The mortality rate as the central unknown
In the earliest episode in this set, Jacob Sullum, identified as a senior editor at Reason magazine, told Bob Zadek that the most important unknown about COVID-19 was how deadly the virus was — the percentage of infected people expected to die. He said the seasonal flu has a case fatality rate of about 0.1%, and that U.S. public health officials put COVID-19’s best estimate somewhere between 0.1% and 1%, a range he called huge. Some epidemiologists, he said, thought the true figure might be as low as 0.05%, which would make COVID-19 less deadly than the seasonal flu. How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020)
Sullum cited projections built on the higher end of that range: the CDC foresaw 1.7 million deaths in the U.S., and a group at Imperial College headed by Neil Ferguson projected 2.2 million. He called those scenarios implausible for two reasons — they assumed a relatively high case fatality rate (the CDC 0.8%, Imperial College 0.9%), and they assumed that 65% of the population would ultimately be infected, which he said failed to account for voluntary changes in behavior such as reduced social contact, fewer errands and frequent hand-washing. His own range ran from a few thousand U.S. deaths to perhaps 20,000, against the CDC’s worst case of 1.7 million. How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020)
From that uncertainty Sullum drew a policy conclusion: when you do not know how many Americans are infected or what percentage will die, you cannot know whether aggressive interventions are worth the cost. He described those costs as enormous — people out of work, businesses no longer operating, possible bankruptcy, and a severe recession he compared to 2008–2009, which he said cost an estimated $22 trillion. He rejected as a mistake the position he attributed to Andrew Cuomo, that we will do whatever it takes for as long as it takes, no matter the cost, arguing that if the cost is huge and the benefit small, the measures should not be undertaken. How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020)
Testing, the denominator, and who bears the risk
Zadek framed the testing problem as one of rationing: given woefully few tests, how should available testing be used? Sullum answered that the goal was eventually to test the whole population or a representative sample, but that in the meantime testing should follow symptoms and contacts — test people with symptoms, ask whom they had been in contact with, test those people, and trace further contacts, an approach he said South Korea used. That, he argued, would yield a sense of how many cases actually existed and how transmissible the virus was, permitting a much more focused approach than telling the entire population to stay in place. How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020)
Sullum attributed to Neil Ferguson, the British epidemiologist, the point that COVID-19 deaths were strongly concentrated among older people and people with serious pre-existing medical conditions. Ferguson, testifying before a parliamentary committee, said the country could not be kept in lockdown for a year, and that it was not known how many excess deaths there would be — how many more deaths than otherwise expected. Ferguson estimated that half to two-thirds of COVID-19 deaths could occur in people who would have died by the end of the year in any case. Sullum called this touchy but relevant, and said Ferguson’s group at Imperial College had not considered economic or ethical issues at all in its initial analysis, only scenarios, policies and projected deaths. Sullum’s own formulation: an epidemic killing primarily healthy children, teenagers, young adults and middle-aged people would be a greater loss, and we would be willing to bear much greater cost than in the situation actually faced. He denied that this meant the old and sick are expendable. How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020)
Economic fallacies and regulatory scarcity
A separate episode paired Zadek with Don Boudreaux, described as an economics professor at George Mason University and a writer for Cafe Hayek, to discuss the economic and social trade-offs of the government’s pandemic response. The excerpt’s summary states that they explored how lockdowns, anti-price gouging laws, tariffs and Certificate of Need regulations create artificial scarcity and undermine the complex systems of cooperation that sustain human life and prosperity. The episode’s listed topics include Robert Higgs and Crisis and Leviathan. The Single Most Common Economic Fallacy in COVID-19 Reporting (2020)
A third episode featured Alex Tabarrok, identified as the Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, on what the summary calls systemic failures of the CDC and FDA during the early pandemic. The listed topics include the trade-offs between public health and economic activity, the necessity of assigning a value to human life for policy-making, regulatory hurdles that prevented rapid testing and drug approval, testing capacity, Right to Try, telemedicine and public choice theory. FDA (2020)
Cities, remote work and the decoupling of home from work
In June 2020 Zadek turned to the pandemic’s effect on cities with Brent Orrell, described as a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a veteran of the Bush administration and host of the podcast Hardly Working. Zadek observed that the virus had profoundly affected large cities — he named New York, Chicago and Seattle — which took the brunt of the adverse economic, social and health effects, and that this led immediately to large numbers of workers working from home. That in turn, he said, prompted inquiry into what a city is, whether the virus had forced a profound change in the relationship between where we live and where we work, and whether the long-term effects on city life would be positive, negative, or simply disappear. The episode’s summary states that remote work is decoupling residence from employment, potentially leading to a more decentralized and freer American society while posing significant challenges to the tax bases and political structures of major metropolitan areas. The Future of Cities (2020)
Mandates, gag orders and the political turn
By 2021 the framing had shifted from trade-offs to coercion. Zadek opened an Easter Sunday episode by saying that for the last year we had all fired our healthcare professionals and replaced their information with information from elected officials or unelected bureaucrats — politicians, many far away, who never met us, did not examine us, and in many instances had agendas besides our health. He said we took behavioral and medical advice from these officials and wondered aloud whether the same advice from one’s own physician would not have made the world’s most winnable medical malpractice case. His guest was Dr. Jeffrey Singer; the episode’s summary describes a critique of the shift from medical guidance to government mandates, the unseen costs of lockdowns, and scientific data on school reopenings and vaccine efficacy, with topics including vaccine passports, Frédéric Bastiat and the CDC. Vaccines & the Totalitarian Principle (2021)
A July 2020 episode concerned a California law that a school board member described as preventing him from sharing his opinion. He said that if he shared an opinion perceived as deterring or discouraging somebody from joining the union, the board or district could be sued, and that they were advised to shut up, to avoid comments about the Janus decision, and to be extraordinarily careful about what they said or risk an unfair labor practice lawsuit — devastating to a district on a tight budget. He also said that UTLA, the union representing teachers in Los Angeles, which he called the second largest school district in the country, had demands for reopening schools regarding COVID that had nothing to do with COVID-19: defunding the police and eliminating all charter schools. California’s New Union Gag Order Violates 1st Amendment (2020)
Origins and the coverup allegation
The latest episode in the set is a November 2023 interview with Senator Rand Paul about his book Deception: The Great COVID Coverup. Paul said it was the outright lies that got him intrigued, and that the book exposes a coverup extending to eight different agencies in government and hundreds of people. Anticipating the objection that a conspiracy of hundreds makes no sense, he invoked George Carlin: a conspiracy theory isn’t necessarily where interests converge, and over time the idea that they could share guilt or culpability for millions of deaths is a big incentive to cover up. The episode’s summary states that the book details an alleged conspiracy by government officials to hide the pandemic’s origins, and that the discussion covers the role of Dr. Anthony Fauci, funding of gain of function research in Wuhan, and a coordinated effort to suppress the lab-leak theory to protect the business of science. Senator Rand Paul Exposes the Great COVID Coverup (2023)
Across episodes: the same question, sharpened
The recurring question across these episodes is whether officials can rationally impose costs on the public when the magnitude of the problem is unknown, and the treatment changes register rather than substance. In March 2020 Sullum argued the uncertainty itself made cost-benefit reasoning impossible and that voluntary behavior change was already reducing transmission; in April 2020 Boudreaux and Tabarrok located the failure in specific regulations — price gouging laws, tariffs, Certificate of Need, and FDA and CDC testing bottlenecks — that manufactured scarcity; by 2021 Zadek and Singer described the same dynamic as a transfer of authority from physicians to bureaucrats, and by 2023 Paul recast it as deliberate deception rather than mere error. The earlier episodes argue about what is not known; the later ones assert what was hidden.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the state in which any city named is located, the name or number of the California law at issue beyond a reference to a 3550 law, or what the Janus decision held. They do not give the founding date or membership of any institution named, nor the title of the school board member who speaks in the July 2020 episode. Several excerpts break off mid-sentence or at a section break, and nothing is reported here from beyond those points. No excerpt states the outcome of any litigation, investigation or election discussed.