COVID-19 Lessons Businesses Must Promote

Members of the public are seen out on Princess Street during the COVID-19 pandemic in Edinburgh, Scotland, on April 17, 2020. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Commentary

Four years have passed since much of the world reacted to a coronavirus bug as if a new strain of smallpox threatened to wipe out a sizable portion of humanity. Lockdowns shut the economy almost everywhere; distaste for government and a negative outlook for the future almost certainly turned the 2020 presidential election against incumbent President Donald Trump despite the historic economic boom enjoyed up until COVID-19 hit; and, as was ultimately discovered, top Washington health care officials were engaging in deceit.

Last month, the Pew Research Center found, remarkably, that only 10 percent of Americans are very concerned that they will contract one of the new mutations of the virus that causes COVID-19 and require hospitalization; compare that with mid-2020, when as many as two-thirds considered the virus a major threat.

According to Pew, only 28 percent of adults in the country who were polled reported getting the latest COVID-19 vaccine, despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention strongly recommending it to prevent serious illness. What a difference from three years ago, when nearly 70 percent were fully vaccinated. Amazingly, a significantly larger proportion of adult Americans have received the latest flu shot—44 percent. Nearly half of those getting the flu shot by their doctor or other health care provider refused to use their visit to get the COVID-19 vaccine, too.

Skepticism in regard to what Americans were being told to believe four years ago—that the virus was a massively deadly threat requiring that almost everyone stay home from work and school for months on end, that there was no way that the virus was devised in a Chinese lab, and that available treatments were useless—might best be reflected in the following fact: No less than the CIA confirmed last fall that it was conducting an internal probe into whether some of its personnel who were investigating COVID-19’s origins were allegedly paid off to suppress their discoveries.

Some seven “multi-disciplinary and experienced officers with significant scientific expertise” were tasked with forming a “COVID discovery team,” noted a letter last year to CIA Director Bill Burns from two House chairmen, Reps. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Mike Turner (R-Ohio). A whistleblower described in the letter as a “multi-decade, senior-level, current CIA officer” made the allegations against his or her colleagues. Six of the seven CIA team members came to accept “a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” according to the letter from the congressmen.

Clearly, COVID-19 is not what we were told it was four years ago, and the lockdowns were not, as almost everyone accepted, a rational response.

Even in 2020, with the lockdowns in full swing and before public resentment snowballed, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was describing how businesses could and would make end runs around government edicts forcing workers, so it was thought, to vegetate unproductively at home. At that early stage, he identified “systemic, structural changes ... that will define the way we live and work going forward.”

The Microsoft Teams remote meeting app amid the lockdowns “now has more than 75 million daily active users,” Mr. Nadella boasted. “The number of organizations integrating their third-party and line of business apps with Teams has tripled in the past two months. ... 20 organizations with more than 100,000 employees are now using Teams, including Continental AG, Ernst & Young, Pfizer, and SAP.”

As prescient as he may have been, it is telling that Mr. Nadella’s mindset was 180 degrees from that of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who two years ago was demanding that his employees return and threatened to fire those wishing to remain unvaccinated and stay home.

“If you aren’t going to get vaxxed, you won’t be able to work in that office,” he told Reuters. “We’re not going to pay you not to work in the office.”

The year before that, Mr. Dimon had groused: “I’m about to cancel all my Zoom meetings. I’m done with it.”

He pointed to cases in which JPMorgan lost business to its rivals because “bankers from the other guys visited, and ours didn’t.”

“Well, that’s a lesson,” Mr. Dimon said.

And he argued that remote work “does not work for younger people.”

“It doesn’t work for those who want to hustle,” Mr. Dimon said. “It doesn’t work in terms of spontaneous idea generation.”

Obviously, technology has reached a level at which working from home—or from anywhere—is feasible for a great many if not most white-collar jobs; still, just as ludicrous as denying this fact would be to discount the value of physical contact among employees, as celebrated by Mr. Dimon.

It is with these prominent CEOs’ perspectives in mind that the findings of a new analysis of the COVID-19 response should be appreciated.

“COVID Lessons Learned: A Retrospective After Four Years” was published last month under the auspices of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and the Independent Institute. Authors Scott Atlas, a Hoover Institution health scholar; Steve Hanke, a Johns Hopkins economist; Philip Kerpen, an ex-Cato Institute policy analyst; and Casey Mulligan, a University of Chicago economics professor, found that what had been the accepted policy in responding to a pandemic—assuring that “normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted”—was swiftly thrown out the window when COVID-19 arrived.

Instead, according to the report, “the public health establishment followed the opposite principle: they intentionally stoked and amplified fear, which overlaid enormous economic, social, educational, and health harms on top of the harms of the virus itself.”

Chief among them were needless losses of human life.

“Non-COVID excess deaths from lockdowns and societal panic are estimated at about 100,000 per year in the United States and zero in non-lockdown Sweden,” the report reads.

The much-ballyhooed saving of lives as a result of forcibly smothering nearly all economic activities involving physical contact was hugely exaggerated, accompanied by deceptive governmental motives.

“Most lockdown measures were realized around the time when hospitalizations peaked, which due to the timelag between infection and severe disease, necessarily occurs well after the infective peak,” the report reads. “They were timed to claim credit for declining waves, but rarely had any discernible causal impact.”

A comprehensive review of the literature and meta-analysis published by the Institute of Economic Affairs in London revealed that the average lockdown in the United States and Europe in spring 2020 cut mortality by only 3.2 percent. Shelter-in-place orders similarly reduced mortality only marginally, by 2 percent. That comes to a few thousand individuals. (By comparison, there are about 38,000 flu deaths in the United States and 72,000 flu deaths in Europe every year.) It turns out that it was voluntary changes in behavior, such as social distancing, that were responsible for the significant measure of lifesaving.

Meanwhile, the lockdowns themselves were often much more a hazard than COVID-19, causing “a rise in non-COVID excess mortality, mental health deterioration, child abuse and domestic violence, widening global inequality, large increases in debt, food insecurity, lost educational opportunities, unhealthy lifestyle behaviors, increased loneliness and social polarization,” and “democratic backsliding and human rights violations,” according to a comprehensive study on lockdown harms cited by the report.

Bullying everyone, or close to it, to go home and stay there left “a legacy of poverty, mental health illness, learning loss, debt, food insecurity, social polarization, erosion of respect for human rights and elevated excess mortality for non-COVID health conditions,” the same study states.

More than 49 million Americans were forced out of work, as shown by Bureau of Labor Statistics survey data. A study by the National Bureau for Economic Research forecasts, as a consequence, from 840,000 to 1.22 million excess deaths in the next 15 to 20 years, disproportionately among women and minorities. By contrast, Sweden, “commonly viewed as an outlier relying more on recommendations and voluntary adjustments than on strict lockdowns ... combined low excess death rates with relatively small economic costs.”

The report’s big takeaway is that “lockdowns, school closures, and mandates were catastrophic errors, pushed with remarkable fervor by public health authorities at all levels.”

In anticipation of future pandemics, Congress and the states should pass laws restricting the powers of governmental executives, with term limits for all those holding senior positions in health agencies, the authors recommended.

There is no getting away from the certainty that other pandemics will assault the globe in the future, likely in fewer years than the century that separated the 1918 flu from COVID-19. Businesses must affix themselves to the right side of the divide between governments always looking to come off as heroic via restrictions on freedom and those who have learned a painful lesson and are not bashful about calling out Big Brother’s miscalculations and abuses of power. CEOs should be saying it loud and clear to one and all—no more lockdowns as a response to what amounted to an especially severe flu.

If they do not, when the time comes, they will again find themselves stuck at home endlessly exasperated, as Mr. Dimon was, as they try to run their companies and outstep their competitors via dependence on Zoom.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.