MDs underscore importance of rationality in fighting pandemic

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EDICAL doctors, writing in the Wall Street Journal and the Epoch Times, have crystallized the great importance of applying rationality in all decisions and measures to fight the coronavirus pandemic at both government and citizen level.

Whether the decision concerns an entire country, like an order to place it under lockdown, or whether it involves only the individual citizen’s decision to be vaccinated with a chosen vaccine, or to refuse vaccination.

It is critically important that the government and the citizen should reach their decision by rational study of the facts and the nature of the choice before them. The decision should be publicly defensible.

Three articles by doctors of medicine, published by the Wall Street Journal and the Epoch Times over the past few months, are instructive in this regard. They have helped me in my own decision-making and writing on the pandemic, so I commend them to interested readers for study.

1. “An epidemic of Covid mania” by Joseph A. Ladapo, Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2021

2. “Rationality and immunization” by Theodore Dalrymple, MD, Epoch Times, April 20, 2021.

3. “An epidemic of misinformation,” by Scott Atlas, MD, WSJ, Dec. 21, 2020.

Covid mania

Joseph A. Ladapo, MD, PhD, a physician and health policy researcher at the University of California, focuses on two related problems: 1) an overreaction to the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) and 2) the diminution of every other problem. He wrote:

“What are the lessons of Covid-19? It depends who you ask. Some believe politicization of the pandemic response cost lives. Others believe a stronger US publichealth system would have reduced Covid-19 deaths significantly. Still others say lockdowns should have been longer and more stringent, or that they were ineffective.

“But one lesson that should transcend ideological differences: Don’t put one illness above all other problems in society, a condition known as ‘Covid mania.’

“The novel coronavirus has caused suffering and heartbreak, particularly for older adults and their loved ones. But it also has a low mortality rate among most people and especially the young — estimated at 0.01 percent for people under 40 — and therefore never posed a serious threat to social and economic institutions. Compassion and realism need not be enemies. But Covid mania crowded out reasoned and wise policymaking.

“Americans groaned when leaders first called for ‘two weeks to slow the spread’ in March 2020. Months later, many of these same Americans hardly blinked when leaders declared that lockdowns should continue indefinitely. For months Covid had been elevated above all other problems in society. Over time new rules were written and new norms accepted.

“Liberty has played a special role in US history, fueling advances from independence to emancipation to the fight for equal rights for women and racial minorities. Unfortunately, Covid mania led many policy makers to treat liberty as a nuisance rather than a core American principle.

“Covid mania has also wreaked havoc on science and its influence on policy. While scientists’ passion for discovery and improving health has fueled research on the novel coronavirus, Covid mania has interpreted scientific advancements through an increasingly narrow frame.

“There has only been one question: How can scientific findings be deployed to reduce Covid-19 spread? It hasn’t mattered how impractical these measures may be.

“Discoveries that might have helped save lives, such as better outpatient therapies, were ignored because they didn’t fit the desired policy outcome.”

Rationality and immunization

Theodore Dalrymple, whose article appeared in the Epoch Times on April 20, 2021, wrote:

“…None of us can spend his life examining the evidence for all that he believes or fears. At best, we can do so only intermittently and in bursts. We are obliged to take much on trust or according to our prejudices.

“No subject now arouses more passion than immunization against epidemic disease, as it has always done.

“Doctor Johnson has one of his characters say in Rasselas: ‘Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must first be overcome.’ Mankind is thus inevitably both the beneficiary and the victim of the Promethean bargain.

“The assertion, often made, that the long-term effects of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are unknown is therefore correct in the strictest sense but irrelevant. The long-term effects of much of what we do are unknown. Moreover, we often mistake the rational reasons for doing what we do.

“Immunization seeks not only to reduce very drastically an individual patient’s chances of contracting a disease, but to interrupt the transmission of the disease and if possible to eliminate it altogether…

“The fear of immunization against Covid-19 seems to me exaggerated and irrational. The fact that none of us can be fully rational does not obviate the need for us to try to be as rational as possible.

“Here are some figures from the British Medicines and Healthcare

products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the organization in charge of tracing harmful effects of drugs and medical equipment. It has a scheme by which any doctor, nurse or member of the public can report any suspected harmful effect to it.

“As of April 5 this year, 31, 622,367 people had received a first dose of vaccine, and 5,496,716 people a second. In all, there were 43,890 reports of side effects with the Pfizer vaccine and 126,577 with the AstraZeneca vaccine. Eleven million people had received the Pfizer vaccine, and 20.6 million the AstraZeneca.

“The vast majority of the side effects reported were not serious and, because of the vagaries of reporting, affected for example by publicity, no conclusions about relative frequency can be drawn from these raw figures.

“There were 314 deaths within a month of immunization with the Pfizer vaccine and 521 with the AstraZeneca, suspected by someone of having a connection with the immunization, that is to say, one in 35,032 for the Pfizer, and one in 39,539 for the AstraZeneca.

“These figures are meaningless in themselves, because there is no proof of a causative relationship between the vaccine and the death; in any given month a number of people among 31 million, especially including the oldest section of the population can be expected to die, on my back-of-theenvelope calculation at least 25,000. So, vaccine followed by death within a month cannot possibly be taken as indicating cause and effect.…”

Pandemic of misinformation

The Wall Street Journal was the first to use the phrase “pandemic of misinformation” when it published an op-ed piece by Dr. Scott Atlas, on Dec. 21, 2029, entitled “A pandemic of misinformation.”

Atlas, a former adviser to Donald Trump in the White House coronavirus task force, addressed chiefly the misinformation that was scaring America out of its wits during the pandemic. He wrote:

“America has been paralyzed by death and fear for nearly a year, and the politicization of the pandemic has made things worse by adding misinformation and vitriol to the mix. With vaccines finally being administered, we should be entering a joyous phase. Instead we endure still more inflammatory rhetoric.

“Americans need to understand three realities. First, all 50 states independently directed and implemented their own pandemic policies. In every case, governors and local officials were responsible for on-the-ground choices — every business limit, school closing, shelter-in-place order and mask requirement…

“Second, nearly all states used the same draconian policies that people now insist on hardening, even though the number of positive cases increased while people’s movements were constrained, business activities were strictly limited, and schools were closed.

“Lockdown policies had baleful effects on local economies, families and children, and the virus spread anyway…

“Third, the federal government’s role in the pandemic has been grossly mis-characterized by the media and their Democratic allies. That distortion has obscured several significant successes, while undermining the confidence of ordinary Americans. Federal financial support and directives enabled the development of a massive, state-of-the-art testing capacity and produced billions of dollars of personal protective equipment.

“The federal government also increased the protection of the elderly during late summer and fall. This effort included an intensive testing strategy for nursinghome staff and residents based on community activity.

“The federal government expedited development and delivery of lifesaving drugs, such as novel antibody treatments that reduce hospitalizations of high-risk elderly by more than 70 percent.

“Under Operation Warp Speed, the federal government took nearly all the risk away from private pharmaceutical companies and delivered highly effective vaccines, hitting all promised timelines.

“In this season when respiratory virus illnesses become more common and people move indoors to keep warm, many states are turning to more severe restrictions on businesses and outdoor activities. Yet empirical data from the US, Europe and Japan show that lockdowns don’t eliminate the virus and don’t stop the virus from spreading. They do, however, create extremely harmful health and social problems beyond a dramatic drop in learning, including a tripling of reported depression, skyrocketing suicidal ideation, unreported child abuse, skipped visits for cancer and other medical care.

“States and cities that keep their economies locked down after highly vulnerable populations have been vaccinated will be doubling down on failed policies that are destroying families and sacrificing children, particularly among the working class and poor.

“It is not at all clear that American society with its cherished freedoms will survive, regardless of our success in defeating the pandemic threat.”