to trust doctors. When doctors are peddling the anti-science bullocks that public health officials are erroneously peddling, then you get sick of it after a while. It can be easy to build trust. However, once trust is destroyed or harmed, it is difficult to rebuild. Regrettably, that is what the medical profession faces. 

I will concede that there were other reasons prior to the pandemic as to why people did not trust doctors. Ballooning health care costs, a less personalized experience due to less time spent with patients, greater availability of medical information, a lack of transparency and communication, and burnout in the profession all attributed to the mistrust pre-pandemic. But make no mistake: politicizing healthcare during the pandemic made matters worse. 

To quote the World Economic Forum, "Health workers are increasingly disillusioned by the politicization of health, exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. This skepticism hampers the prospects for meaningful reform and transformative progress within our health systems." The health workers are increasingly disillusioned, as are the patients. It will take time to rebuild that trust. I simply hope that the trust could be rebuilt well before the next pandemic so that people do not have to needlessly die.

Grade School Students in the U.S. Still Have Not Recovered from COVID School Closures

As the United States goes through another brutal election cycle, I have noticed one topic about which candidates are staying quiet: the government response to the COVID pandemic. It is not only the fact that policy decisions from both parties that made the pandemic all the more unbearable. What makes it all the more jaw-dropping is that in spite of President Biden declaring the pandemic over in September 2022, we are still reeling from the poor policy choices that were made. 

There is the Fed printing a lot of money and the federal government spending a ton of money that gave us the inflation that has eaten into Americans' purchasing power. Everyday citizens trust public health experts and all vaccines (not only COVID vaccines) less. We should also think of the children because children have especially paid a terrible price for lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI). It is not only the decline in socio-emotional skills or the chronic absenteeism that worry me about the children that will eventually be the future adults in this country. 

Student achievement among grade school students has taken quite the hit, according to research from the testing nonprofit Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA). This new report from NWEA, entitled Recovery Still Elusive: 2023-24 student achievement highlights persistent achievement gaps and a long road ahead, shows that growth during the 2023-24 school year fell short of pre-pandemic trends. The average student will need 4.8 additional months of schooling to catch up in reading and 4.3 additional months to catch up in mathematics. What makes this more perturbing is that the gap is the same for mathematics as it was last year and even larger for reading than it was last year. What was expected to have ended, as expressed by the authors of the NWEA report, is taking much longer to recuperate. 

As eye-opening as these findings are, we still do not know the full extent of the damage that school closures, lockdowns, and other NPIs caused to millions of students. Lower academic achievement is as tragic as it was predictable. I expressed my concerns as early as July 2020 that school closures would have a considerable and negative impact on student achievement. 

I highlighted preliminary findings in June 2022, one of which included that a loss of three months of schooling is equivalent to 2.5 to 4 percent of one's life income. Given that the NWEA findings show an average of over 4 months of lost schooling, the school closures have damaged life earnings even more than 2.5 to 4 percent. This will translate into a smaller economy, a diminished purchasing power that will adversely impact these future adults, and even shorter lifespans. 

As the NWEA report points out, lower achievement and widened inequities are the new norm. What makes this more lamentable is that no one is going to be held responsible. It certainly will not be Dr. Anthony Fauci. Not only did Fauci's recommendation influence many school districts to remain closed. It was Fauci's six-foot social distancing recommendation (which has since been shown to be anti-science nonsense) that made school re-opening impractical for many classrooms, thereby delaying children from returning to a sense of normalcy. 

Aside from knowing that those responsible for such mayhem will not be held responsible, I do know one other thing. If there is to be a recovery in which lower achievement is not a permanent norm, there is quite the uphill battle. A high teacher turnover rate, chronic absenteeism, higher rates of anxiety and depression among students and teachers alike, and now diminished student achievement to the list. Assuming that the damage can be reversed, it is going to take years to do so. Outside of that, there is the faintest of hopes that we do not put our trust in the government next time there is a pandemic. That way, we can avoid of harming all of our citizens, including our children. 

Vaccine Mandates Likely Caused Greater Unemployment for Healthcare Workers

Although the COVID pandemic is further in the rearview mirror, especially with an upcoming presidential election, the effects of the policy response to the pandemic still remain. Lockdowns caused multiple negative outcomes, including lost educational attainment, greater mental health issues, greater food insecurity, erosion of liberal democracy, and wider economic inequality on the global scale, to name a few. The lockdowns were by far the biggest policy mistake during the COVID pandemic. I would call it the greatest peacetime public policy in human history. 

There was another policy decision that had unintended, negative consequences: the vaccine mandate. My position during the pandemic was that I was in favor of the vaccines but against the vaccine mandates. The opposition I had was strong enough where I created a list of 10 reasons to be against the COVID vaccine mandates. One of those reasons was that I was worried that a vaccine mandate would cause greater unemployment in the labor market. What about the labor market for healthcare workers specifically? 

This is a question that economists from George Mason University and William Paterson University answer with their paper, Promoting Public Health with Blunt Instruments: Evidence from Vaccine Mandates (Abouk et al., 2024). As the authors point out, it was unclear whether the vaccine mandates would incentivize or disincentivize healthcare workers to work. On the plus side, the perceived public safety could have relaxed worker shortages. On the other hand, there could be more workers that are skeptical of the vaccine, thereby creating a shortage. Here is how the state-level vaccine mandates played out for healthcare workers:

Our findings suggest that vaccine mandates may have worsened healthcare workforce shortage: following adoption of a state-level mandate, the probability of working in the healthcare industry declines by 6%. Effects are larger among workers in healthcare-specific occupations, who leave the industry at higher rates in response to mandates and are slower to be replaced than workers in non-healthcare occupations. 

In March, I detailed another negative unintended consequence of vaccine mandates: increased vaccine skepticism for all vaccines. Ignoring the scientific process, evidence, and cost-benefit analysis while propagating fear had an abysmally large amount of consequences that we feel to this day. If the findings of the aforementioned study end up being correct, then we are confounded with yet another unintended consequence of COVID-era policy stupidity. By trying to make things safer with the vaccine mandate, it looks like the vaccine mandates made things less safe by causing workers in a vital industry to leave. This once again shows the cure of good intentions is more than likely not worse than the disease itself, a lesson that seemingly continues to be lost on many public health officials.

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 healthcare 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 different 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 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.