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Letters to the Editor: Lockdown Edition The Free Press
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On Saturday, we ran the latest installment of our Prophets series, which pays tribute to thinkers from the past who predicted our current moment. For his entry, Joe Nocera wrote about D.A. Henderson, the epidemiologist credited with eradicating smallpox who warned against shutting down the world to combat a pandemic.
Joe’s article prompted a response from someone who actually knew Henderson, who died in 2016: Donald G. McNeil Jr., the former New York Times science correspondent and author of a new book on pandemics, The Wisdom of Plagues. Here’s his letter:
Joe Nocera suggests that D.A. Henderson, were he alive today, would agree with the premises of Joe’s new book, The Big Fail, particularly the idea that lockdowns were the wrong response to the Covid pandemic.
Unlike Joe (I suspect), I actually knew D.A. Henderson. I interviewed him frequently and I wrote his New York Times obituary—from which Joe quotes. When presented with new facts, D.A. would change his mind. I gave examples of that in the obit. While Joe is correct in saying that Henderson warned that closing down society to stop a pandemic would have unpleasant consequences, that does not mean he would have backed the absurd idea advanced in the Great Barrington Declaration that we should have just let the virus rip through the population (while somehow—they never explained how—magically “protecting the vulnerable”). That was a ridiculous, dangerous idea, and the Great Barrington epidemiologists—and their acolytes, like Scott Atlas, a member of Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force—kept insisting that the end of the pandemic was just around the corner, thanks to their theory that it would stop when 30 percent of the population had been infected. They were wrong. As early as the late summer of 2020, Atlas was insisting that the epidemic was fading away. At the time, about 200,000 Americans were dead; another 900,000 more would die after he made that statement.
Joe cites Sweden as a model we should have emulated. It’s an article of faith among lockdown skeptics that Sweden did great during the pandemic. It did not. It became famous in the spring of 2020 for taking a laissez-faire approach. Before the year ended, the country—including the king and the epidemiologist who came up with the laissez-faire policy—admitted that it had failed because so many Swedes had died (mostly in nursing homes). Lockdowns and school closures, much like those in the rest of Europe, were imposed. By the time the pandemic was over, Sweden had a far higher Covid death rate than any of its neighbors (about 2,700 deaths per million vs. 1,200 for next-door Norway). It had more deaths per capita than Germany and was on a par with Spain and France. In other words, it did just about average in Western Europe.
And the U.S. did terribly, with a higher Covid death rate (3,600/million) than any Western European country. In my book The Wisdom of Plagues I, like Joe, argue that we failed terribly in the face of Covid—but because we reacted too slowly, too incompetently, with too much political fragmentation. And that ultimately, the most important reason for our high death rate was vaccine rejection.
I’ve been denounced as a totalitarian for arguing in favor of a rapid, aggressive, Pentagon-like response to epidemics, for closing borders, restricting travel, ending home quarantine, ending religious exemptions, and imposing rigorous vaccine mandates (and, yes, brief but rigidly enforced shutdowns and mask mandates if testing data suggest that they will keep local hospitals from being overwhelmed—not to please teachers unions). I estimate that our failed response meant we lost almost 550,000 more lives than we should have to Covid. And I think that if we don’t get better at this, we’ll lose more Americans next time.
And I’m pretty sure D.A., were he still alive, would agree with me rather than with Scott Atlas.
—Donald G. McNeil Jr.
And here’s Joe’s response:
Donald McNeil spent most of his career as an infectious disease reporter for The New York Times, so it’s not a surprise that he advocates for the Covid mitigation measures championed by his public health sources. But that also causes him to share the same blind spots—overlooking important factors that Henderson pointed out in his 2006 paper.
The first is that a “rapid, aggressive, Pentagon-like response” doesn’t take into account a hugely important factor: human behavior. You simply can’t lock people up in their homes, shut down their businesses, eliminate every venue for human contact and enjoyment, and expect people to put up with it indefinitely. China took exactly that approach, and its citizens ultimately revolted. When the government finally relented and allowed cities like Shanghai to open up again, a lot of people died.
Second, Henderson understood, as I quoted him in my story: “You have to be practical, and you have to be humble, about what public health can actually do, especially over sustained periods.” The person who recalled that quote for me was Dr. Tara O’Toole, Henderson’s longtime number two. I venture that she knew him even better than McNeil. And much of what McNeil calls for, such as travel restrictions, simply don’t work. We know now that most of the masks people used during the pandemic didn’t stop the virus either. Lockdowns? The evidence is overwhelming that lockdowns did not ultimately save lives.
Third, McNeil fails to make important distinctions—distinctions that are key to understanding the rationale behind the Great Barrington Declaration. As Martin Kulldorff, one of the authors of that document, told me, “There is an enormous age difference in the risk of mortality—a thousandfold difference between the old and the young.” The elderly were highly vulnerable to the virus, but as you went down the age scale, people were less likely to die from it. And the number of children who died of Covid was miniscule. McNeil doesn’t mention the harm done to children by lengthy school closings, but it was far worse than any harm inflicted on them by the pandemic. On the flip side, of the 1.1 million Americans who died of Covid, some 200,000 were nursing home residents. McNeil scoffs at the idea that society could protect the elderly while letting the rest of society function, but of course we could. We just chose not to.
McNeil’s view that D.A. Henderson would have turned his back on his lifelong beliefs, based on real-world experience, seems pretty unlikely. So much of life requires balancing risks versus rewards. Pandemics are no different. As bad as the virus was, public-health experts made a grievous mistake overselling the risks to the exclusion of all else. That is why they have so little credibility today. That’s what Henderson understood, and McNeil doesn’t.
—Joe Nocera
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Yesterday, in a long story about “the petty feud between the [New York Times] and the White House,” Eli Stokols of Politico suggested that the paper’s negative coverage of President Joe Biden came from the frustration of its publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, at Biden’s refusal to do an exclusive interview with the paper. Two people told Stokols that Sulzberger’s reasoning is that only an interview with an established paper like the New York Times “can verify that the 81-year-old Biden is still fit to hold the presidency.”
For his part, Stokols reported, Biden’s frustration with the New York Times reflects “the resentment of a president with a working-class sense of himself and his team toward a news organization catering to an elite audience,” and their conviction that the newspaper is not taking seriously the need to protect democracy.
A spokesperson for the New York Times responded to the story by saying the idea that it has skewed its coverage out of pique over an interview is “outrageous and untrue,” and that the paper will continue to cover the president “fully and fairly.”
Today, Biden sat for a live interview of more than an hour with SiriusXM shock jock Howard Stern. Writer Kurt Andersen described it as a “*Total* softball interview, mostly about his personal life—but lovely, sweet, human, and Biden was terrific, consistently clear, detailed, charming, moving. Which was the point. SO much better than his opponent could do.”
Also today, the Treasury Department announced that the pilot program of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that enabled taxpayers to file their tax returns directly with the IRS for free had more users than the program’s stated goal, got positive ratings, and saved users an estimated $5.6 million in fees for tax preparation. The government had hoped about 100,000 people would use the pilot program; 140,803 did.
Former deputy director of the National Economic Council Bharat Ramamurti wrote on social media, “Of all the things I was lucky enough to work on, this might be my favorite. You shouldn’t have to pay money to pay your taxes. As this program continues to grow, most people will get pre-populated forms and be able to file their taxes with a few clicks in a few minutes.” Such a system would look much like the system other countries already use.
Also today, the Federal Trade Commission announced that Williams-Sonoma will pay a record $3.17 million civil penalty for advertising a number of products as “Made in USA” when they were really made in China and other countries. This is the largest settlement ever for a case under the “Made in USA” rule. Williams-Sonoma will also be required to file annual compliance certifications.
FTC chair Lina Khan wrote on social media: “Made in USA fraud deceives customers and punishes honest businesses. FTC will continue holding to account businesses that misrepresent where their product[s] are manufactured.”
In another win for the United Auto Workers (UAW), the union negotiated a deal today with Daimler Trucks over contracts for 7,300 Daimler employees in four North Carolina factories. The new contracts provide raises of at least 25% over four years, cost of living increases, and profit sharing. This victory comes just a week after workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted overwhelmingly to join the UAW.
Today was the eighth day of Trump’s criminal trial for his efforts to interfere with the 2016 election by paying to hide negative information about himself from voters and then falsifying records to hide the payments. David Pecker, who ran the company that published the National Enquirer tabloid, finished his testimony.
In four days on the stand, Pecker testified that he joined Michael Cohen and others in killing stories to protect Trump in the election. Trump’s longtime executive assistant Rhona Graff took the stand after Pecker, and testified that both Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels were in Trump’s contacts. Next up was Gary Farro, a bank employee who verified banking information that showed how Michael Cohen had hidden payments to Daniels in 2016.
Once again, Trump appeared to be trying to explain away his lack of support at the trial, writing on his social media channel that the courthouse was heavily guarded. “Security is that of Fort Knox,” he wrote, “all so that MAGA will not be able to attend this trial….” But CNN’s Kaitlan Collins immediately responded: “Again, the courthouse is open [to] the public. The park outside, where a handful of his supporters have gathered on [trial] days, is easily accessible.”
Dispatch Politics noted today that when co-chairs Michael Whatley and Lara Trump and senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita took over the Republican National Committee (RNC), they killed a plan to open 40 campaign offices in 10 crucial states and fired 60 members of the RNC staff. According to Dispatch Politics, Trump insisted to the former RNC chair that he did not need the RNC to work on turning out voters. He wanted the RNC to prioritize “election integrity” efforts.
The RNC under Trump has not yet developed much infrastructure or put staff into the states. It appears to have decided to focus only on those that are key to the presidential race, leaving down-ballot candidates on their own.
While Trump appears to be hoping to win the election through voter suppression or in the courts, following his blueprint from 2020, Biden’s campaign has opened 30 offices in Michigan alone and has established offices in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Florida.
Finally today, news broke that in her forthcoming book, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem wrote about shooting her 14-month-old dog because it was “untrainable” and dangerous. “I hated that dog,” she wrote, and she recorded how after the dog ruined a hunting trip, she shot it in a gravel pit. Then she decided to kill a goat that she found to be “nasty and mean” as well as smelly and aggressive. She “dragged him to the gravel pit,” too, and “put him down.”
Noem has been seen as a leading contender for the Republican vice presidential nomination on a ticket with Trump, and it seems likely she was trying to demonstrate her ruthlessness—a trait Trump appears to value—as a political virtue. But across the political spectrum, people have expressed outrage and disgust. In The Guardian, Martin Pengelly said her statement, “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story,” was “a contender for the greatest understatement of election year.”
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Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/25/new-york-times-biden-white-house-00154219
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/26/trump-kristi-noem-shot-dog-and-goat-book
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2298
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/26/1247632662/daimler-truck-uaw-strike-averted
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The Chris Hedges Report with independent candidate for the House Dennis Kucinich on the corruption of the two party system, the genocide in Gaza and the struggle to reclaim our democracy. Chris Hedges
The presidential election in November looks set to pit Donald Trump, who will most likely dismantle what is left of our decayed democracy, against Joe Biden, who is a full partner in the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Not, for most of us, a palatable choice. The two ruling parties, who have foisted these candidates on the public, have at the same time conspired with their corporate sponsors to block third parties and independents, along with mavericks such as Bernie Sanders, from running viable campaigns. The only groups that consistently win in our elections are the militarists, corporations and the billionaire class, who, of course, fund and stage manage the electoral farce. On all of the major issues – endless war, trade deals, deindustrialization, government surveillance, the steady decline of social services including a for-profit health care system that allows corporations to prey on the sick, the bloated prison population and militarized police – there is little daylight between the two ruling parties. How can we reclaim our democracy and provide real and meaningful political alternatives? Are we forever condemned to the diminishing returns offered by the least-worst option? Is there a way to create an electoral system that is not captive to big money and dominated by groups such as the Israel lobby? Joining me to discuss the state of our anemic democracy – a system the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin referred to as inverted totalitarianism — is Dennis Kucinich. Dennis served as U.S. Representative from Ohio’s 10th Congressional district from 1997 to 2013, losing his seat when the Democratic Party engineered redistricting that forced him to run in the newly-drawn 9th district. He was a presidential candidate in 2004 and 2008, running on an anti-war platform during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a strong advocate for unions, the restoration of our civil liberties and singer-payer health care. Dennis, who briefly served as Bobby Kennedy’s campaign manager, is currently running as an independent in Ohio’s 7th Congressional district.
April 26, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
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