Ceding Intellectual Territory in the Covid Debate
Assuming that the institutional covid response was based on ignorance instead of evil is itself ignorant...
The response to covid-19, a novel but minor cold virus originating in China in late 2019, can be viewed in two separate contexts.
The first – a panicked and hysterical, yet sustained, reaction by the general population and governments around the world. This manifested in lockdown policies, ubiquitous mask wearing and enforcement of related rules, and other absurd behavior. If one is feeling generous, these reactions can be described as ignorant but not necessarily evil.
The second – the most wicked case of government overreach in history, with the media and a large swath of the general population carrying their water. Locking down economies and closing schools destroyed lives and livelihoods en masse. Many people were no longer able to earn a living, children were unable to attend school or see friends, those who needed non-covid medical attention were often ignored, and a population of overweight Americans was discouraged from physical activity, among many other phenomena.
While ignorance is assumed in the first context, the second should be viewed as pure and intentional evil; a clear-eyed series of cynical and tyrannical actions, and accompanying propaganda, for the sole sake of consolidating political power. The slogan for this behavior is the famous line “Never let a crisis go to waste,” but even that presupposes a true crisis, whereas the covid response required a crisis to be manufactured.
Given the substantial yet untold negative impacts of the lockdown regime, it is in the second context that discussion around covid should be had, lest the same abuses be repeated. Assuming that the institutional covid response was based on ignorance instead of evil is itself ignorant, and proponents of freedom and sanity should stop ceding intellectual territory in the discussion.
Fallacy : The first strain was highly deadly, especially the wave that hit New York.
Any talking point about the severity of covid, specifically the number of deaths it caused, contains multiple false premises. Digging into this particular claim about the first-wave severity of covid, especially in the state of New York, should elicit skepticism.
Why was the state of New York, specifically, the subject of assertions about a “deadly wave?”
To start, New York’s governor Cuomo instituted a directive on March 25 of 2020 that significantly increased the number of elderly deaths. Cuomo encouraged hospitals to release what they called “covid patients” from nursing homes back into their nursing homes instead of treating them at the hospital. This was ostensibly meant to free up hospital capacity.
To the extent these patients did have a contagious illness, covid or otherwise, releasing them back into nursing homes, chock full of the elderly and infirm, without hospital treatment, was a recipe for fatalities.
Also, the median tenure for nursing home patients before death is five months. To ascribe deaths to a single cause in a setting where tenants die early and often, for various reasons, is erroneous.
Most importantly, the key premise behind this claim – that people who reportedly died from covid actually died from covid – is spurious. We often hear the counterargument that “deaths with covid are not necessarily deaths from covid,” but even this unnecessarily cedes a point to the lockdown zealots. There is little evidence that they were even with covid.
Testing for covid is and was the height of medical quackery. The standard covid test was the polymerase chain reaction, or “PCR.” The PCR amplifies and detects existing viral material within a sample taken from a subject. The problem is that the existence of viral material is not an indicator of contagious illness. A positive result could, for example, be residual viral material from an illness several weeks beforehand or material from a virus that entered a subject but never manifested as illness (i.e., asymptomatic transmission).
Furthermore, the sensitivity (“cycle threshold”) of PCR tests used was almost always too high to be meaningful in any way. Anthony Fauci admitted as much, stating “… if somebody does come in with [a positive PCR at high cycle threshold], you got to say, you know, it's just dead nucleotides, period."
The New York Times also acknowledged in an August 2020 article that “up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus…”
Replete with monetary incentives for booking covid patients, hospitals and clinics PCR-tested anything with a pulse, and went the extra mile to encourage positive results regardless of any underlying illness.
By all accounts, properly measured, covid-19 has a fatality rate on par with that of seasonal flu. That has always been the case.
Fallacy : Government has a responsibility to act during a pandemic.
Note the use of the word pandemic to imply severity. Global populations experience pandemics every year. A vast number of viruses sweep through countries annually, on a routine schedule. They are all pandemics. None of them require any coordinated government response.
The only responsibility that government has in this context is to get out of the way and let citizens, along with their communities, make any needed preparations.
Dr. Donald Henderson, a leader in the effort to eradicate smallpox and a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, worked with three other scientists on a 2006 paper titled “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza.” The paper concludes (emphasis added):
Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.
Decades of research yielded similar conclusions, all ignored during the covid panic.
Fallacy : The efficacy of the institutional covid response is measured in the number of lives saved.
This is a counterfactual - an unprovable assertion that relies on convincing others what would have happened if lockdown measures had not been taken. The most effective way to sell it is through propaganda, which is why similar statements are often used in support of war.
This assertion is also plagued by what economist Frederic Bastiat called the problem of “the seen and the unseen.” Even if we grant that a life is saved through a particular intervention, what is the collateral damage? The saved life is seen and the collateral damage is unseen. With regard to lockdowns, examples of the unseen include increased drug and alcohol abuse, increased child abuse, economic ruin, mental deterioration, and many others – factors that are not readily apparent effects of a response, but are real nonetheless.
Also, focusing on lives allegedly saved ignores quality of life considerations. What is the purpose of saving a life only to take away everything that makes that life worth living - interaction with loved ones, productive work, and other joyful activities.
Lastly, a simple thought experiment can cut through the weakness of this fallacy. If the measure of lives saved is most important, then it must be better to save the lives of ten 90-year-olds instead of nine 10-year-olds. Does that sound right?
Glibly referencing “lives saved” is amoral utilitarian nonsense.
Hold the Line
The preceding is not meant to rehash all of the arguments for and against lockdowns, masking, and other measures enforced during the covid panic. Rather, it is meant to shine a light on instances where even the standard anti-lockdown, pro-freedom arguments make intellectual concessions to the other side that are both harmful and unnecessary. Give them an inch and they will take a mile. So why give them an inch?
What astounds me is the number of people who still maintain the fallacies you mention, especially that Covid was somehow particularly virulent. Seemingly no amount of data will convince them otherwise. To your second fallacy, I think this is a byproduct of the larger problem of what I'll call full-time governments. When politicians are always "working," they are always looking to do something. Consider Biden's great "victory" of reducing or eliminating cable-cancellation fees. Seriously? That was a problem the president needed to address? Of course, people will say Covid was much more important, but was it really? We knew early on that basically only the elderly and extremely sick were at risk, which is pretty much the case for the flu, which does not require massive government intervention each season to stave off the destruction of humanity.