Its superfast spread told us early the virus was unstoppable and likely lab-modified.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., June 18, 2024 Wall Street Journal
You didn’t think any question related to Covid would be settled in the recent congressional grilling of Anthony Fauci and you were right. That’s why the episode came and went from your news feed with barely a ripple.
Here’s the story that needs to be fleshed out. Covid was a superfast spreader compared with the ordinary flu or even the novel pandemic flu that afflicts mankind once or twice a century.
Its superfast spread had a particular outcome in Wuhan, Northern Italy and New York City, where the virus spread unrecognized for weeks and severe cases, though a small percentage of the total, reached a critical mass that overwhelmed hospitals.
Where communities anticipated the virus and people made small adjustments, these catastrophes weren’t repeated. A vast fog of recrimination since has obscured this part of the story.
Our efforts did nothing to stop Covid and yet all but extinguished the flu during the two years in question. One variety, the so-called Yamagata B strain, appears to have been rendered extinct altogether by social-distancing efforts that had zero effect on Covid itself.
That’s how fast-spreading Covid was, and how uncontainable.
Stop here: If Covid’s uniquely rapid spread was due to a lab modification, as accumulating circumstantial evidence suggests, that’s extremely important to know.
Back to the story: Most people’s experience of Covid wasn’t going to be bad enough to justify lockdowns. They wouldn’t voluntarily stop normal living; the spread wasn’t going to be curtailed.
On the same day President Trump received a report saying the virus had potential to be a trillion-dollar calamity, I wrote that it was already certainly spreading undetected in New York City and was less deadly than reported thanks to unobserved mild or symptomless cases. I was channeling what epidemiologists were thinking at the time. Scientists, it’s true, would end up surrendering to the politicians, but the real story is that the politicians surrendered to the public, which wanted to be told an unrealistic story about the virus being stamped out.
The turning point came when the Trump administration extended its 15-day stay-at-home guidance after polling showed the public didn’t want “flatten the curve,” it wanted to be spared Covid altogether, though all knew this was impossible.
If you wonder why the Covid experience is playing no role in the election or slightly favors Mr. Trump, this is why. Americans by now have experienced the disease and realize it was far from unendurable. The lockdowns were needless destruction. Vaccine mandates were not going to stop the spread (though the vaccine itself reduced the risk of severe outcomes in vulnerable patients).
Mr. Biden is now more associated with the failed medical establishment and post-Covid inflation than Mr. Trump is. Test, trace and quarantine was absurd and worthless when 90% of infections went unreported. Mask mandates undoubtedly caused some vulnerable people to die because they believed a mask would protect them.
These steps were a political show as the virus made its inevitable way through the population, while politicians competed to suggest how valiantly they were trying to stop it.
It was a hand-waving show, unbelievably expensive and wasteful. And lacking was corrective reporting from our press. The essence of our folly was a fetishizing by the news media of a pathologically stupid “confirmed case count,” which made the virus seem more deadly, rare and stoppable than it was, justifying a tone of media blame against any politician who seemed insufficiently committed to stopping it.
I noted at the time another large democratic country with an English-language press, India, where cognitive realism led reporters to relegate “confirmed case” reports to the bottom of news accounts. Their reporting focused on antibody studies showing the real spread to be 20 or 30 times greater.
I choose the phrase cognitive realism to contrast with the U.S. press, which picks sides among political leaders and filters reality through a need to valorize its favorites and vilify the baddies. The culmination was Joe Biden’s absurdly unscientific vaccine mandates, designed for a political end, to focus blame for Covid on the media stereotype of a GOP loyalist and Trump supporter.
In a democracy, voters get the government they ask for. If so, the most important Covid lesson is the one least mentioned. Read between the lines of today’s newsroom furors at the Washington Post, New York Times and other outlets. The mission of the press still seems dangerously up in the air. The job should be helping the public understand what disciplined factual reasoning can tell us about the world. It’s hard to believe our socio-political Covid outcomes wouldn’t have been a lot better if the media had done so.