The Adverse Effects of Lying during a Pandemic

T he Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) reported recently that 28 percent of adults express hesitancy about the vaccine for Measles, Mumps, and Rubella. That number represents a significant surge. Among parents of school-aged children, suddenly, the number believing that the MMR vaccine should be a requirement for enrollment in school dropped twelve percentage points. Forty-four percent of Republican-leaning independents, up from 22 percent a few years ago, said that the decision for a child to receive an MMR vaccine should be left to their parents, not to schools or the state.

This is the adverse effect of public-health officials’ behavior during the pandemic, when our institutions fed us a toxic cocktail of confusion, deliberate manipulation, and outright lying, and also endorsed censorship of contrary opinion.

Upon reflection, the mercy is that those KFF numbers aren’t much, much worse.

Of course, there is no direct connection between the miscalculations and misbehavior of public-health bureaucrats in 2020–22 and a vaccine that was approved in the early 1980s. But there is an institutional and professional connection. And it demonstrates the profoundly conservative lesson that each generation in power in every institution — fathers in families, scientists in labs, public-health officials in the FDA — hold in their hands the reputation of the past, present, and future — and can easily sully all at once.

The president of the United States and other officials made false claims about the vaccines in order to enthuse the American people about receiving them. As Dr. Deborah Birx admitted, she “knew” Covid vaccines would not “protect against infection,” and said she thought that “we overplayed the vaccines.”

And it wasn’t just vaccines. Contrary opinions about all sorts of Covid-related matters — the efficacy and wisdom of lockdowns, the origins of the disease, its severity for young children, or the efficacy of each and every type of mask — were subjected to various forms of censorship at the behest of public-health institutions and to serve their aims. And many of these contrary opinions turned out to be right, or at least plausible.

Many parents were convinced — and had good reason to be convinced — that Covid was not an emergency for their children and concluded they had no need for a vaccine offered on the basis of an emergency. They saw the FDA’s own approval board express hesitance about mandates. By the time those vaccines were available, many parents had seen their kids test positive for Covid, nursed them through what was for most of them an extremely mild cold — milder than the flu — and knew they now had some form of natural immunity. And yet, doctors and some public authorities acted as if recognizing these facts was a thought crime.

Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC director Rochelle Walensky constantly implied that children could not return to a semblance of normal life — in-person school, unmasked — until a pediatric vaccine had been approved and administered to most of them. Dr. Fauci had no doubt that three-year-olds should wear masks, even though the United States was a global outlier on masking young children:

Barely a third of children ages five to eleven received the vaccine. But for most of the country, normal life returned. And the only hint of a crisis for children was due to the pandemic restrictions that had been needlessly placed on them.

All the hassle that parents received during the pandemic — the fears they had about losing their jobs due to mandates, or losing their child’s place in school due to vaccination requirements — could be easily associated with the era of hysteria and misinformation spread by public authorities whom we usually trust to be sober and judicious.

This also naturally occasions harder questions and conspiratorial musings: If a public-health authority is recommending a vaccine I know my child doesn’t need, what am I to make of the radical expansion of the childhood-vaccine schedule in recent years? If a bunch of people denounced as psychos and conspiracy theorists turned out to have been right during the pandemic, and our major authorities turned out to have been wrong, why shouldn’t I listen to the FDA-skeptics such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. more often?

Too often, public-health experts assume that the public wants a projection of perfect confidence. But what public-health experts needed to do during the pandemic was to be more honest about the limits of their knowledge in an evolving crisis, and be more liberal with the public and with its own critics. Recovery is going to take years.