Neal Milner: How I Became An Unthinking Soldier In The War On Covid

It’s five years after the Covid-19 pandemic, and I am ashamed of myself.  I’m ashamed of the poor job I did as an analyst.

I was part of the herd of people — analysts, scientists, academics, journalists — who should have known better but succumbed to a conventional wisdom based on fear and a cripplingly narrow view that the only thing important was saving lives.

When I do analysis, my goals are openness and tolerance, but most of all a healthy skepticism that covers everyone, including myself. I want to report on what’s missing from the common explanations.

I should have done this better because I have the training. At my stage of life, I’ve got plenty of time to reflect.

But that training is like any other preparation. It’s one thing to have it, but it’s another thing to put it into practice when the chips are down.

I’ve learned my lesson, at least have begun to, from Stephen Macedo’s and Frances Lee’s new book “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us.” And politics did, big time.

The central message of their book, they say, “is that several tenets of basic rationality evaporated under the stress of the Covid onslaught.“

”One of the greatest failures, was the failure to weigh the expected costs of policy against the expected benefits.”

On Oʻahu, all parks and beaches, including Lēʻahi Park, were closed because of the pandemic. (Cory Lum/Civil Beat/2020)

Wholesale Adoption Of Dubious Plans

Those who failed included government, scientists,  the news media and academics. Those who thought otherwise, not just anti-vaxxers but also respectable scientists and planners with different ideas, were typically ignored or stigmatized.

What made things worse was that these failures occurred partly because from the start they ignored pre-2020 pandemic plans that correctly predicted many of the costs and ethical dilemmas that emerged during the Covid pandemic response. Closing schools for instance, but many others, too.

“Instead, previously untested, unproven policies were implemented wholesale across society in earnest hope of benefits, heedless of costs.” 

I made three big mistakes.

First, I should have made myself aware of these earlier plans and written about them at least during the brief moment when there was some opportunity to have a rational discussion about alternatives, costs and benefits.

But I was captured by the moment — the sudden surge of a terrible disease, my fear of getting Covid — and never got my nose out of the present. Like most people, I suppose, but I had those obligations about skepticism and distance I needed to follow.

Second, I should have been skeptical about the sudden, or as Macedo and Lee call it, “turn on a dime” about-face away from these plans. 

It’s astonishing how quickly and with so little evidence the World Health Organization refuted these earlier plans and instead saw the total lockdown in Wuhan, China, as the model that the world should follow.

China, an authoritarian country, as the model and the beacon of light? Really? We had no reliable data that the Wuhan lockdown was working. Its lockdown had hardly begun. Besides, China’s scientists would not or could not release any reliable Covid information.

Plus, as we know now,  a leak in the research lab in Wuhan was quite likely the source of Covid.

Talk about buying a pig in a poke.

Norman Jonithan receives his Covid shot from Jolana Gollero in Waipahu in 2021. By the time the vaccine was available, it was impossible to ignore the dynamics of politics. (Cory Lum/Civil Beat/2021)

No Time To Consider The Alternatives

What brought about this extraordinary, world-shaking turn of events in the absence of any reliable evidence that the new pandemic focus on full lockdown would work?

I never thought about that question because I did not know enough to look.

The most likely explanations are fear and panic that a couple of public health experts describe “as if governments were following one another over a cliff.”

 It was fueled by the language of war. “The war on Covid.” Get on board, or we’ll all gonna die!

Tradeoffs? The serious economic and social consequences of a total lockdown? No time for that. Mentioning them in the heat of battle became disruptive, disloyal and insensitive to all those hospital patients dying and their staffs’ bravery.

Third, I minimized the importance of dissent. I paid attention only to the dissent that political polarization created. 

That was very important. Once the response became Democrat versus Republican and red state versus blue state, it became impossible to carry out serious, open discussion about Covid policy. 

“Follow the science” became a virtue signal. Anthony Fauci as Satan became a response.

It turns out that whatever the polarization battle over masking, social distancing, contact tracing and school closing was, it made no difference.

Before the vaccine, Republican states had the same Covid death rates as Democratic ones. Only the vaccine made a difference. Once it was available, red states had a higher death rate than blue states because fewer red state people got the shots.

I paid no attention to how impossible it was for respectable, knowledgeable scientists to dissent.

School shutdowns started early and last far too long. (Cory Lum/Civil Beat/2020)

‘Focused Protection’ Wasn’t Good Enough

About eight months into the lockdown thousands of scientists and public health officials signed a petition called The Great Barrington Declaration. 

It called for a move away from a total lockdown toward “focused protection,” where those most at risk of dying could be kept safe while at the same time society took no other steps to prevent the infection. One consequence: Schools should open.

Barrington was clearly influenced by those pre-2020 Covid plans that had so quickly dropped out of the picture.

The declaration stresses all of the serious long- and short-term damages that a total lockdown creates.

In fact, Sweden from the get-go adopted this approach and has ended up with a very low death rate. Not our choice, so not our interest.

I don’t remember much about the declaration because I paid no attention to its points. But what I  do remember is that it scared the crap out of me. Its ideas threatened to pierce my security bubble.

Dissenting opinions were considered disloyal – fake news with dangerous implications. 

If I had taken a step back, as I’m doing now, The Great Barrington Declaration sounds like an opportunity to do science as it’s supposed to be done: A group of knowledgeable experts having an open discussion that adhered to debate, critical examination including self-examination, doubt and self-doubt.

It did not. In fact, just the opposite. National Institute of Health’s Francis Collins’s response to Covid officials Anthony Fauci and Alex Azar: “There needs to be a quick and devastating takedown of its premises.”  

And takedown there was. According to these heavy-duty opponents, the Barrington signers weren’t just dissenters. They were labeled to be on the fringe. In fact, the Wikipedia “Great Barrington” entry calls the Barrington ideas “fringy.”

By that time, dissenting opinions were considered disloyal – fake news with dangerous implications. 

I uncritically accepted the demeaning counter-to-science language of the scientists critical of the declaration.

I didn’t think much about this even close to home — professors censuring their colleagues for advocating dissenting views. 

I had become a soldier, or at least a patriotic citizen, in the war on Covid.

How about you?

Here are two questions for everyone. Can a crisis like a pandemic be dealt with in a rational way that openly examines costs and benefits from the beginning? What’s the proper balance between experts like scientists and the opinions of the rest of us?

If you think the questions themselves are unrealistic or “too theoretical,”  here’s a reality check:

Imagine what the country’s response would be if a pandemic hit tomorrow.