Have American elites—influential journalists, powerful policymakers and other cultural arbiters—learned the lessons of 2020-21? Do they want to?

See ‘An Abundance of Caution’ and ‘In Covid’s Wake’: Failing the Pandemic Test by Philip Wallach. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

He reviewed two books: “An Abundance of Caution” by David Zweig and “In Covid’s Wake,” by the Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo.

Excerpts:

"the poor evidentiary basis for the prolonged school closures and attendant follies such as masking requirements and social distancing."

"he dug into the epidemiological modeling papers whose projections seemed decisively to rule out the safety of opening schools, he found “a never-ending matryoshka doll” of citations, resting ultimately on an assumption conceded to be “arbitrary” by its initial author."

"evidence emerged early on—in March 2020—that the virus did not pose a serious threat to children. American public-health professionals remained largely impervious to this fact. Further evidence of children’s relative safety from the virus came to light in Europe and parts of the U.S. where schools reopened early or never closed, but America’s public-health establishment remained largely unmoved. Teachers’ unions, it’s fair to say, promoted hysteria about the alleged dangers of opening schools"

"officials claimed only to be offering nonbinding recommendations."

"elite institutions failed us by giving in to panic."

"consensus plans—none of which would have required extended lockdowns—were thrown out before Americans ever began dying, in part because public-health experts were entranced by China’s harsh restrictions. American policymakers had sound advice ready at hand, but most of them took the view that safety outweighed individual liberties, economic activity and quality of life."

"tendency to paint critics of lockdowns and mask mandates as racists, quacks and conspiracy theorists. Such conduct was especially evident on the question of Covid-19’s origins, as top scientists vilified anyone suggesting the virus may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China."

"By clinging to their favored nonpharmaceutical interventions, well past the point when they should have known such policies offered few benefits and many costs, governments in many urban and wealthy parts of the country trod a path that was uniquely bad"

"before the availability of vaccines, areas imposing the severest restrictions earned no discernible health benefits."

"thanks to lower vaccination rates, red states suffered many more deaths in the pandemic’s second year"

"Ms. Lee and Mr. Macedo make a strong case in favor of Sweden’s approach, which called for voluntary safety measures focused on the elderly but never included enforceable mask requirements or stay-at-home orders, let alone extended cancellations of school and recreational activities. Despite some front-loading of deaths in 2020, Sweden’s excess mortality ended up, the authors show, the lowest in Europe."

"their book is in part a plea to academia to clean its own house and so avoid the more indiscriminate scourges that politics may eventually bring."