{"id":3836,"date":"2025-02-19T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-19T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=3836"},"modified":"2025-02-19T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-02-19T10:00:00","slug":"the-covid-contrarians-are-in-power-we-still-havent-hashed-out-whether-they-were-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=3836","title":{"rendered":"The Covid \u2018Contrarians\u2019 Are in Power. We Still Haven\u2019t Hashed Out Whether They Were Right."},"content":{"rendered":"

In October, Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya hosted a conference<\/a> on the lessons of covid-19 in order \u201cto do better in the next pandemic.\u201d He invited scholars, journalists, and policy wonks who, like him, have criticized the U.S. management of the crisis as overly draconian.<\/p>\n

Bhattacharya also invited public health authorities who had considered his alternative approach reckless. None of them showed up.<\/p>\n

Now, the \u201ccontrarians\u201d are seizing the reins: President Donald Trump has nominated Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins University surgeon Marty Makary to run the Food and Drug Administration. Yet the polarized disagreements about what worked and what didn\u2019t in the fight against the biggest public health disaster in modern times have yet to be aired in a nonpartisan setting \u2014 and it seems unlikely they ever will be.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole covid discussion turned into culture war dialogue, with one side saying, \u2018I believe in the economy and liberty,\u2019 and the other saying, \u2018I believe in science and saving people\u2019s lives,\u2019\u201d said Philip Zelikow, a scholar and former diplomat based at Stanford\u2019s Hoover Institution.<\/p>\n

Frances Lee, a Princeton University political scientist, has a book coming out<\/a> that calls for a national inquiry to determine the lockdown and mandate approaches that were most effective.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is an open question that needs to be confronted,\u201d she said. \u201cWhy not look back?\u201d<\/p>\n

For now, even with the threat of an H5N1 bird flu pandemic on the horizon, and some other plague waiting in the wings of a bat or goose in a far-flung corner of the world, U.S. public health officials face ebbing public trust as well as a disruptive new health administration led by skeptics of established medicine. On Feb. 7, the Trump administration announced devastating NIH budget cuts, although a judge put them on hold three days later.<\/p>\n

Zelikow led the 34-member Covid Crisis Group, funded by four private foundations in 2021, whose work was intended to inform an independent inquiry along the lines of the 9\/11 Commission<\/a>, which Zelikow headed.<\/p>\n

The covid group published a book<\/a> detailing its findings, after Congress and the Biden administration abandoned initiatives to create a commission.<\/p>\n

That was a shame, said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, because \u201cwhile there are some real ideological battles over covid, there\u2019s also lots of stuff that potentially could be fixed related to government efficiency and policy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bhattacharya, Makary, and others in 2023 called for<\/a> a larger study of the pandemic. It\u2019s not known whether the Trump administration would support one, Lee said.<\/p>\n

The new CIA director, John Ratcliffe, however, has reopened the<\/a> Wuhan lab leak theory, an issue that Republicans have used to try to cast blame on Anthony Fauci, an infectious disease expert and a top covid adviser to both the first Trump and Biden administrations. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the new head of the Senate\u2019s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, says he\u2019ll investigate what he described as a cover-up of covid vaccine safety problems.<\/p>\n

Bhattacharya declined to respond to questions for this article. Makary did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis said his colleague Bhattacharya has an opportunity to advance understanding of the pandemic.<\/p>\n

\u201cUntil now it has been mostly a war on impressions and media, kind of mobilizing the troops. That\u2019s not really how science should be done,\u201d Ioannidis said. \u201cWe need to move forward with some calm reflection, with no retaliation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mistakes Were Made<\/strong><\/p>\n

In October 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored the \u201cGreat Barrington Declaration\u201d with Trump White House support. It called for people to ignore covid and go about their business while protecting the old and vulnerable \u2014 without specifics about how.<\/p>\n

Bhattacharya and Makary championed the policies of Sweden, which did not impose a harsh lockdown but emerged with a death rate far lower than that of the United States. The Swedes had advantages including lower poverty rates, greater access to health care, and high levels of social trust. For instance, by April 2022, 87% of Swedes ages 12 and over were vaccinated against covid \u2014 without mandates. The U.S. figure, for adults over 18, was 76% at the time.<\/p>\n

After Bhattacharya\u2019s earlier research was rebuffed by most of the public health establishment, he \u201ccurdled into a theological position that the risk wasn\u2019t that severe and the economic costs were so high that we had to roll the dice, or segregate the elderly \u2014 which you cannot do,\u201d Zelikow said.<\/p>\n

Ten experts interviewed for this article largely agreed that the health establishment lost public trust after bungling the initial handling of the pandemic. Existing pandemic plans were faulty or ignored. Shortages of protective gear and inadequate testing rendered containment of the virus impossible. As time wore on, government scientists failed to emphasize that their recommendations would change as new data came in.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe totally blew it,\u201d former NIH Director Francis Collins said, in a discussion sponsored by Braver Angels, a group that promotes dialogue among political opponents. Though he blamed disinformation about vaccines for many deaths, he also wished public health officials had said \u201cwe don\u2019t know\u201d more often.<\/p>\n

Collins said he didn\u2019t pay enough attention to the socioeconomic impact of lockdowns. \u201cYou attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life,\u201d he said. \u201cYou attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people\u2019s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Fauci and other public health officials did express worries about collateral damage from mandates, U.S. measures were stricter than in much of the world. That\u2019s left unresolved issues, such as how long schools should have been shuttered, whether mask mandates worked, and whether the public was misled about the efficacy of vaccines.<\/p>\n

At the same time, U.S. officials failed to communicate clearly that vaccines prevented most deaths and hospitalizations. An estimated 232,000 unvaccinated Americans died<\/a> from covid during the first 15 months in which shots were freely available.<\/p>\n

Experiences with HIV control taught public health officials not to moralize about behavior, to focus on harm reduction, and to use the least restrictive methods possible, Nuzzo said. Yet politicization led to shaming of people who wouldn\u2019t mask or refused vaccination.<\/p>\n

Harm reduction was top of mind for infectious disease doctor Monica Gandhi when she defied lockdown orders by keeping open Ward 86, the clinic she runs for 2,600 HIV patients at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Her patients \u2014 many poor or homeless \u2014 had to be treated in person to keep their HIV in check, she said.<\/p>\n

In general, the lockdowns hurt low-income people most, she said. The wealthy \u201cwere happy to be shut down, and the poor struggled and struggled.\u201d Gandhi\u2019s two children attended a private school that quickly reopened, she said. Yet she recalled how a medical assistant burst into tears when asked how her family was doing.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy 8-year-old is at home, on Zoom, all by himself,\u201d the woman told Gandhi. \u201cI have to work and he doesn\u2019t know how to learn that way. There\u2019s no one to give him food.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite strictures, including school closures that were longer than in most European countries, the U.S.\u2019 death rate from covid was the highest in the world<\/a>, except for Bulgaria, according to an Ioannidis study of countries with reliable data.<\/p>\n

Part of the blame lies with the first Trump administration, which \u201cmore or less just said, \u2018You states manage this crisis,\u2019<\/a>\u201d Zelikow said. \u201cThey went through a lot of somersaults. They did a lot of feckless things and then they basically just gave up,\u201d he said. Pandemic deaths peaked in the four months after the November 2020 election that Trump lost.<\/p>\n

Ioannidis, a critic of lockdowns, said the United States was doomed to a bad outcome in any case because of vulnerabilities in the population including poverty, inequality, lack of health care access, poorly protected nursing homes, high rates of obesity, and low levels of trust.<\/p>\n

But the disappearance of viral diseases such as respiratory syncytial virus and flu in late 2020 showed how much worse it could have been without lockdowns, said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children\u2019s Hospital of Philadelphia, who has noted that, while children were the least vulnerable to covid, it killed 1,700 of them by April 2023. More than a million American children<\/a> had had long covid as of 2022, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.<\/p>\n

Consensus Never Arrived<\/strong><\/p>\n

After arising by accidental passage from bats and other animals to humans (or, alternatively, from a Chinese lab accident), the coronavirus was uncannily adept at frustrating containment efforts \u2014 and aggravating political tensions. Its ability to infect up to 50% of people asymptomatically, infection outcomes ranging from sniffles to death, waning immunity after infection and vaccination, and the shifting health impact of new variants meant \u201cthe deck was stacked against public health,\u201d said biology professor Joshua Weitz of the University of Maryland.<\/p>\n

In the end, teams formed along political lines. Conservatives attacked governors for depriving them of liberty, and Trump\u2019s erroneous ramblings about curing the disease with bleach and ultraviolet light inspired intolerance on the left.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf anyone else was president we would have had a better result,\u201d Gandhi said. \u201cBut if Trump said the sky was blue, then goddamn it, the infection disease doctors disagreed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The right and left don\u2019t even agree on the correct questions to ask about the pandemic, said Josh Sharfstein, a vice dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone knew that 9\/11 was a terrorist attack,\u201d he said. \u201cBut what the pandemic was and represents \u2014 there\u2019s so much disagreement still.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe let children down, we let poor people down,\u201d Ioannidis said in closing remarks at the Stanford conference. \u201cWe let our future down.\u201d<\/p>\n

KFF Health News<\/a> is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF\u2014an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF<\/a>.<\/p>\n

USE OUR CONTENT<\/h3>\n

This story can be republished for free (details<\/a>).<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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