Mar 5, 2023·edited Mar 5, 2023Liked by Glenn Harlan Reynolds
I knew there was malice at work when *every* known or off-the-shelf treatment for corona viruses was dismissed as quackery, even chloroquine which had been shown effective in research from 2005. Early treatment and prophylaxis were dismissed, and people at the ER were told to go home and get sicker, then return. Often to die.
Vitamin D + zinc supplements could have saved thousands of lives, but noooo.
Vinod Prasad has a lot to say about this. The whole video is interesting, but he reinforced your suspicion that a lot of it was that Trump said it so it MUST be wrong.
I thought the world was going crazy, and I couldn't understand the failure to analyze the available data and conclude that Covid was nothing to fear. There was the Diamond Princess Cruise "lab" full of old people who had very little serious infection. There was Ioannidis' opinion piece that tried to calm the storm. There was the radical departure from previously established protocol by public health authorities over the past 100 years, which was suspicious. I am naturally suspect of any totalitarian moves by government.
Of course the most important factor in my rejection of the Covid response was the principle that government has boundaries that can't be crossed, no matter how good the proposed policy is. There is no emergency clause in the Constitution, neither the US, nor the Tennessee Constitution, which is more robust even than the US Constitution in protecting civil liberties . . . at least on paper. Government could propose a policy that would get everyone a million dollars . . . it doesn't matter, if it involves action that is outside of government boundaries, ya can't do it. Every encroachment on constitutional rights probably started with someone saying "this is a good idea, it will help people". Well, maybe not every encroachment.
But you shouldn't feel too bad, in Tennessee there were only 2 lawyers who did anything about the lockdowns - Kirk Clement, in Nashville, and me. Nothing from Beacon or any other supposed public interest group claiming to protect civil liberties. So most people were fooled.
Congratulations for admitting you were wrong. That's a lot better than most of our government leaders are willing to do. It wasn't just Sarah and Charles who were trying to tell you back then. A large number of your commenters, including me, were aghast at your gullibility.
It didn't really fit with our image of you as our fearless leader. I think a lot of us gave you a pass, however, because the rumor was that Helen's health had been precarious in the past and you were trying to shield her– a chivalrous thing to do.
Next time, and God forbid there is a next time, perhaps trust your commenters more. They are some of the sharpest people around, except for the trolls of course!
I would like to say I have some kind of extra perception, but my super-power in this case was that my husband is a mathematician.
I'm not very good with math -- it's been years -- but there is a tendency in this house, when things get scary, to get out the numbers and examine them. (Younger son is an idiote savant (okay, he's not a idiot, but you know what I mean) who starts pointing out where the pattern doesn't fit, and where the numbers are wrong and why at the speed of light, too.))
I looked at the numbers of the Diamond Princess. And I know cruise ships are virus vats. It was impossible for it to fizzle so blandly there and be a serious problem. Just impossible.
I felt like I was crazy, and people I otherwise respect were yelling at me that I was crazy. But I have to tell the truth when it's glaringly obvious to me. And so I did.
And I was somewhat afraid you'd shut me down, but trusted you wouldn't, because at heart you believe in freedom of expression.
This, btw, is one of the things we need it for. Sometimes the crazy people saying "no, you're all wrong" are actually right.
Thanks for this, Glenn. My solace at reading this nudged me to become a paid subscriber, although nothing shy of full confessions of corruption from our government and agencies will give me and others ample reparation for the stark isolation, sadness, and anger of watching our country go rabidly insane for the last three years. The patterns were familiar and I recognized them early; I was an earth scientist during the birth of “global warming” which morphed into “climate change” and is now called “climate catastrophe/crisis”, all of which have hardened the regulatory and reporting landscape for all companies in the resource sector a mere couple of decades later. The “science” that backs both covid and “climate change” is equally shoddy and biased. They are political agendas dressed up as science but lacking the one characteristic that defines real science; sharing of all data, and open and heated debate. Any scientist who professionally pushed back, with evidence, on the one-and-only approved narrative was black-balled and their reputations intentionally sullied. Professional papers by acknowledged experts that disputed the narrative were made suddenly invisible. Public shaming was not only allowed but encouraged by all levels of our government and their agencies. Mandates and orders, neither of which were passed by any legislative body and therefore were not laws, were created capriciously and unevenly enforced. The last several years, after watching with horror the evolution of “global warming”, I’ve turned 180 degrees from the mainstream narrative on most topics and have been right more often than wrong. No such thing as “conspiracy theories” any more; they’re all “spoiler alerts”. Now that the veil has been lifted on covid, it’s time to push back hard on its ramifications and open the curtains wide on “climate change”, the Russia-Ukraine escalation, J6 “insurrection”, Hunter’s laptop, Epstein’s client list, the 2020 “election”, etc. Thanks for continuing your fabulous InstaPundit blog and I’ll look forward to further excellent content here, too. Sadly, we lost Cato to “the pandemic” (complete absence of pushback). It’s up to us now. Let’s giddy up!
Average age in the United States is 38/39 and female. What 39 year old female takes risks? In addition many of the younger generations are terminally online and subject to mass media hysterias.
Generally, I observed 3 different types of support for lockdowns, masking, etc. The first one was the most benign: A belief in, and support for, public health authorities. The second one was part of a huge problem we have to deal with in America: A belief that we must do what the government tells us to do, rather than think for ourselves and behave like citizens not subjects. The Europeanization of America. And the third one was the worst: A combination of number two and an overwhelming desire to get Trump. This one combines obedience of government with extreme partisanship.
We’ve seen number 3 before and it never ends well.
Hope your Mom recovers quickly. If it helps to know, my Mom who is about 10 years older than yours has had it twice and was only mildly ill both times. But what is impacting my Mom is that without her normal activities, she was way too inactive during the lockdown period. As a result she has lost a lot of strength and has gotten very unsteady on her feet which has led to more inactivity. She's taken several falls in the past year. My DIL's Mom is in her 70's was also inactive and got unsteady on her feet. She did get into an exercise program and was able to rebuild enough strength to avoid falls. But I worry about how many other seniors were similarly impacted. It's the type of impact that isn't discussed.
You’ll get plenty of responses to this one about what ought to be done. I’m privileged to be among the very few people who was in a position to help implement risk-management strategies and tactics three years ago; I helped a church/event center reopen within three months of the beginning of the local lockdown.
This particular “negative risk event,” to use project-management parlance, had—as many high-profile issues do—both “hardware” and “software” components, and as is usually the case, the hardware was easier than the software, although in the effort I assisted in we seemed to manage both adequately.
The hardware fixes were: 1) heavy use of dilution ventilation with outdoor air; 2) surface cleaning and minimizing contact with high-touch surfaces (this, in retrospect, was largely unnecessary); 3) some social distancing and masking, especially during congregational singing; 4) running the HVAC nonstop during services to get at least 6 ACH (air changes per hour); and 5) installing bipolar ionizers in the HVAC return ducts to kill the virus. The combination of all of these reduced the likelihood of disease transmission by ≈99%, and we had no superspreader events, hospitalizations, or deaths in the congregation.
The software fix, or rather admonition, was, this being a church, to apply Romans 14. It worked well enough that we were among the ≈3% of congregations that grew during COVID.
Notwithstanding the chaos, economic shock, and secondary pandemic of mental illness induced by government action in 2020, which was all our enemies might have hoped for (and certainly instructive to them for any future attempt at taking the US down a peg), I don’t think it was “deliberate malfeasance.” Our so-called leaders really are that incompetent; it’s part and parcel of a Strauss-Howe “Crisis Era.”
We are in the position, assuming another pandemic comes along—which seems overwhelmingly likely—of the moral equivalent of a Guadalcanal or a Kasserine Pass, but in 1945 rather than 1942, because our political class has learned next to nothing about how to manage large-scale risks.
I think a lot of the domestic rhetoric had to do with Trump, but the policy response was global, with very few outliers, and Trump was not a big factor overseas. I think much of the early extreme was response was driven by (1) as you allude to, the insane Chinese reaction, which we now understand was motivated by a desire to ramp social control "to 11," but then was perceived as an informed response about a serious new disease of local origin, and (2) the catastrophe in Italy, which scared everybody in rich Western countries. Regarding the US, the situation in NYC in the early days looked catastrophic - we did not understand for a while how inept Cuomo and de Blasio were - and it was a bit of bad luck for us that New York is the center of media and the chattering classes. They poured their anxiety over the local disaster into every American TV and computer. Had the initial severe outbreak been in (say) Cleveland, I strongly suspect our national response, at least at an emotional level, would have been very different.
Regarding the government's response, there is a great deal that may be said, too much than can be written in a blog comment. For me, however, the most disappointing thing in the government response involved the permanent agencies, and the degree to which our "state capacity" seems to have been hollowed out. From the FDA shutting down early Covid-testing in academic labs to the CDC slowing the transfer of testing to the big lab companies over its claims to "intellectual property" in the development of the test, these agencies showed no early ability to operate differently in a crisis than in ordinary times. One strongly suspects that comes from too many lawyers and "compliance modules," but we really need a truly independent study, like the Warren Commission or even the 9/11 investigation, to understand what happened step-by-step.
Finally, I would recommend Scott Gottlieb's book "Uncontrolled Spread" for a deep dive on the failures of the public health agencies in the critical early weeks of the crisis.
Meh. I think my approach was similar to yours. And for similar reasons. Additionally my wife’s in health care so I defer to her. I had COVID in February 2020 - before I knew what it was. Mine was pretty bad. I missed work for a week I think but I didn’t consider going to the hospital. I just figured it was a bad flu.
I was resistant to getting vaccinated only because I already had COVID. But of course I got it since you had to have it to travel or whatever and because I’ve never been an anti vaxer so I didn’t care that much.
I’m appalled at what keeps coming out about all of the authorities we should have been able to rely on
So, if there is an apology in there, it is accepted. Dr. John Campbell, a British PhD nurse apologized for his previous COVID cheerleading. My first clues were (1) President Trump said good things about HCQ and other approaches under study and was ridiculed (there were preliminary data out there for some of them that aligned with what he said) and (2) Fauci's flip-flops. But I was an early supporter of the clot shot for old people like me and I regret that. The thing that continues to worry me is the US government is still hawking the clot shot for everyone, even children.
FYI, in MA the healthcare providers are still nuts about masks. Wish we had realist docs like you have in TN. Furthermore, they are crazy still about Covid. If you test positive for Covid, they don't do treatments or make you wait for 60 days AFTER you tested positive, even if you had Covid a month and a half ago. THIS CAN KILL people! (And just for the record, I know that the docs and nurses think this whole thing is crazy as well, but it is the ADMINISTRATORS who are the whip holders!)
My 89 year old mom had Covid in August. She didn't take Paxlovid and she didn't go to the doctor because it was a bad COLD. She didn't want to take up precious medical resources. In October her afib came back. She had to take a Covid test, which came back positive. They wanted her to wait 60 days to try to jolt her heart back. (They had to do a more invasive procedure because she had missed one of her blood thinner doses.) My brother took her to the test or I would have said something that she had Covid in August, and this test would probably test positive, but what laypeople know that? They wouldn't treat her. With her apple watch, she could watch that her heart rate steadily increase up to the 140s.
They finally agreed to treat her after I went on the warpath and the docs explained the rules, and it didn't work. She steadily declined because she is one of those people who just can't be in afib. Her heart is fine except for that. She goes to the gym 5 days a week and rides the bike and the treadmill, except when her heart is in afib and she can't even move.
She had the jolt again at Christmas and she has been fine since, just about back to her previous routine.
And ALL the health care facilities are still required to require masks. The whole thing is ridiculous!
I knew there was malice at work when *every* known or off-the-shelf treatment for corona viruses was dismissed as quackery, even chloroquine which had been shown effective in research from 2005. Early treatment and prophylaxis were dismissed, and people at the ER were told to go home and get sicker, then return. Often to die.
Vitamin D + zinc supplements could have saved thousands of lives, but noooo.
Ref: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16115318/
Vinod Prasad has a lot to say about this. The whole video is interesting, but he reinforced your suspicion that a lot of it was that Trump said it so it MUST be wrong.
I thought the world was going crazy, and I couldn't understand the failure to analyze the available data and conclude that Covid was nothing to fear. There was the Diamond Princess Cruise "lab" full of old people who had very little serious infection. There was Ioannidis' opinion piece that tried to calm the storm. There was the radical departure from previously established protocol by public health authorities over the past 100 years, which was suspicious. I am naturally suspect of any totalitarian moves by government.
Of course the most important factor in my rejection of the Covid response was the principle that government has boundaries that can't be crossed, no matter how good the proposed policy is. There is no emergency clause in the Constitution, neither the US, nor the Tennessee Constitution, which is more robust even than the US Constitution in protecting civil liberties . . . at least on paper. Government could propose a policy that would get everyone a million dollars . . . it doesn't matter, if it involves action that is outside of government boundaries, ya can't do it. Every encroachment on constitutional rights probably started with someone saying "this is a good idea, it will help people". Well, maybe not every encroachment.
But you shouldn't feel too bad, in Tennessee there were only 2 lawyers who did anything about the lockdowns - Kirk Clement, in Nashville, and me. Nothing from Beacon or any other supposed public interest group claiming to protect civil liberties. So most people were fooled.
Congratulations for admitting you were wrong. That's a lot better than most of our government leaders are willing to do. It wasn't just Sarah and Charles who were trying to tell you back then. A large number of your commenters, including me, were aghast at your gullibility.
It didn't really fit with our image of you as our fearless leader. I think a lot of us gave you a pass, however, because the rumor was that Helen's health had been precarious in the past and you were trying to shield her– a chivalrous thing to do.
Next time, and God forbid there is a next time, perhaps trust your commenters more. They are some of the sharpest people around, except for the trolls of course!
I would like to say I have some kind of extra perception, but my super-power in this case was that my husband is a mathematician.
I'm not very good with math -- it's been years -- but there is a tendency in this house, when things get scary, to get out the numbers and examine them. (Younger son is an idiote savant (okay, he's not a idiot, but you know what I mean) who starts pointing out where the pattern doesn't fit, and where the numbers are wrong and why at the speed of light, too.))
I looked at the numbers of the Diamond Princess. And I know cruise ships are virus vats. It was impossible for it to fizzle so blandly there and be a serious problem. Just impossible.
I felt like I was crazy, and people I otherwise respect were yelling at me that I was crazy. But I have to tell the truth when it's glaringly obvious to me. And so I did.
And I was somewhat afraid you'd shut me down, but trusted you wouldn't, because at heart you believe in freedom of expression.
This, btw, is one of the things we need it for. Sometimes the crazy people saying "no, you're all wrong" are actually right.
Very helpful essay. I hope your new understanding helps all of us the next time we get something like COVID.
Thanks for this, Glenn. My solace at reading this nudged me to become a paid subscriber, although nothing shy of full confessions of corruption from our government and agencies will give me and others ample reparation for the stark isolation, sadness, and anger of watching our country go rabidly insane for the last three years. The patterns were familiar and I recognized them early; I was an earth scientist during the birth of “global warming” which morphed into “climate change” and is now called “climate catastrophe/crisis”, all of which have hardened the regulatory and reporting landscape for all companies in the resource sector a mere couple of decades later. The “science” that backs both covid and “climate change” is equally shoddy and biased. They are political agendas dressed up as science but lacking the one characteristic that defines real science; sharing of all data, and open and heated debate. Any scientist who professionally pushed back, with evidence, on the one-and-only approved narrative was black-balled and their reputations intentionally sullied. Professional papers by acknowledged experts that disputed the narrative were made suddenly invisible. Public shaming was not only allowed but encouraged by all levels of our government and their agencies. Mandates and orders, neither of which were passed by any legislative body and therefore were not laws, were created capriciously and unevenly enforced. The last several years, after watching with horror the evolution of “global warming”, I’ve turned 180 degrees from the mainstream narrative on most topics and have been right more often than wrong. No such thing as “conspiracy theories” any more; they’re all “spoiler alerts”. Now that the veil has been lifted on covid, it’s time to push back hard on its ramifications and open the curtains wide on “climate change”, the Russia-Ukraine escalation, J6 “insurrection”, Hunter’s laptop, Epstein’s client list, the 2020 “election”, etc. Thanks for continuing your fabulous InstaPundit blog and I’ll look forward to further excellent content here, too. Sadly, we lost Cato to “the pandemic” (complete absence of pushback). It’s up to us now. Let’s giddy up!
Average age in the United States is 38/39 and female. What 39 year old female takes risks? In addition many of the younger generations are terminally online and subject to mass media hysterias.
Demographics alone ensured that we'd overreact.
Generally, I observed 3 different types of support for lockdowns, masking, etc. The first one was the most benign: A belief in, and support for, public health authorities. The second one was part of a huge problem we have to deal with in America: A belief that we must do what the government tells us to do, rather than think for ourselves and behave like citizens not subjects. The Europeanization of America. And the third one was the worst: A combination of number two and an overwhelming desire to get Trump. This one combines obedience of government with extreme partisanship.
We’ve seen number 3 before and it never ends well.
Hope your Mom recovers quickly. If it helps to know, my Mom who is about 10 years older than yours has had it twice and was only mildly ill both times. But what is impacting my Mom is that without her normal activities, she was way too inactive during the lockdown period. As a result she has lost a lot of strength and has gotten very unsteady on her feet which has led to more inactivity. She's taken several falls in the past year. My DIL's Mom is in her 70's was also inactive and got unsteady on her feet. She did get into an exercise program and was able to rebuild enough strength to avoid falls. But I worry about how many other seniors were similarly impacted. It's the type of impact that isn't discussed.
You’ll get plenty of responses to this one about what ought to be done. I’m privileged to be among the very few people who was in a position to help implement risk-management strategies and tactics three years ago; I helped a church/event center reopen within three months of the beginning of the local lockdown.
This particular “negative risk event,” to use project-management parlance, had—as many high-profile issues do—both “hardware” and “software” components, and as is usually the case, the hardware was easier than the software, although in the effort I assisted in we seemed to manage both adequately.
The hardware fixes were: 1) heavy use of dilution ventilation with outdoor air; 2) surface cleaning and minimizing contact with high-touch surfaces (this, in retrospect, was largely unnecessary); 3) some social distancing and masking, especially during congregational singing; 4) running the HVAC nonstop during services to get at least 6 ACH (air changes per hour); and 5) installing bipolar ionizers in the HVAC return ducts to kill the virus. The combination of all of these reduced the likelihood of disease transmission by ≈99%, and we had no superspreader events, hospitalizations, or deaths in the congregation.
The software fix, or rather admonition, was, this being a church, to apply Romans 14. It worked well enough that we were among the ≈3% of congregations that grew during COVID.
Notwithstanding the chaos, economic shock, and secondary pandemic of mental illness induced by government action in 2020, which was all our enemies might have hoped for (and certainly instructive to them for any future attempt at taking the US down a peg), I don’t think it was “deliberate malfeasance.” Our so-called leaders really are that incompetent; it’s part and parcel of a Strauss-Howe “Crisis Era.”
We are in the position, assuming another pandemic comes along—which seems overwhelmingly likely—of the moral equivalent of a Guadalcanal or a Kasserine Pass, but in 1945 rather than 1942, because our political class has learned next to nothing about how to manage large-scale risks.
I remember when you questioned my assertion that it was unlikely to me that asymptomatic people could spread covid.
I think a lot of the domestic rhetoric had to do with Trump, but the policy response was global, with very few outliers, and Trump was not a big factor overseas. I think much of the early extreme was response was driven by (1) as you allude to, the insane Chinese reaction, which we now understand was motivated by a desire to ramp social control "to 11," but then was perceived as an informed response about a serious new disease of local origin, and (2) the catastrophe in Italy, which scared everybody in rich Western countries. Regarding the US, the situation in NYC in the early days looked catastrophic - we did not understand for a while how inept Cuomo and de Blasio were - and it was a bit of bad luck for us that New York is the center of media and the chattering classes. They poured their anxiety over the local disaster into every American TV and computer. Had the initial severe outbreak been in (say) Cleveland, I strongly suspect our national response, at least at an emotional level, would have been very different.
Regarding the government's response, there is a great deal that may be said, too much than can be written in a blog comment. For me, however, the most disappointing thing in the government response involved the permanent agencies, and the degree to which our "state capacity" seems to have been hollowed out. From the FDA shutting down early Covid-testing in academic labs to the CDC slowing the transfer of testing to the big lab companies over its claims to "intellectual property" in the development of the test, these agencies showed no early ability to operate differently in a crisis than in ordinary times. One strongly suspects that comes from too many lawyers and "compliance modules," but we really need a truly independent study, like the Warren Commission or even the 9/11 investigation, to understand what happened step-by-step.
Finally, I would recommend Scott Gottlieb's book "Uncontrolled Spread" for a deep dive on the failures of the public health agencies in the critical early weeks of the crisis.
Meh. I think my approach was similar to yours. And for similar reasons. Additionally my wife’s in health care so I defer to her. I had COVID in February 2020 - before I knew what it was. Mine was pretty bad. I missed work for a week I think but I didn’t consider going to the hospital. I just figured it was a bad flu.
I was resistant to getting vaccinated only because I already had COVID. But of course I got it since you had to have it to travel or whatever and because I’ve never been an anti vaxer so I didn’t care that much.
I’m appalled at what keeps coming out about all of the authorities we should have been able to rely on
So, if there is an apology in there, it is accepted. Dr. John Campbell, a British PhD nurse apologized for his previous COVID cheerleading. My first clues were (1) President Trump said good things about HCQ and other approaches under study and was ridiculed (there were preliminary data out there for some of them that aligned with what he said) and (2) Fauci's flip-flops. But I was an early supporter of the clot shot for old people like me and I regret that. The thing that continues to worry me is the US government is still hawking the clot shot for everyone, even children.
FYI, in MA the healthcare providers are still nuts about masks. Wish we had realist docs like you have in TN. Furthermore, they are crazy still about Covid. If you test positive for Covid, they don't do treatments or make you wait for 60 days AFTER you tested positive, even if you had Covid a month and a half ago. THIS CAN KILL people! (And just for the record, I know that the docs and nurses think this whole thing is crazy as well, but it is the ADMINISTRATORS who are the whip holders!)
My 89 year old mom had Covid in August. She didn't take Paxlovid and she didn't go to the doctor because it was a bad COLD. She didn't want to take up precious medical resources. In October her afib came back. She had to take a Covid test, which came back positive. They wanted her to wait 60 days to try to jolt her heart back. (They had to do a more invasive procedure because she had missed one of her blood thinner doses.) My brother took her to the test or I would have said something that she had Covid in August, and this test would probably test positive, but what laypeople know that? They wouldn't treat her. With her apple watch, she could watch that her heart rate steadily increase up to the 140s.
They finally agreed to treat her after I went on the warpath and the docs explained the rules, and it didn't work. She steadily declined because she is one of those people who just can't be in afib. Her heart is fine except for that. She goes to the gym 5 days a week and rides the bike and the treadmill, except when her heart is in afib and she can't even move.
She had the jolt again at Christmas and she has been fine since, just about back to her previous routine.
And ALL the health care facilities are still required to require masks. The whole thing is ridiculous!