How the elites justify coronapanic

Tomorrow is the five-year anniversary of my blog post If coronashutdown is to protect the old, why do young people have to pay for it?

The average age of a Covid-19-tagged death here in Massachusetts is 82. Thus, presumably to the extent that any lives are saved from Covid-19 by our educational, social, and economic shutdown, they will be roughly 82-year-old lives.

A friend in Berkeley, California who was an early and enthusiastic adopter of Faucism (cloth masks, double masks, N95 double masks, experimental vaccinations, double and triple boosters, Paxlovid for the inevitable encounters with SARS-CoV-2, school closures, lockdowns, etc.) recently set me an April 16, 2025 paper, “Pandemic preparation without romance: insights from public choice”, by Alex Tabarrok, a tenured economic professor at George Mason University (i.e., a state government employee who can’t be fired). My friend loves this paper and believes that it covers purported “missteps” in the elite Covidcrat response to SARS-CoV-2.

I pointed out that the professor starts from the assumption that humans are in charge of viruses (therefore, preparedness could possible reduce deaths to zero) and then promulgates a narrative that keeps those who spent 2-3 years deep in coronapanic feeling fully justified:

In its size and scope the COVID disaster was unique. COVID killed more Americans than World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War combined.

The professor even has data:

Of course, the body count method is fundamentally flawed when talking about a virus that kills people at a median age of 82 and that targets those with multiple comorbidities. If SARS-CoV-2 had actually killed a lot of American seniors who had 10+ years to live, we would have seen the following:

• huge improvement in Social Security finances (nearly a million beneficiaries eliminated; 80 percent of COVID-tagged deaths in the U.S. were among those 65+)
• huge improvement in Medicare finances (nearly a million beneficiaries eliminated)
• impaired financials for life insurance companies
• dramatic change in life insurance rates (see COVID-19 is sure to kill you, but life insurance rates haven’t changed)

Since we didn’t see any of these things happening, we are forced to conclude that COVID-19 did not have as dramatic effort on American demographics as wars that killed healthy men at age 18 (remember, though, that “Women have always been the primary victims of war” — Hillary Clinton). Nor did Americans suffer as many lost life-years from COVID-19 as we did from the regular relentless toll of car accidents.

This preface is a far more interesting window into the psychology of American elites than anything in the rest of the paper. It confirms my often-expressed statement that almost nobody who advocated for school closures, lockdowns, forced masking, and forced vaccinations will ever come to see him/her/zir/themself as having been wrong (much less apologize!). These folks either deny that school closures and lockdowns ever occurred (a popular strategy for Californians, New Yorkers, and the righteous of Maskachusetts) or they say that all measures were based on the best available Science at the time and that what’s wonderful about Science is how it evolves from week to week. Mostly, though, these folks simply don’t look at data that contradicts their faith in themselves. A Maskachusetts lockdowner who said that COVID-19-tagged death rate is a measure of a state’s collective intelligence will never get curious about how “do almost nothing” Sweden ended up with a lower COVID-19-tagged death rate than “do absolutely everything” Maskachusetts (or how Maskachusetts ended up with roughly the same age-adjusted COVID-19-tagged death rate as “do almost nothing after a couple of months of panic” states derided as being full of stupid people).

Related:

• Norwegian government admits that lockdown was a mistake (May 29, 2020!)
• Coronaplague is a primarily sexually transmitted disease in Massachusetts? (May 26, 2020): Here we are in Massachusetts in our third month of shutdown with 2.3X the death rate of never-shut Sweden … Judging by the shape of the curve of deaths per day, the virus is spreading here at roughly the same rate as it has been spreading in Sweden.
• The government can’t find the 22 million undocumented, but it will find and track every coronafected human inside the U.S.? (May 19, 2020), regarding the Big Dreams of the Covidcrats
• Use testing and tracing infrastructure to enforce alcohol Prohibition? (May 15, 2020), my own Big Idea for Bigger Government