The Covid Off-Ramp Is Right in Front of Us
The Justice Department announced Tuesday that it is willing to appeal a federal judge’s ruling that overturned the Biden administration’s public transportation mask mandate. It’s a mistake. The public is ready to take the off ramp from the pandemic, and political and governmental decisions are often lagging indicators of change. Rather than reacting reflexively to a loss in court, our leadership should consider whether now is the right time to lift mask mandates and other remaining Covid restrictions. The American people are ready for a Covid crisis off-ramp.
The pandemic emphasized an obvious fact about America – we are a wonderfully diverse country. This is a national characteristic we all celebrate regardless of our politics. And our nation is steeped in a uniquely American form of federalism, where state governments share power with our national leaders in Washington, DC.
Our distinctive Constitutional order and character resulted in numerous approaches to the pandemic. The states partnered with the federal government and relied heavily on Washington for guidance and resources, such as the Trump administration spearheading Operation Warp Speed. That said, there were repeated attempts to impose top-down restrictions and mandates without considering our country’s diversity, and many in the public health establishment advocated for what turned out, in retrospect, to be overly restrictive Covid policies.
Overall, however, individual states worked out their own pandemic responses. Many governors and mayors followed the dictates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), but others offered more local flexibility and freedom in their Covid responses. For instance, Iowa never issued a full ‘stay-at-home’ order, yet states like California and New York imposed Covid restrictions earlier in the crisis and for longer durations.
We embraced a variety of responses to the pandemic. In some parts of the country, Americans accepted stringent rules and public health measures (enforced by legal punishment, loss of employment, and social opprobrium). However, in other jurisdictions, Americans were much less accepting of government orders, and many, of course, landed somewhere in-between.
Americans had varied responses to the science. We argued over more than just the policies, but also the factual predicates since early in the pandemic. Questions remain over natural immunity, the efficacy of masking 5-year-olds, and whether children without comorbidities should be vaccinated at all. We ignored Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s adage: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
Given the wide range of opinions and our disagreements over policy and facts, is there a reasonable position on when we end the pandemic? Is there an off-ramp to normalcy? With polls showing Americans increasingly unhappy with governmental management of the pandemic, it is past time to examine whether and how we declare the crisis to be over.
The inevitable end of the pandemic is not an occasion to spike the football by those who have been advocating for normalcy all along. This group has been on the side of ending extraordinary responses to the pandemic, and because the pandemic was always going to end at some point, they were always going to be right – eventually. Those who have been on the side of keeping extraordinary restrictions were always going to be wrong at some point, as the pandemic fades. Who wants to be the last holdout on keeping toddlers masked in daycare, especially after we’ve seen sports fans clog up arenas and spring-breakers crowd beaches, all without masks and without mass outbreaks?
We are months past when a nationally prominent doctor declared “cloth masks are little more than facial decorations.” We have vaccinated a solid 78% of the population with at least one dose. State and local Covid restrictions, even in places like New York City, have faded away. Mask mandates are being lifted all over the country – again, even in jurisdictions, where such mandates were stringent. As noted, on the national level a federal court eliminated Biden’s public transportation mask mandate. On masks, all this moving back to normal is being implemented without any new science. Indeed, it could be inferred that the last populations to have been required to mask – air travelers, school children, and retail workers – are the only groups that could still be effectively forced to wear masks. It’s fair to say that our getting back to a pre-Covid life is really disconnected from any new science. So, what happened?
The public led the way and the politicians followed. The American people – in blue states and red states alike – grew increasingly frustrated by the politics of Covid. Lockdowns and restrictions became obviously less and less about the science. Even as the public health community has not changed its Covid stance broadly on these issues, and politicians often waffled, the public has opened the off-ramp through ever-increasing opposition to the restrictions.
How will the public health community react to these changes given that in many cases they have entwined themselves into directing policy and participating in politics? If, on the one hand, they declare that the science has suddenly changed, they will undercut their authority by looking as if they have been pushing a political narrative, not science, to the public all this time. If, on the other hand, they remain stuck defending policies that are rapidly being abandoned, to great public relief, they risk losing authority and becoming irrelevant to the public discourse. A third option – the best option for public health – is to go back to science: leave politics and as the pandemic ends, conduct scientific retrospectives on the pandemic and our responses.
After examining the history of what happened – closing schools, refusing dying visitations, canceling weddings and funerals, shutting down businesses, and so on – we can come to an understanding of what mistakes were made in our Covid response, perhaps re-learn what parts of older pandemic doctrine were correct, update what we should be doing differently going forward, and try to figure out how to strengthen the public health community. The mistakes made by our public health agencies may well turn out to be the result of too few in charge of the Covid decisions. Scientific and policy errors hardened and delayed our ability to change course, and groupthink created the biggest roadblock to the Covid off-ramp.
We need to understand the implication of the revealed Procrustean instinct of our scientific and political leadership. When lockdowns did not work to prevent disease spread over months and now years, many in the public health community who should know better – and those whom they influence at universities, in governments, and at prestigious journals – persisted in trying to force the public to fit their plan. Many states, corporations, and other jurisdictions followed. Those who did not follow the narrative were ostracized, browbeaten, and cancelled. This must never happen again.
The American people built the Covid off-ramp. When will our whole country take it?
Eric D. Hargan ( @EricDHargan ) founded the Hargan Group and was the deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services after serving as acting secretary.
