Gender Bias Cannot Explain the Pandemic Response

Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO's COVID-19 technical lead and head of emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, looks on during a press conference at the World Health Organisation's headquarters in Geneva on Dec. 14, 2022. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

Women were notably victimized by lockdowns, masking, and vaccine mandates. The lockdowns yanked many working women with children out of the workforce, closed child care and schooling, and forced them back into the home. Millions were hit by this fate, and many are still not back at work. Labor force participation by working-age women is back where it was decades ago.

That is to say, many women who lost paid work have not gone back to work. I’ve yet to see any major feminist influencer comment on this disaster much less speak frankly about what has happened, namely the reversal of decades of what they used to call progress. It was all shattered in an instant, the work of a century tossed out. Then the very groups that one might suppose would rise up in fury said: who cares?

Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker

So too with masking, which robbed everyone of the ability to communicate via something as simple as a smile. Yes, this hurts everyone but one gender has a particular focus on the smile as a communication tool (and if you cancel me for that remark, you have no interest in reality).

Forcing all women to cover up in public is not a Western practice. Indeed, it amounts to a kind of de-emancipation. To top it off, it is incontrovertibly true that the masks achieved nothing in terms of public health. So women covered up their faces for two years for no reason.

As for the vaccine, new data shows that menstrual irregularities affected not some but perhaps most women, which should have served as a sign. They knew this from the trials but they went ahead anyway. Miscarriages are way up too. This is an emerging scandal, no question about it. If the vaccines have made any contribution to dramatically declining rates of birth in most countries that deployed them, there will surely be hell to play.

Several friends of mine are looking at the above and noticing something about the professions surrounding public health. The overwhelming numbers of employees are women but the profession is by-and-large run by men. To what extent can we blame the disastrous policies on a kind of blindness to the special needs of women? Was there a hidden misogyny at work in the decision to overthrow decades of experience in public health in favor of draconian policies?

At first this seems tempting to believe. There might even be a grain of truth in it. But as we are looking for causes and solutions, I have doubts that this is the best place to look. After all, and uniquely in this pandemic, women have been in very high leadership positions.

Consider Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, who works for the World Health Organization. An American by birth and training, it was she who drafted the Feb. 20, 2020, report on the U.S./UK/EU junket to China and reported that lockdowns work great, thanks to government and people and their patriotic willingness to lock down. “Remarkable solidarity,” she wrote!

This report inspired the United States and the world to lock down. She bears direct responsibility. We know this because her name is on the metadata, plain to see. She signed off on that document without the slightest interest in how it would hurt working women and moms.

Now take a look at the second powerful women to carry out the actions. It was Dr. Deborah Birx. She talked President Trump into lockdowns. She later falsified government reports to keep panic high. Then she toured the United States urging mask mandates and further closures. Contrary to what the Cato Institute claimed, she is far from being a hero of the pandemic. She personally bears responsibility for the disaster, probably even more than Fauci.

Then consider Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers who bears responsibility for keeping schools closed with impossible demands. Students in the United States have lost two years of educational achievement, and probably more. She was behind not only the disruption but also its incredible prolongation for one year, two years, and even longer.

Finally, look at Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who heads the CDC and worked to deny natural immunity, overpromise on the vaccines, and push masking and lockdowns throughout. She has been truly the worst of the worst.

I’ll stop there without mentioning the many women reporters, doctors, and public health scientists who agitated for lockdowns and mandates. My point is not somehow to pick on the women involved. My point is that error and power abuse is a tendency of the human condition that is not uniquely gendered. I do think we can conclude from this that simply putting more women in powerful positions in public health is not going to prevent the next pandemic disaster. Plenty of women were in powerful positions this time and they performed no more exceptionally than the men.

Now, to be sure, moms were the true heroes of the pandemic because it was they who essentially stormed statehouses around the country to demand that the schools be reopened. It was they who ferociously decried the vaccine mandates in colleges. And it is they who are today driving educational reform to fix the ghastly curricula they discovered once they had to help the kids with homework.

So in this case, women, just like men, were both villains and heroes throughout, which is to say that both are simply people and not homogeneous actors. The gendered critique of the pandemic response seems to forget that.

Our ideological systems can prevent us from seeing reality. They add a prism to our investigations that can blind more than they reveal. This is certainly true with the theory that the calamity of three years was caused by men at women’s expense and therefore the way to turn things around is to put more women in powerful roles. I have no objection to anyone achieving new heights of professional success but merely gendering hiring is not likely to achieve anything.

A clear lens to understand the response must consider class. All these people, men and women who became oppressors, were in the government class, the ruling class, the high-end professional class, and they all (men, women, black, white, whatever) decided to adopt willful blindness to the interests of the poor and working classes. Indeed, they shoved them in front of the virus, made them mask up for no reason, and then used them as guinea pigs in a test of a new medical technology that hurt so many people and helped few if anyone.

We should pledge in this post-pandemic period to dispense with our ideological bias and see the world as it really is, not a cesspool of conflict involving race and gender but rather one in which a few of the powerful rule unjustly over the many of the powerless. That’s the core of the problem. It’s a matter of distribution of power and rights. That’s the real problem and the underlying cause of the destruction all around us.

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