Last week I had lunch in Massachusetts with Martin Kulldorff, the Harvard Medical School professor who helped draft the Great Barrington Declaration, which condemned lockdowns as a public-health disaster.
I can't tell you how great it was.
That part didn't surprise me. What did surprise me: how few masks I saw even in Massachusetts.
I had assumed that that charade would persist for quite a while in the blue states. And yet there were far fewer masks than I expected.
With so much of normal life resuming so quickly, it's tempting to think that the issue is behind us and we can safely move on to other things.
And of course I have been discussing plenty of other things on the Tom Woods Show, and at times in these emails (which are worth reading even when not about COVID, my dear subscriber).
But a few words of caution:
(1) Many places outside the U.S. are still enduring inhumane lockdowns and those people matter, too.
(2) We cannot just let this rest. What these people did to us is unforgivable, and since we have something approaching control groups, we can know it was all essentially useless. We cannot allow the conventional wisdom to settle at: the mitigation measures saved countless lives, and the deaths we experienced were the fault of people's "bad behavior." That myth needs to be "exploded," to use a favorite word of Ludwig von Mises.
(3) The fanatics are emphasizing the "Delta variant," even though it isn't any more deadly. The UK has already exploited it as an excuse to break its promise regarding the end of restrictions. We have to carry on the fight to keep anything similar from happening in the U.S.
When the conventional wisdom is a pack of lies, it can influence future policy for decades to come.
The caricature that passes for knowledge of nineteenth-century economic history influences antitrust policy to this day. The false belief that "capitalism" caused the Great Depression and the financial crisis of 2008, and the equally false belief that the New Deal deserves credit for lifting the U.S. out of the Depression, continue to influence economic policy.
If we declare victory and walk away, lockdown will become yet another historical episode everyone misunderstood, and that in turn brought about future calamities.
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