By Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday, February 09, 2022
In the Washington Post, Leana Wen attempts to explain away her sudden change of heart on
COVID restrictions by positioning herself as the reasonable third way between
“two extremes.” Her argument is Obama-esque:
Some claim that these actions are
proof that mandates were never needed and question the effectiveness of
masking, vaccination and other evidence-based mitigation measures. Others offer
no reasonable endpoint for restrictions and make continued masking a symbol of
their belief in science.
Both extremes are wrong. Public
health policy is nuanced and complex, and the sooner we acknowledge this, the
quicker we can move from polarizing rhetoric to reasonable compromises that
allow us to live with covid-19.
In Wen’s telling, there are three camps in America: Those
who think that restrictions were never needed, those who think that
restrictions are always needed, and those who “advocated restrictions from the
start but now believe circumstances have changed enough that mandates can go.”
It is into this third “camp” that Wen is trying to place herself.
But this, of course, is not the whole story, because it
misses a vital constituent part: time. The primary criticism that
is being leveled against Wen — and many others — is not that there was never a
need for restrictions, but that those restrictions lasted far too long, were
routinely justified with Calvinball, confused personalized cost-benefit
analyses with objective “science,” and only disappeared when the polling became
unbearable for the Democratic Party.
Wen writes that:
At the start of the pandemic, there
were few tools in the public health arsenal to fight a new and deadly virus. At
that time, and during subsequent surges, masks and physical distancing were
crucial measures that helped “flatten the curve” and save lives.
This is fine defense of what happened in early 2020. But
it is not a good defense of what has happened since that time. There are
an enormous number of people in America who sit in Wen’s
“third camp” — people, that is, who “advocated restrictions from the start but
now believes circumstances have changed enough that mandates can go,” who
“acknowledge the tragic toll of the pandemic but also understand that good
health cannot simply be the absence of covid-19,” and who have been trying “to
replace vitriol and divisiveness with nuance and compromise” — and who have sat
in that camp as early as April of 2021.
Throughout her piece, Wen’s key implication is that only
those who have changed their minds this week are following “the
science.” On TV on Monday, Wen said this
literally. But, again, it is simply not true that only now is
it possible for a person to conclude, as Wen finally has, “both that covid-19
causes illness and harm, and also that its continued prioritization, to the
exclusion of other issues, does, too.” Given that Wen acknowledges the
continued existence of Americans who “offer no reasonable endpoint for
restrictions,” she presumably knows this.
All told, Wen’s essay presents an opinion about tradeoffs
masquerading as a mathematical diagnosis. If Wen were more honest, she would
have made her case for changing our approach now, while acknowledging that
others disagree and have disagreed for a while. Instead, she played precisely
the same game as has been played throughout — and showed us all that she, and
those who think like her, haven’t learned a damned thing.
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