What We Lost in the War on COVID
Daniel Dal Monte
August 22, 2024
The news cycle moves so quickly these days that we can forget to dwell on major events. But tyranny thrives on a short attention span.
Just a couple of years ago, we witnessed government dictates turn the entire world into a highly regimented military encampment.
A Military Response: The Role of the National Security Council
Ongoing research has revealed that the response to COVID-19 shifted early on from the public health authorities to the military. For instance, the then deputy national security advisor, Matthew Pottinger, in November 2019, appointed Deborah Birx to spearhead the COVID response.
Pottinger had no experience in public health but knew Birx through his wife, who worked at the CDC. Birx admitted in her congressional testimony that the National Security Council had recruited her for the position on the COVID task force. Birx was an immunologist and an Army colonel who had worked on AIDS research but had no experience in epidemiology or novel airborne respiratory viruses.
It appears as though the National Security Council, which is responsible for foreign policy and protecting the nation, took over the development of the pandemic response protocols, scrapping those already established by public health officials. According to a March 13, 2020, document titled “PanCap Adapted U.S. Government Pandemic Response Plan,” the National Security Council was entirely in charge of policy development for the COVID response. PanCap stands for “pandemic crisis action plan.”
Debbie Lerman, a persistent investigative journalist on the pandemic response, points out that the adapted PanCap shifted the implementation (distinct from the policy development) of the pandemic response away from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The National Security Council (NSC) ran policy, and FEMA became the lead federal agency on the interagency cooperation necessary to implement the policy.
This shift in power from public health authorities to military management helps us understand the exceptionally blunt and one-dimensional response to the COVID pandemic —that is, the “quarantine-until-vaccine” response. I want to highlight here three aspects of the pandemic response that flagrantly violate standards of medical ethics.
Bad Medicine
First, the COVID response coming from NSC insisted that a vaccine was the only proper response to the virus. Alternative treatments—so they told us—were largely ineffective at best, and dangerous at worst. The insistence on the vaccine as the unique panacea to COVID was the basis for the mandates coming from all sectors of the economy because if there were alternative treatments, we would not all have to receive the vaccine.
For instance, authorities dismissed the idea that natural immunity was sufficient protection, equal to or better than the vaccine. Therapies like ivermectin suffered ridicule and severe warnings, even though now a massive number of meta-analyses attesting to the efficacy of this drug against COVID have been published.
Instead of offering an array of viable treatments, the militarized COVID response insisted on “quarantine until vaccine” for the entire population. We could not go to work, the gym, or even to a restaurant, unless we took the vaccine, which wasn’t even available for a year after the pandemic was declared.
This heavy-handed approach, characteristic of a wartime response instead of a sophisticated public health strategy, violated the medical ethics principle of beneficence. Beneficence refers to the duty of acting for the good of others: We cannot merely refrain from harming people, but we must actively help them when they are in distress, especially when we occupy positions of public trust, as do physicians. Beneficent people seek what is best for the other, like the good Samaritan in one of Jesus’ parables.
By insisting on a crude quarantine-until-vaccine military strategy, pandemic response leaders did not act in our best interests. Someone truly motivated by beneficence will use all the options available to help someone, particularly if those options have low risk. When someone is drowning, a beneficent person will not arbitrarily refuse to use, for instance, a life preserver, or other lifeline, or to at least call for help, but instead insist on only using a helicopter for the rescue.
A beneficent medical professional will not provide just one option for therapy (especially one that isn’t yet available) when there are multiple low-cost, low-risk therapies available. To push just one therapy, one must have selfish, not beneficent, motives. A drug manufacturer would not be beneficent if it pressured doctors to prescribe only its medication when others are also available.
The quarantine-until-vaccine policy had a high cost for the population, with questionable benefit. The forced quarantine caused kids to miss school and people to lose employment. The vaccine was a novel product with little track record for safety and efficacy. Indeed, vaccines in general are complicated and often have no effect on mutated forms of the originally targeted virus.
On the other hand, natural immunity and ivermectin had a much better risk-to-benefit ratio. Anyone who has already had the virus has natural immunity, and the WHO classifies ivermectin as an essential medicine that any functioning health system must keep in stock.
With a novel product like the COVID mRNA vaccines, the government should have adopted a precautionary principle, waiting to see the early effects on willing trial participants of the vaccine to ensure its safety, rather than immediately imposing mass vaccination.
‘Follow the Science’
Secondly, the quarantine-until-vaccination strategy also showed a naïve confidence in the effectiveness of one strategy for an entire global population. Careful clinicians recognize that the practice of medicine is not like following a cookbook. Evidence in medicine is not a universal algorithm, providing an exact solution to a very complex problem for an entire population.
Philosophers of medicine have noted that a single complete algorithmic and infallible methodology for fixing medical problems is not possible. The scientific method reaches microsolutions for particular contexts, not general solutions. We cannot provide objective ranking for different types of evidence, and oftentimes it is hard to extrapolate evidence to new contexts. Medical evidence is pluralistic not monolithic, but the militarized COVID response applied a one-size-fits-all strategy.
Government officials continually blasted us with claims that “the science says,” as if the scientific method were some omniscient, unambiguous oracle instead of ongoing discovery.
Big Brother
Finally, the militarized COVID response showed a complete disregard for patient autonomy. This response exercised hard paternalism, a form of paternalism in which an authority takes away decision-making from someone who is fully competent. No one could make their own medical decisions during COVID, even highly educated and healthy people.
Hard paternalism is an authoritarian style of leadership that is foreign to American democracy and our culture of respect for the individual. We do not accept the idea that Big Brother knows best, nor should we accept such egregious violations of medical ethics like those characteristic of a military response.
intellectualtakeout.org/2024/08/what-we-lost-in-the-war-on-covid
