No. It is not. Having an expert on infectious disease be essentially the sole input into public health policy in dealing with the pandemic was a mistake which should not have been made, and for reasons that any sober observer of public policy and/or the behavior of scientists and bureaucrats would have known in advance: an infectious disease expert will set policy as if the sole good is the prevention of infection and/or death from the given disease, and will thus give advice without regard to cost-benefit analyses, in particular other harms likely to result from the most effective means of preventing the spread of the disease. Sweden got it right. The Great Barrington Declaration signers got it right. A committee including Fauci and experts on cost-benefit analyses in public health might have managed to get it right. Fauci given carte blanche to set policy got it wrong.
I made these critiques in real time throughout the pandemic: that setting public policy as if the sole human good was the prevention of infection by and death from the Sars-Cov2 virus was simply wrong. The destruction of a generation's education, the disruption of the economy, the excess deaths of despair from lockdown and job loss, none of it needed to have happened. Sweden had a lower per capita death rate than the US or UK. But the question was not debatable: Fauci got social media companies to censor posts referencing the Great Barrington Declaration. That there was not robust debate on policy, either within the Trump administration or in American society at large was Trump's fault.
Great posting. I said the same thing at the time:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/covid19_the_security_implications.htmlFrom April 2020:
"The biggest mistake has been that critical decisions have been based on the assessments of health care professionals only, and have not properly evaluated the benefit of being able to adequately care for all of those who need care against the cost of ruining our economy and compromising constitutional freedoms. Ruining the economy is going to have disastrous effects on the health care system and all other systems. These costs may well pale in comparison to the short-term benefit of having enough ventilators.
As Trump pointed out early in the crisis, government makes these trade-offs all the time. The interstate highway system is open despite the fact that there are 38K deaths from auto accidents every year. The calculation has been made that having an interstate highway system is worth the cost of 38K lives per year. The same has been true of the flu. The economy is not shut down in flu season despite the fact that tens of thousands die each year from the flu.
If the number of dead Americans from coronavirus turns out to be 200K, a number that many are skeptical of, then the percentage of Americans dead from the pandemic will be .057 percent of the total population. Will someone in the mainstream media at least consider whether closing the economy down and compromising our way of life is worth the price of .057 percent of the population?
If someone says, "if it saves one life to lose the economy, it's worth it," that person needs to be flogged. As callous as it sounds, the calculation needs to be made, not in terms of dollars, but in terms of lives. How many lives is the government willing to trade for having a professional sports industry, a restaurant industry, an airline industry, or a manufacturer of air defense weapons? The answer to that question is not zero. It never has been."
