REVIEW: The Price of Panic – Axe, Briggs, Richards (Regnery Publishing, 2020)

As the COVID-19 epidemic rolls into it’s ninth month in the US (depending on how it’s been tracked), there remain two consensuses over its handling and even what it was. One consensus considers the outbreak to have been poorly handled, as it resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and that the only way forward is a grueling endeavor involving resuming the “lock down” measures and wearing masks. The other consensus, steadily gaining in popularity as the numbers and actual data keeps chugging out, is that whatever threat the COVID-19 virus actually posed can safely be handled by living a normal civilian life, and that the previous lock downs and mask mandates were wildly unnecessary.

It’s fortunate, then, that we have a book we can point to that cuts through the disinformation and confusion. The Price of Panic is the world’s first easily-legible cut at this unprecedented world event. Writers Douglas Axe, William Briggs, and Jay Richards approach the subject with a pragmatism too often lacking in the spheres of social media and popular theorizing. Accompanied by numerous charts and citations to studies, their analysis of the pandemic and ensuing hysteria warrants the attention of anyone seeking to avoid this sort of thing happening again.

Before we get to that, however, even this review has to address the contemporary social context that this book landed in the middle of. The split across the aforementioned consensuses contributes to the deepening differentiation between the two Americas of today, and it can’t be ignored here. Many—but, I think, not all—of those who adhere to the first consensus will be unconvinced by efforts such as this book to cut through the noise. Rather, the mere existence of a book titled The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe will serve as evidence of a misinformation counter-campaign orchestrated, no doubt, by Trump supporters to destabilize the country and get more people sick. This isn’t to say that they shouldn’t even bother reading it, but that it shouldn’t come as a surprise if certain interests try to bury it.

This book best serves those of us who adhere to the other consensus—and not because it necessarily verifies any of our beliefs, except for those that we’ve witnessed with our own eyes. It’s because it serves as a small repository of the important information on the epidemic that’d been released up until about a month and a half ago. You don’t have to scour the internet for William Briggs’ regular COVID posts or long twitter threads by anonymous users in order to get the facts straight. They’re all right here.

The book offers something else, too. Some of us followed the steadily-increasing continuity errors that piled up between what the data itself was saying versus what those figures in the press and authority were telling us. A book like this, well-sourced and reasonably argued, stands as a comforting reminder that no, you haven’t gone insane.

It has been clear, to anyone who has bothered to track the numbers, and not just listen to the bloviations of politicians, that the COVID hysteria of the last half a year has been wildly out of control. While I was not public about my beliefs at the time, my opinion of COVID changed after it turned out that the initial spike in deaths was not being accurately reported and that statistics were being fudged with liberal attributions of death. After watching the leaks from China, it seemed to be a legitimate threat worth caution. But that belief evaporated after about a month of the virus reaching our shores.

Hospital after hospital was revealed to have been over-reporting COVID deaths in the interests of greater federal aid funding, which meant that the number of dead in the initial spike was not even close to the official report. In other words, it became clear that the virus was not as deadly as we were being led to believe, and worse, that there were parties in the media and government—even at the local level—who wanted us to be frightened of a bug that was essentially a beefy cold. The latter part of this deduction is what should have had all of us a little concerned. The writers touch on this. “The standards for cause of death”, they inform us, “were lax”:

the CDC changed the rules mid-stream, declaring in early April that doctors could list COVID-19 as the official cause of death without a test. The change led to a spike in official deaths from the coronavrius. Stories started appearing of families questioning how COVID-19 had appeared on the death certificates of loved ones, without evidence.

[…] Naturally, the press fixed on any excuse to paint a grimmer picture.¹

And this was only at the beginning of the epidemic, when we were told we had to “flatten the curve” and lockdown—quarantine—measures were first drafted. Lest we forget, talk of that curve only lasted about a month and a half; “by the end of May 2020, most people had forgotten the curve-flattening story,” our writers remind us, “and most states were easing up.”² In the mean time, the stunning degree of number-fudging became public knowledge after the CDC’s relaxation of the rules:

Most people who tested positive for the virus were very unlikely to be killed by it. Yet officials used these tests to inflate the COVID-19 death numbers. In Washington state, 13 percent of official COVID-19 deaths “involved persons who had previously tested positive for COVID-19 but did not have the virus listed anywhere on their death certificate as either causing or contributing to death.” They were counted in the coronavirus deaths because of the “state’s practice of counting every person who tests positive for COVID-19 and subsequently dies, even if the death was not caused by COVID-19.”

These included several deaths from gunshot wounds. On top of that, healthcare workers sometimes counted people who died with coronavirus-like symptoms as dying from the coronavirus, even if they hadn’t been tested.³

I use the term “public knowledge,” but perhaps that isn’t quite so clear. As mentioned earlier, the public consensus today is fractured along a distinct partisan line; “public knowledge” in one sphere is considered complete disinformation in the other. The stranglehold that social media and tech giants have over the shaping of these consensuses isn’t to be taken lightly, either.

“YouTube couldn’t just promote WHO,” our writers explain, it, along with Facebook, “had to promote only ‘respectable’ content and purge the dissenters.”⁴ We know, and Big Tech does not even deny, which side of the divide their monolithic opinion sits. We know which consensus they ascribe to, in other words, and that consensus is one that chases the coattails of self-affirmed intellectuals and academics. The name of the game is credentials, which is fine, but the problem is when the platforms being used to disseminate information are themselves biased against that information.

To illustrate this point, our writers list off example after example of people—medical professionals and academics alike, even—who got the boot from social platforms because their information contradicted the accepted narrative. It was a predictable shtick to see when it came to censoring political speech or people that defied the dogmas of the sexual revolution, but this time censorship was invoked against health experts that simply proclaimed the opposite of what YouTube thought was correct. And so far, that hasn’t changed—if anything, they’ve doubled down.

So how can we know that the information we’re dealing with is accurate? Our writers address this as well, breaking down the now-forgotten Imperial College London model that “predicted the coronavirus would claim 40 million lives worldwide, including 2.2 in the U.S.”⁵ The fact the model was wrong isn’t even the point, nor the real problem. It was how it was used; the writers continue:

That trick of claiming that any outcome proves you were right can really come in handy. One California doctor used it masterfully when the death numbers turned up short. “What we’re trying to do is prevent people from dying, that’s what we’re trying to do in the Bay Area,” he said. “The early projections were that there would be 44,000 deaths in the Bay Area. There have been 210 so far so I think we’re doing pretty damn good and I certainly don’t want to mess with that kind of success.”⁶

Here, they’re quoting J. R. Stone, who was on the record about this in late April of this year. That was around the time, it should be remembered, that the death rate for most of the United States had peaked. “Even well into the crisis,” the writers continue, “when other experts had savaged the Imperial College model, authorities and media were still citing it.”⁷ It’s hard to shake the suspicion of outright, willful dishonesty on the part of the media apparatus, particularly as it worked in conjunction with whole swaths of administrative governments. Our writers, however, are keen to avoid making outright accusations of media duplicity.

They do come close, however. The narrative that COVID would wreck the healthcare system was one carefully crafted around people like the governors of the states hit the hardest. Meanwhile, in places like New York City, which was unambiguously ravaged by the virus, sent home Navy hospital ships after they sat, unused, in the Hudson for a month. The entire country’s healthcare sector, they mention, “saw massive job losses”, such that “by early May, over 1.4 million jobs were lost in health care”.⁸ That the lock downs wreaked havoc upon the national economy was expected the moment they were instituted, but that they decimated the one sector that was supposed to thrive as a result of a national pandemic is the insult added to the injury.

This turned deadly, as they note:

Government was, in effect, rationing healthcare by fiat based on anticipated shortages. But the curve-flattening argument became obsolete in April when the shortages never came, and yet the restrictions continued. As a result, we’ve not only delayed life-saving treatments but also crippled our health-care sector.⁹

There is a lot of room to suppose, they note, that the closings and lock downs resulted in many deaths all by themselves, unrelated directly to the COVID virus. But they aren’t the only ones to suggest this; British studies have already been conducted, and the only consensus at the time of this book’s writing was that deaths were certainly caused by the lock downs, and it’s possible that it was an alarming number. Even a mere ballpark estimate, however, isn’t possible due to how close to the events we currently are. We just have to wait.

The book makes the compelling (and somewhat obvious, for those of us who had to endure them) case that the lock downs didn’t work. This leaves us with the question, “Who got it right?” Taiwan, Sweden, and Japan all share something in common when it came to COVID response: they didn’t lock down, and their death rates were far better. Population density certainly can’t be blamed for this, as while Sweden has a low density, the same can’t be said for either Taiwan or Japan. And yet, international media had an interest in making the picture look worse than it really was.

The writers note how social media was used to try to discredit this staid approach to the virus. This included simple confirmation bias to purposeful manipulation of data to blow numbers out of proportion. To some extent, there could be made an argument that these dweebs on social media were sincere in their beliefs, despite the overwhelming evidence that lock downs didn’t work. But many of them were transparently trying to justify the lock downs even if it meant contradicting the evidence. Why would someone want to do this? I have my own theories, but the writers remain silent on the issue.

Concluding the book is a look at what we learned from the handling of the pandemic and what steps to deal with going forward. “A more likely road to serfdom,” our writers dryly note, “could be paved by Big Tech.”¹⁰ They’re probably right. What the social media platforms have done to this country’s people is criminal, and it’s on full display with the response to COVID. The mainstream media apparatus is equally if not even more at fault, working hand in hand, in some cases, with platforms like Google in order to tailor a false public consensus. What this book is fundamentally about isn’t just the mishandling of a plague that really wasn’t as bad as we all expected it to be. It’s about the dangers of the technocratic elite—and I’m not speaking of conspiracy theories here. I’m talking about the dangers that mass narratives pose and the obviousness with which the entire country, even those of us who resisted COVID hysteria, were subjected to them.

I definitely recommend this book. Get this book before Amazon bans it.

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154.

218.

324.

440.

578.

680.

7Ibid.

8135.

9140.

10202.