To this writer, Sunday felt a little bit like Groundhog Day in autumn.
On CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Dr. Anthony Fauci — the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, America’s COVID guru and arguably the most powerful unelected, unconfirmed bureaucrat in recent U.S. history — informed Americans it was “just too soon to tell” whether we’d be able to have Christmas gatherings.
This answer to a question posed by host Margaret Brennan was vaguely reminiscent of one Fauci gave last November when he was asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper whether Christmas gatherings would be out of the question.
“Yes, I’m — well, I think that, if we get most of the country vaccinated in the second, third quarter of the year, and the vaccine continues to prove its efficacy, and people adhere to those fundamental measures, I think we can start approaching the degree — it’s not going to be a light switch, Jake.”
A year has passed, vast strides have been made against the coronavirus — both in vaccinations and treatment therapies. Deaths are way down. But Fauci’s fundamental position, and that of other lockdown-and-social distancing czars, doesn’t seem to have changed: Keeping Americans locked down, masked and socially distanced is still the only option.
Insert your own “15 days to flatten the curve” joke here.
To the Fauci crowd, the end of this all is somewhere in the middle distance. Next January. Maybe May. When 70 percent of adults are vaccinated. Make that 85. Or 98 percent, if you’re President Joe Biden. We can all get our lives back if we do what they say for just a little longer. Just a little while longer.
According to the author of one paper, however, all the lockdowns have potentially been for naught.
In a peer-reviewed study published Sept. 29 by the International Journal of the Economics of Business, Douglas W. Allen, an economics professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, argued that: “It is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in modern history.’
“An examination of over 100 Covid-19 studies reveals that many relied on false assumptions that over-estimated the benefits and under-estimated the costs of lockdown,” Allen wrote in the paper (which he originally published in April). “The most recent research has shown that lockdowns have had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of Covid-19 deaths. Generally speaking, the ineffectiveness stemmed from individual changes in behavior: either non-compliance or behavior that mimicked lockdowns.”
It didn’t matter how stringent the lockdown was, either. Why? Allen noted that much of the decision-making was based on the so-called Imperial College model or models like it. The Imperial model concluded “that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time. The social and economic effects of the measures which are needed to achieve this policy goal will be profound.”
However, there were multiple problems with the model, Allen wrote.
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