The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe

Praise for

THE PRICE OF PANIC

Jay Richards, William Briggs, and Douglas Axe have written the definitive account of the most egregious policy blunder in the history of American government.

—George Gilder, author of Life after Google

"As America emerges from lockdown, many are wondering how we were all stampeded into actions that have caused more deaths than they prevented. How did ‘experts’ like Fauci become gods, and why were those of us who questioned the panic labeled as ‘psychopaths’? How did progressive fascism become the ‘new normal’ and, more importantly, how do we get—and keep—the normal normal back? Arm yourself with the answers to these questions by reading The Price of Panic, then buy a copy for a liberty-minded friend."

—Steven W. Mosher, author of Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream Is the New Threat to World Order

We physicians appropriately focus on an individual patient’s medical problems as we see them before us; very few of us have the knowledge or wisdom to balance the much larger issues involved in responding to public health pandemics with major economic and political impacts. This book puts these issues in perspective, for example, by showing that the illness and death toll from the COVID-19 virus was unremarkable in comparison with many historical pandemics. ‘What was remarkable is how we reacted’ is how the authors put it. They explore this and other important issues, such as why the COVID-19 pandemic incited worldwide panic whereas previous pandemics did not. This book also shows how most decision-makers relied way too heavily on gimmicks, such as computer models, to arrive at disastrous decisions. As a radiologist, I saw how my X-ray film seemed like magic to others; I had to resist the temptation to imply that I actually had magical powers to tell other doctors what to do.

—Robert J. Čihák, M.D., past president, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons

Practically everything the Internet told you about COVID-19 is wrong. While the pandemic may have been real, the panic was more a product of social contagion. Jay Richards, William Briggs, and Douglas Axe provide a highly informed, page-turning look at how the entire world succumbed to what can only be described as a virus of experts.

—Austin Ruse, author of Fake Science: Exposing the Left’s Skewed Statistics, Fuzzy Facts, and Dodgy Data

Entertaining prose, surprising insight, and an engrossing account of how a handful of so-called experts with bad track records, dubious modeling, and no data convinced world leaders to shut down the economy. This book exposes the ‘expert-media industrial complex’ and confirms the lesson that ‘nothing spreads like fear.’

—Betsy McCaughey, Ph.D., New York Post columnist

From Douglas Axe

To Daniel and Emily, who, like countless other young people, had their big day taken away, and to Verna, who, at ninety-one, refused to let fear steal a day.

From William M. Briggs

To my dad, who taught me to be skeptical of experts.

From Jay W. Richards

To my daughters, Gillian and Ellie, who survived being trapped in the house with me while this book was being written.

INTRODUCTION

What can we be certain of from history? That human beings have been wrong innumerable times, by vast amounts, and with catastrophic results. Yet today there are still people who think that anyone who disagrees with them must be either bad or not know what he is talking about.

—Thomas Sowell¹

The last century gave us the word viral to refer to the spread of tiny pathogens. It didn’t take long for the meaning of the word to expand. We now speak of stories and ideas going viral when they explode into public awareness.

In 2020, the metaphor reclaimed its literal sense.

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres declared the greatest crisis since World War II. In the United States, state and federal governments ordered the closure of tens of thousands of small businesses—many never to return. Almost every school and college in the country sent its students home to finish the school year in front of their computers. Churches cancelled worship services, many before the government forced them to. Christians celebrated Easter in their homes, in front of screens. Overnight, social distancing went from an obscure medical term to a duty. Shaming of skeptics on social media was ratcheted up to ever-new heights.

A walk in the park became a criminal act. In Brighton, Colorado, police handcuffed former state trooper Matt Mooney in front of his six-year-old daughter. Why? He was playing tee-ball with her in an otherwise empty field.²

Police cited a Pennsylvania woman out for a drive during stay-at-home orders.³

Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer banned family visits between homes. A ninety-nine-year-old man in New Jersey was charged for attending an engagement party with nine other people.⁴

This was not a top-down dictatorship imposed on a resistant public. Polls showed that most Americans supported the lockdowns. If anything, we pushed for them. Neighbors snitched on small church groups with gusto. New Jersey posted a form on its website to make it easy to turn your neighbors in to the authorities.⁵

In late March, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti said that snitches in his city would get rewards.⁶

Two months in, most Americans were still telling pollsters that they supported the shutdowns.

Local government did its best to keep up. On Easter morning, District of Columbia mayor Muriel Bowser tweeted that she had met with the Easter Bunny. It expressed its frustration about people not staying home, she reported, and consequently, that its stops may be delayed this year. We agreed that road closures will be necessary for the Easter Bunny to quickly hop its way through the District and stay on time.⁷

Louisville mayor Greg Fischer tried to ban drive-in church services on Easter. A federal judge quickly slapped that down.

In the Philippines, President Duterte ordered police and the military to shoot residents who wandered out.⁸

Thank God we live in the land of the free.

All this in response to a new virus—a tiny infectious agent that hijacks living cells.

Some viruses are deadly, and the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 certainly can be. Symptoms of the disease may include fever, coughing, shortness of breath, chest pain, and loss of smell. Severe cases can lead to pneumonia, and even death. More than four hundred thousand deaths worldwide by the end of June have been attributed to the virus since we first detected it at the end of 2019. By the end of May, it had claimed about a hundred thousand souls in the United States. At its peak, on Good Friday, April 10, just over two thousand Americans were reported to have died with it in a single day. There were later apparent peaks. But these followed the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) diluting the way COVID-19 deaths were coded, which increased their numbers.

Death is always hard, and these numbers sound shocking. Context matters, though. When we compare COVID-19 deaths to the background death rate and to deaths in other pandemics, the situation looks different. This virus triggered global panic long before it compared to any other global catastrophe. As we’ll show in these pages, even after several months, total U.S. deaths were well below those of several twentieth-century flu pandemics. None of these triggered a global panic, and some are now almost forgotten. The global response to COVID-19 vastly exceeded that to any other pandemic in history. The president of the Philippines issued his shoot-to-kill order before his country of over 100 million people had suffered 150 deaths.

Never before had scores of countries around the world chosen to perform such economic harakiri in unison. In the United States, unemployment was at a historic low of 3.5 percent in February. By the week ending May 2, 33.5 million new jobless claims had been filed over a mere seven-week period. There had never been anything like this in American history. Ever. By the end of May, the new jobless claims had climbed to nearly 41 million.

This was not a bottom-up panic, as in the movie Contagion, where people need no inducement to fear a deadly virus that melts skin and dissolves organs. Sure, people bought more toilet paper, as they do when forecasters predict severe weather. They also snapped up hand sanitizer. But there were no riots and little civil unrest during the first month, even when cases and deaths were going up. Our panic led, at first, to compliance and self-protection.

So, what caused the viral panic? The panic and lurching government overreach were inspired not so much by deaths people knew about firsthand, and not so much by the virus’s murky origins in China. They were sparked by a few forecasts that had the smell of science. The World Health Organization (WHO) favored a single, untested, apocalyptic model from Imperial College London. The United States government took its cues from the Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. We now know these models were so wrong they were like shots in the dark. After a few months, even the press admitted as much. But by then vast damage had been done.

How powerful were these false prophets? In describing his choice to wage war on the invisible enemy, President Trump told the press on April 8, The big projection being that 2.2 million people would die if we did nothing. That was another decision we made, close it up. That was a big decision that we made. Two very smart people walked into my office and said listen these are your alternatives. And that was a projection of 1.5 to 2.2 million people would die if we didn’t close it up.⁹

Two very smart people. Let that hang in the air for a minute.

As we soon learned, the IHME often had to adjust its forecasts to align them with the facts.¹⁰

These weren’t random errors. Their tweaks always went in one direction: fewer deaths, fewer needed hospital beds, and so forth, than they had forecast the day before.

By April 10, Anthony Fauci, M.D., the president’s top medical advisor and surely one of those two very smart people, was insisting that he didn’t follow models.¹¹

Never mind that twelve days before, he had brandished models to dissuade the president from loosening the reins at Easter. We showed him the data, Fauci explained, he looked at the data, and he got it right away. It was a pretty clear picture.¹²

On April 11, the IHME tweeted, We strongly agree that decision-makers should draw on a diversity of COVID-19 models. We’re committed to scientific debate and constant improvement of our predictions.¹³

Model defenders cited the much lower rates of deaths as proof—not that the models were wrong, but that the shutdown had worked.¹⁴

As we’ll see, that’s not true. Whether we compare countries or U.S. states, the virus seemed indifferent to government-mandated lockdowns. Not only did the models exaggerate the danger, but our response to that danger, both voluntary and coerced, exacted great pain for little or no gain. That may sound baffling. How could a nationwide shutdown not stop or at least greatly slow a contagious virus? But as we’ll see, there is no evidence it did.

Add to this the spectacle of the CDC changing the way that it (and the U.S.) counted COVID-19 infections and deaths, which caused a spike in the death count in mid-April. At that point, it was not just the models, but also the underlying data that were iffy. It was as if our public health officials were trying to spark conspiracy theories.

It’s easy to grasp why the public, and even heads of state and other politicians, trusted public health experts in a perceived public health emergency.¹⁵

But what of those experts? They treated predictive models—which are at best complex conjectures about future events—as if they were data. And then, when the models flopped, they began to massage the data. To get past this catastrophe we will need to forgive, but we should never forget. We should do whatever we can to dismantle such experts’ unchecked power over public policy.

These experts, however, could never have done so much damage without a gullible, self-righteous, and weaponized media that spread their projections far and wide. The press carpet-bombed the world with stories about impending shortages of hospital beds, ventilators, and emergency room capacity. They served up apocalyptic clickbait by the hour and the ton.

For the U.S. media, facts and nuance took a back seat not just to hysteria, but also to bloodlust against the president. The anti-Trump angle persisted even as the narrative about the virus changed. In January the press attacked Trump for restricting travel from China against advice from WHO. They called it a xenophobic reaction to a virus that wasn’t passed from person to person. Later, the press blasted the president for not clamping down sooner. As a result of this spectacle, millions of Americans knew they couldn’t trust the press to give them the straight scoop. And the president knew that, no matter what he did, the press would attack him for killing people.

Without media hype, we doubt the panic over this virus would have gone viral, or that most governments would have responded as they did. As it was, only a few managed to resist the tide of misinformation across the globe—Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Sweden, Japan, Hong Kong, and a few others. And in the United States, only Iowa, Oklahoma, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas, Utah, and Wyoming didn’t have lockdowns, though many of their counties and cities did.

Social media made COVID-19 the first virus with public relations,¹⁶

as an Israeli physician and former health minister put it. We were incessantly fed secondhand tweets of people sick or dying, liked and retweeted thousands of times. Any effort to quell fear by, say, comparing the outbreak with past pandemics, disputing the models, or urging a more targeted quarantine was denounced as tantamount to murder.

On April 4, an open-air fish market at the Wharf in Washington, D.C., drew a crowd of shoppers. City police soon closed it, egged on by an army of online scolds who took to Twitter to denounce the fish-seeking sociopaths as soon as the story broke and for twenty-four hours afterwards. There were scores of such incidents in cities around the country.

Every celebrity who tested positive, from Tom Hanks and P!nk to Idris Elba and Chris Cuomo, found his or her way to the front page. UK prime minister Boris Johnson garnered the most attention. But even the fifty-two-year-old guy from Fountains of Wayne who died with the virus trended for a few days.

Of course, people, even famous ones, get sick every minute of every day. One hundred and fifty thousand people you’ve never heard of die every day somewhere in the world. Starting in March, though, the ever-relentless media made juicy stories look like evidence. Coverage of the virus was so pervasive that some obituaries of those who died at that time noted that the deceased hadn’t died of COVID-19. No stories noted that people had not died of heart disease or cancer—though they killed far more people over those same months.

We were hooked on news analyses with eye-catching graphs. Millions spoke, like statisticians, of flattening the curve. We mistook rumors of millions of deaths and emergency rooms overflowing with bodies for reports when they were dubious worst-case scenarios. Major media outlets went so far as to use deceptive pictures of busy hospital wards captured at other times and places. News stations ran with memes that were too good to check, like the absurd viral video of a nurse who quit her ICU nursing job because her hospital wouldn’t let her wear a mask. It wasn’t true, but CBS reported it, and Senator Bernie Sanders fell for it.¹⁷

Of course, we were all affected by the virus in some way. Many of us got sick or knew someone who did.

Between us, we three co-authors know several people who landed in the hospital. One of us has a friend whose father died in Bergamo—the ground zero of the pandemic in Italy.¹⁸

You have your own stories.

But our experiences don’t prove that a plague was shrouding the earth in darkness and death via a pandemic of such magnitude that no response was too extreme. The press spoke in terms of a war economy as firms shifted manufacturing from cars (GM), pillows (My Pillow), and vodka (Tito’s) to ventilators, masks, and hand sanitizer.¹⁹

But our fear of the coronavirus did what no real war, depression, terror attack, or disease had ever done before. It not only emptied hotels and airplanes. It shuttered professional baseball and basketball and the Summer Olympics. It closed schools, businesses, and churches. It kept healthy people with near-zero risk of death huddled in their homes for months.

They say hindsight is 20/20. But here we are, months later, and most of us still have more questions than answers. How much did social distancing, school and business closures, stay-at-home orders, and press campaigns help? What will be the total cost in dollars, lives, and livelihoods of this response from governments and mass media? What role have national and global health organizations such as WHO played? To whom are they accountable? How did unelected bureaucrats with narrow expertise, relying on murky data and speculative models, gain the power to shut down the world?

And why did elected politicians, who knew little of the science, trust them?

How much of the blame belongs to social media mavens and reporters who amplified the claims of officials? What of a TV talker who wore a hazmat suit to terrify viewers, while his unseen cameraman wore a t-shirt? Or White House correspondents who frittered away press conferences with the president, badgering him about what he called the virus? What of headlines that aimed for clicks and political digs rather than truth and accuracy?

And, amidst all this, what of average citizens? How are we supposed to sift prudence from propaganda? How can we tell when we should quietly comply rather than openly question? With the collapse of media credibility, whom should we trust if something like this happens again? Given what we saw from officials and the media, is it any surprise that so many people fell for conspiracy theories?

Was this a unique event, never to be repeated, or a harbinger of a new normal?

We can answer that last question now: it depends on whether we learn the right lessons this time.

Enemies of the American experiment, both inside and outside our borders, were watching. They now know that even the most liberty-loving Americans will surrender our rights if we think the lives of other people, especially the vulnerable, are at risk.

There’s a book to be written about the many acts of generosity and bravery by charities and donors,²⁰

businesses, health care workers, servicemen and women, police, firefighters, government workers, artists, pastors, priests, and ordinary folks in the United States and around the world.²¹

This is not that book.

In this book, we diagnose and dissect the response to the crisis by the public, the press, and the government. Historically, it’s during crises that governments expand their reach. And unfortunately, they almost never retreat after the crisis has passed. Alas, the panic over COVID-19 has given rise to an expert-media industrial complex. It has the power to trigger public panic, which in turn inspires government overreach. These experts and their like-minded media heralds now have even more incentive to use our fear and our compassion against us.

To resist this new force, the rest of us need a way to distinguish evidence from extrapolation, and data from models. We need to know just how hard it is for scientists and physicians to tease out the many causes that contribute to death in human populations. We need to be able to tell truth from truthiness, and wisdom from hokum. To know when experts are trustworthy, and when they’re blowing smoke.

We need to know what happened and how it happened, so we can keep it from happening again. Or the coronavirus will turn out to be the least of our problems.

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.