The Atrocious Ethics of Fauci’s Lockdown Defense

On February 7, 1968, after American military forces rained rockets, napalm, and bombs on the village of Ben Tre in South Vietnam, killing hundreds of civilians, Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett quoted a military officer’s justification of the event.

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” a US major was quoted as saying.

Arnett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who’d go on to become one of the last western journalists in Saigon until its capture in 1975, never revealed the source of the quote, which some US officials doubted was authentic. Nevertheless, the quote—which eventually morphed into the pithier "We had to destroy the village in order to save it”—became a symbol of an absurd military strategy in a failed war.

While the reasoning is absurd—destroying a town is no way to save it—the ethics that underpin the quote are surprisingly common and convey a simple and popular idea: a wrong, evil, or unjust action can be morally justifiable because it ultimately brings about a greater good.

‘You Have to Do Something Draconian’

The latest public official to employ such reasoning is Dr. Anthony Fauci, who recently offered this justification for the government’s pandemic response, which included lockdowns, widespread business closures, and other “draconian” public policies.

"You have to do something that's rather draconian, and sometimes when you do draconian things, it has collateral negative consequences," the National Institutes of Health director explained. “Just like when you shut things down, even temporarily, it does have deleterious consequences on the economy, on the school children, you have to make a balance.”

Fauci, who in August announced his intention to retire before the end of the year, continued:

“We know the only way to stop something cold in its tracks is to try to shut things down. If you shut things down just for the sake of it, that’s bad. But if you do it for the purpose to regroup and open up in a safe way, that’s the way to do it.”

Fauci’s phrasing in this last part—that lockdowns are the only way “to stop something cold in its tracks”—is odd because it’s clear that lockdowns did no such thing. The official data plainly show the virus circulated and people died regardless of the presence of lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions. Not only was the virus not stopped “cold in its tracks,” an abundance of research shows lockdowns do little to reduce virus spread and Covid mortality.

But let’s put aside the empirical results of lockdowns and analyze the ethics Fauci uses to justify them, particularly his use of the word “draconian,” which means “excessively harsh and severe.”

The word traces back to the Greek legislator Draco (or Drakon) who in about 621 B.C. laid out the very first written Athenian constitution. As you can probably guess, these laws were quite harsh. Those who fell into debt were forced into slavery to their creditors, for example (unless one was of noble birth), while those caught stealing were sentenced to death, even if it was something as simple as a head of cabbage from the marketplace.

“It is said that Drakon himself, when asked why he had fixed the punishment of death for most offenses, answered that he considered these lesser crimes to deserve it, and he had no greater punishment for more important ones,” the historian Plutarch wrote.

One can see how Draco earned title to an adjective that means “excessively harsh and severe,” which is what makes Fauci’s invocation of this term so troubling. Draco’s treatment of petty criminals was harsh and excessive, but at least punishment was meted out against people convicted of crimes.

Fauci, on the other hand, is defending “draconian” public policies that harm innocent people. During the pandemic, people were arrested for leaving their homes, driving their cars, paddling a boat, or going to a park. Moreover, Fauci admits these draconian policies also had other “deleterious consequences.” These included mental health deterioration, record drug overdoses, systemic fraud of taxpayers, millions of jobs lost, increased self-harm (especially among teenage girls), and more.

Despite these consequences, Dr. Fauci has consistently defended lockdowns, insisting that the draconian policies served a greater good.

The Danger of Pursuing ‘the Greater Good’

Justifying actions not on their morality but on their potential outcomes is a dangerous philosophy for individuals, because it allows humans to rationalize their actions—even evil ones. The great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky demonstrates this well in his classic novel Crime and Punishment, which centers on a young idealist named Raskolnikov who justifies killing an unprincipled old woman who works as a pawnbroker because it would lift him from poverty and allow him to become a great man, and perform great deeds for humanity.

While pursuing a greater good instead of acting ethically is dangerous individual philosophy, history shows it’s far more dangerous collectively.

“Many of the most monstrous deeds in human history have been perpetrated in the name of doing good—in pursuit of some 'noble' goal,” noted the great thinker and FEE founder Leonard Read.

Read was right, and the examples are ubiquitous.

When Franklin Rooseveltt issued Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, which led to the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese-American men, women, and children, virtually everyone conceded it violated the Bill of Rights, including FDR’s own Attorney General Francis Biddle. The order was carried out anyway, however, because it was seen as serving a greater good: winning World War II.

Forced sterilization policies and government experiments on prisoners and unsuspecting subjects, including the notorious MKUltra Project and the Tuskegee Study, were also clearly ethically bankrupt, but they were carried out nevertheless because each served a “greater purpose”—scientific progress and the creation of “purer” gene pools.

It’s an objective truth that many of the greatest atrocities of the twentieth century—from Hitler’s Final Solution to Mao’s Great Leap Forward to the Killing Fields of Cambodia—were ushered in by governments violating the individual rights of civilians for a greater good: a better collective society.

This is precisely why Read said one of the greatest philosophical mistakes people make is to judge the ends they seek, not the means they use.

"Ends, goals, aims are but the hope for things to come…They are not a part of the reality,” Read explained in Let Freedom Reign. "Examine carefully the means employed, judging them in terms of right and wrong, and the end will take care of itself."

This is the great and grave mistake made by Dr. Fauci. He failed to distinguish ends from means. Like the Army major who told Peter Arnett it was necessary “to destroy the town to save it,” Fauci rationalized a draconian action to pursue a greater good—and caused irreparable harm to the American people and Constitution as a result.

It’s never too late to learn from a mistake, however.

Indeed, even the people of Ancient Greece saw that Draco’s constitution was deeply flawed, and most of his laws were repealed by the Athenian statesman Solon (630–560 B.C.) the following century.

Let us hope Americans learn a similar lesson.

This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The Atrocious Ethics of Fauci’s Lockdown Defense

What Is the True Vaccine Breakthrough Rate? The CDC Doesn’t Want You to Know

Over a recent 12-day period the Milwaukee Brewers had nine players test positive for COVID-19.

While we don’t know the vaccination status of all the players, the team disclosed that most of the players were vaccinated for COVID-19, including former MVP Christian Yelich, who tested positive after experiencing mild flu-like symptoms.

"He did the right thing and reported those mild symptoms," Brewers GM David Stearns said when it was announced Yelich was heading to the disabled list. "We got him a test … .The test returned positive and we got a confirmation test, which also came back positive."

The Brewers are not an isolated example of Major League Baseball teams experiencing a rash of vaccination breakthroughs. Teams across the league have experienced similar problems, including the New York Yankees, who saw nine vaccinated players sidelined in May with COVID-19.

“This is the vaccine working,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos at the time, adding that those who tested positive didn’t get a severe infection.

How Common Are Breakthroughs?

Walensky is correct that data show vaccinated individuals are far less likely to die or become hospitalized with COVID-19 than unvaccinated individuals.

Yet breakthrough cases also appear to be more common than the CDC, media, and public health officials suggest.

CNN says the breakthrough rate is less than one percent, while CBS News reports that 99.7 percent of new COVID cases involve unvaccinated people. The Hill, meanwhile, agrees that CDC data show less than one percent of fully vaccinated people get COVID.

How does this data mesh with anecdotal evidence that suggests many vaccinated people are contracting COVID? To be sure, it’s not just Major League Baseball teams who are seeing spikes of COVID cases among vaccinated individuals.

A recent outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for example found that the vast majority of COVID cases involved vaccinated individuals.

"Overwhelmingly, the affected individuals have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19,” Town Manager Alex Morse told NBC.

The outbreak, attributed to the rise of the Delta variant, was serious enough to prompt the CDC—which published a report on the outbreak—to reverse its recommendation that vaccinated individuals needn’t wear masks indoors.

But that wasn’t all. The CDC’s study also found, the Washington Post noted, individuals “carried as much virus in their noses as unvaccinated individuals.”

“High viral loads suggest an increased risk of transmission and raised concern that, unlike with other variants, vaccinated people infected with Delta can transmit the virus,” Walensky said.

All of this data suggests two important things.

First, COVID cases among vaccinated individuals appear to be higher than the “less than 1 percent” many claim. Two, vaccinated individuals appear quite capable of transmitting the virus to others, as Walensky states. Indeed, viral loads in nasal passages suggest they could transmit the virus at rates similar to unvaccinated carriers.

A Data Fiasco?

In the world today, we often hear that data is king. The problem is, the data have been a total mess throughout the pandemic. COVID, the New York Times recently observed, has shown the CDC is utterly broken.

Perhaps because of this, I decided to see how the CDC tracks and defines breakthrough cases.

“As of May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to focus on identifying and investigating only hospitalized or fatal cases due to any cause,” a statement says. “This shift will help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance.”

Does this mean the CDC isn't tracking breakthrough cases anymore unless someone is hospitalized or dies? I asked the CDC for clarification. I didn’t hear back from them.

But if one goes to the CDC site, you’ll find information on vaccine breakthroughs that includes only hospitalizations and deaths. The figure—as of August 2—stands at 7,525, which is below the 9,245 breakthrough infections the CDC had documented as of April 26. (The CDC noted the true rate was higher, due to a lack of surveillance and testing.) Since then, three and a half months have eclipsed and nearly 70 million more people have been vaccinated—and the Delta variant has arrived in force.

Unfortunately, what the actual breakthrough rate is, nobody knows—because the CDC stopped collecting and publishing the data, choosing instead “to focus on identifying and investigating only hospitalized or fatal cases.”

In making this decision, the CDC arrived at the strange conclusion that public health would be better served by providing the public with less information.

Is the Breakthrough Rate Less Than 1%?

Because of this, the media are left guessing what the breakthrough rate is.

CNN points out that roughly half of US states report data on breakthroughs, and in those states official statistics put the COVID infection rate of vaccinated people at less than 1 percent, “ranging from 0.01% in Connecticut to 0.9% in Oklahoma.”

A highly cited Kaiser report similarly puts the breakthrough rate at “well below” 1 percent.

An NBC News analysis covering 38 states, meanwhile, found 125,682 breakthrough cases, which represents about 0.08 percent of the 164 million vaccinated Americans.

The actual breakthrough rate appears to be much higher than .08 percent based on anecdotal evidence, however, and a more careful perusal of state data.

Let’s start with Major League Baseball. There are about 750 professional ball players on 30 MLB teams. Applying that rate (0.08%) to MLB baseball players would mean we could expect less than one player (0.6) to experience a breakthrough case. A rate of 1 percent would mean 7 or eight players. But as previously mentioned, the New York Yankees alone had nine breakthroughs in May, and many other teams racked up breakthrough cases.

One could argue that perhaps Major League ball players, for some reason we may not yet understand, are more likely to contract the virus after being vaccinated, but plenty of other examples can be found, including the six vaccinated Texas Democrats who tested positive for COVID after taking a charter plane to Washington, DC. Ask yourself this: how many people do you personally know who contracted the virus after being vaccinated? (I know many.)

A thorough review of the evidence strongly suggests breakthrough cases are far likelier than the claims in headlines. A New York Times story published Wednesday exploring the Delta variant—which now accounts for more than half of COVID cases in the US—hinted at this.

The paper noted that the CDC “does not tally national figures on breakthrough infections that don’t result in hospitalization or death,” so the precise incidence “is unknown” even though the CDC says breakthroughs are “extremely rare.”

Seeking comment, the Times received a vague response from Walensky in reply to an email inquiring on breakthrough incidence.

“A modest percentage of people who are fully vaccinated will still get Covid-19 if they are exposed to the virus that causes it,” Dr. Walensky said in reply to a Times email.

But infectious disease experts hinted that breakthrough cases are more likely than the current data suggest. “I think that if we started to test people just randomly on the street, we would find a lot more people who test positive,” Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious diseases fellow at Stanford, told the newspaper.

On Thursday, New York magazine published an article under the headline “Don’t Panic, But Breakthrough Cases May Be a Bigger Problem Than You’ve Been Told.”

Journalist David Wallace-Wells, who spoke to scientists at Harvard and Scripps’s, said public health officials may be “overstating the vaccine effect on transmission and understating the scale and risk of breakthrough infections.”

“The message that breakthrough cases are exceedingly rare and that you don’t have to worry about them if you’re vaccinated — that this is only an epidemic of the unvaccinated — that message is falling flat,” Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina told Wallace-Wells.

Eric Topol, an American cardiologist and author, was more blunt, saying he estimated the vaccines’ efficacy against symptomatic transmission had fallen to roughly 60 percent for the Delta variant.

“The breakthrough problem is much more concerning than what our public officials have transmitted,” Topol said.

Wallace-Wells notes it’s impossible to estimate the true breakthrough rate because the CDC stopped tracking and reporting most breakthroughs in May, but the data he assembled paint a much different picture.

“In Delaware, between July 1 and July 22, ‘breakthrough’ cases were 13.8 percent of the total,” he writes. “In Michigan, between June 15 and July 30, the figure was 19.1 percent. In this period, there were 2,369 breakthrough cases and 12,409 in total. In Utah, 8 percent of new cases were breakthroughs in early June, but by late July, as Delta grew, the share grew, too, to 20 percent (even while the total number of cases almost doubled).”

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

None of this is to say Americans shouldn’t get vaccinated. Evidence suggests it significantly reduces one’s chances of dying of or becoming hospitalized with COVID-19. A New York Times analysis of 40 states found that fully immunized people accounted for less than 6 percent of COVID deaths and less than 5 percent of hospitalizations. (Other data is even more promising, including statistics Dr. Fauci cited in June which claimed 99.2 percent of COVID deaths involved unvaccinated individuals.)

A close loved one of mine was vaccinated this week after I suggested it was a good idea; the same day, I encouraged several other loved ones to get the vaccine. This is not about being “pro-vax” or “anti-vax”; it’s about the CDC not being forthright on vaccine breakthroughs.

Choosing to not count vaccinated people who tested positive for COVID as breakthrough cases is little different than choosing to not count positive COVID cases as actual cases. Imagine how much lower US numbers would be if the CDC stopped tracking cases, and instead only counted deaths and hospitalizations.

The great American writer Mark Twain popularized a well-known saying on stats.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics," Twain said. (Twain and others attributed the quote to British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, but it’s unclear if Disraeli ever said this.)

We’ve seen throughout the pandemic how authorities have manipulated statistics to serve their own agendas—most notably New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who changed public health reporting to cover up the number of New Yorkers who died in nursing homes because of his policies.

By only tracking breakthrough infections that result in hospitalization and death, the CDC is depriving the public of crucial information on the efficacy of vaccines and fueling the vaccine wars. Increasingly, these wars are a bipartisan chorus of vaccinated voices who paint the unvaccinated as either crazy people—there are no microchips in it, Times columnist Charles Blow recently quipped—or filthy creatures who are prolonging the pandemic because of their selfishness.

“It's time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks,” Alabama’s Republican Governor Kay Ivey said in July.

Ivey was echoing sentiments President Joe Biden had expressed days earlier.

“Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated,” Biden had said while speaking to reporters on the White House lawn.

This chorus has had its desired effect. A recent Axios-Ipsos poll found that 80 percent of Americans blame the unvaccinated for rising cases—even though the US has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world—which has fueled efforts to force Americans to get vaccinated by requiring “vaccine passports” to travel or do business.

Blaming the unvaccinated for the drawn out pandemic may be popular and politically convenient, but as the Times points out, the CDC’s own data suggest that “vaccinated people can carry as much virus in their nose and throat as unvaccinated people.” Moreover, breakthrough transmissions appear to be more common than the CDC has let on—which is undoubtedly why they stopped tracking most breakthrough cases.

The Cost of Hiding the Truth

The CDC’s effort to hide breakthrough cases not involving death or hospitalization from the public eye might serve its presumed goal—getting more Americans vaccinated—but it undermines the truth and further erodes public trust in government, which is already at historic lows.

The silver lining in the story is that a full analysis of the science of vaccination makes an even stronger case that the decision of whether to vaccinate or not should be made by one person: the individual getting the vaccine.

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

What Is the True Vaccine Breakthrough Rate? The CDC Doesn’t Want You to Know

How Germans Went from Mocking America’s Decentralized Pandemic Approach to Envying It

"A world power embarrassing itself."

That's how one prominent German magazine described the US's decentralized, state-based approach to COVID-19 last year. The fact that the US government didn't prescribe a national lockdown strategy, but left the decision on restrictions to the states, seemed bewildering and chaotic to many in Europe.

One year later, the tide had turned and Germans under stay-at-home orders watched in disbelief as the US started to return to normal life with a vaccination speed four times that of Germany.

What happened?

A Top-Down Approach

Similar to the US, German law left the responsibility for imposing stay-at-home orders and other drastic restrictions in the hands of the states. Unlike in America, however, the restrictions were almost identical throughout the country. An informal, politically powerful gathering of the minister presidents of all German states together with Chancellor Merkel handed down all policies on lockdowns nationwide.

Think of it as akin to all governors and the president meeting and deciding a uniform COVID-19 policy for all of the country. It's federalism in name only. The international media lauded Merkel's response, with The Washington Post praising Germany as "one of the envies of the Western world" for its handling of COVID-19.

In the US, however, the restrictions in response to the coronavirus varied across the states. Some red states never closed down, and many like Georgia and Florida reopened early. Many blue states on the other hand, like California and New York, locked down longer and harsher.

And that's federalism at work: State governments assessed the situation differently, some saw less risk in reopening to their citizens than others, some may have placed freedom and self-responsibility ahead of other concerns, or the simple fact that states are just vastly different, e.g. some more rural, others more urban.

A federal top-down one-size-fits-all approach would have neglected all of that. More importantly with state policy, unhappy citizens can always ultimately choose to vote with their feet and leave the state: For a substantial number, it was indeed the final straw to move out of certain blue-governed states like California.

The Harshest Lockdown Ever

While Germany eventually reopened in the summer, it closed down again just weeks before Christmas, cutting short the usual Christmas shopping. At the same time, the US was already administering the first vaccine shots. The new phase of restrictions in Germany was meant to be only a temporary time span of four weeks but ended up lasting for almost half a year. Amid the harshest lockdown ever in Germany, with restrictions like curfews, surpassing that of even the early days of the corona outbreak, the feds pushed state governments to agree to take it to the next level: Over Easter, for five days everything including supermarkets would close. Only on one of the five days would citizens be able to buy food for half a day. The announcement backfired and under public backlash, the decision was reversed within a day.

But days later, when some state governments began toying with the idea of "model openings," a trial reopening of certain regions with low infection numbers, Merkel threatened a federal takeover of the corona-policy setting. More than one year into the pandemic the German parliament approved the power grab from the states and new, federally mandated stay-at-home orders ensured no state could deviate from the national strategy.

All the while, the American vaccination campaign was full speed ahead and several US states, including Texas and Florida, had returned to normal life.

A Sudden Admiration for the ‘Chaotic’ US

By now, Germany's view of the US had dramatically shifted. Gone was the earlier view of a chaotic American Corona-Wild West. Instead, many Germans began to envy the pictures of American drive-through vaccination sites and Americans returning to normalcy, unthinkable in Germany, with slow, overly bureaucratic vaccination centers and restrictions harsher than one year before.

So what do we learn from this?

Just because decisions are made by a central government body, it doesn't mean they're the right decisions. The long phase of lockdowns in Germany may now be coming to an end, but it doesn't look like it's fully catching up to America's progress on reopening and vaccination any time soon. And one can be pretty confident that many Texans or Floridians are probably not too keen on switching places with a German.

Decisions on drastic interventions in the daily life of everyday citizens are made best at the most local scale possible: ideally at the individual level, or at least at the local or state level, and not by federal officials far away contriving a one-size-fits-all plan.

Sebastian Thormann

Sebastian Thormann is a Young Voices Contributor and a student at the University of Passau, Germany. He has also written for the Washington Examiner, The National Interest, CapX and Townhall.com.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

How Germans Went from Mocking America’s Decentralized Pandemic Approach to Envying It

Fauci’s Mask Flip-Flop, Explained (by Economics)

Last summer in an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell, Dr. Anthony Fauci said he had no regrets over advising Americans against wearing masks in public spaces early in the pandemic, even though his recommendations changed months later.

“I don’t regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct,” said Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease advisor. “We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs and masks for the health providers who are putting themselves in harm’s way every day to take care of sick people.”

Fauci was referring to comments he made on 60 Minutes in March 2020. During that interview, Fauci said “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” noting they should be used only for sick people as source control.

“When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is,” said Fauci. “And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

Fauci’s about-face on masks was not without controversy, but it had some excuse given its context. A public health official lying to the public he is responsible for protecting (for whatever the reason) is no small matter. But one could also see Fauci’s explanation as a “noble lie” designed to make sure the people who needed masks most would get them.

Newly released emails, however, suggest that when Fauci said in March that there was no reason for healthy individuals to wear masks, it wasn’t to prevent a mask shortage—it was because he believed it.

Privately, Fauci Also Advised Against Masks

This week the Washington Post and BuzzFeed News released hundreds of pages of Fauci's emails, which were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

The emails contain many revelations. Among them is an email reply Fauci sent to one Sylvia Burwell, presumably the same Sylvia Burwell who served under President Barack Obama as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Burwell, who was slated to travel, had asked Dr. Fauci for his advice on the use of face masks. Fauci's reply, dated February 5, 2020, is included in its entirety below.

"Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location."

The email is important because it shows Fauci was saying privately in February 2020 precisely what he was saying publicly in March 2020. The fact that Fauci was sharing this information privately with Burwell undermines his claim that his recommendation to not wear masks was motivated by fear of causing a mask-purchasing stampede.

In other words, there’s every reason to believe that Fauci was simply sharing his genuine medical opinion, which corresponded with the scientific consensus and the World Health Organization at the time, that masks (particularly cloth ones purchased at retail stores) are ineffective at keeping the virus out and may cause riskier behavior by giving wearers a false sense of protection.

A Model of Public Choice Theory

The obvious question, of course, is what would prompt Fauci to change his medical opinion on masks. The answer can perhaps be found in basic economics.

Public Choice Theory, a field pioneered by the Nobel Prize-winning economist James M. Buchanan, applies economic theories and methods to the analysis of political behavior. As Buchanan saw it, public choice is “politics without romance.” It questions the widely accepted notion that those engaged in public service are motivated primarily by “the common good.” This is not to say Buchanan was suggesting that public officials are uniquely malevolent. On the contrary, public choice theory rests on the assumption political actors are pretty much like everyone else in that their decisions are shaped by self-interest and incentives.

Geoffrey Brennan, a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina and a professor of political science at Duke University, notes there’s a misguided tendency to see public agents as “benevolent despots” instead of regular people.

“When you ask what should government do, you also imply that those in government are motivated to try to choose the very best policies for the public good,” said Brennan in a 2020 discussion on public choice theory. “When it comes to political agents it’s surely a mistake simply to assume that what motivates a person exclusively is their desire to do good.”

He continued:

“After all, the winning assumption in economics is that ordinary folk operating in markets are motivated predominately by self interest. Why should we assume politicians and bureaucrats are motivated any differently than anyone else?”

Both publicly and privately, early in 2020 Fauci said masks were an ineffective, unhelpful way for individuals to protect themselves from COVID-19. His public opinion on the matter changed, and it changed at a time when masks became bitterly divisive (as they were a century ago during the Spanish Flu).

Masks became so politically polarizing that even top government officials could be hit with a social media ban for posting that masks were unhelpful. Indeed, this is precisely what happened to Dr. Scott Atlas, who at the time was a top member of the White House coronavirus task force. In that environment, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Fauci flip-flopped to “fall in line” for the sake of his political career.

To be clear, we don’t know for certain what motivated Fauci’s decisions. It's certainly possible he became convinced (or convinced himself) masks were necessary because asymptomatic spread was a greater risk than he previously believed. (Though research shows asymptomatic spread cases are rare and are unlikely to contribute to the spread of the virus in a meaningful way.) 

What we do know is that public choice theory can help us better understand what motives besides public health may have helped Fauci change his mind (consciously or subconsciously).

It shows how political incentives can often be at odds, not only with the public good, but with truth itself.

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Fauci’s Mask Flip-Flop, Explained (by Economics)

Americans Are Wildly Misinformed about the Risk of Hospitalization from COVID-19, Survey Shows. Here’s Why

Americans in December were asked “what percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized."Their answers are shocking.

Americans Are Wildly Misinformed about the Risk of Hospitalization from COVID-19, Survey Shows. Here’s Why

The New York Times Finally Discovers Unintended Consequences

The New York Times published an article titled "Covid Absolutism" on Friday that explores the unintended consequences of "hygiene theater."“Telling Americans to wear masks when they’re unnecessary undermines efforts to persuade more people to wear masks where they are vital,” Times writer David Leonhardt explains.

Source: The New York Times Finally Discovers Unintended Consequences - Foundation for Economic Education

Suicides Up Nearly 100% Among Young People in Wisconsin's Second Largest County as Medical Experts Cite Perils of Social Isolation

This summer, a relative reached out to me regarding the sad story of Kodie Dutcher, a 10-year-old from Baraboo, Wisconsin who was reported missing in July.

Law enforcement officials put out an Amber Alert, and a volunteer search party was organized. Kodie’s body was found the following morning—July 7, a Tuesday—near her home. Her death was ruled a suicide by the Baraboo Police Department.

Kodie’s death shook me. I grew up in a small town not far from Baraboo and know people who live there today. It occurred to me that my own little girl, whom I still think of as a baby, is roughly the same age Kodie was when she took her life.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenge for everyone, but evidence suggests that few demographics are suffering more than young people. Data show they’re suffering more economically, and emerging evidence shows that many are less equipped to deal with the “collateral damage” of forced lockdowns mentally.

A new report from the Wisconsin State Journal examining mental health trends in Dane County, the second most populous county in Wisconsin, shows that many are struggling to cope with the mental toll of social isolation precipitated by the economic lockdowns.

Hannah Flanagan, the Director of Emergency Services at Journey Mental Health Center, said calls to the center’s crisis hotline are up more than 15 percent since the beginning of the pandemic, with many people suffering not from severe mental illness but situational stress. Preliminary data collected by the center show that Dane County passed its 2019 suicide count in early October.

Flanagan said Dane County had experienced 57 suicides as of early October, more than the total of 54 it had experienced the entire calendar year in 2019. She indicated that the excess deaths largely stem from stay-at-home orders.

“When people are lonely, it’s really hard to cope,” Flanagan said. “The specificity about COVID social distancing and isolation that we’ve come across as contributing factors to the suicides are really new to us this year.”

It’s alarming to see a large county eclipse its previous suicide total with nearly three months remaining in the calendar year, but the numbers become even more troubling when you drill into them a little further. The center’s figures show that 15 of these suicides were committed by people under the age of 25. That’s nearly double the total in 2019 (eight)—and we still have nearly three months until the year is over.

One could dismiss these figures as anecdotal evidence or a strange outlier. The problem is it fits with other mental health trends around the country. The CDC recently reported that one out of four young people have contemplated suicide during the pandemic, about two and a half times the overall rate.

Though national data on youth suicide during the pandemic is not yet available, trends reported from suicide hotline centers across the country show that many young people are crying out for help.

Social Isolation Is Deadly

Flanagan’s explanation that the spike in suicide in Dane County is tied to COVID-19 lockdowns dovetails with years of science that shows social isolation isn’t just psychologically harmful to humans, but deadly.

An abundance of scientific evidence shows social isolation “is one of the main risk factors associated with suicidal outcomes.” The dangers are particularly acute in women, research suggests.

This is why from the beginning of the pandemic there has been a small but consistent chorus of researchers warning that forced isolation could prove to be “a perfect storm” for suicide.

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"Secondary consequences of social distancing may increase the risk of suicide," researchers wrote in an April 10 paper published by the American Medical Association. "It is important to consider changes in a variety of economic, psycho-social, and health-associated risk factors."

It should be noted that suicide is just one of the deadly effects of social isolation. Dr. Dhruv Khullar, a physician and assistant professor of healthcare policy at Weill Cornell Medical College, detailed numerous other deadly effects of social isolation in a popular 2016 article in the New York Times:

"A wave of new research suggests social separation is bad for us. Individuals with less social connection have disrupted sleep patterns, altered immune systems, more inflammation and higher levels of stress hormones. One recent study found that isolation increases the risk of heart disease by 29 percent and stroke by 32 percent.

Another analysis that pooled data from 70 studies and 3.4 million people found that socially isolated individuals had a 30 percent higher risk of dying in the next seven years, and that this effect was largest in middle age.

Loneliness can accelerate cognitive decline in older adults, and isolated individuals are twice as likely to die prematurely as those with more robust social interactions. These effects start early: Socially isolated children have significantly poorer health 20 years later, even after controlling for other factors. All told, loneliness is as important a risk factor for early death as obesity and smoking."

Tradeoffs: An Economic Reality

Unfortunately, nations around the world and many US states have failed to assess these risks. Policymakers, perhaps incentivized by a 24-hour media that tracked and reported COVID-19 deaths like a sporting event, have adopted empty slogans such as “if it saves just one life.”

It rarely occurs to lawmakers to also look at the lives lost as a result of their policies.

“There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs,” the famous economist Thomas Sowell once observed, “and you try to get the best trade-off you can get, that's all you can hope for.”

Tradeoffs are a simple economic reality, but one humans often overlook. The idea was perhaps best described by economist Russ Roberts, who noted that every choice also means giving something up.

In many ways, the pandemic is a perfect example of ignoring the reality of tradeoffs. Lawmakers saw that by enforcing social distancing, they were (in theory) limiting the spread of the virus. What they didn’t see was the tradeoffs: lost social interaction that is crucial for humans, cancer screenings abandoned, jobs lost, AA meetings canceled, babies denied heart surgery, and so on.

As economist Antony Davies and political scientist James Harrigan noted early in the pandemic, across the country we saw the leaders of America’s institutions—county councils to mayors to school boards to police to clergy—simply ignore the realities of tradeoffs:

“Rational people understand this isn’t how the world works. Regardless of whether we acknowledge them, tradeoffs exist. And acknowledging tradeoffs is an important part of constructing sound policy. Unfortunately, even mentioning tradeoffs in a time of crisis brings the accusation that only heartless beasts would balance human lives against dollars. But each one of us balances human lives against dollars, and any number of other things, every day.”

Americans, particularly those with influence and those in leadership positions, should recognize that lockdowns—and indeed all sweeping government-mandates—come with a host of unintended consequences.

The failure to acknowledge or adequately consider them is why so many people today are in pain—and why more young Americans are seeking to throw away their most precious gift.

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

‘A Year’s Worth of Suicide Attempts in Four Weeks’: The Unintended Consequences of COVID-19 Lockdowns

The costs of the government responses to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic have been severe. New evidence suggests they could be even worse than we imagined.

An ABC affiliate in California reports that doctors at John Muir Medical Center tell them they have seen more deaths by suicide than COVID-19 during the quarantine.

“The numbers are unprecedented,” said Dr. Michael deBoisblanc, referring to the spike in suicides.

"We've never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time," deBoisblanc added. "I mean we've seen a year's worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks."

Kacey Hansen, a trauma nurse who has spent 33 years at the hospital, said she has never witnessed self-inflicted attacks on such a scale.

"What I have seen recently, I have never seen before," Hansen said. "I have never seen so much intentional injury."

To date, there is little evidence that lockdowns have reduced the spread of COVID-19. But even if there were compelling evidence that lockdowns were saving lives, it would be a mistake to ignore the manifold unintended consequences of stay-at-home orders.

As economist Antony Davies and political scientist James Harrigan explain, “every human action has both intended and unintended consequences. Human beings react to every rule, regulation, and order governments impose, and their reactions result in outcomes that can be quite different than the outcomes lawmakers intended.”

The problem with negative unintended consequences is two-fold.

First, as Ludwig von Mises, observed, every government intervention in markets creates unintended consequences, which often lead to more calls for government interventions which have more unintended consequences, and so on. Second, as Frédéric Bastiat pointed out, we tend to focus our attention more on the intended consequences than the unintended ones. (Think of government assistance and the poverty trap.)

The unintended consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have been severe. Most of the attention, however, has been focused on the economic consequences. Forty million US jobs lost. A looming recession. Hundreds of thousands of businesses wiped out and retirements destroyed.

The psychological and physiological unintended consequences of stay-at-home orders have received less attention. Media have been largely transfixed on COVID-19, reporting daily death tolls and rising case numbers in states easing lockdown restrictions (while failing to note that COVID cases are rising because of expanded testing).

To be sure, measuring the impact on mental health is trickier than measuring COVID-19 fatalities or job losses. But that is no reason to discount the psychological and physical impact of lockdowns, especially when evidence suggests the toll is severe.

A recent Wall Street Journal report shows a surge in the number of people taking drugs for anxiety and insomnia, prompting physicians to warn about the long-term risks of increased prescriptions, which include drug addiction and abuse.

Stay-at-home orders may seem relatively benign, but they are not. Science shows that human beings struggle mightily in isolation from one another.

As The New York Times reported in 2016, social isolation isn’t just harmful, it’s quite deadly:

A wave of new research suggests social separation is bad for us. Individuals with less social connection have disrupted sleep patterns, altered immune systems, more inflammation and higher levels of stress hormones. One recent study found that isolation increases the risk of heart disease by 29 percent and stroke by 32 percent.

Another analysis that pooled data from 70 studies and 3.4 million people found that socially isolated individuals had a 30 percent higher risk of dying in the next seven years, and that this effect was largest in middle age.

Loneliness can accelerate cognitive decline in older adults, and isolated individuals are twice as likely to die prematurely as those with more robust social interactions. These effects start early: Socially isolated children have significantly poorer health 20 years later, even after controlling for other factors. All told, loneliness is as important a risk factor for early death as obesity and smoking.

Anecdotal evidence, like the testimony of doctors at John Muir Medical Center and reported surges in calls to suicide hotlines around the country, suggest the mental toll of lockdowns could be as great as the material costs. (Indeed, they likely go hand-in-hand.)

We’ll have months if not years to debate whether the lockdowns were effective or the right thing to do. What’s important to remember is the stay-at-home orders come with a host of unintended consequences that we have not yet even begun to measure or understand.

For his part, Dr. DeBoisblanc has seen enough to convince him that it’s time to lift stay-at-home orders and let people return to their communities.

"Personally, I think it's time," he said. "I think, originally, this was put in place to flatten the curve and to make sure hospitals have the resources to take care of COVID patients. We have the current resources to do that, and our other community health is suffering."

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Bylines: The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.