The French generals who made plans for fighting the war that came after the Great War are routinely mocked for having assumed that what worked in 1918 would lead to success in the next conflict. In that belief, they endorsed devoting vast resources to the construction of the Maginot Line and downplayed the usefulness of tanks.
That is one of the many instances of “preparing to fight the last war”, a phenomenon hardly confined to French military men of the 1930’s. But what would one say if, instead of trusting to concrete-reinforced trenches, the generals had put their faith in massed cavalry charges? To think that static fortifications could stop whatever attack Germany might launch wasn’t delusional. If armor and air forces hadn’t advanced as far as they did between 1918 and 1939, the Maginot Line would very likely have been a shining success, an impenetrable shield that would have allowed the French army to concentrate forces on its left flank and repel any German repetition of the 1914 offensive.
Cavalry charges, on the other hand, had been almost uniformly disastrous. Even soldiers who very much liked horses and felt nostalgia for their military role, figured out as much (one such was George S. Patton) and turned to other means of waging war.
Imagining Anthony Fauxi and Rochelle Walensky in 1938, you can hear their ringing endorsements of the war horse and the winged hussar. As John Tierney relates in the Wall Street Journal (behind a pay wall, but you can read generous excerpts from it and other pertinent commentary here) –
Lockdowns and mask mandates were the most radical experiment in the history of public health, but Dr. Walensky isn’t alone in thinking they failed because they didn’t go far enough. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, recently said there should have been “much, much more stringent restrictions” early in the pandemic. The World Health Organization is revising its official guidance to call for stricter lockdown measures in the next pandemic, and it is even seeking a new treaty that would compel nations to adopt them. The World Economic Forum hails the Covid lockdowns as the model for a “Great Reset” empowering technocrats to dictate policies world-wide.
There is certainly room for debate about whether shutting down much of the world’s economy, keeping children out of school and turning masks into a symbol of civic virtue did more good than harm. What is beyond rational dispute is that, if the balance favored the good, it was a very small increment of good, even if one takes no account of the health effects of lowered standards of living, interruptions of children’s education, postponement of non-Covid medical care and drastic disruptions of daily life.
U.S. states with more-restrictive policies fared no better, on average, than states with less-restrictive policies. There’s still no convincing evidence that masks provided any significant benefits. When case rates throughout the pandemic are plotted on a graph, the trajectory in states with mask mandates is virtually identical to the trajectory in states without mandates. (The states without mandates actually had slightly fewer Covid deaths per capita.) International comparisons yield similar results. A Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis of studies around the world concluded that lockdown and mask restrictions have had “little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.”
Florida and Sweden were accused of deadly folly for keeping schools and businesses open without masks, but their policies have been vindicated. In Florida the cumulative age-adjusted rate of Covid mortality is below the national average, and the rate of excess mortality is lower than in California, which endured one of the nation’s strictest lockdowns and worst spikes in unemployment. Sweden’s cumulative rate of excess mortality is one of the lowest in the world, and there’s one particularly dismal difference between it and the rest of Europe as well as America: the number of younger adults who died not from Covid but from the effects of lockdowns.
So the positive effects of the Covid mitigation strategy are hard to discern. The negative effects are starkly visible:
Even in 2020, Sweden’s worst year of the pandemic, the mortality rate remained normal among Swedes under 70. Meanwhile, the death rate surged among younger adults in the U.S., and a majority of them died from causes other than Covid. In Sweden, there have been no excess deaths from non-Covid causes during the pandemic, but in the U.S. there have been more than 170,000 of these excess deaths.
No one knows exactly how many of those deaths were caused by lockdowns, but the social disruptions, isolation, inactivity and economic havoc clearly exacted a toll. Medical treatments and screenings were delayed, and there were sharp increases in the rates of depression, anxiety, obesity, diabetes, fatal strokes and heart disease, and fatal abuse of alcohol and drugs.
As Mr. Tierney also recounts, the futility of the Fauxi-Walensky strategy was foreseen. A pre-Covid study by one of the world’s premier epidemiologists and his colleagues “considered an array of proposed measures to deal with a virus as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu” and concluded “that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted”.
This advice was subsequently heeded in the pre-Covid pandemic plans prepared by the CDC and other public-health agencies. The WHO’s review of the scientific literature concluded that there was “no evidence” that universal masking “is effective in reducing transmission.” The CDC’s pre-2020 planning scenarios didn’t recommend universal masking or extended school and business closures even during a pandemic as severe as the 1918 Spanish flu. Neither did the U.K.’s 2011 plan, which urged “those who are well to carry on with their normal daily lives” and flatly declared, “It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.”
But when the moment of decision came in March 2020, the plans were thrown out the window. Panicked by computer models “that proved to be absurdly wrong”, the “experts” chose the tactics that had failed before. Deployed against Covid, they failed again. And therefore the experts look forward to giving them another try the next time that a virus races out of control.
“When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”
Addendum: Belatedly, I see that Mr. Tierney has covered much of this ground in a non-paywalled City Journal essay.
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