Evidently these remarks from the former head of the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic, Francis Collins, were made earlier this year but are just now beginning to make the rounds. That's a shame, because it is an impressive and accurate mea culpa that needs to be amplified as much as possible.
During this forum, Francis said he and his colleagues showed an “unfortunate” narrow-mindedness. To wit:
“If you’re a public-health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is. So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.”
He also admitted to having an urban bias, working in Washington, D.C., and thinking almost exclusively about New York City and other major cities; and tailoring mitigation strategies and diktats accordingly.
Basically, Francis is saying what I and thousands of others were screaming for two years. Public Health officials have a narrow focus during a pandemic. They suggest measures based on worst-case scenarios. And their suggestions are made with the unreachable goal of zero sickness and death.
The other sides of the equation---the public COST of such policies---are *supposed* to be weighed by our politicians and other leaders. Under the proper relationships, the science and public health experts present scenarios under the headings of "best case," "worst case" and "most likely." Then, armed with this crucial information, our leaders weigh it against larger societal concerns in order to conduct a cost-benefit analysis.
Unfortunately, our leaders took scientists and pubic health wonks as the final word, and their "worst case scenarios" as "most likely scenarios." Instead of letting the wonks play a limited but essential role in the overall decision-developing process, they were given free reign to dictate policy. The results were entirely predictable and disastrous.
While this ham-fisted approach was going on at the national level, and in the nation's two most populous states, other Governors were utilizing the right approach. They listened to what the scientists had to say. They listened to what the health policy experts had to say. And they weighed the costs and benefits.
In most every case where the scientists and the health side's suggestions were carefully placed under a cost-benefit analysis, the policies that emerged ended up being FAR more reflective of the actual dangers of COVID. And those states enjoyed better outcomes. That doesn't mean fewer people got sick and/or died. It means that the state was able to keep COVID somewhat at bay while bankrupting and disrupting a comparatively low number of people, businesses and families.
I can forgive a lot of the confusion in the opening months of the pandemic. We were in uncharted waters. No one knew precisely what was going on. But around the summer of 2020 many were able to extrapolate that the virus primarily targeted the elderly and those with compromised immune systems…and that the younger and healthier you were, the likelihood of bad outcomes was near zero. Unfortunately, these facts were rarely incorporated into the mitigation measures that were proffered by health bureaucrats and instantly implemented by politicians.
As Rich Lowery reports in his excellent piece in National Review, scientists who were given near Carte Blanche authority could have shown a little modesty. They could have welcomed debate. They could have denounced the campaign of moral bullying that many were using to defend their recommendations. Many of those actors, of course, were GOVT agencies and NGOs.
Lowery further points out that scientists are humans, too. As such, they are susceptible to groupthink, recency bias, and parochialism. They are necessarily hyper-focused on narrow areas and sometimes know next to nothing about broader matters of importance. Again, that blind spot is where our leaders are supposed to step in and weigh the findings of scientists and the recommendations of public health officials against the inevitable tradeoffs of such policies.
Having public health leaders show some humility now might be too little too late, but perhaps it will guide our reaction in the next national emergency to better reflect the proper decision-making process which includes the science, the health community, and the Real World.