The ‘third camp’ that Wen describes has existed for more than a year. That she finally agrees with it represents a judgment call, not ‘science.’
In the Washington Post, Leana Wen attempts to explain away her sudden change of heart on COVID restrictions by positioning herself as the reasonable third way between “two extremes.” Her argument is Obama-esque:
Some claim that these actions are proof that mandates were never needed and question the effectiveness of masking, vaccination and other evidence-based mitigation measures. Others offer no reasonable endpoint for restrictions and make continued masking a symbol of their belief in science.
Both extremes are wrong. Public health policy is nuanced and complex, and the sooner we acknowledge this, the quicker we can move from polarizing rhetoric to reasonable compromises that allow us to live with covid-19.
In Wen’s telling, there are three camps in America: Those who think that restrictions were never needed, those who think that restrictions are always needed, and those who “advocated restrictions from the start but now believe[] circumstances have changed enough that mandates can go.” It is into this third “camp” that Wen is trying to place herself.
But this, of course, is not the whole story, because it misses a vital constituent part: time. The primary criticism that is being leveled against Wen — and many others — is not that there was never a need for restrictions, but that those restrictions lasted far too long, were routinely justified with Calvinball, confused personalized cost-benefit analyses with objective “science,” and only disappeared when the polling became unbearable for the Democratic Party.
Wen writes that:
At the start of the pandemic, there were few tools in the public health arsenal to fight a new and deadly virus. At that time, and during subsequent surges, masks and physical distancing were crucial measures that helped “flatten the curve” and save lives.
This is fine defense of what happened in early 2020. But it is not a good defense of what has happened since that time. There are an enormous number of people in America who sit in Wen’s “third camp” — people, that is, who “advocated restrictions from the start but now believes circumstances have changed enough that mandates can go,” who “acknowledge the tragic toll of the pandemic but also understand that good health cannot simply be the absence of covid-19,” and who have been trying “to replace vitriol and divisiveness with nuance and compromise” — and who have sat in that camp as early as April of 2021.
Throughout her piece, Wen’s key implication is that only those who have changed their minds this week are following “the science.” On TV on Monday, Wen said this literally. But, again, it is simply not true that only now is it possible for a person to conclude, as Wen finally has, “both that covid-19 causes illness and harm, and also that its continued prioritization, to the exclusion of other issues, does, too.” Given that Wen acknowledges the continued existence of Americans who “offer no reasonable endpoint for restrictions,” she presumably knows this.
All told, Wen’s essay presents an opinion about tradeoffs masquerading as a mathematical diagnosis. If Wen were more honest, she would have made her case for changing our approach now, while acknowledging that others disagree and have disagreed for a while. Instead, she played precisely the same game as has been played throughout — and showed us all that she, and those who think like her, haven’t learned a damned thing.