COVID-19 must be defeated without locking down the economy
Written By: Charlie Gerow
COVID- 19 is a serious disease. Every good person wants to see it defeated as quickly as possible and all wish that no other lives are lost or seriously affected. On that we all agree. However, there is significant disagreement on how best to accomplish the agreed upon objectives.
The suggestion that those who don’t buy into serial lockdowns, shutdowns and governmental edicts as the best way of handling the disease are uncaring, selfish or just plain ignorant is unctuous, to say the least.
Let’s be clear from the outset. I’m not a scientist. I don’t even play one on television. A quick glance at my science grades from high school or college will tell you why.
I do know that the scientific community is not monolithic in its thinking as many in the media would like us to believe. There is serious disagreement among scientists about the effectiveness and wisdom of locking down the country, stifling our economy, seriously disrupting individual lives and bringing negative consequences to innumerable households.
Tom Wolf and Rachel Levine have spent months issuing arbitrary after capricious edict, killing the state’s economy and causing individuals and families psychological, financial and personal harm.
They took elderly patients out of hospitals and put them into nursing homes where many died. Of course they waited to get Levine’s mother out of harms way and into a luxury hotel first.
Wolf violated his own pronouncements about social distancing by attending a “peaceful protest.” He apparently believes that making political statements is far more important than saving lives.
Wolf’s hypocrisy was matched by governmental leaders across the country who adopted the “do as I say, not as I do” approach. Governors and mayors in state after state thought it was perfectly acceptable to impose restrictions on the freedoms of individual citizens while simultaneously flaunting their own rules.
The list of those who impose restrictions and then defy them personally is so long it won’t fit into this column.
Chicago’s mayor thought it was perfectly acceptable for her to sneak out and get her hair done while she compelled her fellow citizens to stay at home.
The mayor of Washington D.C. thought her attendance at a Biden rally was more important than any public health considerations.
Speaking of political gatherings, were those Trump rallies that were held at few days before election day any more “super spreaders,” as the media termed them, than Biden events held a few days after?
The governors of Michigan, New Mexico and Illinois; the mayors of Denver, San Jose and San Francisco and others were all guilty of commanding others to do what they refused.
Adding to the blatant hypocrisy of those imposing crushing dictates and then ignoring them was the arbitrary manner in which the mandates were imposed and the inconsistencies of the orders themselves. All of it added up to serious pushback from many citizens.
One clear example was the issue of high school sports. Wolf’s overreaches reached the point where the legislature, whom he routinely ignored, took action. They overwhelmingly adopted legislation to allow individual school district to make the call on whether their athletes played. Nearly 50 House Democrats voted in favor as did almost half the Senate Democrats.
Sadly, as with so much common sense legislation, it was met by Wolf’s veto pen. Unfortunately not enough Democrats wanted to buck their own governor and an override failed by a couple of votes.
When I suggested in this column and elsewhere that schools should not be shuttered, my position was attacked as insensitive and unscientific. Now even Anthony Fauci is saying, “Keep the schools open.”
When we are admonished to “follow the science,” it’s often a question of which science. There is far from unanimity in the scientific community over the effectiveness of lockdowns.
The Great Barrington Declaration, drafted by top scientists from Stanford, Harvard and Oxford calls into question the wisdom of shutting down individual lives and the nation’s economy. It’s been signed by thousands of other scientists.
Of course, there is also the vital issue of individual constitutional rights. As Justice Samuel Alito recently observed, the pandemic “has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” Alito declared, “The Constitution is not suspended when the government declares a state of disaster.”
Defeating the pandemic must be a state and federal goal. The battle must be waged within the knowledge that locking down the economy doesn’t necessarily contain the disease but does create negative economic and health consequences.
As Dr. Cryel Whect, one of the commonwealth’s best known medical doctors and prominent Democrats, said this week, “The time to dispense with panic and hysteria has arrived. A return to a functioning civilized society is now overdue. The overall restrictive measures that have been imposed are simply unsustainable.”