“Compared to what?” That should be the first response of any economist worth his or her salt if asked to opine on a specific public policy. For example, should we err on the side of disease prevention and lockdown an entire country despite devastating social and economic consequences? Or should we live with the risk of the disease? That is what economics is supposed to do well: compare alternatives based on tradeoffs. Experts in various policy realms often lack the perspective to consider the consequences of focusing exclusively on their narrow fields. Health experts focus on health, sometimes without consideration of other costs, particularly down the road. Of course, this assumes that the experts themselves have relevant, rigorously tested, and accurate prescriptions to handle public policy challenges. 

Nowhere did the costs of these tradeoffs become more obvious, and the accuracy of the prescriptions more questionable, than in the handling of the Covid pandemic by US health experts who were both myopic and frequently wrong. Let’s consider two cornerstones of US Government Covid policy proposed by health experts and imposed by government officials: masking and social distancing. During the chaotic early days of the pandemic, when the citizenry was looking for guidance, public health officials pushed for individuals to physically separate themselves at least by six feet. They also eventually required masks in various settings.

And yet contemporary investigation and research show that the efficacy of masking is at best marginal or ineffective. Even before the pandemic the effectiveness of mask-wearing was never well known beyond consistent use of N95 masks in very specific settings. Furthermore, at a House Oversight Committee hearing in 2024, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man who became the face of Covid extremism, admitted that social distancing guidelines were not based on scientific evidence at all.

The US government’s handling of the Covid pandemic is undoubtedly the worst government failure since the Vietnam War. The experts and their media cheerleaders and defenders during the pandemic probably exaggerated the risks of the disease, prescribed unproven and onerous practices to try to prevent the spread of the disease, and now we are living with the consequences of those errors and misrepresentations.

Consider the recent national and regional news coverage which has highlighted the increasing frequency of measles outbreaks throughout the US, because of declining vaccination rates in the country. Virtually all of the coverage, whether it is from The Atlantic, NPR, or CNN is the same. The authors indirectly blame “the public,” or RFK Jr., or even what the Associated Press awkwardly referred to as more parents post-Covid “claiming religious or personal conscience waivers to exempt their kids from required shots.” None of these stories understand that when experts utterly fail the public, it has consequences. After Covid, many individuals are skeptical of their advice and are turning away from good practices.

Why are the experts to blame here? During the surreal months between the announcement of the Covid shots, the rollout, the non-optional tone of the public health community without significant testing of the side effects, and the imposition of the inoculations on even children who later turned out to be susceptible to adverse reactions. The public, however, was told by the Facuis of the world to stop complaining, get in line, get jabbed, and be thankful. It turned out the vaccine was more akin to a flu shot, making the disease less severe, but not preventing it altogether, or preventing its spread. Yet the public was not trusted to weigh the tradeoffs between that and potential adverse effects. The public today is understandably, albeit unfortunately, skeptical about mainstream medical advice.

The litany of mistakes made throughout the Covid pandemic is too long to list and fully elaborate, but at the heart of every error was an underestimation of the costs of leaning heavily into risk aversion, even when the tested expert information about mitigating the problem was scanty or non-existent.

It began when the first Trump administration ignored the potential risks to America’s elderly and obese populations, the ones who suffered the most during Covid. Relatively early during the outbreak, it became abundantly clear that the risks lay primarily in those two groups. Very few healthy or younger Americans died as a result of the disease. And yet unproven public policies were applied to everyone. We got a double whammy: the elderly died in large numbers and the rest of us suffered the consequences of lockdowns and disruption. Those results began to shave away some of the trust in our leaders and health experts and it was exacerbated by the above-mentioned revelations of deceit. When health leaders couldn’t or wouldn’t provide answers about the source of the virus or simply squelched debate about its origins, we moved away from reasonable, efficacious health policy towards command-and-control risk aversion.

Then there were the blatant misrepresentations of the lockdown and restriction timeframes. It’s hard to remember it now, but the interminable lockdowns, limits on crowds, mask-wearing, and destruction of social capital and community were all supposed to last mere weeks. Instead, public health officials and the media continued to ramp up the public perception that everyone was equally at risk—or that the only way to save grandma was to ensure that you never got the disease. Their policies and the ignored trade-offs, therefore, needed to be extended indefinitely. Some states and localities pursued wildly different policies, and the world looked in horror at Sweden’s experiment in living with rather than hiding from the virus. Now we know that Sweden had among the lowest excess death rates in the world and both California and Florida, which pursued diametrically opposed policies of openness and lockdowns had roughly identical excess death outcomes. How could this have been? I still have seen no good explanation by our so-called experts.

We got some hint about how uncomfortable certain individuals in government and the public health world felt about their Covid performance when President Biden decided to give Anthony Fauci retroactive immunity for things he may have done during the pandemic. He argued that the incoming Trump administration would perhaps pursue politically motivated charges against Fauci. Since we now live in a world where these practices are unpleasantly common this may have been true.

But, Dr. Fauci now doesn’t have to explain himself before a Congressional committee or ever explain his role in the relationship between the United States and the Wuhan lab that might lay at the heart of this virus. Fauci assured the public that the lab was not to blame, and yet now, most American security agencies lean towards the lab leak as the likely cause of the virus. Do we not deserve to hear from him on this matter?

While Dr. Fauci got his presidential pardon, whatever trust the public had in the rest of the establishment was gone. The appointment of a vaccine skeptic in the wake of the rollout of the Covid vaccine is clearly a sign that the public has turned its back on health experts who were either mistaken and embarrassed to admit it or simply lying. The media and a disgraced public health community are now bemoaning the return of various diseases that had long been considered eradicated and once again blaming the public. They ought to look squarely in the mirror.

The same hubris of expertise revealed itself in school closings. Even among the European countries that followed more stringent Covid policies, schools largely stayed open. In the US, particularly in blue states, teachers unions flexed their muscles and abandoned the students they were supposed to serve. Initially, schools were closed in the US because of concerns that children could be “super spreaders.” Again, we had little evidence at the outset about this risk, but previous pandemics had targeted children. And examples of the early outbreaks pointed to high risks of crowded events, weddings, sporting events, public transit, as potentially spreading Covid. Classrooms seemed to fit that category.

Journalists and public health officials painted pictures of children living in multigenerational households coming home from school, carrying Covid, and killing their grandparents. Remote learning (not available to many Americans who lacked Internet and the necessary computer setups) was touted as nearly identical in educational quality. Teachers unions rang the alarm about their members facing grave dangers from unhygienic children infecting them and lobbied local, state, and national officials to keep the schools closed, leaning heavily on the risk aversion of “experts” instead of the educational needs of kids.

As months went by, it became painfully clear children were not vulnerable to Covid in the same way that the elderly were. Yet schools remained closed and the experts ignored the growing mountain of data that showed kids were not super spreaders. Again, it resulted in a rupture between the experts and the public at large.

Finally, we are all living with inflation and the constipated housing market that was directly caused by poor government fiscal and monetary policy during the pandemic. The Trump and Biden administrations, after locking people into their homes for months on end, printed trillions of dollars in money that we did not have. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, and now we have it and are going to struggle to shake it. 

Making matters even worse, as Allison Schrager at Bloomberg has noted, the Fed kept interest rates artificially low in 2021 well after it was necessary or prudent. Not only did this decision have inflationary effects, but it also gave homeowners, many of whom are wealthier and older, the opportunity to refinance their homes for artificially low rates while younger and newer home buyers were locked out. These two actions have left us with the slow erosion of wealth and living standards. Inflation is particularly hard on the working class and poor families, and it was the working class that supported President Trump in his phoenix-like rise from the ashes.

Starting with the “a few weeks to bend the curve” lockdowns that turned into months and months I wrote in November of 2020 that “isolation and separation from our friends, loved ones, and social life is not natural and not without cost. It can fracture our social fabric irreparably. Waiting for months without a clear set of goals decreases cohesion and trust among the governed. At the regime level, this opens up the possibility for a growing chasm between the governed and governors. Such a situation invites potential abuses of power.”

The election of 2024 was clearly the Covid reaction election. Parents who had been forced to suddenly try to do some sort of hybrid “homeschooling,” service sector workers who lost their jobs and savings during the pandemic, young people who saw their social lives and career tracks derailed, everyone who suffered through social isolation, rampant inflation, and campaigns prohibiting discussion and debate about Covid policy vented their disgust with the elite attitudes that the pandemic revealed. It took a mammoth gaffe in governance to cultivate such distrust in our institutions, and historians will have a field day documenting it.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.