The Expert Who Cried Lockdown: How a Panic-First Approach to Covid Is Helping the GOP
A playground in Los Angeles, California closed due to Covid-19.
By David R. Wheeler, Ph.D. and Olivia London, MPH
In the early days of the pandemic in 2020, Boston’s Arnold Arboretum posted signs warning people not to smell the lilacs. Why? Because such reckless inhaling and exhaling around the flowers might transmit the virus. “I just couldn't believe it,” said Dr. Paul Sax, Clinical Director of the Infectious Disease Clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He found the advice so ridiculous that he posted a picture of it on Twitter.
The Arboretum did not re-post the signs when the lilacs bloomed again in spring 2021, perhaps learning from the latest data about outdoor transmission that those precautions crossed the line into absurdity and provided no actual protection from Covid-19.
“We know that outdoor transmission is extremely rare,” Sax told us in an interview. “Getting outside into the fresh air is about the best thing you can do to minimize Covid-19 transmission and still be able to spend time with family and friends.”
However, it seems many in the media, as well as the public health experts they choose to quote, have not learned the same lesson of adapting to data over the course of the pandemic. If they had, we would see more articles sending people outdoors, encouraging businesses to improve building ventilation, or highlighting the successes of institutions that opened through the use of other effective public health strategies. What we’ve seen instead is often cavalier suggestions that widespread closures are inevitable.
For example, on August 10, a writer for The Atlantic casually mentioned that “All signs point to shutdowns returning.” In July, Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch newspaper, quoting Dr. Joe Gastaldo, Medical Director of Infectious Diseases at OhioHealth, said low vaccination rates “could necessitate more lockdowns, masking and distancing.”
We are in favor of effective interventions to mitigate the impacts of Covid; however, a knee-jerk desire for additional lockdowns may be counterproductive and even harmful. Such rhetoric has the appearance of drama and panic rather than reason and respect for the realities of human nature. The result is not good for anyone’s health.
Indeed, this panic-first brand of Covid messaging, even after the U.S. has an oversupply of vaccines with over 90% effectiveness, is accomplishing exactly the opposite of what these journalists and health experts want to accomplish. Namely, it is pushing people into the arms of GOP politicians, some of whom want to jettison all precautions by conflating scientifically sound advice with don’t-smell-the-lilacs sensationalism. At the same time, GOP leaders have successfully drawn attention to inconsistent health messages (e.g. early advice against mask wearing) and occasional hypocrisies on the political left (such as D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser not following her own mask mandate).
The more health experts and the media discuss extreme measures, the more the average citizen tunes them out entirely — or at least begins looking for leaders who espouse a different approach. Earlier this summer, Luis Ostrosky, Chief of Infectious Diseases at University of Texas Health, was still warning about “closures” in an article in USA Today. "If we don't act now, we're just going to be in the same situation we were in a year ago with closures, with disruptions, with deaths," he said in the article. "It's very discouraging."
Tragically, people are still dying from Covid-19. However, invoking the idea of closures and other draconian measures — in a time of plummeting death rates from the pre-vaccine era — is causing not only a quiet backlash against health experts but also a tacit-if-uneasy alliance with Republican politicians. As of August 3, only 27% of Americans viewed Covid as a “severe” health risk in their community, despite the surge of the delta variant . A Gallup poll in July also found that only 8% of Americans mention the coronavirus as the biggest problem in the U.S.
Looking at the headlines of any major news outlet on any given morning, you could be forgiven for thinking death rates hadn’t budged since the beginning of the pandemic. On the day we wrote this article, the top headline on the Washington Post’s website was: “Virus surge sends ripples of alarm through Democrats.” On the day we edited this article, the Post declared at the top of its website: “‘Goldilocks virus’: Delta vanquishes all variant rivals as scientists race to understand its tricks.”
Such ceaseless alarm-sounding creates an opening for Republican leaders such as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to oversimplify the choice facing Americans: “We can either have a free society, or we can have a biomedical security state,” DeSantis said recently according to The New York Times. “And I can tell you: Florida, we’re a free state. People are going to be free to choose to make their own decisions.”
DeSantis, a frontrunner for the Republican nomination for President in 2024, is so confident about Covid fatigue among the general public that he embraces a platform of “freedom over Faucism” and sells “Don’t Fauci My Florida” merchandise.
DeSantis’ approach — forcing a false dichotomy between personal freedom and public health strategies — may be contributing to a spike in Florida’s Covid cases, but it could also turn out to be an effective political message. For people who wanted to go to the beach without facing criticism or dared to suggest that spending time with family out of town was important enough to take a calculated risk, GOP messaging, problematic though it may be, starts to sound more appealing.
Legacy media outlets may not understand the public’s changing priorities, but the Biden administration seems to get it. At a recent White House press conference, press secretary Jen Psaki rejected the idea of closing schools or the economy: “We are not going back,” she told reporters. “We are not turning back the clock.” When The New York Times tweeted about transmissibility of the Delta variant equalling that of chickenpox, and that it may be spread as easily by vaccinated people as unvaccinated, a White House communications staffer tweeted back in all caps that the information was untrue and lacked context. Such messaging shows that Biden recognizes the public is ready to accept Covid as one of many challenges facing the country, but not the only challenge.
Indeed, the media’s careless, context-free journalism regarding breakthrough infections even drew a rebuke from the esteemed Columbia Journalism Review in an article titled “How major media outlets screwed up the vaccine ‘breakthrough’ story.”
The media’s failure to adequately acknowledge mistakes of public health messaging, realities of human nature and needs, and significance of lifesaving successes has exacerbated distrust toward the media and overall public anxiety. In their seminal textbook, The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel argue that journalists “must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.” However, the press’s paternalistic approach and ongoing moral outrage is an example of what Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Julia Marcus describes as a distraction from “directing our outrage toward institutional deficiencies,” as well as a counterproductive fixation on — and stigmatization of — individual choices.
George J. Annas, Professor of Health Law, Ethics, and Human Rights at Boston University School of Public Health, and Dr. Sandro Galea, Dean of Boston University School of Public Health, emphasize that “health is a means to an end” — the end being a full life rich with complex needs, including “the need to be safe from the virus, the need to earn a living, and the need to be with loved ones who are sick and dying.” Further, Annas and Galea argue that “a chronic emergency is no emergency at all. It becomes, rather, a justification for not acting rationally.”
In its Covid coverage, the U.S. media has largely neglected to consider human complexity and has chosen instead to promote a value system based on short-term, often individualistic and even irrational health measures. By not thinking through unintended consequences or long-term health goals, they have inadvertently fueled the rise of politicians less likely to prioritize prevention of future pandemics and the climate crisis. This is not, ultimately, health-centered.
“How often can you run the same story that the variants are overtaking us and we're going back to where we were a year ago?” Professor Annas said in an interview with us. “I'm asking you the question. How often can you keep running that same story?”