Bill Maher’s latest monologue, “Stuck on stupid,” takes out after what he sees as overreactions to the covid pandemic (including closing schools and denying flatly that the virus came from a Wuhan lab), I remember disinfecting groceries with alcohol and staying a long distance away from people, and, seriously I don’t think that Maher is correct to say that those behaviors were simply stupid. After all, remember that people were dying of a virus that we didn’t understand, and a lot of people hadn’t yet been vaccinated.
So I think here Maher is being snarky with the wisdom of hindsight. He even seems to diss vaccinations!
And yes, we have learned some stuff: how to make RNA vaccines, that those vaccines work, and that, right now, we don’t really need to have our sixth booster unless we’re immunocompromised.
This ain’t one of Maher’s better efforts. I didn’t follow his opinions at the beginning of the pandemic, but I know some reader did, so please weigh in below.
I like Bill Maher, but on the subject of the pandemic he is and has been all along off-base. He’s accorded no room for society to find its way through an unknown, challenging and deadly problem and his flippant dismissal of good faith efforts to save lives is pathetic. Were some mistakes made? Sure, but he’s over blowing them. He is taking a few excesses and claiming that they characterize the entire response. Some of his sensationalistic examples didn’t even last long and others remain debatable. If everything had been done the way he now claims it should have been, more people would have died. His polemic is unfair, but he doesn’t care.
He’s always been a non-vaxxer. I don’t say “anti-vaxxer” because he hasn’t campaigned against it in the way that some do, but by his own admission he won’t even get a flu shot, and he loves to take passing “shots” (pun intended) at vaccines. He’s got some crazy axe to grind about this and just won’t let go.
Right on. And when decisions were being made it wasn’t known how deadly Covid would be. Extreme precaution seems prudent in such a situation.
I don’t agree with his generally anti-vax positions, but the response to covid was pretty messed up.
There was an official position on the specific origin of the disease, and you could be punished for disagreeing with it.
Teacher’s unions dictated some CDC policies not because of any medical expertise, but because they are a powerful lobby.
Vaccine mandates in general are about stopping the spread of disease. Some risk to the vaccinated individual is accepted for the greater good.
However, the COVID vaccines do not prevent one from catching or spreading the disease. The CDC claimed specifically that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.”
Some businesses were allowed to stay open, and sometimes it had to do with lobbying power. Once in an open store, some things were safe to purchase, and other things were forbidden to buy for medical reasons, like seeds.
Public gatherings were either terribly risky or quite safe, depending on the political views of the organizers or participants.
We have come to expect medical professionals to be completely honest with us about our symptoms, prognosis, and realistic expectations of treatment. I think, prior to COVID, people generally thought that the CDC was an evidence-driven medical authority instead of a political organization.
Of course, reality requires a bit of PR sense when dealing with matters of public health.
Trust is easily lost and very hard to reacquire.
“…but the response to covid was pretty messed up.”
Yup, and so was the response to 9/11, or Ho Chi Minh, or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and countless other historical events, especially if they’re black swans like Covid. All your examples are simply the way humans react to the unknown, take advantage, make money, nothing novel here and nothing could have happened differently. The best we can hope for is we learned some things, and one is keeping politics (like religion) out of science. That’s a focus worth remembering whilst marking a ballot.
Well said. My observations exactly on each of your points.
„good faith efforts“ 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
sure, the 4 trillion dollar wealth transfer to the top 1% including big tech and big pharma during the pandemic was all in good faith.
research sweden. why did they figure out lockdowns/masks were ineffective and panicked Americans still can’t admit they overreacted.
I don’t believe they did figure it out. They mainly took a risk. It isn’t correct to make broad sweeping generalizations. Lockdowns were very helpful in that they saved lives. Masks were effective (if used with other mitigating measures), and again lives were saved. But those generalizations, although w/ truth to them, aren’t the whole story either.
I agree. Whenever restrictions were relaxed ICU admissions would spike. Now with over 70 percent of population vaccinated at least once we no longer have huge spikes in admissions and deaths. ICUs are no longer spilling out into the hallways. Maher also goes into meltdown whenever he recalls seeing people outside wearing a masks – with no knowledge of what their health issues might have been (maybe they were old and scared, asshole). I would often wear a mask going into stores because it was required and forget I had it on when I walked back to the car – even drove off with it on before removing it. Just glad Maher wasn’t behind me. The little hothead would’ve rammed my car.
I think deaths were higher in Sweden than in Norway or Denmark. So they took a risk and had more deaths.
Sweden had way more deaths than Norway, Finland, Denmark…their Scandinavian experiment didn’t pan out. Though, in general, Scandinavian countries fared pretty well during the pandemic. No surprise, they have their shit together.
I don’t think total deaths is a useful metric of success in dealing with Covid. Who died? is more important from a public-health viewpoint which is necessarily utilitarian by philosophy.
Sweden had many more deaths among its care-home residents than neighbouring Norway. This could be expected from that model of elder care being more popular in Sweden and from the very high risk of dying of Covid in a congregate setting for the frail elderly. Sweden might well have made a conscious prediction that staying open would result in a higher death toll (chiefly among frail elderly) but impose lower economic costs on working people and school children who have many more years of burden to bear than infirm elderly do, (who are likely to die soon of Alzheimer disease.) This is in contradistinction to many other governments who made prevention of deaths in nursing homes their Number One political priority. They closed public schools at the behest of teachers unions and prohibited social gatherings (unless geared to leftist protest) to achieve that.
The King of Sweden expressed public dismay that so many elderly people died in nursing homes but this was not necessarily a public-policy mistake by his government. I recognize that this formulation might infuriate an audience that skews older and has accumulated some co-morbid conditions but we should nonetheless be most thankful that Covid didn’t orphan many children or kill many nurses, unlike influenza 1918-19.
but Sweden also has a ridiculously high foreign born population who tend to be lower in socio economic status and have worse health than their Scandinavian counterparts. a disproportionate number of sweden’s covid deaths were among than demographic. Denmark and Norway do not have many poor migrants nor are they as urbanized as Sweden. also Covid deaths alone is a poor measure. look up excess deaths/ population and you’ll see sweden had one of the lowest in Europe during the pandemic. this is not even accounting for the quality of life that comes with not missing school, not being confined to the home, not having economic instability etc. public health MUST be taken holistically. no point in mitigating one disease if the solution causes more problems.
Well, they didn’t, and they had their own measures. Secondary schools and universities were largely online for a pretty long time, large gatherings weren’t allowed, and old people in homes were massively and cruelly isolated with no visitors at all for many months.
+1
Hypothesis: Maher got too smug due to his connections with Bret and Heather Weinstein, who now strike me as smart, attention-seeking quacks.
I still see a fair number of the, presumably, non-immunocompromised masking in Boston. And I still see far-leftists on X describing when they mask their kids. So, Maher’s criticism, in so far as it addresses these behaviors, sits well with me. But I’m with Ceiling Cat on Maher’s snark about the response to Covid containment when we were still learning.
OTS, I studied the overlapping genomic architecture of antisocial behavior (e.g., rule defiance and risk taking) and getting Covid using data that existed prior to the availability of vaccines. There is a positive genomic correlation between defying rules and getting the notorious contagious disease. So, those of us who were more risk averse and careful prior to vaccinations were likely spot on in protecting ourselves!
However, in addition, to being defiant (e.g., flouting mask mandates or social distancing), being poor and having lower IQ also associate more with getting Covid.
If Bret and Heather were spared Covid, it isn’t due to ivermectin. Rather, it’s due to their higher IQs and socioeconomic privilege — namely, they work from home! They may have had it by now.
(I believe I’ve had it 3x, though I only tested positive once. My polygenic risk score for risk taking is very low. We’ll all get Covid if we live long enough, vaccinated or not. And I’m very grateful for the vaccines. There is no way in living hell I’d have forgone them, and I believe Bret and Heather were a negative force during the pandemic, possibly persuading people poorer, less healthy, and less smart than them from getting vaccinated. They appear to have had some influence on Maher.)
All good points. My wife and I did all we could with the best scientific advice available at any particular time, knowing that ongoing research was uncovering better information.
We masked, cleaned surfaces, washed food, and remained solitary as much as practical. We’re now almost as social as we were before Covid, though we still avoid the most congested stores, restaurants, and events.
Unfortunately, and probably inevitably, we got Covid a couple months ago, maybe from shopping at a big-box store.
Having Covid wasn’t fun, but because we’d each gotten vaccinated and boosted 7 times, we suspect our infection wasn’t fatal and much milder than it could have been, especially given that we’re both 74, though otherwise reasonably healthy.
Also, it seems likely that our precautions — including vaccinations — gave us a soft landing into a time when Covid strains are less virulent. Of course, being retired and not actually poor probably gave us a lot of that cushion, too.
Being poor, or a family with young kids, or a worker in a service industry… Well, we weren’t, and lucky for that.
We are in the exact same boat as you, jon and had pretty much the same attitudes, actions, and experiences…and also feel very fortunate to be retired, in our 70’s and feel for younger working folks (like our kids’ and grandkids’ generations) who did not have our options. You said it all very well!
Thanks, Jim. I’m glad that you and I are alive and still around to comment. Luck was involved, of course, but cautiously trusting in the best available scientific evidence certainly played a part.
Maher is often full of himself and it shows in his opinions. He considers the pandemic as an inconvenience that kept him from performing, and shows no concern for the millions who died. He doesn’t display much compassion, and zero humility.
I watched the beginning where, surprisingly, Zacharia criticized NBC for firing Ronna McDaniel, a position which Maher agreed with. Their argument is that the news media has to include MAGA opinions in their broadcasts as if they have a legitimate point of view. It’s the both sides fallacy. They’re wrong on two counts, one, they’re not refusing to talk to people like McDaniel, they had in fact just interviewed her, and two, a news organization is not obligated to hire someone with no journalistic integrity at a salary of 300k, who participated in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election and who still insinuates that it was illegitimate.
I stopped watching after that. Glad I missed Maher’s screed.
Bill has some kind of hate on for journalism. Like science, he doesn’t know how it works. I always like episodes with Bret Stephens because Bret explains these things. Of course, Bill never learns, just like he never learns about science.
Bill’s “both sides” bias also, paradoxically, a journalistic trap. Remember how journalists didn’t realize that there isn’t a “both sides” in science and would try to give equal voice to anti-evolution cranks? It’s sort of like that here. There is the truth, vetted through the courts, etc. then there are things made up. We can ignore the made up things.
Bill Maher certainly does a lot of snarkiness with the benefit of hindsight. There seems to be a fairly consistent thread of his brand of humor with respect to a wide variety of topics. I find it somewhat endearing and chalk it up to his Catholic -Jewish-ness, his Jewish-Catholic-ness-atheistic-ness plus a seasoning of 420- friendliness. Some of his punchlines seem odd and disconcerting so they may need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Although I think he hits the mark on many controversial issues, Bill Maher’s medical insights are clearly infected with populist propaganda and conspiracy “theories,” which he mines to back up his conclusions (confirmation bias).
As Penn Jilette likes to say, everybody got a gris-gris.
When it comes to Bill Maher, you can safely ignore his opinions when it comes to food, medicine, and animals (he’s a big PETA supporter). He’s not a rational participant on those topics.
I do like Bill, and I think he has a finely honed social and political sense and his comedy plays superbly off these.
However, when it comes to the sciences, he has an annoyingly common juxtaposition of thinking he can view matters of medicine or other science competently while at the same time having essentially zero actual ability to do so.
Like others say: hes not rational about these matters and seems to have no intention to be such.
I just googled “Is Bill Maher anti-vax” and the answer seems to be sort of/ mostly. There was an article from 2019 by the president of AAP critiquing Maher for giving a platform to people who promulgate vaccine myths. Here is one link.
https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-maher-real-time-vaccines-cause-autism-anti-vaxxer-2019-11?amp
There were many more, including an interview with Seth MacFarlane in 2024 where they argue about vaccines.
I too disinfected my groceries until they knew enough to tell us it was not spread this way. My department chose to teach in person during the pandemic. The College required us to disinfect all the desks and tools that we touched.
Hindsight is convenient. I will refrain from watching this video.
Yes, when we knew nothing about a new pathogen and had to figure it out as we went, we all did pretty well. Bill simply doesn’t understand how science works.
I am glad Fauci and company were cautious in there approach. The influenza epidemic that swept the world in 1918 killed an estimated 50 million people. So far Covid has killed 7 million. Coulda been worse. And, without the rapid development of vaccines it certainly would have been much worse.
It almost certainly was worse. Excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic years exceeded 30 million, a more likely death toll from covid. A lot of countries grossly underreported covid deaths, and a lot of them didn’t have access to the vaccine.
Can you imagine if that influenza strain had appeared in 2020 rather than 1918? If met with the same sort of dis-information and distrust toward what happened during Covid …
Probably a harsher result, but with modern detection and vaccination, probably not as bad as it was in 1918. Remember, the vaccine was developed in months and , as far as I know, with no knowledge by DT.
The vaccine against the 2009 influenza pandemic (swine flu) was ready even faster than the Covid vaccines. The 2009 H1N1 virus was pretty similar to the 1918 one, but we are much better fed, also, the oldest generation still had some immunity to relatives of the 1918 strain.
I don’t think we can speculate what would have happened without the vaccines. Even as the vaccines were rolling out, there were concerns voiced in an article in the Atlantic that vaccination was not going to get us back to normal. In the ideal circumstances of clinical trials, both mRNA vaccines were about 95% effective in preventing symptomatic infection with the original Wuhan strain, now long gone. (There were no deaths in either arm* of either trial, making it impossible to say if deaths were prevented. Ditto the trials could not demonstrate interruption of transmission from those infected without symptoms.) That means, roughly, that vaccinated you would have to have contact with up to 20 infected people in order to have the same risk of getting Covid compared with your not being vaccinated. In the real world, knock this down to 10-15. This was still a major scientific achievement.
But recall this efficacy was demonstrated during pandemic measures where human contact was largely interdicted by public health measures. When those were relaxed, you would easily rack up those 15-20 casual contacts during the time it would take to get the one you incurred during lockdowns. So statistically your chance of getting Covid over, say, 6-12 weeks, was little changed between the two scenarios: unvaccinated plus lockdown vs. vaccinated plus unrestricted social interaction. What we were counting on was that the consequence of that infection would be less severe if you were vaccinated, i.e., keep you out of the ICU. I suspect that was and is true but we really don’t know to this day. Toward the end, most of our ICU patients had been vaccinated and there were still a lot of them.
What got us back to normal so we could go back to educating our children and being humans again was the divine intervention [kidding!, but we were still damn lucky] of Omicron. But for Omicron we’d still be hiding in our homes, vaccinated.
———————
* As usual for clinical trials, subjects with poor performance status and a high risk of dying from some other disease in the next 6-12 months were excluded. This meant no nursing home residents.
Bill Maher, in this regard thoroughly and cluelessly stuck on stupid, is without credibility when it comes to medicine. He doesn’t seem to bother to learn anything about the subject either; he’s been cheerfully wrong about a number of issues for many years. (He doesn’t like “western medicine”) So far as origins, it’s essentially settled question. The overwhelming weight of evidence indicates spillover of SARS CoV-2, originating in the bat population, probably via raccoon dogs but maybe other intermediate host — via the wild animal trade to the market in Wuhan. The careful peer reviewed literature is easy to find. Noteworthy is that this issue of spillover via the markets has been a matter of concern for many years.
I’m not very impressed by his snark, anyway, since there are genuinely thoughtful public figures….somewhere. If he’s on point, it’s because the targets are easy & obvious.
As for “far leftists” making their kids, oh please — you don’t know what medical circumstances that family might face.
Bill is evolving into a Fox News moron.
He seems to take really broad sweeps with things. He is distrusting of journalism as well and while there are examples of such things, I think journalism itself isn’t the problem. He seems anti-intellectual and I laughed out loud in one episode where he and Bari Weiss talked about how education was a waste since they were both the product of higher education. Easy to say when you’ve already got yours.
Maher dissing vaccinations?
Say it isn’t so!
Professor Coyne,
I love your takes on these things. I disagree with a fair amount of what you say but I appreciate the thoughtful perspective. im glad that you and many other leftists are able to critique your own side without going full-blown crazy conservative. And Maher has always been fairly aniti-vax, this is exactly what I expect from him.
“im glad that you and many other leftists are able to critique your own side without going full-blown crazy conservative.”
Or crazy liberal! (As with unscientific and extremist identitarian positions on sex/gender & DEI.)
It’s increasingly rare in the current political climate to find informed and nuanced opinion. People now are like magnets with either a north magnetic pole or south magnetic pole on various issues — and they’re not necessarily or easily classifiable as either left or right.
Bill Maher, although he usually exhibits more good sense than most commenters, is disconcertedly anti-GMO and anti-vaccine.
He also got triggered by the Barbie movie. He’s sort of an anachronism in many respects.
How in the world was Bill triggered by Barbie??
He didn’t like that the movie showed an all men Board at Mattel because in real life that isn’t the case. He has done monologues about how sexism isn’t at all bad.
Apples and oranges. GMOs are not a disease but a biological process that has proven neither dangerous nor safe, and to link anti GMO worriers to anti vaxxers is
to smear honest doubters as anti science. The fact is that the greatest threat from GMOs is in the field, i.e. introducing unknown genomes that could outbreed and eventually render important food crops extinct. It is not irrational to move slowly with human-imposed genetic combinations that could have major adverse
impact on farmers and important food crops. No one has suggested GMOs are
poisonous. But I refuse to dismiss critics and doubters who have credible science-based questions that are still unanswered. This is not the same as those who are knee jerk curmudgeons with hidden social agendas. There are hundreds of legitimate scientists who have expressed the need to go slow on expanding
GMOs in the market. They need to be heard.
I ignore Maher on just about everything he says about science. He’s intellectually lazy and seems to think it’s a flex that he doesn’t understand basics like the big bang theory no matter how many times a scientist has explained it to him. He has formed his opinions about health and diet because the science in these areas have been notoriously weak so his remedy (pun intended) is to go full on left with it and decided that medicine, and pharma are all corrupt and therefore probably wrong instead of seeing this as how science works (realize you’re wrong, admit it, fix it) but Maher doesn’t really know how science works. Some of his examples of mistakes made in the past aren’t even current….he’s just decided to hold onto them forever because they fit with his worldview. His ideas about covid and how it was managed don’t hold up. Masks do work, they were proven to work but he remembers how cloth masks didn’t work so has decided they all don’t and never did and whoever wears one is making a political statement. He basically was just upset that he couldn’t go out and perform and go to restaurants for dinner so he formed this weird mythology around the whole covid situation. Poor Bill didn’t get to engage in superficial Hollywood social activities. Boo hoo.
BTW I thought Real Time wasn’t on last night for some reason so I watched an episode of Rome instead (finally got to the series after I read it’s not too bad as I usually avoid all movies and series to do with Classics topics). I’m glad I watched Rome instead of this. I would have been grinding my teeth for days.
Maher is an antivaxxer. He is generally pro-alternatives to medicine/woo. I find his stances surprising for an atheist. No one’s perfectly consistent *shrugs*.
In 2019, it was inconceivable to me that communists still roamed the earth, or were necessarily obviously so, and I had never heard of dialectical political warfare. To say great lengths are gone to in the name of Marxism is an understatement.
But Maher (and, of course, his writers) is appealing to the populace that got blamed for all the problems because — well, perhaps they did make problems — but also blamed simply because they didn’t want to go along with the plan, or had other, perhaps incomprehensible ideas. They were preventing unity on the new basis of the peoples’ standpoint.
Perhaps his concluding point can help resolve some political warfare – that warfare which only ever advances communism and discards all combatants eventually.
OK, thanks to you,TP, I will relent and listen to his concluding point at least.
My usual take on Bill Maher is that as long as he can talk about stuff where it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he’s OK. This monologue by reports here sounds as if he’s not OK. Even if he’s sort of right maybe.
In statistics we have a principle called the Texas Marksman. (I don’t know why Texas.) A guy with a rifle fires six rounds at the side of his barn, all over the place. Then he gets a brush and paints bulls-eyes around the six bullet holes.)
right on!
“Stupid” is probably a bit harsh, but also it’s true that there were plenty of people (and I include myself) rolling their eyes at many of the the measures taken at the time and some of the hysteria.
I’ve been listening to a few of the older Triggernometry podcasts, from around the time covid hit the mainstream, and many of their guests had a good grasp on it from the get go.
I have little doubt a lot of the panic was induced by social media and the 24hr news cycle. I started my career in medicine at the same time swine flu came through and that was scary at the beginning, preferentially killing younger people, and no such collective loss of sanity. I suspect if social media was as ingrained then it would have had the same effect.
The 2009 influenza was and is far less deadly than Covid. This winter season in Germany, influenza led to ca 900 laboratory confirmed deaths, most of them from H1N1 pdm 2009, and Covid to 6200.
Covid led to a greater loss of life expectancy than anything since WWII (in the countries where that took a big toll) and probably since the 1918 flu in the US. Sure, one could have said, it kills mostly older people and we will all die one day anyway, so let’s just let it happen and not talk about it to avoid a panic. Certainly the social isolation and constant fearmongering was psychologically harmful, and some of the measures weren’t effective. But it wasn’t merely a media induced panic.
People seem to forget, willingly or unwillingly, that the purpose of the measures were to “flatten the curve”. It worked, but then pressure to relax restrictions prevented the continuation, and critical follow-through. That said, I stopped watching Maher quite some time ago… I ended up yelling at the TV when he would present his beliefs without data, and contrary to easily accessible data. However, thank goodness for people like Seth McFarlane and Kara Swisher who have taken him to school on several issues.
I’m a virologist who has worked on respiratory viruses in the past. It was clear from the very start that COVID-19 was going to be bad. I was enormously impressed with the scientific community coming together so quickly to safely develop the mRNA vaccines. As to whether this was a lab leak or a “natural” spread from infected animals at the Wuhan market I don’t think we’ll ever know. It’s not as if China has any motivation to communicate the truth. Mayer is an ignoramus with his anti-vax views. I won’t waste my time watching his show.
I especially appreciated the huge effort made by your virology and immunalogy colleagues in the early days to get good science quickly and broadly out to the public who were outside of the academy. Of particular note was the MIT biology online lecture series that was broadcast on youtube in 2020, then updated with what was known a year later and then offered again in 2021. Lecturers were excellent! Course is archived (and still instructive!) at url https://biology.mit.edu/undergraduate/current-students/subject-offerings/covid-19-sars-cov-2-and-the-pandemic/
Of course vincent racanello and his This Week in Virology dropped its aim from fellow academics to a broader audience for more than a year to provide up to date thinking for a growing, general educated but non-specialist audience.
I like to think I did my bit educating my Cotswold community in Chipping Campden pubs!
They also serve who simply sit, sip, and talk!
Thanks for saying this. I think people look back at the beginning of covid and snicker thinking we over reacted because they forget the Herculean efforts put forth by so many to make it less of a threat. It is still killing people. I think we have learned a lot about how nasty viruses can be when we took this one seriously.
And I also get a little disgusted with those who think, in hindsight, that the schools clearly should not have been closed because covid was not a threat to children. First, as Paul Offit points out, kids did get sick and did die, just not to the same extent as the elderly; and second, children certainly did get infected, even if not symptomatic, and would bring contagion home to parents, and , in multi-generational households, to the elderly grand parents and in some families, great grand parents. These are all pareto optimal decisions…none is simple. And shame on Maher for using simplistic thinking to buy a few yuks.
Yes I agree 100%.
He’s long been an Anti-vaxxer. And I long ago stopped respecting him as a result.
I think he’s worse – he’s anti-intellectual and anti-vax stances are just one manifestation of it.
I’m late in coming to this post and nearly everyone will have moved on, but I will respond directly to Jerry’s point about hindsight because it plays directly into Bill Maher’s point about a commission.
Many people seem to have settled into an attitude of “We did the best we could. Much was unknown. Extreme caution was prudent. It’s not fair to criticize in hindsight.” And so on. These are fine sentiments. Perhaps they are even true in some cases. Let’s find out. Much more was known at an earlier time than many now want to grant. We don’t need to argue about it in comment sections. Let’s have a commission. Include the brightest people who opposed various pandemic measures early on. Let’s look at the data again in an environment not racked with fear, panic, peer pressure, ad hominem attacks, and social media “censorship.” The fact that there has been no such commission to assess our failures and successes during the most significant pandemic in over a hundred years is telling, but it’s the only way we might steer clear of repeating any mistakes that we might have made. Last year, one group of scientists with obscure credentials from Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and UC San Francisco, among others, proposed an 80-page list of questions, divided into ten categories, that such a commission might address:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23601038-norfolk-group-questions-for-a-covid-19-commission
Perhaps the core question to start would be to ask why our pandemic response diverged so greatly from that of existing pandemic plans that had been sculpted over decades. I posted the below article a year or so ago. It is D. A. Henderson’s 2006 paper “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza.” It was written at a time when–post-9/11 and post-anthrax incidents–U. S. policy makers feared a broader biological weapon attack, and the defense establishment was gaining influence in the crafting of public health responses. Henderson’s measured guidance served as rebuke to the ideas circulating in D. C. at the time, but throughout the recent pandemic it would have been dismissed as fringe—his longtime leadership of both the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the world smallpox eradication campaign would have been ignored.
Henderson’s conclusion: “An overriding principle. Experience has shown 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. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.”
Please note that the article appeared not in a standard public health journal; those practitioners already knew the core principles for which Henderson advocated—principles that we largely jettisoned during COVID. The article was, instead, published in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science. Any guesses who Henderson’s audience was in the policy world?
https://www.aier.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/10.1.1.552.1109.pdf