Transcript for #365 — Reality Check

Just the times, yeah, I write a weekly piece for the opinion section, basically, a column because I was an newsletter and I write a column for the magazine once a month and some features too. And I've been there for about almost two years now, long time before that at New York. And before that somewhat bumpy road, I worked at Slay at I worked in book publishing. I worked at the New York Sun, the Neo-Con newspaper in New York. And yeah, just in the Paris Review is a deputy editor at the literary magazine for a while.

Yeah, they're incredible. Yeah. That was, you know, one of the best part of the job was I did one with William Gibson, but I added a bunch of them and they're also much more collaborative than you may think of the outset. So you're basically writing it with the writer as being to view it all the time.

You know, I, about 10 years ago, I was writing a profile of this guy Ben Kunkel, who's one of the founders of Nplus 1, and is a pretty left-wing guy, and as it happens, also pretty concerned with climate, which I became later on. And he asked me the same question during the reporting, and I said, you know, I think I'd have to call myself a neoliberal. And he just like rolled out of his chair laughing, thinking like, how ridiculous it could be for someone to call themselves a neoliberal. You know, I'm a child of the 90s. I grew up in, I was born in 82 and grew up in New York in the 90s. And I think on some animal level, I processed all of the meta narratives of that era quite deeply. So I was, you know, sophisticated enough teenager to think that progress wasn't inevitable, you know, prosperity and justice weren't laws of the universe, but that over long enough timelines we were kind of moving in the right direction and that the U.S. was part of that story. And I've had like a lot of people, kind of a bumpier last decade or decade and a half where A lot of those assumptions seem much less safe to me to make, and the world seems much messier and more complicated than I thought it was, both domestically and internationally. And probably it's also meant that I've moved quite a bit to the left of where I was when I described myself as a neoliberal 10 or 12 years ago. But I also think of myself as someone who is pretty resistant to tribal thinking and like team-based thinking about the world. And spent a fair amount of time, I think, trying to interrogate anything I see in myself as a kind of doctrine error, position or perspective. And that means often getting irritated and frustrated with people who I think of as political allies, because I don't think they're being quite serious enough about asking themselves the hard questions.

I think it's a big mess. When my colleagues are, you know, people in this sort of mainstream establishment media talk about these issues, they often do talk about, you know, disinformation and they're talking about the distortions of social media in the way that it inflames many of our sort of intuitive tribal feelings about the world and the state of the world. I tend to think that the changes that we've seen over the last five years are kind of bigger and more fundamental than that. I, you know, 20 years ago, people worried a lot about American culture trending and a, you know, kind of idiocracy dystopia direction. We worried about the the dumbing down of our population of our culture. And I think there are certain ways in which that's undeniably unfolding. On the other hand, I think in the last five or 10 years, as this incredible explosion of pretty high-minded, pretty serious curiosity in other parts of the new media landscape. So you can see certain algorithmic problems when you're looking at Twitter or TikTok. But when you look at what's happening on YouTube or in podcasts, it seems to me like we just have a huge new population of people who demographically and professionally have generation ago would not have been really intellectuals. Now playing the role of intellectuals in public but also many of them just processing news from the world on their own. And you know on some level that has to be progress and it has to be a good thing. When I think about, you know, just imagining the equivalent like Silicon Valley elite from 20 years ago, they were just not, you know, listening to three hour podcasts about, you know, some 17th century adventure, like, you know, the path of the plague through Europe or whatever whatever it is. It just was just a very different kind of more business-centered culture. And that's true of more traditional business centers, too. And now I think almost everyone of some education and sort of status that thinks of themselves as a thinker and thinks of part of their job as figuring out the state of the world in the future. And that is, you know, like I said, you kind of have to count it as progress. On the other hand, it's meant that it's possible for many of us to treat those conversations which are in many ways abstracted and separated from the way the real world is unfolding as though those conversations are the real world and not to confront ourselves or be confronted with contrary facts or contrary arguments. And so we have this combination of forces where we have many people thinking and talking in much more sophisticated and informed ways but producing just an awful lot of, I think, pretty damaging narrativeization and mischaracterization of all the shifts that we're living through. And, you know, maybe because of what I cover and what I write about, it's also because of, you know, the recent history that we've all lived through. But I think of this, I guess, primarily in terms of the pandemic, where it almost seemed like every month I was both arguing with journalists at places like the New York Times about how they were describing the pace of the pandemic and the course of the pandemic and what it's required of us. And also arguing with contrarians who seem to be far too extreme in their rejection of establishment, wisdom and establishment, understanding. And I don't know given the information landscape that we've landed in now in 2024 against the political backdrop in which all of that's unfolding, whether we can get back to a place where, you know, we have to argue from real facts with one another, but it does seem like a quite, quite distressing situation where, you know, you have pretty prominent people with pretty large followings And it was following, we have grown a lot over the last five years talking about the net harm that vaccines have done to the population. Or, you know, on any number of points about the course of the pandemic, really, really, I think over correcting for some of the real oversights and shortcomings of conventional public health messaging, but overcorrecting in ways that I think are, you know, I've left us in a worse place. And you know, we could talk about some of the particulars there. But in the big picture, it's like half of states, I think, of past laws, restricting the ability of public health officials to impose any behavioral restrictions in the face of a future pandemic, independent of how transmissible or lethal that pandemic might be. You know, reasonable people can say, can take issue with the way that American pandemic was handled. But like the idea that we should do absolutely nothing in the face of all possible future pandemic threats just seems to me to be just a horrible overcorrection and a real indictment of how, you know, how narrow-minded, narrow-mindedly we're all thinking about what we just went through and the lessons are really offers us.

Or it has negative status.

Yeah, and at a baseline, I would say, I agree with just about everything you said and your perspective on it all. And I think it's really damaging and worrisome. A few things to mention, one is a lot of these fears as they were expressed, especially early on in the pandemic about the sort of Orwellian takeover. really have not come to pass in any meaningful way which is to say even taking seriously the possibility that somebody might have been trying to get you to take a vaccine for some nefarious future purpose or they were trying to lock you in your home for some you know out of some sense of you know social control all of that pressure, disappeared relatively quickly. We are not living in the world that Naomi Wolf warned us about. We're not living in a world in which we're being pinned down and syringes forced into our arms every six months. We're not being tested as we walk out the door. We're not being told that we can't leave our homes. We're not being told we can't go to school. The long-term vision that was offered as this kind of, this is a stepping stone, a global stepping stone to a kind of new totalitarian order, just as obviously not come to pass. There was a period of time in 2020 when our lives were restricted to some degree. But I think even in remembering that history, we often overstate how significant and how intrusive those restrictions really were. and how politically divisive they were. If you look at the data all through 2020, red states and blue states across the board imposed roughly the same level of restrictions. They all closed schools at the same time. They all restricted social gatherings at the same time. They all issued mask advisories at the same time. By the fall of 2020, there were some different starting to emerge between red states and blue states. But it was relatively small. And if you look at the mobility data that Google and others have assembled, people were still moving around at somewhere between 98% of what they'd been doing before the pandemic. We remember that time now so many of us as a period of intense government-directed lockdown. And mostly, it wasn't that. Mostly, it was a culture of fear, partly cultivated by public officials. I think for good reason, but partly cultivated them by them, but also embodied and instantiated by individuals who were largely scared. And I think in retrospect, we've made this collective mistake, and the big point I want to make is, this is not just like an information problem about what Joe Rogan says about the pandemic. It's a problem at the level of the consumer, too. So many people have revised their own memories of the pandemic or have a distorted memory of that period and think of it as a much more aggressive, much longer lasting, much more restrictive regime. Then we really had, I think, to sort of pin the blame for all of the disruption on someone else, as opposed to really reckoning with what it meant, that given the facts, and we all basically did know the facts. We did know roughly what the fatality rate was. We did know what the HQ of the disease was. All of those things were publicly available in the winter of 2020, you know, as early as the first data coming out of China, all of that has been really quite remarkably vindicated in the years since. Responding to that set of facts and that set of data, most of us had a really quite panicked response. Even if we knew that, you know, I'm 41 years old, even if I was, you know, an ever 37, when the pandemic had even if I knew that the risk of dying given an infection was incredibly low for a healthy 37-year-old male, I was still scared to get the disease. And part of that was because I was spending time with my father-in-law who was a compromised and older, but part of it was just pure pandemic fear. And I think a huge amount of what we remember as the emotional, social, and political disruptions of 2020 are, or word, projections of that fear, which we don't want to acknowledge, and we want to blame someone else for. And so we've kind of collectively decided, and again, this is not just, you know, in sub-stackest and it's among, you know, good liberals I know in Brooklyn, we decided that we went too far. And that if we had the chance to do it again, we would do things differently. We'd be much more open and much more voluntary. And that is, I think, a bad lesson to take going forward, especially if we're going to apply it to potential future pandemics that could be considerably worse. But it's also just at the level of truth telling, delusional.

I think that's absolutely true, but I think it also tells you something about the timeline, which is to say that the real partisan gaps opened up with behavior and response to the disease not in 2020. But in 2021, you started to see them in the fall of 2020, but then they really opened up with the arrival of vaccines. And then there was another bump when there was a consideration. They were never really implemented, but a consideration of vaccine mandates on later on in 2021. And I agree that that is the thing that now dominates its the sort of It's the looking glass through which our memory of, or the prism through which our memory of the pandemic has been distorted. And I think it's, I mean, from my perspective, the vaccines are, and we're a miracle. We could have actually gotten them a lot faster, but even getting them within 10 months or 11 months, counts as one of the great achievements in human history when you look not just in the US, but all around the world whenever the vaccines arrive. If they were taken in great enough numbers, they essentially eliminated the pandemic in one go. In the UK, for instance, they had much worse. big initial waves that were much worse than we had in the U.S. And they got the vaccines. And basically, haven't had anything comparable since the U.S. is a little bit of a marketer picture because we had less successful vaccine uptake. And yeah, to your point, it's just, you know, it's just, if we, if we can tell ourselves stories that involve something like 10, 15, 20 million vaccine deaths, If we can even entertain that idea without feeling like the world is contradicting us, we're in a really bad place. And that's the place that we're right now. And I think some of the natural features of COVID played a role here, I think that, you know, it's significant that the fatality rate was something like 1% at the population level. It's changes based on the demographic structure of the population, but something like 1%. which means that even if you knew 100 people who got sick probably you may only know one or two people or even zero people who actually died from it and allows you especially as a survivor on the other side of the pandemic to look back and think it was not that big a deal but of course we know we know not just from official COVID deaths and desert certificates we know from the excess mortality studies that the US has lost something like 1.1, 1.2 million people that we would not have lost in the absence of the pandemic we know that it's almost entirely driven by COVID-19 because the waves of those excess deaths matches perfectly the wave of the waves of infection as they passed through. The country as they passed through states as they passed through local communities. You know, there's no reason that if the problem were lockdowns that we would be having huge surges when there was a wave of infections and not a week later, when people were still locked in their homes, but the number of infections were lower. It's just indisputable that this was a major disease. It was primarily punishing us because of how novel it was, how inexperienced our immune systems were, but it proved at the global scale to be incredibly punishing best estimates or something like 25 or 30 million people died. And best estimates are that those vaccines, as they rolled out, save several multiples of that number of lives, which means This is really one of the great medical biomedical and political and social interventions in the history of the world. And exactly why the people who turned against it, turned against it, is a incredibly complicated, deep question. I'm sure you have lots of thoughts, but I would just start by saying, you know, as a counterfactual, it's interesting to consider the possibility that the vaccines were approved before the election, before the Biden Trump election. There's some reporting. I think plausible that the approval was delayed at a fear that it would be used in a political way, but probably the original timeline would have meant the vaccines were given approval just before the election. It's possible given the margins of that election that Donald Trump might have benefited to a reelection on the basis of those approvals. and then how the country particularly the sort of You know, I don't know exactly how you want to characterize on the political spectrum what you're calling sub-stackest and it's, you know, it's some mix of center-right and fringe, including, you know, and some just fringe, independent of particular political ideologies. But exactly how those people would have responded to the vaccine, if Donald Trump was president and his people were designing the rollout, is I think it's a really important and interesting counterfactual history to consider, I think, it's quite possible that we'd be living in a much less pandemic divided nation than we are now. But that's not to say that there's much that we could do now or even in retrospect, if we could take a time machine back in time to really change the course of that, or that we might want to. I mean, would it have been worth a second term term to have support for vaccines among Republicans at 75 instead of 55% I don't know.

which is mostly, even more remarkable because it's, he is such a tribune of the whole movement that almost anything he says becomes a cause for them. Yeah. And the fact that they can, they can, they can like follow him almost anywhere, but not to the vaccines. It is really quite remarkable. Yeah. On the other hand, you know, I would just say as a, as a baseline, important to keep in mind, 95% of American seniors got at least one shot by the end of 2001, 2021. Mm-hmm. And we know it's probably higher than that, but the CDC actually stopped counting it 95% because they don't want to like over promise and they think that the data might get a little unreliable at that level, but it surpassed the threshold of 95% of American seniors. The risk of this disease was concentrated in seniors in a quite traumatic way. The age skew is for an 80 year old. It's like 1,000 times more deadly than for an eight-year-old. And so like in a certain logical way, those are the people that we needed to get. And we got almost all of them in the calendar year in which we began rolling out vaccines. And so we can compare ourselves to other countries in terms of vaccination uptake, especially among the middle-aged. We fell away behind, which is why when Delta came, something more Americans died than other in other countries. But on some of like our first job here was to protect the elderly and even in spite of the partisan dynamics, even in spite of the vaccine skepticism, we got the vast vast majority of the most vulnerable people, some protection on a relatively fast timeline. And so one of the things that we're talking about, I think, at least I'm talking about, is the way in which these questions and these debates almost separate from the facts on the ground, not just in terms of do we acknowledge how many people died of COVID, do we acknowledge how many people took vaccines, but how many of the people who are expressing vaccines skepticism now took the vaccines, the data suggests quite a large share. And you know, and are we treating the distortions of our discourse that sort of uglyness of our public discourse around these issues as a substitute for the data that we know we have about who actually got the shots. And I'm just as appalled and horrified and scared about what the state of scientific discourse and public trust is as you are. But I also think there's some reasons to think that when you look at the actual behavioral data, not just with vaccines, but how much people are moving around, how much social distancing people are doing at various points of the pandemic, there was actually less division and less hostility to behaviors that we could take to protect ourselves and protect those around us than it seems on the sort of narrative surface.

Yeah, the one, the first number is the one that I think is a little complicated to assess, was like, how do we think about that death toll? Was that how much of that was avoidable? You know, how much, who do we can, what other countries do we compare ourselves to? In the heat of the spring and summer of 2020, a lot of people were willing to say that the entire pandemic was Trump's fault, and that every American death was on his desk and on his responsibility. Joe Biden said, you know, any president has presided over a couple of hundred thousand American deaths, does not deserve to be president, and Joe Biden has now presided over about 750,000 American deaths. So I think a lot of those narratives that we told ourselves at the outset of the pandemic were politically naive, epidemiologically naive, And it means that many of the deaths that we saw were probably on some level unavoidable. We shouldn't look at the scale of COVID death and say, all of that is a sign of our national failing. The question of exactly what share of that 1.2 million is was avoidable. I think people are going to be debating for generations. My own sense is probably something like, something like the share that you suggested, maybe a little bit more if it's, if it's, you know, maybe 500,000 of the 1.2 million couldn't have avoided. But, you know, hardly any country in the world really thrived and succeeded in ultimately containing the disease, even until the arrival of vaccines. Those countries which were celebrated in 2020 is being the most successful at limiting the spread of the disease. They ended up in a better place than the U.S. did or the UK did, but they didn't end up in a place that, you know, they defeated the pandemic. They, everybody suffered. And one of the things that's most remarkable to me about that is that you see political blowback even for those leaders in those countries who did quite well. So just into art and in New Zealand, you know how to resign. I mean not just because of her COVID policies, but you know, she was incredibly popular in 2020 and then by 2022 was incredibly unpopular in that country. There was a political backlash against Xi Jinping and China that was powered in part by the COVID lockdowns there, just from an epidemiological level, like China did well in containing the virus, but there was heat suffered a huge backlash there. Across the world, Canada did relatively well, but Trudeau suffered. There's almost nobody who came out a hero. at the level of national leader. Almost anywhere in the world, whether they were somebody who suffered through a brutal pandemic or someone who managed to relatively easy one, no matter what level of suffering or what kind of suffering countries went through. Almost all of them looked at their leaders and said, like, we don't like run this guy's running things. And I think they get back to something I was saying earlier, which is the way in which we're trying to make sense of the disruptions and suffering that we all went through over the last couple of years in part by pinning blame on someone some discreet authority. Partly out of hopes that we could get them out of office, or kick them out of power, or at least learn our lesson so that in the future we wouldn't listen to people like them. And I think the University of that feeling across the world shows that it doesn't say all that much about how individual leaders manage things. It says a lot more about how hard it is to live through a pandemic, how much we don't actually want to do that, and how much we want to pretend that it was possible to avoid.

Well, I would say, for sure, the initial criticism was overstated. It turns out that even in 2020 before the arrival of vaccines, Sweden died a lot less than the United States did. And I think that is a really important distinction to make and thinking about all of these questions. It's like, how did we do before the vaccines and how did we do after the vaccines? Because in the big sweep of the pandemic, the most important factor in determining a country's outcomes. was how many people got sick before they were vaccinated and how many people got sick after they were vaccinated. And in 2020 Sweden did considerably worse than its neighbors, which are its natural comparisons by every measure of COVID and excess mortality. So I think 10 times as many Swedes died as Norwegians, something like that level compared to Denmark and Finland and Iceland are also much better. After the arrival of vaccines, things leveled out, so that depending on the database that you look at, the ones I trust, they're still a little behind those countries. They're still doing a little bit worse than their peers, but it's in the same rough band. There are other analyses, including ones that the Swedish government has put together. That suggests that they actually outperform their neighbors. But like I said, I think the better models there suggest something like slightly below the performance of their peers. But there are a lot of complications and caveats that are important to acknowledge when telling the story. One is the one that I mentioned that you know, you really do need to divide the experience before vaccines from the spirit experience after because if you get the whole population vaccinated on day one and the pandemic goes on for several years like that's going to make a big difference. Another is that Sweden talked about its pandemic response as hands off. And it was in some ways, most of their guidance was offered as guidance. But some schools did shut down in Sweden. Some stores did shut down. There were travel restrictions. People did move around a lot less. Much of that was voluntary. In the sense that the police weren't going around ticketing people when they left their homes in the same way that they were in other parts of Europe. But they also weren't doing that much in the United States. They're isolated incidents here and there if people getting ticketed for being in parks or beaches. There was a period of time in the late spring of 2020 when in some US states and municipalities there were some sort of surveillance of that kind. But by and large, we did the same thing. We told people that they shouldn't run much of socialize and then we didn't do much to enforce those rules. When you look at some of the data that's been examined by the Oxford Blvd. School of Government, they've done a international comparative study of COVID mitigation measures and they look at, I think it's like eight or 10 different categories of restrictions. Sweden is not unusually open in the spring and summer of 2020. It's a little bit more open than some of its European neighbors. It's about as open as the US is. And so their experience there was less confrontational. It was less patronizing in certain ways than the US was. But if the level of individual behavior and how it was, guided and policed. I think there's actually considerably less difference between the two countries than we've told ourselves there was. And they had other natural advantages that, you know, they don't have a ton of people coming in and out of the country and the same way that the US does, they have high levels of social trust, all those things played a role too. But I think in the big picture you'd have to say, Sweden did not have the disaster that was predicted at the time, but it is also not necessarily a model for how a country like the US could operate in part because we're not so far from them and their policies as some of the Sweden advocates want to make us believe. And in part because the US is just a different and more complicated country to manage than Sweden is. And in thinking about the comparison of the US and Sweden, I just want to raise one particular anecdote, which I think is really illustrative. And that is that in May of 2020, in May, Anthony Fauci was interviewed on CNN by Chris Cuomo and Chris Cuomo said, you're losing the argument. People are getting tired. They're sick of staying at home. They're not going to do this much longer. What do you say to them? And Fauci said, you're right. We are. We can't do this indefinitely. And everybody ultimately has to decide for themselves. when they return to their normal life and what level of risk they're comfortable with. And this is not in 2022. It's not even in 2021 after the vaccines. It's in like month three of the pandemic. I think fewer than 100,000 Americans had died at that point. And you have the person who is the face of the quote unquote lockdown, saying very publicly, this is all voluntary. And I know that I'm not going to convince everyone. Now we all took messages from Fauci later on as more hard line and more, you know, more confrontational than that, absolutely. And he was not always that deferential to the judgment of individuals. But it's a reminder that a huge amount of this pandemic timeline that we remember as, you know, authoritarian dictatorial lockdowns directed from the top by Tony Fauci, it just wasn't that way. You know, I hear Bill Meyer talking about a two-year lockdown. It's like he didn't miss a recording a single show. And yes, he did it for a while without an audience. But that's a way of keeping one another safe and adjusting to an epidemiological environment that's threatening. And maybe we wouldn't want to do it in exactly the same way the next time. We can talk about those lessons. We can talk about what we might have learned or what we could do better. But I think as a just a baseline, we should remember that the country as a whole navigated this pandemic as libertarians, not as, you know, figures in an Orwellian nightmare. And many of us chose to stay at home and live in fear. And some people still are staying at home and living in fear. And some of them even have good reason, too. But overall, we made decisions on our own. We processed information on our own. And then we got really angry because we weren't happy with the world that we were living in, not because someone like Anthony Fauci or Donald Trump who is the president of the time was coming around to our houses locking thousands of people up, you know, nailing doors shut like they did in China, nothing like that happened here. We may feel that our lives were really restricted and limited in many ways they were. But to your point earlier, it was not an Orwellian nightmare in the same way that I think many of us kind of falsely now remember it to be.