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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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Today, in Racine, Wisconsin, President Joe Biden announced that Microsoft is investing $3.3 billion dollars to build a new data center that will help operate one of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems in the world. It is expected to create 2,300 union construction jobs and employ 2,000 permanent workers.
Microsoft has also partnered with Gateway Technical College to train and certify 200 students a year to fill new jobs in data and information technology. In addition, Microsoft is working with nearby high schools to train students for future jobs.
Speaking at Gateway Technical College’s Racine campus, Biden contrasted today’s investment with that made by Trump about the same site in 2018. In that year, Trump went to Wisconsin for the “groundbreaking” of a high-tech campus he claimed would be the “eighth wonder of the world.”
Under Republican governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin legislators approved a $3 billion subsidy and tax incentive package—ten times larger than any similar previous package in the state—to lure the Taiwan-based Foxconn electronics company. Once built, a new $10 billion campus that would focus on building large liquid-crystal display screens would bring 13,000 jobs to the area, they promised.
Foxconn built a number of buildings, but the larger plan never materialized, even after taxpayers had been locked into contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars for upgrading roads, sewer system, electricity, and so on. When voters elected Democrat Tony Evers as governor in 2022, he dropped the tax incentives from $3 billion to $80 million, which depended on the hiring of only 1,454 workers, reflecting the corporation’s current plans. Foxconn dropped its capital investment from $10 billion to $672.8 million.
In November 2023, Microsoft announced it was buying some of the Foxconn properties in Wisconsin.
Today, Biden noted that rather than bringing jobs to Racine, Trump’s policies meant the city lost 1,000 manufacturing jobs during his term. Wisconsin as a whole lost 83,500. “Racine was once a manufacturing boomtown,” Biden recalled, “all the way through the 1960s, powering companies—invented and manufacturing Windex…portable vacuum cleaners, and so much more, and powered by middle-class jobs.
“And then came trickle-down economics [which] cut taxes for the very wealthy and biggest corporations…. We shipped American jobs overseas because labor was cheaper. We slashed public investment in education and innovation. And the result: We hollowed out the middle class. My predecessor and his administration doubled down on that failed trickle-down economics, along with the [trail] of broken promises.”
“But that’s not on my watch,” Biden said. “We’re determined to turn it around.” He noted that thanks to the Democrats’ policies, in the past three years, Racine has added nearly 4,000 jobs—hitting a record low unemployment rate—and Wisconsin as a whole has gained 178,000 new jobs.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act have fueled “a historic boom in rebuilding our roads and bridges, developing and deploying clean energy, [and] revitalizing American manufacturing,” he said. That investment has attracted $866 billion in private-sector investment across the country, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs “building new semiconductor factories, electric vehicles and battery factories…here in America.”
The Biden administration has been scrupulous about making sure that money from the funds appropriated to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and manufacturing base has gone to Republican-dominated districts; indeed, Republican-dominated states have gotten the bulk of those investments. “President Biden promised to be the president of all Americans—whether you voted for him or not. And that’s what this agenda is delivering,” White House deputy chief of staff Natalie Quillian told Matt Egan of CNN in February.
But there is, perhaps, a deeper national strategy behind that investment. Political philosophers studying the rise of authoritarianism note that strongmen rise by appealing to a population that has been dispossessed economically or otherwise. By bringing jobs back to those regions that have lost them over the past several decades and promising “the great comeback story all across…the entire country,” as he did today, Biden is striking at that sense of alienation.
“When folks see a new factory being built here in Wisconsin, people going to work making a really good wage in their hometowns, I hope they feel the pride that I feel,” Biden said. “Pride in their hometowns making a comeback. Pride in knowing we can get big things done in America still.”
That approach might be gaining traction. Last Friday, when Trump warned the audience of Fox 2 Detroit television that President’s Biden’s policies would cost jobs in Michigan, local host Roop Raj provided a “reality check,” noting that Michigan gained 24,000 jobs between January 2021, when Biden took office, and May 2023.
At Gateway Technical College, Biden thanked Wisconsin governor Tony Evers and Racine mayor Cory Mason, both Democrats, as well as Microsoft president Brad Smith and AFL-CIO president Liz Schuler.
The picture of Wisconsin state officials working with business and labor leaders, at a public college established in 1911, was an image straight from the Progressive Era, when the state was the birthplace of the so-called Wisconsin Idea. In the earliest years of the twentieth century, when the country reeled under industrial monopolies and labor strikes, Wisconsin governor Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette and his colleagues advanced the idea that professors, lawmakers, and officials should work together to provide technical expertise to enable the state to mediate a fair relationship between workers and employers.
In his introduction to the 1912 book explaining the Wisconsin Idea, former president Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, explained that the Wisconsin Idea turned the ideas of reformers into a workable plan, then set out to put those ideas into practice. Roosevelt approvingly quoted economist Simon Patten, who maintained that the world had adequate resources to feed, clothe, and educate everyone, if only people cared to achieve that end. Quoting Patten, Roosevelt wrote: “The real idealist is a pragmatist and an economist. He demands measurable results and reaches them by means made available by economic efficiency. Only in this way is social progress possible.”
Reformers must be able to envision a better future, Roosevelt wrote, but they must also find a way to turn those ideals into reality. That involved careful study and hard work to develop the machinery to achieve their ends.
Roosevelt compared people engaged in progressive reform to “that greatest of all democratic reformers, Abraham Lincoln.” Like Lincoln, he wrote, reformers “will be assailed on the one side by the reactionary, and on the other by that type of bubble reformer who is only anxious to go to extremes, and who always gets angry when he is asked what practical results he can show.” “[T]he true reformer,” Roosevelt wrote, “must study hard and work patiently.”
“It is no easy matter actually to insure, instead of merely talking about, a measurable equality of opportunity for all men,” Roosevelt wrote. “It is no easy matter to make this Republic genuinely an industrial as well as a political democracy. It is no easy matter to secure justice for those who in the past have not received it, and at the same time to see that no injustice is meted out to others in the process. It is no easy matter to keep the balance level and make it evident that we have set our faces like flint against seeing this government turned into either government by a plutocracy, or government by a mob. It is no easy matter to give the public their proper control over corporations and big business, and yet to prevent abuse of that control.”
“All through the Union we need to learn the Wisconsin lesson,” Roosevelt wrote in 1912.
“We’re the United States of America,” President Biden said today, “And there’s nothing beyond our capacity when we work together.”
—
Notes:
https://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/WIReader/WER1650-1.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/14/business/manufacturing-jobs-biden/index.html
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Where the heck is Katherine Maher?
The NPR CEO has not made a single public appearance since April 9, when The Free Press published a bombshell exposé by Uri Berliner, a 25-year veteran at the network, alleging ideological bias at the institution.
Even today, when Maher was summoned by Congress to give testimony about whether NPR’s news reporting was “fair and objective,” she was a no-show.
Her excuse? The night before the hearing, she announced she could not attend because of. . . a previously scheduled board meeting.
Instead, Maher submitted written testimony drafted in the prose style of brand management consultants. According to Maher, NPR is “bringing trusted, reliable, independent news and information of the highest editorial standards” to tens of millions of listeners.
Meanwhile, four witnesses from media and political think tanks gave two hours of testimony to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce about how federal money is shared between NPR and local public radio affiliates, among other issues.
Berliner had sounded the alarm internally at NPR for years over the public’s loss of trust in the network before coming forward with his story in The Free Press. He wrote that “an open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America. That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience,” he continued, “but for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.” A New York Times investigation later showed that NPR’s weekly audience has dropped from an estimated 60 million in 2020 to about 42 million today.
Berliner’s story quickly went viral, especially after biased tweets Maher had posted before she became NPR’s CEO last January started to emerge. In 2016, she urged Hillary Clinton not to say “boys and girls” because “it’s erasing language for non-binary people.” In 2018, she tweeted “Donald Trump is a racist.” And in 2021, she appeared on a panel at the Atlantic Council where she claimed the First Amendment was the “number one challenge” in the fight against disinformation.
Maher struck a different chord in her written testimony today, invoking the First Amendment ten times. She gushed about “the Constitution’s promise of a free and independent press,” and claimed she would never interfere in her journalists’ news gathering. Indeed, one aspect of her job, she wrote—in a veiled barb at the Republicans on the committee—was to “prevent undue influence or intrusion from anyone into the editorial decisions of news leadership.”
Now Berliner, who has since resigned from the network, is questioning whether Maher is the best person to lead NPR.
“Why isn’t she there? Is she the right person for the job at this time?” he asked, adding that her written statement “sounds like a pledge drive.”
Berliner also called BS on Maher’s claim that she doesn’t interfere in NPR’s editorial content. “She said she was on the other side of the firewall that separates the newsroom from the CEO,” he told The Free Press in a phone interview. “However, when my story came out, after I had already been suspended for five days without pay, she told editorial staffers in a public statement on the NPR website they had been hurt, demeaned, and disrespected by what I wrote. That’s knocking down the firewall right there.”
He added, “She doesn’t address how NPR’s audience has shifted dramatically over time, from roughly reflecting America to a much narrower progressive slice of the country.”
Maher’s no-show clearly frustrated Republican members of the committee. Its chair, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), said, “It is especially troubling that an organization funded with taxpayer dollars has mocked, ridiculed, and attacked the very people who fund their organization.”
Meanwhile, Democrats on the committee defended Maher and criticized her accusers. Ranking member Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) called Berliner a “disgruntled former employee,” and questioned if his Republican committee members “were truly concerned about journalism,” given their lack of scrutiny toward right-wing media organizations with a “long history of peddling misinformation, disinformation, promoting partisan agendas, and sowing fear and division.”
And Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) said, “Foreign adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party, Russia’s Putin, or Iran’s violent theocrats certainly enjoy it when American politicians undermine our own objective journalists. This committee should not do their dirty work for them.”
But while Berliner does not advocate the defunding of NPR, he is sticking to his argument that the network must reform in order to survive. “NPR needs real leadership now,” he said. “The board will need to decide whether Katherine Maher is the right person for the job.”
Eli Lake is a writer and podcaster for The Free Press. Read his piece “Who Is in Charge at The New York Times?” and follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @EliLake.
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Not too long after October 7, Itamar Edelman, a 34-year-old artist who lives in Los Angeles, matched on Hinge with a pretty woman named Lina.
On his profile, Edelman’s ethnicity is set to “Middle Eastern” (he’s Iraqi Israeli), and his religion to “Spiritual/Jewish.” He’s been looking for “sparks of connection,” he tells me.
“Hey, Lina,” he messaged a few months ago. “Happy Friday!”
“Hey!” Lina wrote back. “This is unfair because I don’t throw this question to everyone on Hinge but. . . thoughts on IDF?”
Jake Williams, a 32-year-old ad salesman based in New York, matched with a guy on Grindr called Eric. The two chatted a bit through the app and soon exchanged numbers. Williams sent Eric a selfie—his Star of David necklace clearly visible.
“Do a lot of people ask you about Palestine?” Eric immediately texted. “What’s your opinion?”
Harry Markham, a 24-year-old student in London, refers to himself as a “charming Jewish boy” on the apps. Since October 7, he says, about half of his matches have grilled him on the Jewish state: “They say, ‘Before we go any further—are you a Zionist?’ ”
The war in Gaza has crept into many a friendship and family gathering, and Jewish singles—on Hinge, Bumble, Tinder, Grindr, and OKCupid—are reporting that it’s their Jewishness, not their politics, that has put a target on their backs when it comes to dating. While the pro-Palestine movement is quick to declare that anti-Zionism is different from antisemitism, that distinction doesn’t quite track for many young, Jewish singles.
A student who lives in New York and declined to give his name for privacy reasons matched with a cute guy on Grindr, went to bed, and then woke up to an odd message from him: “Get that dumbass flag out my messages pls.” Except there was no flag in his profile—only a small Star of David he’d added before his name. “What flag?” he asked.
“The Israeli flag since ur too dumb to figure it out. So pls be on your way.”
Singles tell me they feel interrogated, and as though, because they’re Jewish, they have to answer for the actions of the Israeli government. “It’s as if I have to be a ‘good Jew,’ ” says Markham. Daniela Aguinsky, a 30-year-old screenwriter living in Buenos Aires, lists her Judaism on the apps, and that she speaks Hebrew. She thought putting it out there could lead to better conversation with both Jews and non-Jews alike. “Topics like, what did you do for Passover?” Daniela mused. “Or how do you prefer your matzo balls?” But the messages she’s been getting lately sound more like this: “Are you a Zionist? Because I’m the grandson of Palestinians and I don’t approve of the genocide.” One man on Bumble responded to her opener, “What’s up, kid?” with this: “Horrified by the genocide in Gaza. And how are you doing?”
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