If Books Could Kill

"In Covid's Wake" Part 1: Lying About Lockdowns

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Peter: I've been dealing with a very Hobbesian ailment lately. I believe that I have a turf toe. 


Michael: Your feet are transphobic? 


Peter: It's like a sprain of the big toe. They call it turf toe because it happens in sports with Astroturf a lot. 


Michael: How did you do that? 


Peter: Probably just walking. Basically, it's like you overextended or like a little too harshly or whatever. 


Michael: That is Hobbesian because my humors are out of balance. There's no actual- 


[laughter]


Michael: -reason it's happening. 


Peter: We've been going on a lot of like walks around our local reservoir and stuff for a few miles. 


Michael: Look at you. 


Peter: It could have been from workout stuff. I don't know. 


Michael: This is your 40s, dude. You're doing like CSI reconstructions-


Peter: Yeah, exactly. 


Michael: -and you figured your pillow was like half a centimeter too low and so your neck hurt for like two weeks. [laughs]


Peter: If my neck is not at like the angle that God chose when I'm watching television, it will hurt for three days.


Michael: Same. [laughs] But it doesn't stop me from doing it anyway. 


Peter: I've been lying on couches in various ways for 40 years. And suddenly it doesn't work, what are you talking about?


Michael: I know, [crosstalk] stop doing it just because it's literally killing me. 


Peter: Absolutely not. 


Michael: Okay. What have you zing wise. 


Peter: Okay. Yeah, I can do it. I can do it. 


Michael: Peter. 


Peter: Michael.


Michael: What do you know about In Covid's Wake?


Peter: All I know is that the only book about Covid that I want to read is the one about why it turned every Republican insane.


[If Books Could Kill Theme]


Michael: So, the full title of this book is In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. It is by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, two political scientists at Princeton. 


Peter: Not real jobs, folks. [Michael laughs] Unemployed as far as I'm concerned. 


Michael: There's really no reason for us to be talking about this book. I mean, this book-- just to spoil it, this book is awful. It's reactionary. It has a very self-published on Amazon kind of feel to it. It's just kind of janky throughout.


Peter: Yeah, you already said that they're political scientists, [Michael laughs] we can move on. 


Michael: Otherwise, we wouldn't be talking about this, but these authors have been featured on episodes of the Daily on an entire segment on PBS News Hour. They are being featured in all kinds of like mainstream, respectable media. And the message of this book is providing like a backbone for this wave of Covid revisionism that has the costume of something that is like a serious reflection on the mistakes that we made during Covid, but it's actually just like right wing agit prop.


Peter: I'm glad we're doing this just because I have noticed anecdotally the proliferation of arguments about Covid that are basically arguments that like we did too much and implicitly that we should have just let it rip. 


Michael: Yep. 


Peter: Which to me, a man of science and reason feels a little wild. When we know that Covid killed a million people here and counting with these measures. It just feels a little bit crazy to me to be- 


Michael: Yeah exactly. 


Peter: -did we, did we go overboard? 


Michael: I think this is the main thing that really bugs me on a gut level about this book is that like they are lying to your face about something that you remember. 2020 was not that long ago. I remember the fucking pandemic. I know the statistics. If you look at official Covid death rates, so adjusted for population, America is the 17th worst in the world. So out of 190 countries, only 16 countries have more Covid deaths than we do. And if you look at excess deaths, which is like more fair way to do country comparisons because a lot of countries didn't track their Covid deaths very well, we're 30th.


And the thing is, people often try to write this off as like, well, we're not New Zealand. We're not a small country where we can control our borders. We never could have handled it that well. But Canada has half the death rate of America. [Peter laughs] It was a massive blunder the way that we managed the Covid pandemic, it just was.


Peter: Also, a lot of the places where our death rates were terrible are places where people live like a quarter mile apart. 


Michael: Yeah. South Dakota. 


Peter: There's just no defending it. 


Michael: In the introduction-- Actually, I'll send this to you. This is one of the core arguments they make throughout. They do this whole thing, this kind of Bari Weiss song and dance where they're like, I'm a liberal, but from within our coalition, we really have to ask tough questions about where our group think is leading us astray, so here is this. 


Peter: A vital source of strength and resilience is liberalism's commitment to fair-minded criticism and self-criticism. The willingness to entertain doubts, listen to other points of view and revise our own commitments. These should not have been set aside under Covid. Oh my God. Dude, I can't. I already hate these guys so fucking much. 


Michael: This is why I can't stop skeeting about this. This is why every fucking thing I've done on the Internet for like three weeks, it's like, fuck these people. [laughs] 


Peter: To many on the left, the willingness to listen fair mindedly to those on the right is a luxury we can no longer afford. Not while Donald Trump occupied the White House and not so long as the Republican Party remains enthralled to election deniers, climate change skeptics, and people who deny structural racism, this is a mistake. The partisan mindset has lumped reasonable questions in with irresponsible claims because both are associated with the same source, the opposing party. This is a prescription for failures of critical thinking. Under Covid, there were heavy consequences.


Okay, so this is the same argument we saw when we were talking about the lab leak in our bonus episode, now made free to all listeners.


Michael: Because we're philanthropists. 


Peter: Where basically the idea is we got too oppositional. Anything coming out of the right was rejected off hand, even though some of it was correct. Although it's interesting that he's like, we weren't listening to them because they're election deniers. RFK doesn't even believe in fucking Germ theory, dude. 


Michael: Right. They're not thinking through the consequences of what they're saying. They're not saying. Oh, they're actually not climate change deniers, you may think they are, but they actually aren't. No, they're just accepting they are climate change deniers. They did try to overturn a free and fair election. They're just accepting all that, but they're like, oh, but you're being too mean to them. 


Peter: I guess there's like a theoretical argument here that's understandable where it's like, not every single thing that comes out of right-wing circles is necessarily wrong, sure. The thing is that I don't think that is the source of the left's positions on Covid, it's just not. 


Michael: We're mostly going to skip it because it's so boring, Peter. And we've read it a million times. But at least like a third of this book is dedicated to criticism of dissidents was unfair, people were too mean. And then every single dissident is somebody who said, like, “Oh, Covid will only killed like 10,000 people. It's basically the flu.” 


Peter: Yeah. Idiots. That's the thing. 


Michael: We're fucking wrong. 


Peter: When these people were running their mouth in early Covid, like Elon Musk being like, “I think the numbers will stop here.” Just talking out of his ass. And a bunch of people were like, “You don't know what you're talking about.” Those people were correct. 


Michael: Yeah, exactly. It's like, sorry, what do you think that we as a society should do with people who lie constantly and are proven to be wrong. You don't think we should marginalize those people? I'm sorry, what is your understanding of what a society is? What is merit? You're trying to explain this to like a child. If you're good, you should get rewards and if you're bad, you should get punishments, like this is a really fundamental aspect of human community. And they're just like, “Oh, no, no.” Let's ignore the fact that they were wrong. Other people were mean to them. Well, they were wrong in a way that would have killed literally tens to hundreds of thousands of people. 


Peter: And like is it really okay that the Secretary of Health and Human Services eats roadkill? [Michael laughs] Is that really okay? 


Michael: Yeah, exactly. This is the outcome that this argument produces. Is fucking RFK Jr. in office. So, for this episode, we're going to just talk about the pandemic chronologically. So, this roughly follows the format of the book, but there's discrete phases of the pandemic. And so, the first phase we're going to talk about is like, pre-pandemic. What did science know about nonpharmaceutical interventions before the pandemic started? So, here is a clip of them talking about the state of the science before the pandemic. 


[Clip starts] 


Stephen: Frances, one of the things that was a real revelation to me was how you document in the book that prior to Covid, that there was a good deal of analysis done about what happens if a respiratory virus does emerge. And the consensus, or some version of a consensus, was that lockdowns are not that effective and that they would cost society enormously. 


Frances: Yes, there had been a tremendous amount of work planning for what to do when the next pandemic arrived. And we took measures in the early going of the pandemic that we’re at odds with the recommendations. They had been recommended against in some cases. There was a World Health Organization report from November 2019 that looked at what was known about all the proposed nonpharmaceutical interventions. 


Stephen: This is masks, shutdowns, isolation, testing, tracing, etc.


Frances: Business closures, school closures. Looked at what was known about the effectiveness of each of those measures and across the board the report states that the evidence base for the effectiveness of each of them was poor. And so, it's so striking that you get six months later and those measures are being employed all around the world with policymakers saying that they're following the science. And of course, it's quite obvious that all of those measures have tremendous costs. So, as policymakers are weighing their alternatives, there's uncertain benefits, but certain costs. 


[Clip ends]


Michael: I know. 


Peter: A report that came out before we knew exactly how Covid spread. 


Michael: A report that was not about Covid because Covid didn't exist yet.


Peter: Well, it existed in a lab in Wuhan. 


Michael: So, basically the argument they're making here is that before the pandemic, everyone in public health kind of knew that things like mask mandates, lockdowns, travel restrictions, they knew that these things didn't work. They had no real evidence that they worked. And yet as soon as we get to 2020, all these public health officials are saying, “Oh, we should do these lockdowns. We should use mask mandates.” 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: Most of their chapter in the book covers this WHO document from November of 2019. They're basically going through and saying, “Okay, what is the evidence for masks? What is the evidence for stay-at-home orders, right? And so, the first thing to know about the WHO document, as we mentioned, this is about the flu. This is not about Covid. As of 2020, the fatality rate of Covid was about seven times higher than the flu. 


Peter: Mm-hmm. 


Michael: So, it's talking about something that was less severe in basically every way we know how to measure that, and so the recommendations kind of follow from that. The second thing that you need to know about the WHO report is that it has all these recommendations of like, “Yes, you should do this. No, you should do that.” 


And the authors of In Covids Wake make big hay about the fact that certain things like contact tracing, the WHO says it's not recommended in any circumstance. But all of these recommendations in the WHO report are provisional. So, for border closures, “It says border closure is generally not recommended unless required by national law in extraordinary circumstances during a severe pandemic.”


Peter: Right, right. 


Michael: So, over and over again in this document, they're like, okay, don't do contact tracing unless you have this massive once-in-a-century global thing on your hands. So, like yeah- [laughs] 


Peter: Yeah. Yeah. 


Michael: -things are different when things are different. 


Peter: This reminds me of a really irritating argument about this stuff that I've seen pop up occasionally, which is just sort of pointing out that things like masks, social distancing have limited efficacy. The thing is, even if masking reduced transmission by 10%, it would be really important to get people to do it, because at scale, you're saving thousands and thousands of lives. 


Michael: But then those are kind of like the obvious surface level problems with this argument that the WHO, everybody knew that like masks and lockdowns don't work before the pandemic. The main thing to know about this document is that the document is using what's called the grade standard. This is a kind of objective measure of how high quality is research. 


And the grade standard is based on this principle that like you want a standard of research across every single field to say what is high quality, medium quality, and low-quality research. So, the kind of gold standard is like a double blind, placebo controlled, randomized control trial. And then at the bottom is just like a case report. Like there's one patient and we tried this thing and then he got better. That's the lowest quality, the lowest certainty. 


Peter: Mm-hmm. 


Michael: But the thing about using these grade standards is that many, many interventions cannot be studied in a randomized control trial. So, in this WHO document, they go through categories of various different interventions that you can do to prevent a respiratory pandemic. And one of them is a respiratory etiquette. So, this is like covering your mouth when coughing. The authors of In Covid's Wake make a lot of hay of the fact that, like, oh, there's no evidence for this and yet they recommended it. But in the actual WHO paper, they say the quality of evidence could not be judged because no study was identified. You cannot do a study where you tell a thousand people to cover their mouth when they sneeze and another one where you tell them not to cover their mouth when they sneeze because people already fucking do that. 


It's like a thing in society that we already practice. It's basically already just background public health guidance. You wouldn't get high compliance if you told people stop coughing on other people's faces. We also know enough about the spread of illnesses that it's really irresponsible if you have the flu to go around doing that, even if it's for a study. So, there is, “No evidence,” that covering your mouth when you cough works to prevent a pandemic, but that's because you can't gather evidence on it. It's not the kind of thing you can do a study on. 


Peter: I'm going to go down to Princeton and cough in these motherfuckers faces. [Michael laughs] Don't worry, Frances, there's no evidence. 


Michael: The other one that drives me fucking crazy is in this paper they also talk about isolation. So basically, when you're sick, you should stay home. And they say the quality of evidence for this Intervention is very low. In Covid's Wake authors are saying, oh, they're admitting that there's low quality evidence. But again, you cannot tell people if you have the flu, oh, yeah, go about your business. You can't do a randomized controlled trial on this. It would be wildly unethical and the compliance would be really low. So low quality evidence in this case basically just means it hasn't been meaningfully studied, you can't do a study on it. 


Peter: Or at least at that granular of a level, because we do understand that proximity to other people impacts the spread of infectious disease, that's not exactly contested. 


Michael: This is actually exactly what they say about mask mandates. So here is their summary from the book where they're talking about face masks. 


Peter: The assessment also stated that in severe epidemics or pandemics, face masks worn by asymptomatic people are conditionally recommended to reduce transmission. Despite there being “No evidence that the use of face masks is effective, there is nevertheless ‘mechanistic plausibility,’” which means what we're saying, which is there's no specific study on this because of the difficulty of conducting that exact study, but we understand the mechanism, therefore we basically know that this works.


Michael: And also the incredible thing about this is that there is actually quite a bit of evidence. There's a number of randomized controlled trials that have been done with masks. One of them, they take kids in college dorms. In one dorm they're like, “Okay, wear a mask all winter.” And in the other dorm they're like, “Don't wear a mask.” And then at the end you see how many kids got common cold flu, etc., at the end of that period. 


Peter: Ah-ha.


Michael: And they do actually find that people who wore masks are much less likely to get sick. 


Peter: It’s crazy. 


Michael: The problem is that study was done on wearing masks and hand washing. So, the reason you can't say with 100% certainty that masks work is because there's two interventions being done at the same time and you haven't isolated just masks. So again, this is science being responsible. They are being transparent. 


Peter: I fucking love these political science dipshits. 


Michael: Dude. 


Peter: Trying to navigate these documents that reflect the work of people who do actual science. Like sorry it's just not your fucking field. How are you doing a two-author book coming out of Princeton and neither of you are like, should we tap someone from our prestigious university who does work on infectious disease perhaps? Now two political scientists, the greatest force known to man. 


Michael: And so, throughout this report, over and over again, for almost every single intervention, they keep mentioning that evidence is moderate, evidence is low quality, but they also give the reasons why the evidence is low quality. They also say that these fucking interventions work. So, in the contact tracing section, they say contact tracing combined with other interventions is effective in reducing influenza transmission in the community, but the effect of contact tracing alone is unknown- 


Peter: Mm-hmm. 


Michael: -because when you have these natural experiments like SARS outbreak, etc. 


Peter: Right. You combine different. 


Michael: Yes. Countries will do like 10 things at once. And so, at the end you're like, “Okay, well, those 10 things worked extremely well.” We can't say this one thing was decisive or this other thing was decisive. 


Peter: What if for the next pandemic we just try one of these? That way we have a coherent piece of data. 


Michael: So, the reason, I mean, this is like such a fucking dunkfest. But the reason I wanted to bring this up is, first of all, just to establish the bad faith and scientific illiteracy of the authors of this book. I'm genuinely trying to approach this in good faith, but it's like they're literally lying in their first substantive chapter. 


Peter: There's almost an implication behind a lot of these arguments that something nefarious was going on with the implementation of these measures, right? 


Michael: Yeah. 


Peter: If you go into fringe right wing circles, the argument was always like, they're never going to lift these restrictions, like it's a control mechanism. Of course they did lift the restrictions, the whole argument falls apart, but it doesn't matter. I don't understand these people who really seem to believe that like someone somewhere had an interest in pushing ineffective mitigation techniques on all of us, I don't get it. 


Michael: This actually comes back to something you mentioned in our lab leak episode where they're talking about all the scientists engaging in a cover up and they say, like, “Scientists with mixed motives.” And you were like, “Hang on, what were their motives? Why would a bunch of American scientists help China engage in a cover up of a lab leak?” 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: It's the same thing here too, where it's like, sorry, if everyone in public health knew that these measures don't work, why was every country in the world recommending them in March of 2020? Which scenario makes more sense. Hundreds of thousands of public health workers around the world recommended a bunch of steps that they know are ineffective? Or is it more likely that two people without the relevant expertise are misreading a report? 


Peter: Is he wearing a burgundy suit? 


Michael: How dare you, Peter. That's from this month's Target Pride collection. [Peter laughs] It's all burgundy, it's all beige. 


Peter: [laughs] The tag just has a homophobic slur. [Michael laughs] That's how you know it's in the Target Pride collection for 2025.


Michael: We're here, we're queer, don't look at me. 


Peter: Yes. [Laughs] 


Michael: The other reason why I wanted to talk about this, not just to establish the lack of credibility of the authors, is also, you hear this so much when you're talking about conspiracy movements and public health. What you often hear is if scientists had been more transparent about the downsides of public health measures or if the CDC had been more transparent about the harms of vaccines. There are very small, but there are existing risks of vaccines. If public health had been more transparent about that, you wouldn't see these anti-vaxxers. 


These conspiracy movements, what they're really reacting to is like the lack of transparency, the lack of accountability of our public health infrastructure. This chapter demonstrates how false that argument is. This is a document from the WHO being extremely transparent about we have no evidence that you should stay home when you're sick. A study has never been done. We have no evidence of that, yet we are recommending it anyway, here is why. And then these bad faith actors come in and they go, “Oh, so there's no evidence and you're recommending it anyway?”


Peter: Mm-hmm. 


Michael: Admitting the weaknesses in your arguments and in your data will not tamp down conspiracy theorists. They will latch onto every single weakness.


Peter: The idea that conspiracy theories emanate from like a lack of transparency is ridiculous. 


Michael: That's what they say, but they fucking lie all the time. They also say that vaccines cause autism. You can't trust what these people fucking say.


Peter: Right. They think the earth is fucking flat. 


Michael: Yes.


Peter: You can't be like, well, what do you want to hear? It's just not how their brains work. They don't know why they are conspiracy theorists. Again, this is just two political scientists in way over their fucking heads, policy wise and suit wise. 


Michael: Okay, so we are now going to move through the timeline to 2020. So, we finally have the start of the pandemic. In late January of 2020, China imposes lockdown. On March 9th, Italy locks down. On March 13th, workplaces in the US start closing. On March 15th, we start getting school closures. March 16th, Trump issues a recommendation to stay home, but he never actually issues a nationwide lockdown order. On March 19th, we get the first stay-at-home orders. And just because there's a lot of discourse about these and a lot of weird misremembering of them. I just want to talk a little bit about the basic facts of the stay-at-home orders. 


So, it was either 42 or 43 states issued stay-at-home orders, depending on the way that you define it. There were tons of exemptions. So, 16 states allowed religious services to be exempt from stay-at-home orders- 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: -which is nuts because that's like perfect super spreader event because everyone's fucking singing. 


Peter: Right. And the Supreme Court intervened. 


Michael: Religious freedom. 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: The Average duration was 43 days. With the exception of eight states, they were all over by June 1st. They were also not enforced. So, I looked up the statute in Washington State, the stay-at-home order that I was under, it was 70 days, which is I think the fifth longest in the US and it was like you have to stay at home unless you're carrying out essential activities. 


Peter: Right, right. 


Michael: And then the definition of essential activities was like relatively broad. It was like getting groceries, getting pharmaceutical stuff, caring for a loved one. No cop was stopping you on the street. No one was ever checking like “What are you on your way to do?” Many countries did actually have enforcement of these things. And you'd get a ticket if you were out on the street. Nowhere in America was anything like that ever imposed. 


Peter: Mm-hmm. 


Michael: What were you doing during this period, Peter? 


Peter: Chilling. [Michael laughs]


Michael: You were in New York, right?


Peter: Yeah, I was in Manhattan, the worst place to be. Andrew Cuomo was actively trying to kill me at this time. 


Michael: Yes. 


Peter: You as a person in the United States during 2020 were not heavily influenced by your state or municipality's lockdown order. You were heavily impacted by your employer and your kids school. 


Michael: Yeah. 


Peter: And that's what I think people are reacting to and why they think the lockdowns actually were much longer than they were. 


Michael: Yeah, I mean a lot of these also included closure of businesses. I think that's when it really started to feel real for everybody was because like you just couldn't go do anything like even if you had wanted to. I actually remember ours being much shorter than it was. I remember ours being like two or three weeks. And I think that's because all of the data indicates that compliance with the lockdown orders started to decay very quickly. So, by week like four or five people were like out doing stuff and seeing people. 


Peter: That's my recollection too, is that when-- Remember when Republicans were protesting outside of state houses?


Michael: That was mid April. That was actually pretty quick. That was after only two weeks of actual lockdowns. It's wild. 


Peter: That makes sense. That's how long it takes to drive Republicans completely insane. It's like-


Michael: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah.


Peter: “Hey, can you just think about the wellbeing of other people for two weeks?” And they were like, “I'm marching to the State House.”


Michael: Yeah. Although what's actually interesting about that period is you really didn't see very much politicization. The first couple weeks, I think it was something like 87% of Americans supported the lockdowns. One of the things that really kind of like hurts my heart about this book is that you have what was really this great sacrifice that everybody went into eyes wide open. Nobody thought that like lockdowns were going to be fun or good or that like kids weren't going to suffer or that businesses weren't going to suffer.


Peter: Right.


Michael:  Everybody knew this and we made a decision collectively to like help other people. They say over and over again in the book, like, “The fatality rates were low for younger people.” And like, I fucking knew that. I was like 35. My risk of dying of Covid was relatively low even before I was vaccinated. But also like, yeah, I'm fine to stay home for a while to help old people and disabled people and people who are less fortunate than me, everyone knew that at the time. No one thought like, “Oh, this is going to be great for kids. Kids learning is going to like go through the roof during this period.” Everyone knew it was going to be really fucking bad. And so, we decided to do this like kind of beautiful thing together. And then this whole wave of Covid revisionism is like, “No, it was ugly. We didn't have to do shit for those people. What you did for healthcare workers and disabled people and old people, they never thanked you for it. They lied to you.” It's like, why do this? 


Peter: It gets retconned as this really horrific thing. My genuine memory of that really early phase. Those first couple of weeks, was that there was a sense of like, we're all in this together that I have never felt in my life, maybe outside of 9/11. Except that applied only to other people because I'm half Iranian.


Michael: Yeah. [laughs] But you saw it. 


Peter: We were the Covid [Michael laughs] of the post 9/11 period.


Michael: Okay, so here is the way that the In Covid's Wake authors summarize this period. Their core argument is basically that there was no evidence that any of this would work and public health knew it at the time. 


Peter: Experts knew that none of these nonpharmaceutical interventions had previously been put to the test and evidence of their effectiveness was weak to nonexistent. There was much reason to doubt that such measures would work as intended, most especially after a virus had spread widely. Experts also knew that elected officials had incentives to use these measures for political reasons, to appear to be doing something and to pretend to be in control in the face of public fear.


The policies pursued were plagued by persistent ambiguity about goals. The initial shutdowns in the United States were justified as 15 days to slow the spread, to curb disease transmission to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. But key actors hoped to reduce the total number of Covid deaths, intended to keep restrictions in place as long as possible, and used slowing the spread as a pretext. 


Michael: As a pretext. They were using it as a pretext to prevent death. [laughs]


Peter: Key actors hoped to reduce the total number of Covid deaths. They're like shady actors behind the scenes were trying to prevent death.


Michael: This is the most minute distinction that, like, oh, they wanted to lock us down to prevent the spread, but they were actually trying to prevent deaths. I mean, A, I don't think they were lying about that. B, is that really a meaningful lie? 


Peter: This is crazy. The first part of this is also just the same error that you were discussing before, where they're acting like the evidence that this stuff works is weak, when in fact it's not, it’s relatively strong. We just don't have very specific studies. And then you have the second part where it feels like there maybe this is the heart of the argument, the idea that this was being done performatively.


Michael: It's very conspiratorial. They drift into conspiracy very often in this book because they have this thing of that public health experts intended to keep restrictions in place as long as possible. And like, yeah, they were very transparent about this. The restrictions should stay in place until we've controlled the spread of Covid and healthcare systems are not overwhelmed. This was totally transparent. Yes. As long as possible to prevent death. 


Peter: They are acting. And I see a lot of people act as though Fauci or something was dictating policy across the country. 


Michael: They make this argument very clear in the conclusion. But they're basically saying that public health experts were given dictatorial control over the country, and we never should have given so much power over to these narrow public health wonks whatever. But America is actually a very good example of that not being true. Because different states had very different lockdown policies. 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: The CDC issued guidance. State public health agencies issued guidance. Also, there were tons of economic forecasts, and governors took all that information and they issued stay-at-home orders or didn't or reopened or closed this business or not, this other business, or masks or no masks. There was actually a wide diversity of approaches across the United States. So, if public health officials had been given this dictatorial power, we would have seen much more strict restrictions and we would have seen unified restrictions. We didn't see that. 


Peter: Let me steelman a good faith version of this complaint, which is that, like, okay, the policy decisions happen at the state and local levels, but a relatively small handful of public health officials have undue influence over the decisions because they're the ones putting out the guidance at the federal level, right?


Michael: Sure. 


Peter: If we want there to be federal public health officials, the question isn't do they put out guidance or not? Because the whole role is putting out guidance. The real question is, who do you want the public health officials to be? Do you want it to be the serious scientists or do you want it to be the roadkill eaters? [Michael laughs] That's the question.


Michael: So, as evidence of their argument that none of these restrictions were effective or necessary, they take us to Sweden. So, the next chapter is called The Swedish Alternative, where they talk about how Sweden didn't do any of these large-scale lockdowns. They say no large-scale test and trace regimes were attempted. Masks were never mandated. No stay-at-home orders or restrictions on movement were imposed. Restaurants and gyms were not closed. Sports continued. And then they say this. 


Peter: Most of the population was at very low risk. It was the very old, sick, and frail who were at serious risk. Preventative measures could be concentrated on the vulnerable. People could be relied upon to change their behavior voluntarily, and that would make a significant difference. In short, Swedish health authorities viewed Covid as the equivalent of a severe flu which could not be contained, but only slowed and which would inevitably run its course. 


Michael: Inevitably run its course. 


Peter: The thing about running its course is that we sort of know that's not true, nor is that like really how the flu works, but whatever. 


Michael: The authors of this book, as usual with these bold heterodox thinker books, is like, they're too chickenshit to make their actual argument. They're basically arguing for herd immunity. Like all of these like-- the dissenters were criticized. It's all people who were pushing for herd immunity. But we now know scientifically, without a doubt, herd immunity does not work because there are variants. [laughs] And people can just get reinfected over and over again. 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: The other reason why the herd immunity shit was never going to work is because it relies on, like, oh, we can protect the vulnerable, people with preexisting conditions. But 60% of Americans have one chronic condition or another. If you look at things like diabetes. 


Peter: I have turf toe right now. 


Michael: [Laughs] I mean, none of these people were ever going to support actual measures to protect vulnerable people. If you look at “vulnerable people,” you're talking about like 80 to 150 million people. Protecting those people requires exactly the same kind of lockdowns we fucking did. 


Peter: Even if you're like, all right, we'll limit it to like certain very specific conditions, like respiratory conditions, etc., people who are immunocompromised in some way, and then the elderly, you're still looking at millions of people that like what, need to be isolated from society without the rest of society feeling it at all, how? It always felt like undeveloped policy solution. That they didn't actually know how it would work. They were just like, “I don't think that I need to be doing this.” 


Michael: They then say that despite this lack of restriction, despite giving their citizens much more freedom, the Swedish experience is actually a case of what we should have done. So here are the results. 


Peter: This book is not a mystery novel. So, at the risk of spoiling the surprise, at the end of June 2021, Sweden's excess morbidity for the period from January 2020 to the end of June 2021 was negative 2.3%. That is, the country had overall no excess mortality, but rather less mortality than would be predicted based on previous year's figures. This was also true of seven of the best performing European countries, which included Sweden's Nordic neighbors. 


Michael: So, first of all, this narrative is roughly correct that the Swedish lockdown experience in March and April of 2020 was a lot lighter than other countries. The thing that really set Sweden apart during this period is that they issued a ton of guidance, but nothing was mandatory. 


Peter: Mm-hmm. 


Michael: They did close schools for kids over 17, but for younger kids, they never closed schools. On March 18th, they told employers to let employees work from home. They're like, “We think you should do this.” And they also told restaurants to avoid overcrowding, only let in a certain number of people at a time. They told Swedes not to travel within the country on March 18th, so they were telling people to do a lot of the things that other countries were doing, but none of this was mandatory. So, it was basically just like, “We think that you should do this.” So that is really something that is very different about Sweden. The main thing to know about Sweden's approach during this period was that it was an abject failure. So, in March and April of 2020, Sweden had the highest mortality rate in the world from Covid as a percentage of their population. 


Peter: Mm-hmm. 


Michael: Their death rate was five times higher than Denmark's, nine times higher than Finland's, and 11.5 times higher than Norway. This is really bleak. This is from one of the articles I read. It was also 25% higher than the USA.


[laughter]


Michael: They're like 12 times worse than Norway and like a little worse than America.


Peter: If you had put Cuomo in charge of one major city [Michael laughs] in Sweden, he would have wiped those motherfuckers out. 


Michael: So, what's wild about this whole kind of like recasting of Sweden's approach as like secretly successful is like Sweden itself set up a Covid Commission and they issued a report that says that this was a failure. So, it says pandemic measures were too few and too late and the commission concluded that these should have been more extensive, particularly during the first wave and considering the limited knowledge about Covid-19. And so, things like keeping businesses open, keeping public transit open, keeping schools open resulted in a ton of Covid spreading around the community, which eventually did get to older people, like that is one of the reasons why the death rate was so high. It says the high number of deaths among older people in Sweden, especially during the first wave, was probably due to high overall viral transmission in the society.


Peter: Mm-hmm. 


Michael: So, even Sweden realized that this approach was a mistake. And so, in June of 2020, Sweden basically updated its approach. So, this is an excerpt from an article called “How Sweden Approached the Covid-19 Pandemic.” It says during the second and third waves, the government and its agencies launched several new and robust measures which they had previously rejected or refrained from using to reduce the transmission of the virus. These included restrictions in restaurants and commercial areas, household quarantine if a family member had Covid-19 and wearing face masks on public transit during rush hour. 


The changes between the first and second waves were not based on any new knowledge. Some measures in late Autumn 2020 were initiated by the government rather than requested by the public health authority. These included no alcohol in restaurants and limits on the number of people allowed at public gatherings. 


Peter: Mm-hmm. 


Michael: So basically, after June of 2020, the practices among the Swedish population and the policies of the Swedish government were not all that different from European countries. The only period when Sweden's policies differed very significantly from other countries was the period when they had the highest death rate in the world.


Peter: Now, what I don't understand is why these other countries had lockdowns at all without the evil mastermind Anthony Fauci, [Michael laughs] without him puppeteering at all.


Michael: So, Anders Tegnell, the head of the public health agency, he writes a book. Earlier this year, he gives an interview. He says, “The misconception is that Swedes haven't changed their lives because they really have. Many work from home. Restaurants were significantly less busy at all times. People were no longer meeting indoors, but outdoors and traveling less. If you walk down the streets in Stockholm, they were empty.” They didn't have mandatory, like, statutory lockdowns, but people in Sweden restricted their activities.


Peter: That's what I was going to ask about, because Europeans believe in society in a way that we don't. So, I was just sort of wondering like what was their behavior like? Because that's what really dictates whether this stuff works. The policy is sort of upstream of that, right?


Michael: Right.


Peter: And you can see that-- I'm sure that there were countries that had more aggressive policies and fewer people adhering to those policies, which would also make the policies a bad indicator of what works in a vacuum. 


Michael: They actually mentioned this. They're like, oh, actually, if you look at the data post June of 2020, and they're like, oh, well, they did restrict their movements, they did restrict their activities just as much as everybody else, but they had more freedom because it wasn't dictated by the government. If this is the strongest case that you can make is like, oh, people should have locked down, people should have stayed home, but the government shouldn't have mandated it.


Peter: Right, right. 


Michael: Okay, what are we really talking about here then?


Peter: See, now we're no longer talking about something that political science professors are too stupid to understand. Now we're talking about something that's so stupid that only a political science professor could think that it's important.


Michael: So, then we have to talk about their weird thing where they say that Sweden had less mortality than the previous year. So again, the book says “Sweden's excess mortality for the period from January 2020 to the end of June 2021 was negative 2.3%. That is, the country had no overall excess mortality, but rather less mortality than would have been predicted based on previous year's figures. This was also true of seven of the best performing European countries, which included Sweden's Nordic neighbors.”


And so, their footnote for this leads to a book called The Herd by a Swedish journalist named Johan Anderberg, who kind of bafflingly is citing a study from the UK Office of National Statistics, which during the pandemic would release these periodic reports of like, what is excess death doing around the world? as these numbers became available. 


And it is true that Sweden has an excess mortality at that time in June of 2021 overall of negative 2.3%. That part is true. However, if you actually go to the citation, Sweden has the worst excess mortality of any Nordic country. So, it's negative 2.3% in Sweden, it's negative 7.9% in Finland, negative 8.3% in Denmark, and negative 12% in Norway. So, I have no idea what is going on with these numbers. I have not seen these numbers in other places. I think it's something with the ONS' specific methodology on calculating excess deaths. But even in their own source, Sweden is doing the worst out of any Nordic country.


Peter: My initial instinct would have been that you would see fewer excess deaths in other regards, like things like car accidents are going to plummet, right? 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, that's most of the explanation.


Peter: Other types of diseases are going to plummet. 


Michael: Yeah. Flu basically disappeared for like two winters, yeah.


Peter: They're just latching on to a stray statistic. 


Michael: It's also just so bizarre to cite a book which is citing a UK report, which he doesn't even link to in the footnotes of that book. I had to go truffle hunting for it when there are dozens of studies on this. The world of academia and epidemiology are very interested in outcomes in Sweden. And so, if you look up numbers from statistics, Sweden, which is exactly what it sounds like, Sweden, had around 7,000 excess deaths in 2020, around 1,000 excess deaths in 2021, and around 4,000 excess deaths in 2022. It is not the case that excess deaths overall went down during the pandemic. It's an utterly bizarre hill to die on. It just isn't true. And I have no idea what's going on with this ONS study. 


Peter: Told you what's going on. Political scientists run wild. [Michael laughs] Look, these guys can't even figure out why Trump won, you think they can figure out fucking Covid? No. Go analyze some polls, bitch.


Michael: So, to slightly steelman their argument, because this is an argument that goes around a lot, is that if you look at the entire duration of the pandemic, Sweden is not actually that much worse than the other Nordic countries, and that's actually true. So, if you look at the four Nordic countries, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway. Sweden is like in the middle of the pack. If you look at all of 2020, 2021 and 2022. However, this kind of ignores like, I think, important nuance. So even though it looks less bad if you look at the entire course of the pandemic, Sweden still has 36% higher death rate than Denmark, like that does matter. 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: The real outlier in Scandinavia is Finland. Finland had 190 deaths per hundred thousand. Sweden had 117. So, Finland did way worse than Sweden overall if you look at the full course of the pandemic. However, Finland apparently really fucked up their vaccine rollout and they had a really bad Omicron wave. So, for them, the year of 2021 and 2022 were just like when most of their deaths were concentrated. They did lockdowns and they had many fewer deaths during the lockdowns. 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: Those are just different things. You can't just say Finland has more deaths than Sweden and therefore lockdowns don't work. You have to look at the specifics. [laughs]


Peter: So, you have basically two months where they had a laxer policy approach. Those two months see a ton more Covid deaths than comparable countries. And then the policies between these countries start to align a little bit as Sweden sort of cracks down. I'm surprised that Sweden takes up such a large part of the mental space of these Covid denialists and people who are sort of Covid denial adjacent, because it just doesn't-- I'm not seeing it. 


Michael: Yeah. 


Peter: There’s not-- I guess the fact that they overall had decent pandemic numbers is maybe what people are hanging their hat on a bit here. But it seems to me, and like, maybe this is the only part of this little rant that you can use, so I guess what you're saying is that just ignore all that. [Michael laughs] I guess what you're saying is that to the extent that Sweden had decent numbers at the end of the pandemic, that was in spite of the fact that they had these sorts of laxer policies in the early phase. 


Michael: And then the other thing about Sweden that I really want to mention is that the whole point of these policies is like, we shouldn't do a lockdown. It's going to cause all of these costs. We're balancing economic growth. Think about how bad it's going to be for economic growth when we shut down all of our businesses. Keep kids home from school, etc., think about how bad it's going to be. Sweden also had a fucking massive economic crash during the pandemic. This is the conclusion from an economics paper about Denmark versus Sweden. Denmark is an interesting case because it had a very strict lockdown and pretty early. So, Denmark and Sweden are a really interesting case study of countries with similar cultures, similar economies, and one was on the strict end of the spectrum and one was on the lax end of the spectrum. So here are the economic effects. 


Peter: Denmark and Sweden were similarly exposed to the pandemic, but only Denmark imposed significant restrictions on social and economic activities. We estimate that aggregate spending dropped by around 25% in Sweden, and as a result of the shutdown, by four additional percentage points in Denmark. 


Michael: So, that's what mass death buys you? 


Peter: Yes. 


Michael: Four points of demand. 


Peter: Right, right. 


Michael: Wow. And we still would have lost 25%. 


Peter: One thing that I feel like it's glossed over is that although there was obviously a loss of economic activity, the response was massive government stimulus that largely worked. And because of that, there was no massive recession or depression in 2020. I think a lot of these discussions get boxed in by this sort of assumption that like this was a massive sacrifice from just a pure economic perspective, which is not totally wrong, because a lot of people were hit very hard, but it also needs to be qualified with the idea that like we did manage our way out of this.


Michael: Yeah, it was more generous than any Western European country. Kind of accidentally, we didn't really know what we were doing, but it's fucking great. We just gave unemployed people a shitload of money and the savings rate went up during that period. You can just throw money at problems, and not all problems, obviously, but a lot of problems become far less severe when you just throw a shitload of money at them. And there's actually-- I'm skipping it because it feels like I'm like dunking on this book too much. But they have a whole section about public debt. 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: About, like, oh, the cost of the pandemic. Look at all the deficit spending. It's going to ruin the children for generations. And it's like, should we not have done that? Should we not have given people money when they had to stay home? This is just completely sociopathic to me. 


Peter: Ludwig von Mises, you are absolutely cooked, bro. 


Michael: Bitch made. Bitch made. The term that I learned from watching Temptation Islands. 


Peter: It feels to me like they're doing the same thing that RFK does, which is like, yeah, a lot of people dying, except they're old and sick. And who gives a shit. They say that basically expressly here, right? It says it was the very old, sick and frail who were at serious risk. And it's like, yeah, and those are people.


Michael: I also looked this up because it drove me so fucking nuts reading this. It's true that Covid is not like a major threat to like very young people. There's only been 1500 deaths of people under 18 throughout the pandemic. You say only about children's deaths and you sound like a fucking monster. But like, compared to 1.2 million deaths rate-


Peter: Yeah, yeah. 


Michael: -a very small percentage of them have been children. But also, once you get into 35 years old. In 2021, Covid was the second leading cause of death for 35- to 44-year-olds. So 16,000 people died of Covid. This was in 2021, after a lot of people had already been vaccinated. For 45- to 54-year-olds, it was the number one cause of death. 


And if you look over the course of the whole pandemic, we had 200,000 deaths of people between 50 and 64 years old. So, it's not just like, “Oh, if you're over 85, you're going to die and everybody else is like super safe.” No, I mean middle-aged people like my age, there's still an elevated risk of death from Covid. They're doing this fucking chickenshit thing, they're like, “Oh, well, young people. Oh, it's not bad for young people.” Fine for fucking infants or people under five or whatever- 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: -yeah, the risks are lower, but there's a spectrum of risk. 


Peter: They can't even find right wing virologists to write this shit. They act like it doesn't matter. And in fact, we've made the mistake of being too snobby about this stuff like listening to bad public health officials rather than some dipshit was the mistake we made. 


Michael: Right. Lefties were too condescending to people early in the pandemic just because they were wrong and lying and unqualified. Have you thought about that? Have you thought about your mistakes? Well, yes and they're not really very meaningful mistakes. [Laughs] 


Peter: Yeah, My mistakes rule. Okay. 


Michael: [laughs] If we're going to have a sort of 2020 hindsight conversation about like what did we fuck up in this period of the pandemic? The actual failures were that we didn't lock down early enough because Covid spreads exponentially, two becomes four becomes eight becomes 16. Even, like one day early for lockdowns can prevent hundreds or thousands of cases further down the line. And that's very clearly what the data shows too, that for a lot of states and counties, you had cases on this kind of upward exponential trajectory. And the minute the stay-at-home orders come down, you see it, like, dramatically turn to the right, literally flatten the curve-


Peter: Right. 


Michael: -that is what happened after the stay-at-home orders came down. So, one study says, compared to counties that did not implement stay-at-home orders, the results show that the orders are associated with a 30% average reduction in weekly cases after one week, a 40% reduction after two weeks, and a 49% reduction after three weeks. Stay-at-home orders are also associated with a 60% average reduction in weekly fatalities after three weeks. So, these did have dramatic effects. And sort of the caveat that you always have to give with these is that they are associations. After the stay-at-home orders came down, we saw a reduction in cases. That doesn't necessarily mean that it is causal and people may have locked down anyway. 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: There's some evidence that people were starting to stay home and avoid bars and restaurants, etc., before the mandatory stay-at-home orders came down. The problem with that is that a lot of other measures had happened before we had stay-at-home orders. A lot of states had already closed schools. A lot of employers had already told people to work from home. Trump had already issued that guidance that was basically, please stay home, and people weren't doing it. 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: And so, in analyses of this period that look at all of the different interventions and what was the most effective, they find that stay-at-home orders were the most effective because you couldn't go out and do things. You can't rely on the population to just voluntarily not leave the house for weeks on end.


Peter: We were aware that Covid was spreading in other parts of the world in January, February, right? I don't think that is like, when we should have locked down, but had we, it would have worked. It would have been very effective. 


Michael: This does kind of get back to the failures of this period, the actual failures for this. I also read The Plague Year by Lawrence Wright, which is really interesting and is basically exactly what it sounds like. It's just like, okay, what happened in 2020? And one of the core arguments of this book is that all we looked at was public health indicators. We weren't looking at the economy. We weren't looking at this broader range of indicators. Most of America's failures during that time come from too much fealty to economic indicators. It is very clear from what was going on behind the scenes that Trump did not want to lock down because he was afraid that it would crater the economy. Fucking Cuomo didn't want to lock down because it would crater the economy. That's the main reason our response was so bad and people waited so long to lock down was to save the economy again, just like they're lying to your face not only about what happened, but about the reasons why it happened. 


Peter: This is the thing is like economies are interconnected. You couldn't have just maintained your country's economic status quo because other countries were shutting down. You rely on imports. The idea that there was like a clean trade where it's like, yeah, there's like a little more Covid spread, but everything else stays the same, ridiculous.


Michael: The other thing that they're totally misrepresenting is like, oh, public health experts don't consider the tradeoffs. But that 2019 WHO document that they cited, the entire purpose of that document was to consider tradeoffs, that's the point, is like cost versus benefits. So, in that document, the WHO does not recommend contact tracing because it's too expensive. These institutions are also, like, they're not far leftist agit prop. These are also relatively conservative institutions who have taken on this kind of everything has to be dollars and cents. Everything has to be return on investment, cost, benefit kind of analysis. 


Peter: The thing that really pisses me off is these people do not have the balls to be like, “I think that 50,000 more deaths would have been worth not having to wear masks.” 


Michael: That is actually what they think. 


Peter: It's the obvious implication of what they're saying, but they don't have the balls to say it. 


Michael: It's also emblematic of the way that they overlook the actual failures, because kind of the point of the shutdowns was to give the government time, was to get PPE, to get a testing infrastructure in place so that we could reopen. And that was like the abject failure of the Trump administration was to do anything with those two months. They completely left states on their own. Governors were bidding against each other. There was a thing where Charlie Baker ordered a bunch of masks from China and then FEMA fucking stole it, like on the runway. 


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: Trump completely sabotaged this entire period. The one thing that Lawrence Wright mentions in his book is that the CDC did not have a press conference for three months-- 


Peter: Oh my god. 


Michael: -for the first three months of the pandemic because Trump wouldn't let them. 


Peter: Well, but he was having the sunlight in your veins press conference at the time. 


Michael: He was promoting ultraviolet beams as a cure for Covid in March, April. 


Peter: That was the funniest fucking phase of the pandemic where you can watch his brain work where he's like, “What kills the virus?” And they're like, “It doesn't seem to be able to survive ultraviolet light.” And he's like, “Perfect, we'll get that. We'll get them in the body.” 


Michael: I read this whole book and then I just to double check, I control F'd. There's no criticism of Trump in this entire book. 


Peter: Oh, my God. 


Michael: Every once in a while, they'll say, like, the left accuses him of failures. Like they did with the climate change denial stuff where the left says this, but it's like, okay, well, do those claims have any merit? Do you want to look at that at all? 


Peter: Yeah, yeah. 


Michael: You're misinforming people about the problems in the pandemic. There was not leftist overreach like that's just incorrect that there was like public health leftist overreach. The actual failures were from the fucking deranged weirdo we had running the government at the time.


Peter: And not to mention, Trump's running interference against the public health officials.


Michael: Yes. Yeah. 


Peter: So, like in this book, complaining about how public health officials have too much power might be worth noting that the President of the United States was undermining them in various material respects.


Michael: Look, he's just the person running the country. We're not going to spend any time on this guy. 


Peter: I don't know where the causations going. Are these people dumb or does taking these positions rot the brain? 


Michael: Yeah. I know. 


Peter: Eat away your fucking neurological function to the point where you can't even read basic data. Data that is [Michael laughs] central to the point you're making. 


Michael: So, we're going to talk much more next episode about everything that happened after the lockdowns lifted. The pre-vaccine period, the post-vaccine period, there's a lot more to go over, but for now we're going to close with an excerpt from their conclusion.


Peter: A fundamental error of Covid policy was to accord too much power to public health experts with a predictably narrow set of professional concerns and expertise, as well as perspectives shaped by comfortable, upper middle class material conditions. There's a real lack of self-awareness going on here. 


Michael: I'm at Princeton. I'm really against these eggheads, these elite eggheads. 


Peter: Slogans like follow the science turned complex practical and moral choices among policy alternatives into simplistic attempts to predict effects on a narrow range of outcomes. Public deliberation was severely hampered by the unwillingness of many political leaders, journalists and academics to ask and demand answers to hard questions involving difficult tradeoffs. 


The problem of elites hubristically deciding that they know better than everyone else is as old as democracy. What, we’re supposed to fucking vote on mask mandates or something like what national referendum? What are you fucking talking about? And by the way, it would have won. 


Michael: Also, it's not hubris for experts to give their expertise. That's not-- It's like I know about nuclear physics, therefore I can tell you about nuclear physics. That's not hubris, that's like basic fucking human functioning. 


Peter: Also, sorry, but these people were put into place by elect democratically elected officials. The idea that this was like done by a fucking cabal of experts who, by the way, by the way, what do we fucking have these people for? If not to give us a little bit of guidance during this once in a century event. It comes and they're like, “You should wear masks and stay away from each other to the best of your ability.” And these people are like, “This is the hubris of these experts.” What are you fucking talking about? 


Michael: Wait, wait, wait, wait. I just remembered something. Hang on. But I actually want you to end with, okay, so this is what they're recommending instead of what we actually did in 2020. 


Peter: What was most needed was critical thinking as health ethicist Ari Joffe puts it, an effortful pause. The UK's official Covid inquiry has recommended that in future crises there be both red teams, groups of dissenting nonexperts trained in critical thinking as well as far wider range of expertise brought to bear. 


Michael: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. What about the dumbasses? We haven't heard from dumbasses. 


Peter: I love the idea of having a group of dissenters, so like you can't have them prepared in advance because you don't know what they're dissenting against. So, you basically get a bunch of experts together and then no matter what they conclude, you pull together a bunch of people who disagree. 


Michael: Whose disagreement is a qualification. That's the only qualification? 


Peter: No, there's two qualifications. [laughs] The other qualification is that they are not experts. [Michael laughs] Also, I love trained in critical thinking. Yeah, I've been honing my mind generally. 


Michael: We have a debate between a public health expert and 50 Sam Harris’. I can logic my way through this. 


Peter: Anthony Fauci that was an interesting presentation. What does the least famous political science professor at Princeton have to say about this? [Michael laughs] 


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