The Price of Panic

How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe

Jay W. Richards, William M. Briggs, Douglas Axe

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781684511426
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

WHAT JUST HAPPENED? The human cost of the emergency response to COVID-19 has far outweighed the benefits. That's the sobering verdict of a trio of scholars—a biologist, a statistician, and a philosopher— in this comprehensive assessment of the worst panic-induced disaster in history.As the media fanned the flames of panic, government officials and a new elite of scientific experts ignored the established protocols for mitigating a dangerous disease. Instead, they shut down the world economy, closed every school, confined citizens to their homes, and threatened to enforce a regime of extreme social distancing indefinitely.And the American public—amazingly enough—complied without protest. Modestly but relentlessly focused on what we know and don't know about the coronavirus, Douglas Axe, William M. Briggs, and Jay W. Richards demonstrate in this eye-opening study what real experts can contribute when a pandemic strikes.In the early spring of 2020, the panic of government officials, the hysteria of the media, and the hubris of suddenly powerful scientists produced a worldwide calamity. The Price of Panic is the essential book for understanding what happened and how to avoid repeating our deadly mistakes.

CHAPTER 1 WHERE DID THE PANDEMIC START?

[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt¹

A hundred years from now, someone may write a book about the pandemic panic of 2020. It will have a catchy title like Extraordinary Delusions or The Madness of Crowds. It may be the last word on the subject. This book is one of the first. We wrote it while we were still in the throes of the crisis, fueled by a sense of futility, each of us more or less stranded in a different part of the world: one of us was in Taiwan, one in L.A., and one in Washington, D.C.

Why the hurry? Because “experts” were already warning that COVID-19 could make an encore performance for the 2020–21 season. We wanted to help prevent our country and the world from making the same disastrous mistake again.

The timing makes our job tough, though. Almost any historical event has many causes. It’s much easier to tease them apart after some time has passed to provide critical distance. We can’t hope to capture the detail and nuance that will only come with more hindsight. Still, even at the peak of the panic, the wellsprings of the catastrophe were in plain sight—more than enough to tell the basic story.

FEAR ITSELF

Most of us know the fear of sickness or death. Infection provokes special fear because we can catch and spread a disease unawares. We’ve heard about nightmarish, organ-melting viruses such as Ebola, but they tend to show up in far-off places. We look to Hollywood to supply us with surrogate experiences of deadly pandemics. During the lockdown in March and April of 2020, millions of us streamed these movies on Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu: Contagion (2011), Outbreak (1985), It Comes at Night (2017), and Twelve Monkeys (1995). Even a few zombie movies are more science than supernatural, such as 28 Days Later (2002), 28 Weeks Later (2007), and I Am Legend (2007).

Stephen Soderbergh’s Contagion hit close to home. It’s about a deadly virus that jumps to humans from a bat—a fact the viewer learns only in flashback at the very end of the film. Bulldozers disturb the bat while it’s eating a banana in a rainforest… in China. It finds shelter in a pig farm, where it drops a bit of banana. A pig eats the banana and gets infected. A chef in Macau slaughters the pig and serves it—and the virus—to patient zero, an American woman played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Her horrible if hasty death is the first of many.

The heroes of the story include not just her husband, played by Matt Damon, but surprisingly attractive officials at WHO and the CDC. (The producers consulted with WHO officials when writing the script.) These public-health savants quickly figure out that, if not stopped, the virus will kill a third of the global population. True to their role, they devise a vaccine and save the world, but not before a year of mayhem and death.

Such films are terrifying, of course. That’s why we watch them. Who would watch a movie about hay fever? But they’re fiction. What we tend to experience in the real world is mostly colds and the flu, which we take in stride. Indeed, we take the deaths of large numbers of people in stride. We have to. Otherwise, we would all be in a full-time planet-wide panic. Over 1,700 people die of heart disease every day in the U.S. Over 1,600 die of cancer. Almost 700 die just from medical mistakes.²

With the coronavirus, however, our fear went viral. The ad for Contagion nailed it: “Nothing spreads like fear.” In 2020, the world of frightening fiction seemed to infect our perception of reality, so much so that we elevated presumed COVID-19 deaths above all others. The usual ways of dying became background noise in the hysteria.

We knew early on that many people, especially children, seemed to catch the virus and develop antibodies without ever showing symptoms. For others, it triggered flu-like symptoms—weakness, fever, cough, sore throat, and the like. Some people, especially older ones in poor health, developed severe symptoms, including pressure or pain in the chest, trouble breathing, and bluish lips or face.³ When death occurred, it came in the form of pneumonia. Symptomatic cases of COVID-19 were often more severe than a common seasonal illness. But this wasn’t Ebola. Judged by its death rate and its other effects, the 2020 coronavirus was like a really bad flu strain, which targets people at higher risk of death while leaving most of the young and healthy unscathed.

The world has seen several flu strains like that in the last generation or two. The 1968 Hong Kong flu, for instance, took an estimated one million lives globally. The more recent swine flu (2009) killed between 150,000 and 600,000. (More on these later.) But in neither case was there global panic. Why, then, did we panic over this strain of coronavirus? Why did we retreat to our homes by the millions even before governments ordered shutdowns?⁴ If we want to avoid a repeat of 2020, we need to find the answer.

BORN IN CHINA

The origin story didn’t help. In late 2019, Chinese media began to report on a mysterious pneumonia-like illness cropping up in Wuhan, a giant city in the province of Hubei in central China (population over eleven million). The New York Times first mentioned the story on January 6 and reported the first death in China less than a week later. From the very start, the Chinese authorities seemed to suppress information about the virus that caused the illness. They went so far as blocking the hashtag #WuhanSARS on social media⁵ and punishing brave Chinese whistleblowers.

On January 22, the Times reported that China was “cutting off” Wuhan. Chinese authorities were “canceling planes and trains leaving the city, and suspending buses, subways and ferries within it.”⁶ The sheer size and speed of the shutdown stunned the world, and the tight lips of Chinese officials only made the tension worse.

Comparisons to SARS and even Ebola started to show up in the Western media. But most reporters were still fixated on the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, which started on January 21. Three days later, President Trump first tweeted about the events unfolding in China: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”⁷

On January 26, Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to the secretary of Health and Human Services asking the White House to consider blocking travel from China. He briefed administration officials the next day, even missing several hours of the impeachment trial. Later he told the Senate that what was happening in China was “the biggest and the most important story in the world.”⁸

Four days later, President Trump tweeted, “Working closely with China and others on Coronavirus outbreak. Only 5 people in U.S., all in good recovery.”⁹

The president, long a harsh critic of the Chinese regime, was clearly biting his tongue. He had announced a coronavirus task force the day before. And the day after, he declared a national health emergency and began restricting travel from China, as Tom Cotton had suggested. At that time there were a mere seven reported cases in the United States, and the Senate impeachment trial was still grinding along.¹⁰

What happened next should come as no surprise. Trump’s political and press critics accused him of xenophobia. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was urging tourists to come to San Francisco’s Chinatown in late February.¹¹ Within weeks, though, the same critics would be complaining that Trump should have acted sooner.

In truth, Trump wanted to avoid a U.S. response to the virus that did more damage than the virus itself. Nevertheless, his skepticism about China likely inspired him to do far more to limit the spread from that country than Pelosi and other China-friendly critics would have.

In any case, the anti-Trump “heads-we-win-tails-you-lose” strategy that would govern the press coverage was already in place.

WAS THE VIRUS—OR ITS LEAK—ENGINEERED?

Beijing deserves a generous portion of blame for the spread of COVID-19. But that doesn’t mean, as some have claimed, that the coronavirus was a product of Chinese bioengineering.¹²

Like computer viruses, natural viruses are coded scripts that trick information processors into running them. But with disease-causing viruses, the information processors attacked are biological cells. So, the virus’s first trick is to gain entry to cells—something it usually does with appendages that can grab matching appendages on the target cells. Once attached, a virus particle can force itself into the cell and release its viral script. The cell then runs this script as if it were its own genetic script, slavishly producing more virus particles, which are released to infect other cells.

One documentary claims that the appendages (called “spike proteins”) on the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) are suspiciously like the appendages on the original SARS virus, which caused an outbreak in 2003. The claim seems to be that scientists engineered a coronavirus from bats so that it would infect humans: “The high similarity of the S proteins from SARS1 to now SARS2… that’s your spike protein. That’s the lock and key. That’s going to be what drives it right through human cells.… So now you’re allowing that access to human tissues.”¹³

Like all proteins, these spike proteins are made in cells by linking amino acids to produce long chains that fold up into their working form. So, if someone made the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein by splicing pieces of the original SARS spike protein into the spike protein from a bat virus, we should see this. Specifically, when we examine the amino-acid sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, we should see pieces that match the SARS-CoV-1 spike protein, with the rest matching the bat spike protein.

A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Where Did the Pandemic Start?
• Chapter 2: WHO Started the Panic?
• Chapter 3: How It Spread
• Chapter 4: Social Manias and the Cult of Expertise
• Chapter 5: Rush to Lockdown
• Chapter 6: Untangling the Numbers
• Chapter 7: Blind Models
• Chapter 8: Why Did We Believe Lockdowns Would Work?
• Chapter 9: Did the Lockdowns Work?
• Chapter 10: The Human Cost
• Chapter 11: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Happiness
• Chapter 12: Through a Glass Darkly: Balancing Costs with Benefits When We Don’t Know the Future
• Chapter 13: Who Got It Right?
• Chapter 14: Lessons Learned
• Conclusion: Against the Brave New Normal
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright