PRICEY PANDEMIC.

• Author: Tucker, Jeffrey A.
• Position: ECONOMICS

"Economics is about people making choices and institutions enabling them to thrive. Public health is about the same thing. Driving a wedge between the two, as happened [during the pandemic], ranks among the most catastrophic public policy decisions of our lifetimes."

ON APRIL 15, 2020-a full month after Pres. Donald Trump's fateful news conference that greenlighted lockdowns to be enacted by the states for "15 days to flatten the curve"--the President had a revealing White House conversation with Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"I'm not going to preside over the funeral of the greatest country in the world," Trump wisely said, as reported in Jared Kushner's book Breaking History. The promised Easter reopening of the economy had not occurred, and Trump was angry. He also suspected that he had been misled--and no longer was speaking to coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx. "I understand," Fauci responded meekly. "I just do medical advice. I don't think about things like the economy and the secondary impacts. I'm just an infectious diseases doctor. Your job as president is to take everything else into consideration."

That conversation reflected the tone of the debate, then and later, over the lockdowns and vaccine mandates. The economy--viewed as mechanistic, money-centered, mostly about the stock market, and detached from anything truly important--was pitted against public health and the preservation of life. The assumption seemed to be that you had to choose one or the other--that you could not have both.

It also seemed to be widely believed in 2020 that the best approach to pandemics was to institute massive human coercion--a belief based on the novel theory that if you make humans behave like nonplayer characters in computer models, you can keep them from infecting one another until a vaccine arrives to wipe out the pathogen.

The lockdown approach in 2020 stood in stark contrast to a century of public health experience in dealing with pandemics. During the great influenza crisis of 1918, only a few cities tried coercion and quarantine--mostly San Francisco, also the home at the time of the first Anti-Mask League--whereas most locations took a person-by-person therapeutic approach. Given the failure of quarantines in 1918, they were not employed again during the disease scares--some real, some exaggerated--of 1929,1940-44,1957-58,1968-69,2003,2005, and 2009. In all of those years, even the national media acted responsibly in urging calm.

Not in 2020, however, when policymakers--whether due to intellectual error, political calculations, or some combination of the two--launched an experiment without precedent. The sick and well alike were quarantined through the use of stay-at-home orders; domestic capacity limits; and business, school, and church shutdowns. This occurred not only in the U.S., but worldwide--with the notable exception of perhaps five nations and the state of South Dakota.

The consequences were profound. Coercion can be used to turn off an economy, but given the resulting trauma, turning an economy back on is not so easy. That is why, 31 months later, we are experiencing the longest period of declining real income since the end of World War II, a health crisis, an education crisis, an exploding national debt, 40-year high inflation, continued and seemingly random shortages, dysfunction in labor markets, a breakdown of international...