Goobermints and Bureaucraps didn’t listen because there was just too much of an opportunity presented for them to grab whatever power they could to increase their control over the populace.<\/p>\n
The Prophets: D.A. Henderson. Years before Covid, the scientist credited with eradicating smallpox warned against shutting down the world to combat an epidemic.<\/a><\/p>\n In 2006, ten years before his death at the age of 87, the legendary epidemiologist D.A. Henderson laid out a plan for how public health officials should respond to a major influenza pandemic. It was published in a small journal that focused mainly on bioterrorism\u2014and was quickly forgotten.<\/p>\n As it turns out,\u00a0that paper<\/a>, titled \u201cDisease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza,\u201d was Henderson\u2019s prescient bequest to the future. If we had followed his advice, our country\u2014indeed, our world\u2014could have avoided its disastrous response to Covid.<\/p>\n This month marks the four-year anniversary of lockdowns on a global scale. And though the pandemic has passed, its consequences live on. The lockdowns embraced by the U.S. public-health establishment meant that millions of young people had their education and social development disrupted<\/a>, or left school for good. Mental health problems rose substantially. So did incidents of domestic violence and\u00a0overdose deaths<\/a>.<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t have to be that way.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Last year, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic,\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0at a conference, \u201cIf you\u2019re a public health person, you have this narrow view of what the right decision is.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people\u2019s lives [or] ruins the economy. This is a public health mindset.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president during much of the pandemic, was asked in the fall of 2022 whether he regretted his advocacy of lockdowns.\u00a0He said<\/a>, \u201cSometimes when you do draconian things, it has collateral negative consequences.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0on the economy, on the schoolchildren.\u201d But, he added, \u201cthe only way to stop something cold in its tracks is to try and shut things down.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s no secret that Fauci\u2019s draconian recommendations did nothing to stop the virus, nor did closing schools save children\u2019s lives. And the idea asserted by Collins and Fauci that public health is about a single metric\u2014stopping a disease, no matter the unintended consequences\u2014was an inversion of the principles espoused by D.A. Henderson.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Public health, as Henderson knew well, is very much about the entire health of society. A lifetime of watching people react to pandemics had taught him two essential things.<\/p>\n First, there were limits to what can be done to stop one. As\u00a0Dr. Tara O\u2019Toole<\/a>, a close colleague and one of his three co-authors on that 2006 paper told me, \u201cD.A. kept saying, \u2018You have to be practical, and you have to be humble, about what public health can actually do, especially over sustained periods. Society is complicated, and you don\u2019t get to control it.\u2019\u2009\u201d (While the paper dealt with influenza, its lessons applied to what we faced with the novel coronavirus.)<\/p>\n Second, Henderson believed in targeted protection for the ill and medically vulnerable, and that overreacting, in the form of shutting down society, would bring enormous harm that could be worse than the virus.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Goobermints and Bureaucraps didn’t listen because there was just too much of an opportunity presented for them to grab whatever power they could to increase their control over the populace. The Prophets: D.A. Henderson. Years before Covid, the scientist credited with eradicating smallpox warned against shutting down the world to combat an epidemic. In 2006, … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,50,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucraps","category-goobermint","category-health-medicine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=100761"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100765,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100761\/revisions\/100765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=100761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=100761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=100761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}