There is a lot of room for legitimate disagreement about the effectiveness of our governments’ responses to the Covid pandemic. Unfortunately, however, there are also plenty of arguments based on irrational prejudices and misleading information.
Consider this January 9 piece by Dr. Henry I. Miller. In leveling accusations against Stanford School of Medicine professor Jay Bhattacharya, Miller is surprisingly sloppy. Don Boudreaux thankfully does a good job exposing the errors. You can read the whole thing here. Here’s a tidbit:
Before laying out — in “Stanford University’s Fickle Commitment To Science (Part 1)” — your appropriate criticisms of what you call Stanford’s “long-standing, anti-scientific tendencies,” you yourself succumb to an anti-scientific tendency by taking a potshot at Stanford Medical School Professor Jay Bhattacharya. Your criticisms of Prof. Bhattacharya are based, it seems, on a shoddy reading of one lone source — namely, an interview that he did this past September with the Wall Street Journal’s Gerry Baker. . . .
Our most egregiously mistaken accusation, however, is that Prof. Bhattacharya — presumably because he co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration — is, as you describe, “a vocal, irresponsible proponent of ‘let it rip’ pandemic policies.” This charge is nonsense, as you would know if you were to attentively read even just the interview to which you link. (Even better would be for you also to read the Great Barrington Declaration, as well as many of other pieces – scientific and popular – written over the past three years by Prof. Bhattacharya.) The deceptive description of the policy proposed in the GBD as a “let it rip” strategy was fueled by the purposeful — or perhaps recklessly ignorant — mischaracterization of the GBD by Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci.
Prof. Bhattacharya calls not for letting the virus “rip,” but, instead, for Focused Protection. Focusing resources, attention, and care on those persons who are vulnerable while rejecting the utterly unprecedented practice of locking down whole societies is emphatically not a “let it rip” strategy. Prof. Bhattacharya made this fact perfectly clear in, among many other places, a November 2020 essay that he wrote with his GBD co-authors, Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff. There they describe Focused Protection as “the middle ground between lockdowns and ‘let it rip’” — implying that they no more support “let it rip” than they support lockdowns.
Anti-Bhattacharya voices may not be remembered by historians as fondly as Miller thinks. At this point in time, highlighting the mistakes of pro-lockdown/pro-unconditional-masking advocates would be much more useful than this sort of sloppy ideological bashing. After all, the pandemic policies that largely prevailed were not those advocated by the likes of Jay Bhattacharya but, instead, by those who have long been critical of him and his fellow Great Barrington Declaration co-authors.