I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas,Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic.
On March 10, 2020, before any government prompting, Harvard declared that it would “suspend in-person classes and shift to online learning.” Across the country, universities, schools, and state governments followed Harvard’s lead.
Yet it was clear, from early 2020, that the virus would eventually spread across the globe, and that it would be futile to try to suppress it with lockdowns. It was also clear that lockdowns would inflict enormous collateral damage, not only on education but also on public health, including treatment for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental health. We will be dealing with the harm done for decades. Our children, the elderly, the middle class, the working class, and the poor around the world—all will suffer.
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I was not the only public health scientist speaking out against school closures and other unscientific countermeasures. Scott Atlas, an especially brave voice, used scientific articles and facts to challenge the public health advisors in the Trump White House, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, and Covid coordinator Deborah Birx, but to little avail.
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Almost everyone now realizes that school closures and other lockdowns, were a colossal mistake. Francis Collins has acknowledged his error of singularly focusing on Covid without considering collateral damage to education and non-Covid health outcomes. That’s the honest thing to do, and I hope this honesty will reach Harvard. The public deserves it, and academia needs it to restore its credibility.
Science cannot survive in a society that does not value truth and strive to discover it. The scientific community will gradually lose public support and slowly disintegrate in such a culture. The pursuit of truth requires academic freedom with open, passionate, and civilized scientific discourse, with zero tolerance for slander, bullying, or cancellation. My hope is that someday, Harvard will find its way back to academic freedom and independence.
“Four years ago this week, freedom was torched.”
Randomized Controlled Trials: Could you be any more scientific? The book I’m now writing, Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets, insists that the randomistas of the economics profession actually have a thinly-veiled political agenda. Namely: To get economists to humbly serve the demagogues that rule the world instead of bluntly challenging their unabated demagoguery.
Paranoid? I don’t think so. Show me a single published economics RCT that concludes, “Government should stop trying to fix this problem and just allow a free market.” No, no, no. They’ll always either find that (a) the treatment “worked” — so government should scale it up; or (b) the treatment “failed” — so government should keep running RCTs until they find a treatment that works. “Freedom” never counts as a “treatment.”
When push comes to shove, can foreigners be counted on to help meet US national security needs? The answer, according to a former deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy, is yes. In fact, they might be more responsive than American firms. It’s a reality that should call into question some premises of US trade policy.
In an op‐ed last week, William C. Greenwalt recalls that during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts the US military had a pressing need to obtain specialized steel for its Mine‐Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) program. Thankfully, the US steel industry rose to the occasion, right? Not exactly. In Greenwalt’s telling, the industry—a beneficiary of protectionist measures including tariffs on steel imports and “Buy America” preferences—was not interested in supplying the Pentagon with the necessary materials.
Instead, the US military obtained steel from companies in Australia, Germany, Israel, and Sweden.
“When [the Department of Defense] urgently needed more steel, the US industry basically told Uncle Sam to pound sand,” Greenwalt writes. “Our allies then bent over backwards to help us, when our own industry would not.”
The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal is not impressed with Biden’s fantastical budget. A slice:
As a share of the economy, Mr. Biden wants spending to reach 24.8%, or a quarter of national wealth. The 1974-2023 average was only 21% and, as Mr. Biden told the country last week, the Covid crisis is over. But instead of letting outlays fall as a share of GDP, as they always have after a recession or crisis, the President wants the government to stay at a new and higher spending plateau.
Jon Miltimore reports on the implosion of China’s tyrannical ‘one child’ policy.
Ryan Bourne and Sophia Bagley decry “the incoherence of the White House’s anti‐“junk fees” agenda.” A slice:
It would clearly be more accurate to say that “junk fees” as weaponized by the White House are any fees the administration identifies some customers might dislike or find annoying. That means this war on prices is likely to create substantial uncertainty for a raft of businesses in the future.
