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COVID-19

8 min read

Part of Health and medicine.

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Every episode (21)

Who argued it

Jeffrey Singer ×2 · Rand Paul · Robert Mahoney · Justin Hart · Richard Epstein · Ryan Bourne · Matt Welch · Adam Thierer · Kevin Kiley · Ryan Young · Glenn Roper · Brent Orrell

Public Choice Theory · CDC · First Amendment · Economics · Public Policy · Education · Libertarianism · Censorship

Background

Uncertainty and the mortality rate

In the earliest episode touching the pandemic, Jacob Sullum, identified as senior editor at Reason magazine, told Bob Zadek that the most important unknown was how deadly the virus is — the percentage of infected people expected to die. He said the seasonal flu has a case fatality rate of about 0.1%, while U.S. public health officials put COVID-19’s best estimate between 0.1% and 1%, a range he called huge and a sign of poor data collection. Some epidemiologists, he added, think the true figure could 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 worst-case projections: the CDC foresaw 1.7 million U.S. deaths, and a group at Imperial College headed by Neil Ferguson projected 2.2 million. He called those scenarios implausible because they assumed relatively high case fatality rates — 0.8% for the CDC and 0.9% for the Imperial College group — and because the CDC assumed 65% of the population would ultimately be infected, based on the assumption that nothing effective is done. He argued that voluntary behavior changes, such as reducing social contact and frequent hand-washing, would affect transmission. How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020)

From this, Sullum drew a policy conclusion: when uncertainty is so high, you are operating in the dark, you cannot know how many Americans are infected or what percentage will die, and so you cannot know whether what you are doing is worth the cost. He described enormous costs from shutdowns — people out of work, businesses no longer operating, possible bankruptcy, and a severe recession possibly worse than 2008–2009, which he said cost an estimated $22 trillion. He rejected as impossible the position he attributed to Andrew Cuomo, that we will do whatever it takes for as long as it takes, no matter the cost. How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020)

Testing, excess deaths, and age-stratified risk

Sullum said the goal should be to test the whole population or at least a representative sample, but given that this could not be done, testing should target symptomatic people and their contacts, and their contacts in turn, to learn how many cases exist and how transmissible the virus is. He pointed to South Korea’s contact tracing as a model, saying that if you knew who was infected and whom they had contact with, you could have a much more focused approach than telling the entire population to stay in place. How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020)

He attributed to Neil Ferguson the point that COVID-19 deaths are strongly concentrated among older people and people with serious pre-existing 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. 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 to assessing the harm of the epidemic and how much economic activity it was worth sacrificing to avoid it. He noted that the Imperial College group’s initial analysis considered no economic or ethical issues, only scenarios, reproduction numbers, and projected deaths. How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020)

Sullum said an epidemic killing primarily healthy children, teenagers, young adults and middle-aged people would be a much greater loss than one primarily affecting the elderly or sickly, and that we would be willing to bear a much greater cost in that case. He insisted this did not mean the old and sick are expendable, the position he attributed to Cuomo, but that the costs of the epidemic had to be weighed against the costs of preventing it. How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020)

Economic fallacies and regulatory failure

A later episode featured Don Boudreaux, an economics professor at George Mason University and a writer for Cafe Hayek, discussing the economic and social trade-offs of the government’s pandemic response. The excerpt 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 Single Most Common Economic Fallacy in COVID-19 Reporting (2020)

A separate episode featured Alex Tabarrok, identified as the Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, on systemic failures of the CDC and FDA in the pandemic’s early stages. The excerpt states that they discussed the trade-offs between public health and economic activity, the necessity of assigning a value to human life for policy-making, and regulatory hurdles that prevented rapid testing and drug approval. FDA (2020)

Cities, mandates, and the coverup

In an episode on the future of cities, Bob Zadek observed that the virus profoundly affected large cities — New York, Chicago, Seattle and the like — which took the brunt of the adverse economic, social and health effects, and that workers working from home raised questions about what a city is and whether the pandemic forced a lasting change in the relationship between where people live and where they work. His guest was Brent Orrell, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The Future of Cities (2020)

In a 2021 episode, Bob framed the past year as one in which Americans fired their healthcare professionals and took medical information from elected officials and unelected bureaucrats, many of whom had other agendas besides our health. His guest was Dr. Jeffrey Singer; the excerpt states they critiqued the shift from medical guidance to government mandates, the unseen costs of lockdowns, and the scientific data on school reopenings and vaccine efficacy. Vaccines & the Totalitarian Principle (2021)

In a 2023 episode, Senator Rand Paul, discussing his book Deception: The Great COVID Coverup, said the outright lies intrigued him and that the coverup extends to eight different agencies and hundreds of people. He invoked George Carlin’s line that a conspiracy theory isn’t necessarily where interests converge, and said the idea that they could share guilt or culpability for millions of deaths is a big incentive to cover up. The excerpt states the book details an alleged conspiracy by government officials to hide the pandemic’s origins, and that they discussed Dr. Anthony Fauci, funding of gain of function research in Wuhan, and efforts to suppress the lab-leak theory. Senator Rand Paul Exposes the Great COVID Coverup (2023)

Across episodes

The same question — how to weigh the costs of pandemic restrictions against their benefits — runs from the March 2020 Sullum episode through the 2021 Singer episode, with Sullum supplying the mortality-rate uncertainty and cost figures and Singer’s episode extending the critique to mandates and vaccine efficacy; the 2020 Boudreaux and Tabarrok episodes add the price-gouging, Certificate of Need, and FDA/CDC testing failures, and the 2023 Rand Paul episode shifts to the pandemic’s origins.

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