What We’ve Learned from COVID-19

L ockdowns and masks have not been scientifically shown to affect COVID transmission or disease, much less deaths from COVID. Nevertheless, on March 18, 2020, without any discussion, debate, legislative deliberations, or scientific evidence, almost all 50 governors, from both parties, locked us all down, in violation of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. When the Constitution was written, the Founding Fathers knew of pandemics such as malaria, yellow fever, black death, and smallpox. Minor infections would quickly lead to death — antibiotics and antivirals were unknown, as was the very existence of bacteria and viruses. And yet there are no constitutional provisions for locking down the American population or for restricting interstate travel and commerce on the grounds of an infectious-disease pandemic, except in the most dire circumstances.

It is now 16 months after the lockdowns began, and many governors have refused to relinquish their dictatorial powers and end the emergency, despite the lack of meaningful or demonstrable evidence that such measures affect the course of the pandemic. If we can’t end a pandemic emergency after all COVID-19 disease trends have been positive for months, when will we end it? Can’t an executive always argue that the virus may come rocketing back, so leaders need this emergency power indefinitely? Look at the example of Philippine strongman President Rodrigo Duterte, who keeps renewing some of the harshest lockdown measures on the planet and expanding his power.

Finally, some courts are stepping in and limiting this arbitrary power. On Friday, the highly liberal U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against Governor Gavin Newsom’s COVID-19 mandates that have barred private-school children from receiving in-person learning.

Contact tracing remains a total joke when coronaviruses slip easily back and forth between human and animal populations. Vaccines will remain limited in their effectiveness unless every cat, bat, fish, and rat is fully masked and vaccinated. Sadly, the logic of this is as clear as day, and yet it is ignored by all the blind public-health idiots making national COVID policy with utter disregard for the economic and social consequences. During the lockdowns, many kids have spent two or three useless hours a day in Zoom classes, with their laptop camera covered so the teacher can’t see their video games. Violent criminals are released from jail, only to commit new crimes despite promising to properly mask and socially distance upon release.

At the beginning of the lockdowns, we wrote that they were futile, pointing to the fact that Sweden never locked down, never mandated masks, and never kept Swedish kids out of school. Yet it suffered no pediatric COVID-19 deaths and had a much lower COVID-19 death rate than America’s.

Lockdown advocates have suggested that Sweden is somehow “special.” But Florida, Texas, and several other U.S. states abandoned their masks and lockdowns months ago and have shown the same rapid drops in COVID cases as the rest of the nation. These economy-friendly states have age-adjusted COVID-19 death rates lower than those in California and in states with lockdown measures so harsh that most of their shopping malls and many restaurants are being converted into homeless shelters.

Focusing public policy exclusively on a single narrow objective, such as COVID-pandemic mitigation — while remaining stubbornly blind to the harmful impact of lockdowns on functioning economies, schools, businesses, social-support networks, and the population’s mental health — has become the greatest public health-policy failure in the history of mankind.

Public officials seem blind to these consequences, and they will now reap the whirlwind of economic and social dislocations. Twisting public policy dials as if humans responded like chemical feedstock valves or like dogs jumping for treats isn’t working. Economists have known for decades — you can pull a string, but you can’t push. At this point, policy officials may not have room to even pull on their strings.

People are already voting with their feet and relocating from economically devastated lockdown states to states with economic- and people-friendly environments. Americans are reluctant to return to work at pre-lockdown wages — more evidence that wages and prices are sparking the rocket-launcher tubes of hyperinflation. When even Family Dollar stores in Carson, Nev., must shut down because no one is willing to work, we know that the economy and society will experience a Hurricane Katrina of change.

What if they launched the next pandemic lockdown and nobody came because they were too busy enjoying life?

John Fund is a columnist for National Review. Joel Hay is the founder of the Department of Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy at the University of Southern California. He is a health economist at the Harbor UCLA Center for Vaccine Research.