A culture promoting safety above all else was a means of establishing unprecedented limitations of the public’s freedom during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Steven Templeton, an immunologist and author of the recent book, “Fear of a Microbial Planet: How a Germophobic Safety Culture Makes Us Less Safe.”
Mr. Templeton shared his thoughts in a recent interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program, saying that this safety culture has become extreme, evolving to something irrational that could—together with the spread of misinformation about the real risks involved—lead to unprecedented misery via lockdowns and other extreme measures.
Although he’s not a psychologist, Mr. Templeton said he is interested in the psychological aspect of what happened in the past three years.
For example, why did governments shut down hiking trails and skating parks during COVID? There was no evidence supporting these measures, but they nevertheless were implemented, as another instance of extreme safety culture that just gives an “appearance of safety.”
This extreme safety culture can be traced back to how some children have grown up in recent decades, Mr. Templeton said, such as not being allowed to play without supervision. Children who grow up under such conditions have become doctors, nurses, and public figures, with a mindset of feeling entitled and trying to control everything.
Healthy With Microbes
To put things into perspective, Mr. Templeton said that first of all, microbial exposure is beneficial for healthy people, and it can strengthen a person. The advent of antibiotics and the era of “the only good bacteria are dead bacteria” came with a trade-off, as the healthy microbial balance in a human body was affected.
Using microbes, or mimicking their effects, can lead to development of therapeutics to lower allergies, autoimmune diseases, and gluten sensitivity, according to Mr. Templeton. Microbial disbiosis can also be relieved.
Killing all microbes with potent antibiotics has the disadvantage of the emergence of diseases that were not common in the past, he said, also called first-world diseases.
This observation can be seen more clearly by comparing the susceptibility to certain diseases in developed and developing countries.
One could expect that people in developing countries with somewhat poorer sanitation would not be able to stay healthy, but real world observations show something different.
For example, the Amish population, who live a life without electricity and modern amenities, is exposed to more microbes, their gut microflora is different, and they are healthy and exhibit fewer first-world diseases compared to other populations.
Safety or Irrationality?
Speaking of some effects that the COVID lockdowns had, Mr. Templeton mentioned that the “monomaniacal” fear of a single threat lead to ignoring other problems, such as skyrocketing obesity in children in the United States during the COVID years.The governments wanted to give to the public something they would believe makes people safer, and given the lack of evidence supporting the measures, this was just an “illusion of control,” Mr. Templeton said.
“Up until early 2020, the idea that you would wear a cloth face covering to prevent giving someone else a respiratory infection or acquiring it yourself—there was no evidence to support that. But after things had been shut down for a while, there seemed to be a need to give the public something that they could believe was going to make them safer—convince them that maybe they could go out if they just wore something over their face. That was enough. That was the appearance of safety, giving them that control—the illusion of control.”
Misinformation via the ‘Research Industrial Complex’
He said the “research industrial complex,” which works for years producing misinformation, reinforces this irrational safety culture.As an example, Mr. Templeton talked about the initial years of HIV and the fear campaign targeting heterosexual men. He said that in reality, those at very high risk were homosexual men with 10 or more sexual partners, whereas heterosexual men did not experience the same level of risk. There was, however, an effort similar to what happened during COVID, to persuade the general public that heterosexual men were also in very high risk, and that the disease could spread to people outside its vulnerable group.
In other words, it was a misinformation campaign.
The goal of this was gaining more power and influence, something that survived to the COVID response, according to Mr. Templeton.
During COVID, federal agencies tried to play with the emotion of fear in people, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying that more than 2,000 children died of COVID. The CDC did not specify whether those children were healthy, and the accuracy of this research should also be questioned, according to Mr. Templeton.
“Whether it’s even accurate is not important. It’s important to say that it’s possible that a child could die. It doesn’t matter whether it’s likely, they are trying to eliminate risk completely. They were saying that anybody can get it, and anybody can die from it, which is not really true,” Mr. Templeton said.
Mass Hysteria
People are more likely to click on sensational things online, such as fear-mongering articles, and media companies make money from clicks, according to Mr. Templeton. The media “use scary models, and pretend their predictions are not just hypotheses or worst case scenarios, but the most likely outcomes.”Experts are also used to provide “a veneer of authority in your otherwise subjective, bias-confirming piece.”
The mass hysteria over the fear of death can itself lead to adverse effects, even without any physical infection.
This was a “mass psychogenic illness,” according to a report by Smithsonian Magazine.
During COVID, the reality was that children were not getting seriously sick and healthy adults were also fine, according to Mr. Templeton. However, symptoms could still manifest in healthy people as a psychogenic illness, due to their fear, or COVID stress syndrome.
“That’s just basically a version of being a germophobe, activated by COVID,” Mr. Templeton said regarding COVID stress syndrome, citing the book “The Psychology of Pandemics,” which was published just before COVID.
“Somebody who’s been prone to [obsessive-compulsive disorder], other types of obsessive disorders, could be driven into COVID stress syndrome,” Mr. Templeton said.
Just like “The Imaginary Invalid” character created by French playwright Molière, these people always fear they will catch a devastating illness.
“They are constantly going to the doctor, constantly thinking they’re feeling symptoms, constantly thinking they’re being exposed to the virus, and being afraid of other people,” Mr. Templeton said.
The Power of the Mind
He went on to give examples of the concepts of placebo and nocebo.Placebo refers to a substance with no active ingredients, given to a patient who is not aware it is not a real medicine. This has proven benefits in Parkinson’s disease, Mr. Templeton said, as the body releases dopamine, which can help alleviate symptoms.
Nocebo means that a person feels ill even though they’ve had no exposure to a pathogen. As an example, Mr. Templeton spoke about a case in which a person overdosed on what they believed were drugs to treat depression. The patient thought he was going to die and his blood pressure dropped dangerously low before his doctor told him that he was taking fake drugs.
This could tie in to the difficulty in establishing causation in long COVID cases, according to Mr. Templeton.
“It’s very difficult to have a causation there, where exactly what they’re experiencing is directly related to the infection. The same thing happens with vaccine responses, especially something that doesn’t happen immediately after getting vaccinated, you don’t know if that’s actually caused by the vaccine or not.”
One has to clear out the “noise” from self-reported symptoms to reach a better conclusion.
Mr. Templeton also said that people are “hard-wired” to avoid exposure to an epidemic, similarly to directly avoiding eating something dirty. He mentioned the “behavioral immune system” that is “getting into the COVID stress syndrome, or going from rational ways of avoiding infectious disease to the irrational ways of avoiding disease.”
In the book “The Psychology of Pandemics,” an example is given where “during SARS-1, a woman went to the bank, and got some cash, and tried to microwave it after she came home to sterilize it, which doesn’t work on money, it actually burns it,” Mr. Templeton said.
An Emotional Response
During the pandemic, many measures that did not have any basis in science were implemented, such as school closures.School closures were enforced despite the enormous problems associated with them. Mr. Templeton mentioned the skyrocketing of 911 calls for drug abuse by youth, and the increase in suicide rates during COVID.
He also mentioned historical examples of experts reacting negatively to solutions that actually worked in fighting the disease, without rationally examining a different approach from the established medical practice of that time.
Mr. Templeton gave the example of his daughter having been infected with an illness in day care, with symptoms of a fever and lesions. The lesions remained for about two weeks.
He said that children can still carry and give a virus to another person even after all symptoms, such as lesions, have disappeared, and the virus can still be found in their stool.
His pediatrician told him that after the fever had been gone for 24 hours, his daughter could return to day care.
However, his daughter was not accepted back into the day care after her fever had stopped, because there were still lesions on her hands and feet.
“That made me think, first, about the idea of the appearance of safety,” Mr. Templeton said. “Because in this case, it didn’t matter that there were facts that this didn’t make anyone safer. It was the action that they were taking, ‘We are just doing this because other people will think it looks like we’re taking safety seriously.’ That really stuck with me when the COVID pandemic hit, and people started to act in that very same way.
“To me, it wasn’t a coincidence.”
