In the early days of the lockdown, Amazon experimented with curating
which books they would and would not publish on the crisis. Or call it
what it really is, given our times: censorship.
Among the first books hit was AIER’s own Coronavirus and Economic Crisis.
The publication was delayed for weeks, then the Kindle edition was
stopped for several more weeks. Still, the publication date is now
listed as March 28, 2020, meaning that AIER had one of the first, if not
the first, book out on the topic, just two weeks after the lockdowns
began.
In the meantime, Amazon has loosened up, perhaps because the sales of
a different point of view were potentially too lucrative to pass up.
Indeed, I see many dozens of such books out there, all taking issue with
the CDC’s narrative and the lockdown policy agenda. I’m thrilled by
this. For that matter, AIER has published an additional four books on
the topic, including my own Liberty or Lockdown.
I’ve been waiting for a bestseller, and it has arrived: Faucian Bargain: The Most Powerful and Dangerous Bureaucrat in American History by Steven Deace and Todd Erzen, two media commentators in the tradition of Rush Limbaugh.
This short book (it took me under an hour to read) is not strong on
scientific rigor, but its sheer readability helps account for its huge
seller status. Anyone who has lived and breathed the data, studies, and
history pertaining to this terrible moment in history might find himself
frustrated that the authors prioritize razzle-dazzle rhetoric and
conservative-style talking points ahead of precision, citation, and calm
exposition.
However, I don’t think our times permit that level of literary
scrupulosity. The important point is that people are downloading and
reading this in great numbers. This is good because the main storyline
of the book is 100% correct. Not mincing words, they call this famous
doctor “one of the most diabolical destroyers of self-governance and
rugged individualism in all of American history.” It’s hard to
disagree.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has played an outsized role in pushing lockdowns,
disease panic, and flagrantly bad science via his major means of
communication: interviews with sympathetic media on TV. Among many, he
has obtained a godlike status but the authors show that he acts more as a
political performance artist. Artists improvise, play roles depending
on the need, and seek approval above all else. That’s their main
complaint against him – his fawning for the camera, his changing lines,
his pseudo-scientific and imprecise but seemingly impressive blather,
and it is correct.
The authors draw attention to a huge mystery of his role early in the lockdowns. On February 28, he wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine
that Covid-19 might “ultimately be more akin to those of a severe
seasonal influenza.” On March 8, he told media that “there’s no reason
to be walking around with a mask.” That was then, and, as they point
out, he was mostly correct on these points in retrospect.
I will let the authors continue the story:
And now, we come to March 11. The
day the earth stood still. The day our way of life ended, with no
definitive hope of when it might return. For that is the day Fauci
testified before Congress that COVID-19 would be “10 times more lethal
than the seasonal flu.” This is the statement that sent shockwaves
across the country and launched us into lockdowns…. what changed in
those eleven days? What new piece of evidence or data did Fauci acquire
to inspire such an about-face?
This is the crucial question. To be sure, there was already panic in
the air on March 8, when South by Southwest was summarily shut down by
the Austin, Texas mayor. There was talk of locking down everywhere, with
the New York Times whipping up a big panic on its main podcast
and op-Ed page. Even then, hardly anyone believed it would happen. That
Fauci testimony was indeed the turning point. His whole demeanor seemed
to be warning the assembled politicians that many of them will die. It
was crazy stuff.
So what is our authors’ theory as to why he made the shift? They
quote an anonymous White House employee who was there during the early
days to the effect that Fauci became consumed by fame and celebrity. The
more he called for lockdowns, the more panic he spread, the more he
enjoyed the spotlight, and the more the media saw their ratings rise.
And let’s be real, the media loved every minute of it. It’s not just
media bias, but the media ratings matter, too. They have to blow this
up, focus on the fight back and forth, and make the virus into the
Malaysian flight that CNN kept on and on with. It has to be all
catastrophic all of the time, or people will make their own decisions
and go about their lives. And if there’s anything the media in
Washington cannot handle, it’s the average American making decisions in
their lives without the supposedly valuable input. So Fauci feeds off
the media, and the media feeds off of Fauci. Both of them clinging to
each other to make both of them more relevant.
That sounds plausible. There is an additional problem raised by 300
pages of emails discovered via FOIA that detail Fauci’s own relationship
with China. Even our authors, who cover the released emails, don’t seem
entirely aware of the implications of a US delegation having travelled to China in mid-February
to learn from Beijing the art of virus suppression. I cannot account
for this myself. Why would Fauci step up to volunteer as our own
Manchurian public health official? Why carry water for the CCP? At the
age of 80, he surely is beyond being paid off or bribed or whatever. Did
he really come to believe that China had the only way out? It all seems
hard to believe.
Despite the pop feel, the obvious bias, the red meat from beginning
to end, the authors are pointing to a dreadful scandal, and it is wholly
understandable that this would inspire anger. Rightly so.
For a book with more data and evidence, in addition to a longer
perspective on how free societies deal with pandemics, I would suggest Lockdowns on Trial
by journalist Michael Betrus. The book came out in the summer but the
2nd edition came out in November 2020. The prose is elegant and
mercifully calm. As I did in my book, he covers the policy response to
previous lockdowns. He cites a huge amount of the literature showing a
lack of any correlation between lockdown policies and disease
mitigation.
The main merit of this book, in my view, is that it shows that in
terms of pathogens and disease, these times have not been without
precedent. We’ve been here before. Indeed, humanity has never not been
here, with germs and so on floating and swirling all around us, many of
them mutations of previous pathogens, all the while with our immune
systems adapting and scaling to absorb them and fight them. With the
exception of a few American cities in 1918, and only then for a brief
time, this country has always dealt with infectious disease as a normal
event to be handled by medical professionals, not an exceptional
catastrophe to be managed by politicians and bureaucrats.
The burden of this book is to prove that these are in fact normal
times or should have been regarded as normal times, which is to say that
the mass panic was wholly unjustified. To that end, the book goes into
some detail about the seemingly endless confusions over predictions,
testing, data over infections and cases, and deals squarely with rampant
issues of misclassification and exaggeration, the nursing home
scandals, and also the details concerning demographic risk of
SARS-CoV-2, the actual lethality of Covid-19 by age and comorbidities,
and the deaths and how to count them.
Insofar as I am in a position to judge based on my own knowledge, I
find this book highly credible in addition to readable, with mercifully
little in the way of politicized argumentation. Most impressive among
these books, the author deals with the astonishing costs of lockdowns,
which are not only economic but also social, cultural, and medical.
Remarkably, lockdowns performed in the name of public health have in
fact devastated public health.
The book includes detailed debunkings of hundreds of media-touted
myths of superspreader events, surges, outbreaks, spread in restaurants
and bars, in addition to bringing all of this in focus with a proper
emphasis on severe outcomes rather than cases as such.
Other issues covered here: media bias, censorship, masks and their
(lack of) effectiveness, the complete absence of evidence of some
relationship between lockdowns and disease outcomes, and the outlying
states around the world with no lockdowns and excellent outcomes. The
chapters on suicides, drug overdoses, depression, learning loss, missed
treatments, weight gain, business closures, and more terrible things,
are enormously depressing and hard to read. Indeed, I’m hard-pressed to
think of a single issue of note not covered in this book.
The book has a conclusion I like: the lockdowns did not do what they
were supposed to do, they caused unspeakable collateral damage, and
therefore should be lifted everywhere immediately.
I do have one argument with the author: I do not agree that stopping
flights from China and Europe was a good idea, even with the information
we had at the time. The presumption always should be about the freedom
to travel. There are no ways to do counterfactuals here but the virus
was already in the US, so I seriously doubt that these blocks achieved
anything in terms of public health. Plus, they violate human rights.
Day to day, my number one major annoyance in life – okay maybe not
the whole of life but certainly my annoyance with the media – is the way
in which terrible outcomes of lockdowns are frequently attributed to
the “pandemic.” At the New York Times, this is daily prattle,
almost assuredly imposed by editors. Writers can pen stories about
depression, job loss, crisis in industries, disrupted supply chains,
hunger and suffering, and everything else, so long as the causal agent
is always named as the pandemic. The lockdowns, goes the implication,
were just what one has to do in the presence of the new pathogen.
This is why I absolutely adore John Tamny’s fabulous book When Politicians Panicked.
It doesn’t cover cell biology, death and case data, PCR testing
scandals, hospitalizations, or virus trajectories at all. It keeps the
focus on what really matters: how politicians smashed our economic lives
out of a complete panic of what else to do. “To blame this on the
coronavirus is to excuse ineptitude that is the normal when the
combined, decentralized knowledge of millions and billions of humans is
ignored in favor of the central and highly limited knowledge of a very
few politicians, and even fewer experts.”
Tamny proves decisively that lockdowns were the cause of the crushed
economy that was otherwise healthy, and this did not have to be. His
fascinating spin on the China issue will challenge any reader. He points
out that the market signals coming out of China even in the worst days
of the pandemic were in fact not revealing anything terribly disruptive
in terms of disease outcomes. US companies in China tested their
employees and found few cases and no deaths. No American company with a
deep stake in Wuhan was showing any level of market response to the
pandemic. Tamny watches these markets carefully and concluded early on,
by virtue of the information they were providing, that this virus itself
represented minimal if any threat at all to social and economic
functioning. Its severe outcomes were limited to the health and
well-being of a small demographic and that would be treated medically
and not politically.
The reason this did not happen is the core thesis of the book. The
politicians panicked. Lockdowns became the default response, though they
had never been tried before, and a test of leadership grit. Real men
and real women lock down to control the virus! That was the ethos
stemming from panic. “What happened was an imposition of
command-and-control that has always suffocated economic growth.” Tamny
further shows that economic growth has always been a precondition for
good health outcomes, so it makes no sense at all to shut it down. He
will not call what resulted a recession, on grounds that this would be
insulting to a very natural market process. It was pure destruction, and
pointlessly so, since the virus should always have been treated as a
medical matter.
The book excels – and is thus far singular – in addressing the
complete failure of the various stimulus packages intended to substitute
for a functioning economy. It can never work. Whether the stimulus is
fiscal or monetary, the government can only take from the private sector
and redistribute it but it can never make up for losses associated with
lockdowns. The author is right on target in associating this with
Khrushchev-style economics (I thought that was my original insight;
Tamny had it first). The Soviet dictator imagined that governments could
outperform markets in a way that made markets irrelevant and
unnecessary, exactly as the lockdowners thought that government could
easily.
Tamny’s book succeeds mightily in intellectually crushing the
lockdown deniers (people who pretend like it never happened), and for
that reason it is enormously satisfying. Somehow out of the three books
mentioned here, this is the one that is most heartbreaking and most
maddening since it shows decisively that none of this was necessary.
None of it. The lockdowns were a monumental distraction from the job
that needed to be done, and which always needs to be done, which is to
promote good health outcomes.
Tamny is willing to ask unaskable questions such as: what if the
politicians had done nothing? His answer might shock anyone who has yet
to rethink the tragic events of the last year. He says we would have
been better off and the severe outcomes from the disease better because
of the nursing home scandals and the collateral damage. In other words,
the “mitigation” efforts not only wrecked the economy; they wrecked
public health too.
I’m so grateful to John Tamny for writing this book, which says
exactly what needs to be said, and ends just the right way: it is time
to reassert the primacy of freedom.
These are three of what will be thousands of books that will be
appearing in the coming years on these tragic times. I’m willing to
wager that most of these books will severely condemn the policy
decisions of the last year, just as these have done. There will be a
reckoning. These books are an excellent start.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research.
He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and nine books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
Jeffrey is available for speaking and interviews via his email. Tw | FB | LinkedIn
By Rich Kozlovich
