What happens when an upheaval so massive forces financial markets, governments, and society to rethink how our systems work? Michael Krieger, author of the Liberty Blitzkrieg, joins Real Vision to explain what coronavirus and the response to the outbreak has revealed about the condition of American systems – from financial markets to the health care system. Tracing the story of financial markets and societal trends over the past two decades, Krieger outlines how our systems have been pushed to the brink – focusing on emergency policy responses and the everything bubble. He also provides viewers with potential solutions to the systemic decay that has been brought to the forefront by the coronavirus outbreak.
The Coronavirus and the Conservative Mind
The pandemic has put psychological theories of politics to a very interesting test.
Over the past two decades, as conservatives and liberals have drifted ever farther from each other, an influential body of literature has attempted to psychologize the partisan divide — to identify conservative and liberal personality types, right-wing or left-wing minds or brains, and to vindicate the claim of the noted political scientists Gilbert and Sullivan, That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive. / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative.
In its crudest form this literature just amounts to liberal self-congratulation, with survey questions and regression analyses deployed to “prove” with “science” that liberals are broad-minded freethinkers and conservatives are cramped authoritarians. But there have been more sophisticated and sympathetic efforts, too, like the influential work of New York University’s Jonathan Haidt on the “moral foundations” of politics: Haidt argues that conservatives actually have more diverse moral intuitions than liberals, encompassing categories like purity and loyalty as well as care and fairness, and that the right-wing mind therefore sometimes understands the left-wing mind better than vice versa.
Both the crude and sophisticated efforts tended to agree, though, that the supposed conservative mind is more attuned to external threat and internal contamination, more inclined to support authority and hierarchy, and fear subversion and dissent. And so the political responses to the pandemic have put these psychological theories to a very interesting test.
In the coronavirus, America confronts a contaminating force (a deadly disease) that originated in our leading geopolitical rival (an external threat) and that plainly requires a strong, even authoritarian government response. If there was ever a crisis tailored to the conservative mind-set, surely it would be this one, with the main peril being that conservatives would wildly overreact to such a trigger.
So what has happened? Well, several different things. From the Wuhan outbreak through somewhere in mid-February, the responses to the coronavirus did seem to correspond — very roughly — to theories of conservative and liberal psychology. Along with infectious-disease specialists, the people who seemed most alarmed by the virus included the inhabitants of Weird Right-Wing Twitter (a collection of mordant, mostly anonymous accounts interested in civilizational decline), various Silicon Valley eccentrics, plus original-MAGA figures like Mike Cernovich and Steve Bannon. (The radio host Michael Savage, often considered the most extreme of the right’s talkers, was also an early alarmist.)
Meanwhile, liberal officialdom and its media appendages were more likely to play down the threat, out of fear of giving aid and comfort to sinophobia or populism. This period was the high-water mark of “it’s just the flu” reassurances in liberal outlets, of pious critiques of Donald Trump’s travel restrictions, of deceptive public-health propaganda about how masks don’t work, of lectures from the head of the World Health Organization about how “the greatest enemy we face is not the virus itself; it’s the stigma that turns us against each other.”
But then, somewhere in February, the dynamic shifted. As the disease spread and the debate went mainstream, liberal opinion mostly abandoned its anti-quarantine posture and swung toward a reasonable panic, while conservative opinion divided, with a large portion of the right following the lead of Trump himself, who spent crucial weeks trying to wish the crisis away. Where figures like Bannon and Cernovich manifested a conservatism attuned to external perils, figures like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity manifested a conservatism of tribal denial, owning the libs by minimizing the coronavirus threat.
Now we are in a third phase, where Trump is (more or less, depending on the day) on board with a robust response and most conservatives have joined most liberals in alarm. Polls show a minimal partisan divide in support for social distancing and lockdowns, and some of that minimal divide is explained by the fact that rural areas are thus far less likely to face outbreaks. (You don’t need a complicated theory of the ideological mind to explain why New Yorkers are more freaked out than Nebraskans.)
But even now, there remains a current of conservative opinion that wants to believe that
- all of this is overblown, that
- the experts are wrong about the likely death toll, that
- Trump should reopen everything as soon as possible, that
- the liberal media just wants to crash the American economy to take his presidency down.
Where does this leave the theories of conservative and liberal minds? It’s too much to say that they don’t describe anything real. A certain kind of conservative personality (a kind that includes more than a few of my own friends) really did seem particularly well attuned to this crisis and ended up out ahead of the conventional wisdom in exactly the way that you would expect a mind-set attuned to risk and danger, shot through with pessimism and inclined to in-group loyalty to be.
At the same time, the behavior of what you might call “normie” Republicans — not Very Online right-wingers or MAGA populists but longtime Fox News and talk-radio consumers — suggests that any such conservative mind-set is easily confounded by other factors, partisanship chief among them. The fact that the virus seemed poised to help Democrats and hurt the Trump administration, the fact that it was being hyped by CNN and played down by Hannity, the fact that Trump himself declined to take it seriously — all of this mattered more to many Republicans than the fear of foreign contamination that the virus theoretically should have activated or the ways in which its progress seemed to confirm certain right-wing priors.
So one might say that the pandemic illustrates the power of partisan mood affiliation over any kind of deeper ideological mind-set. Or relatedly, it illustrates the ways in which under the right circumstances, people can easily swing between different moral intuitions. (This holds for liberals as well as conservatives: A good liberal will be as deferential to authority as any conservative when the authority has the right academic degrees, and as zealous about purity and contamination when it’s their own neighborhood that’s threatened.)
But the right’s varying responses to the pandemic also illustrate two further points. The first point is that what we call “American conservatism” is probably more ideologically and psychologically heterogeneous than the conservative mind-set that social scientists aspire to measure and pin down. In particular, it includes an incredibly powerful streak of what you might call folk libertarianism — which comes in both highbrow and middlebrow forms, encompassing both famous legal scholars predicting minimal fatalities from their armchairs and “you can’t stop the American economy … for anything” tough guys attacking social distancing on Twitter.
This mentality, with its reflexive Ayn Randism and its Panglossian hyper-individualism, is definitely essential to understanding part of the American right. But it’s very much an American thing unto itself, and I’m doubtful that it corresponds to any universal set of psychological tendencies that we could reasonably call conservative.
The second point is that on the fringes of the right, among QAnon devotees and believers in the satanic depravity of liberalism, the only psychology that matters is paranoia, not conservatism. And their minimizing response to the coronavirus illustrates the unwillingness of the conspiratorial mind to ever take yes for an answer — meaning that even true events that seem to vindicate a somewhat paranoid worldview will be dismissed as not true enough, not the deepest truth, not the Grandest of All Grand Conspiracies that will someday (someday) be unraveled.
In his novel “Foucault’s Pendulum,” a sendup of crackpot esotericism that anticipated “The Da Vinci Code” years before its publication, Umberto Eco captured this spirit by describing the way that self-conscious seekers after hermetic wisdom and gnostic mysteries approached the rise of Christianity:
… someone had just arrived and declared himself the Son of God, the Son of God made flesh, to redeem the sins of the world. Was that a run-of-the-mill mystery? And he promised salvation to all: you only had to love your neighbor. Was that a trivial secret? And he bequeathed the idea that whoever uttered the right words at the right time could turn a chunk of bread and a half-glass of wine into the body and blood of the Son of God, and be nourished by it. Was that a paltry riddle?
… And yet they, who now had salvation within their grasp — do-it-yourself salvation — turned deaf ears. Is that all there is to it? How trite. And they kept on scouring the Mediterranean in their boats, looking for a lost knowledge of which those thirty-denarii dogmas were but the superficial veil, the parable for the poor in spirit, the allusive hieroglyph, the wink of the eye at the pneumatics. The mystery of the Trinity? Too simple: there had to be more to it.
This is where the pandemic-minimizing sort of conservative has ended up. They are confronted with a world crisis tailor-made for an anti-globalization, anti-deep-state worldview — a crisis in which China lit the fuse, the World Health Organization ran interference for Beijing, the American public health bureaucracy botched its one essential job, pious anti-racism inhibited an early public-health response, and outsourcing and offshoring left our economy exposed.
And their response? Too simple: Just a feint, a false flag, another deep state plot or power grab, another hoax to take down Trump. It can’t be real unless Hillary Clinton is somehow at the bottom of it.
Rand Paul Has More Than a Cold
The senator from Kentucky was worried enough to get tested. But while he waited for the results, he kept going to work, the gym, and the pool.
By inadvertently spreading the coronavirus around the U.S. Capitol for at least a week, Rand Paul has turned the world’s greatest deliberative body into the nation’s highest-profile vector for the spread of the pandemic. The senator from Kentucky was worried enough about being exposed to the virus that he got a still-hard-to-obtain test for it. But while he was waiting for the results, he
- decided to keep showing up to the Senate. He
- went to group lunches with his Republican colleagues,
- took the Capitol elevators,
- talked with reporters, and
- worked out in the somehow-still-open Senate gym.
- Yesterday morning, he was doing laps in the pool there.
By yesterday afternoon, Paul had announced that he had tested positive. Graciously, he said that he would start self-quarantining.
Paul is exactly what we’ve been told to worry about. For all the laughing and hate-tweeting directed at spring breakers saying they don’t think the coronavirus is a big deal, they’re at worst dumb, selfish, underinformed 20-somethings. Paul is a medical doctor (he worked as an ophthalmologist before first being elected in 2012). He is a senator. He is an elected official. People look to him for leadership.
In the Senate, the average age is 62.9. There are five senators in their 80s—and there will soon be six, when Vermont’s Patrick Leahy has his birthday at the end of the month. There are mothers and fathers of young children in the chamber. There are senators who have close family members with conditions that make them especially susceptible to the virus, such as Utah’s Mitt Romney, whose wife has MS.
Then there is Paul, whose office claims that he was being extra careful by deciding to get tested (he had a procedure last year to remove a damaged part of his lung), and that he “only got tested because of his insistence.” But Paul’s attitude seems to have boiled down to some version of Too bad for you if I’m infected and I come into contact with you.
He is infected. He came into contact with a lot of people. And now, at a crucial moment in American history, when the entire country is counting on Washington’s response, Paul has single-handedly given senators reason to worry that they are risking their health by showing up to vote.
None of this explains how Paul got tested at all. People across the country are having trouble breathing and running fevers but being told that they have to wait for a test. Paul was asymptomatic, but did attend an art-museum fundraiser in Kentucky on March 7 with two people who later tested positive for COVID-19 (Paul says he never interacted with either of the people in question). Other people at the event, including the local mayor, have tested positive, and Paul seems to have decided that attending the fundraiser was enough reason to ask for a test. How he jumped the line for one is a mystery. America doesn’t have anywhere near enough tests for those who need them, despite Donald Trump saying at the beginning of the month that anyone who wanted a test could get one, and Vice President Mike Pence saying on March 10 that there would be an additional 4 million tests “before the end of this week.” That was two weeks ago today.
Importantly, Paul has no idea where or from whom he contracted the virus. He could have gotten it and then spread it at all sorts of places he hasn’t considered. Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky, who was at the same museum fundraiser, announced on March 15 that he’d taken a test and the results had come back negative. Still, Yarmuth tweeted, “I plan to continue working from home and will avoid going out in order to do my part as we all work to practice safe and precautionary distancing to help defeat this pandemic.”
Other senators, including Ted Cruz of Texas, preemptively self-quarantined after learning that they could have been exposed. Cruz had no symptoms either. Paul’s office argued that he got the test “out of an abundance of caution due to his extensive travel and events.” But if traveling between Kentucky and Washington is all that is required to get a test, a lot more people should be able to receive immediate testing.
They can’t, of course. There’s no question that Paul got special treatment. He got a test that others want and can’t get, and he got it despite having no symptoms—something the president has explicitly said people shouldn’t be doing. He got it as a United States senator, which means that he got it on a taxpayer-funded government health-care plan. Everyone else, including those who might be fighting for a ventilator in the coming weeks, can wait.
All last week, while he was deciding that he wanted to be tested, getting that specially obtained test, and waiting for the results, Paul was at work in the Senate. He was holding up, then voting against, then blasting in a floor speech the first major coronavirus-response bill, which includes a provision to make testing, once it becomes more readily available, free for whoever wants it.
Paul got a test that he voted against everyone else being able to get. He slowed the passage of the bill to make a principled stand against the enormous deficit spending involved. He did not mention, as he criticized young people for not taking the virus seriously while in almost the next sentence raising doubts that it is worse than the swine flu, that he was concerned enough about himself to get tested. “Modern man has become accustomed to the idea that life is relatively safe, that a long life is to be expected. Consequently, any re-eruption of diseases beyond our control paralyzes us with fear,” he said, urging people to get their worries under control. He mentioned that his parents remember the polio scares, and that they lived through those well into their 80s.
One of those parents is Ron Paul, the former congressman from Texas and presidential candidate who helped mainstream a version of libertarianism that his son is clearly inspired by, though the elder Paul is a separate political figure and not formally affiliated with his son except by biology. But here’s what Ron Paul, who also began his professional life as a doctor (an obstetrician) wrote in a commentary published on March 16: “People should ask themselves whether this coronavirus ‘pandemic’ could be a big hoax, with the actual danger of the disease massively exaggerated by those who seek to profit—financially or politically—from the ensuing panic.” The same day, Rand Paul’s chief political strategist, Doug Stafford, tweeted mockingly about New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio taking a midday break from dealing with the pandemic response to go to a gym in Brooklyn: “So people can’t eat out but can go to the gym where they expel bodily fluid and touch things other people just touched. Ok.” His boss, he would later find out, was doing those things all week.
Here are some of the questions I sent Paul’s spokesman this morning:
- When did the senator decide to get tested? Why did he wait, when Congressman Yarmuth, who was at that same museum fundraiser, got tested a week earlier?
- Why did he not inform anyone in the Senate that he was concerned enough to get tested and/or self-quarantine?
- How did the senator obtain a test so quickly, when others have been waiting (including others who likewise have conditions that have them on high alert)?
- Was the test covered under his Senate health insurance? If not, how was it paid for?
The only response I received pointed me to the statements that Paul has put out over the past day, which don’t address these questions. Paul’s office released an emailed statement from him this afternoon, calling for “more testing immediately, even among those without symptoms.” He argued, “The nature of COVID-19 put me—and us all—in a Catch-22 situation. I didn’t fit the criteria for testing or quarantine. I had no symptoms and no specific encounter with a COVID-19 positive person. I had, however, traveled extensively in the U.S. and was required to continue doing so to vote in the Senate. That, together with the fact that I have a compromised lung, led me to seek testing.”
He turned his scolding toward anyone questioning how he’s behaved, holding himself up as an exemplar because he went out of his way to get tested, even though he kept it secret, and even though he got a test others can’t get.
“For those who want to criticize me for lack of quarantine, realize that if the rules on testing had been followed to a tee, I would never have been tested and would still be walking around the halls of the Capitol,” the statement reads. “Perhaps it is too much to ask that we simply have compassion for our fellow Americans who are sick or fearful of becoming so.”
I hope the senator makes a full recovery. Many Americans who are sick or fearful of becoming so won’t get the same compassion or access to treatment that he did.
The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory That Informed the Trump Administration
President Trump, who at one point called the coronavirus pandemic an “invisible enemy” and said it made him a “wartime President,” has in recent days questioned its seriousness, tweeting, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.” Trump has said repeatedly that he wants the country to reopen by Easter, April 12th, contradicting the advice of most health officials. According to the Washington Post, “Conservatives close to Trump and numerous administration officials have been circulating an article by Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institution, titled ‘Coronavirus Perspective,’ that plays down the extent of the spread and the threat.”
Epstein, a professor at New York University School of Law, published the article on the Web site of the Hoover Institution, on March 16th. In it, he questioned the World Health Organization’s decision to declare the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, said that “public officials have gone overboard,” and suggested that about five hundred people would die from COVID-19 in the U.S. Epstein later updated his estimate to five thousand, saying that the previous number had been an error. So far, there have been more than two thousand coronavirus-related fatalities in America; epidemiologists’ projections of the total deaths range widely, depending on the success of social distancing and the availability of medical resources, but they tend to be much higher than Epstein’s. (On Sunday, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, estimated that there could be between a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand deaths in the U.S.) In a follow-up article, published on March 23rd and titled “Coronavirus Overreaction,” Epstein wrote, “Progressives think they can run everyone’s lives through central planning, but the state of the economy suggests otherwise. Looking at the costs, the public commands have led to a crash in the stock market, and may only save a small fraction of the lives that are at risk.”
Epstein has long been one of the most cited legal scholars in the country, and is known for his libertarian-minded reading of the Constitution, which envisions a restrained federal government that respects private property. He has also been known to engage with controversial subjects; last fall, he published an article on the Hoover Institution Web site that argued, “The professional skeptics are right: there is today no compelling evidence of an impending climate emergency.” Last Wednesday, I spoke by phone with Epstein about his views of the coronavirus pandemic. He was initially wary of talking, and asked to record his own version of the call, which I agreed to. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Epstein made a number of comments about viruses that have been strongly disputed by medical professionals. We have included factual corrections alongside those statements.
What did you want to achieve with your pieces?
What did I want to achieve with my pieces? First of all, I am not a politician. What I did is that I looked at the standard model that was put out in the New York Times [in an Op-Ed by Nicholas Kristof and Stuart A. Thompson, published on March 13th], which was backed up by other models in other places, and it occurred to me that I just did not think that the underlying assumptions there were sound. The single most important thing to me was not to get my own estimate of what the number is. The most important thing was to look at that curve, which seemed to suggest that there would be ten million cases a day during a ten-day or so band in the middle of July, and to explain why, in relationship to all other things I know about evolutionary theory, that this just has to be wrong. The better way to have phrased the paper would have been to say that the traditional models, which were used for the last flu season, for the 2009 H1N1 situation, are much better approximations of what is likely to happen than these rather scary kinds of projections.
You wrote last week, “In the United States, if the total death toll increases at about the same rate, the current 67 deaths should translate into about 500 deaths at the end.” We are currently at eight hundred deaths—over eight hundred deaths. [This was true when we spoke; the number is now over two thousand.]
First of all, let me just say I wrote an amendment to that, the thing I regret most in that whole paper. But I was not so much interested in explaining why my number was right. I was interested in explaining why the other projections were wrong.
O.K., but your number was surpassed in about a week, and now we’re already—
I understand that, but the point about that is that, first of all, there was a simple stupid error, which is you would never want to put it in a model that total deaths in the United States relative to the world would be one per cent. So if you just inflated it to five per cent or ten per cent, then all of a sudden you’ve got a number which is either five or ten times as high.
Secondly, suppose I should have been wiser in this and said, as I referred to the flu vaccine and later on to the H1N1 situation, if those are your benchmarks, then the number goes up to say between fifteen thousand and forty thousand deaths, as opposed to the one million-plus that are projected. [The Times model projected, without interventions by governments or citizens, a million deaths in the U.S.; with such interventions, the model showed that number dramatically decreasing.] And, remember, the one million-plus is on a model which is universal and worldwide, and you should expect to see something like that somewhere else. And there’s no evidence whatsoever that any of the situations, even in Italy, is going to approach the kinds of numbers that you had there. And so I am truly sorry about that [five hundred] number. I regard it as the single worst public-relations gaffe I’ve made in my entire life. But the question to ask, Isaac, is not whether I chose the right number but whether I had the right model.
Something else you wrote, in an earlier piece, was, “Why has there been such a dramatic mismatch in the responses to ordinary flu and the coronavirus?” Is that a question you’re still unsure about?
Look, the basic problem is, I think, in effect, that the tendency on the part of many people to treat this particular thing as unique is a mistake. There’s an underlying, standard model that you want to use, and the question is how you stuff it full of parameters. That is, numbers you add into it to make what’s going on. And, so, the situation that you get is you cannot use any exponential system because essentially then everybody is going to be dead, because things just keep doubling, doubling, and doubling.
So you have to develop a model which is going to explain why there’s a fairly rapid increase at the outset, and then why the thing starts to turn flat, ultimately down, and then disappears. That’s the strategy that you have to do. And so the theory here is one that I actually worked with and I thought worked pretty well in the AIDS stuff, which I worked on back in the early nineteen-eighties. And the model goes something like this. You start off with this virus, and there’s a range, some of which are very serious and some of which are less, so it’s a theory of natural selection with a normal distribution set. And, if you’re moving into a new environment like the [Life Care Center] of Kirkland or like the cruise ship, what happens is you have people who are completely unaware of what is going on. And so you take a population like in Kirkland, which is fragile and old, you get somebody in who has a strong version of the virus, and the thing will just absolutely rip through the population and kill everybody in it within a very short period of time. [Daniel Kuritzkes, the chief of the infectious-diseases division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, said, after being read this passage, “There’s no evidence that there are strong and weak variations of the coronavirus circulating. There may be minor variations person to person or location to location in the actual genetic sequence, but there is no evidence that they have different virulence or that a less virulent version is overtaking a more virulent version.”]
And Washington State had a very high peak early on. And, probably, most of the deaths that we have today, if you went through and chased them down, were either people who are in the facility or people who have family members who hugged and kissed people in the facility. So they got large doses of intense viruses. [Albert Ko, a professor of epidemiology and medicine and the department chair at the Yale School of Public Health, responded, “There is no evidence that you have a higher risk of dying from contact from someone in the facility than if you had contact from some other source.”] But then adaptation starts to set in. And, in my view, adaptation is a co-evolutionary process in which things change, not only in human behavior but also change in genetic viral behavior. So, on the human side, once you see that these things are really going to happen in this particular form, people take steps to avoid contact.
You write, “I fully understand the need for immediate responses to immediate threats, like fires, but not for crises that may last for three months or more.”
Yes. Well, I’m saying in effect, by this particular point—this is not the medical side—is after you start declaring emergencies you have time for reflection and adaptation and modification, which you don’t have in a fire case. So the political point is one which essentially says when you see governors of three major states putting out statements that their experts have said this, that, and the other thing is a result, and you don’t see the studies and you can’t question the assumption, I regard that as a serious breakdown in the political process. So my view on that particular point is I’d like to know which of these studies they’re relying on. If it’s the New York Times studies, then I thought that that study was mistaken for the reasons that I was trying to give you a moment ago, which is that as the virus becomes more apparent, adaptive responses long before government gets involved become clear.
You wrote, “The adaptive responses should reduce the exposures in the high-risk groups, given the tendency for the coronavirus to weaken over time.” What tendency are you talking about, and how do we know it will weaken over time?
Well, what happens is it’s an evolutionary tendency. [“There is absolutely no evidence for that,” Ko told me. According to Kuritzkes, “There is no proof that this is the case. To the extent we see that evolution taking place it is usually over a much vaster timescale.”] So the mechanism is you start with people, some of whom have a very strong version of the virus, and some of whom have a very weak version of the virus. If the strong-version-of-the-virus people are in contact with other people before they die, it will pass on. But, if it turns out that you slow the time of interaction down, either in an individual case or in the aggregate, these people are more likely to die before they could transfer the virus off to everybody else.
On the other hand, those people have the more benign version of the virus that will allow them to live longer, which means that they have the chance to make a connection with somebody else. And so what happens is, if it turns out you think something like the coronavirus is ten times as strong as another virus, what that means is that the distancing is going to be more violent, which means that the evolutionary process should be more rapid than that for the ordinary flu.
But you stated as fact that the coronavirus has a tendency to weaken over time.
Isaac, let me just explain it. This tendency takes time. It could be a week. It could be a month. It could be longer. But, in the end, you should expect something of this particular sort to take place. More importantly, on the other side, where there’s no dispute, it’s clear that people will start to evolve away from these things so that the rate of transmission will start to go down. And, as that starts to happen, whether you have just private or social responses, you’d expect the rate of transmission to go lower. So the question then is, How quickly will this thing peak? And, if you looked at the standard model, it basically postulated a very long buildup and a peak which is about three months away from now. And that just strikes me as being too high and too far relative to everything else that we have.
So, in the United States, if you start looking at yesterday’s figures, it was about two per cent higher than the day before, which is already indicating that the speed-up is slowing down. We’re going to have to see what the next days do. But we’re talking ten thousand cases a day at the current maximum, and the flu was vastly larger in terms of its number and its extent. And my sense is, given the reactions that you’re going to have, this thing will peak earlier and start to decline earlier than the common models start to say, because they don’t seem to build in anything by way of adaptative responses.
You keep talking about your “sense.” I think that’s the word you’re using. But you’re stating as a fact that the virus is going to weaken over time. It seems like we do not know that. We can turn to other viruses and how they’ve—
No, that is not what I said. I said there’s a long-term tendency in these ways. Over time, yes. And is this a hundred-per-cent tendency? No. Is there any known exception to it? No. [“We did not see SARS or Ebola weaken over time,” Kuritzkes said. “It is only appropriate public-health measures or vaccines that have helped to control those epidemics.”] It seems to me that if you do this, what you’re trying to do is to figure out what the probabilities are, and I think the answer is, if you look at all of the cases that we’ve seen, no matter what’s going on, even if you subtract out the coercion that was used in China and in Korea and so forth, you cannot come up with a credible story that those places in Korea would have had, say, a half a million cases a day. Or in China you would have had, say, thirty million cases a day. And so I do think that the tendency to weaken is there, and I’m willing to bet a great deal of money on it, in the sense that I think that this is right. And I think that the standard models that are put forward by the epidemiologists that have no built-in behavioral response to it—
And you’re not an epidemiologist, correct?
No, I’m trained in all of these things. I’ve done a lot of work in these particular areas. And one of the things that is most annoying about this debate is you see all sorts of people putting up expertise on these subjects, but they won’t let anybody question their particular judgment. One of the things you get as a lawyer is a skill of cross-examination. I spent an enormous amount of time over my career teaching medical people about some of this stuff, and their great strengths are procedures and diagnoses in the cases. Their great weakness is understanding general-equilibrium theory.
O.K., so your expertise in the subject I guess comes in part from your work with AIDS, which you just referenced, is that right?
AIDS, and I’ve worked on evolutionary theory for forty years in its relationship to law.
You write, “There are two factors to consider.
- One is the age of the exposed population, and the other is the
- rate of change in the virulence of the virus as the rate of transmission slows, which should continue apace. By way of comparison, the virulent AIDS virus that killed wantonly in the 1980s crested and declined when it gave way to a milder form of virus years later once the condition was recognized and the bath houses were closed down.” [I read this passage to Kuritzkes, who responded, “It’s completely inaccurate. It had nothing to do with the change in the virus. We were able to do it by safe-sex practices and the like, and we saw the explosive growth of H.I.V. during the nineteen-nineties in sub-Saharan Africa and more recently in Eastern Europe. There is nothing about the virus that has become less virulent.”] What milder form of the virus are you talking about?
Look, all it is is it’s a distribution. What you do is you figure out what this toxicity strength is and if it’s X at one point, then it’s going to be some fraction of X down the road. And it’s quite clear that that is what happened with AIDS. And then, when it comes along and you start getting [the antiretroviral drug] AZT and other conditions, it’s easier to treat them because all of a sudden AIDS is evolved in much the same path as syphilis. If you go through the history of syphilis, it starts off, it’s essentially a deadly disease and kills most people. And then those who survive have the milder version of it. And so after a while what happens is it becomes a tamer disease. [Syphilis is a bacterial infection, not a viral infection. “One doesn’t have anything to do with the other,” Kuritzkes said. Ko told me, “That’s not something that is based in empirical evidence, so the fallacy in his argument is the over-all lack of scientific rigor in his analysis.”]
You’re saying that there’s a milder form of the H.I.V. virus than what was around in the eighties and nineties. That’s what you’re saying?
Well, I mean, there’s always been a continuous distribution from severe to less severe. What I’m saying is the probability distribution switches so that the medium becomes a little more mild. And, if it becomes more mild, it kills fewer people. And, after a while, it becomes something that becomes a chronic disease of some sort or another instead of something that’s virulent.
O.K., but you used the phrase a “milder form” of the virus, which I could find no scientific backup for, so I wanted to clarify that point.
Well, I’m just telling you, I’m giving you this as a theory.
Oh, it’s a theory.
No, look, I’m not an empiricist, but, again, let me just be clear to you, because you’re much too skeptical. The evolutionary component has not been taken into account in these models, and so before one is so dismissive, what you really need to do is to get somebody who’s an expert on this stuff to look at the evolutionary theory and explain why a principle of natural selection doesn’t apply here.
What I’m doing here is nothing exotic. I’m taking standard Darwinian economics—standard economic-evolutionary theory out of Darwin—and applying it to this particular case. And, if that’s wrong, somebody should tell me. But what happens is I just get these letters from people saying, “You’re not an expert. The H1 virus differs from this one in the following way.” What I don’t get from anybody is a systematic refutation which looks at the points parameter by parameter.
I guess my point is that shouldn’t you be careful about offering up these theories before they’re printed?
No. It turns out in this particular world if you become quiet about this stuff it never gets heard. And what we’ve had now is very loud talk on one side. I think most of it is incorrect. I’m always willing to debate somebody on the other side who wants to say this is the way the model works. In fact, I have several of my Hoover colleagues who have done exactly that.
Richard, with all due respect, your article is apparently circulating in conservative circles in Washington and the White House.
I didn’t write it as a conservative article. Donald Trump’s name is not mentioned in it.
I grasped that.
I’m not interested in politics.
I know, but we have a responsibility when we put our name on something, no?
I absolutely do. And I told you I’m willing to debate anybody and anywhere at any time on this particular topic, and we’ll see how it comes out. What was the last sentence in that article? Would you care to read it again?
I’ve got it right here, I believe. “Perhaps my analysis is all wrong, even deeply flawed. But the stakes are too high to continue on the current course without reexamining the data and the erroneous models that are predicting doom.” Are the stakes too high to publish articles with basic errors?
This is not a mistake. It’s an open challenge. I’ve spent my entire life as a lawyer taking on established wisdom. My view about it is what you’re asking me to do is, when I think everybody is wrong, to remain silent, and the stakes are too high. So my view is there’s all these experts on the other side. Somebody come up and explain why it is that they think the results are going to be different. Looking at the data thus far, both theories tend to predict a sharp rise at the beginning, mine less sharp than the one that’s coming out.
In the next week or so, we’ll see. I will be, shall we say, much more compromised if we start to see a continuing explosion of deaths going on for two or three weeks. But, if the numbers start to level off, the curves will start to go downward.
I was just asking about—
I’m saying what I think to be the truth. I mean, I just find it incredible—
I know, but these are scientific issues here.
You know nothing about the subject but are so confident that you’re going to say that I’m a crackpot.
No. Richard—
That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That’s what you’re saying?
I’m not saying anything of the sort.
Admit to it. You’re saying I’m a crackpot.
I’m not saying anything of the—
Well, what am I then? I’m an amateur? You’re the great scholar on this?
No, no. I’m not a great scholar on this.
Tell me what you think about the quality of the work!
O.K. I’m going to tell you. I think the fact that I am not a great scholar on this and I’m able to find these flaws or these holes in what you wrote is a sign that maybe you should’ve thought harder before writing it.
What it shows is that you are a complete intellectual amateur. Period.
O.K. Can I ask you one more question?
You just don’t know anything about anything. You’re a journalist. Would you like to compare your résumé to mine?
No, actually, I would not.
Then good. Then maybe what you want to do is to say, “Gee, I’m not quite sure that this is right. I’m going to check with somebody else.” But, you want to come at me hard, I am going to come back harder at you. And then if I can’t jam my fingers down your throat, then I am not worth it. But you have basically gone over the line. If you want to ask questions, ask questions. I put forward a model. But a little bit of respect.
O.K. Let me ask you this question. All my questions are asked with respect.
That’s not the way I hear it.
O.K. Let me ask you this question. This is an important point, so I want us to come to some sort of resolution on this, because I think it gets to the crux of what you’re saying. You write, “Moreover, it is unlikely that the healthcare system in the United States will be compromised in the same fashion as the Italian healthcare system in the wake of its quick viral spread. The amount of voluntary and forced separation in the United States has gotten very extensive very quickly, which should influence rates of infection sooner rather than later.” Here is what confused me. Are you saying we are overreacting, which seems to be the tone of the rest of the article, or are you saying that the measures we are taking are going to prevent an Italy-like disaster, in which case, why the complaints about the overwhelming response?
Well, I think the answer is all of the above. If what I’m saying is correct, we should not expect to see many replications of what has happened in New York, where in fact the caseload here is actually lower than it was during the height of the flu season last year. [At the time of this interview, Epstein was correct. Now, however, the number of COVID-19 cases surpasses it.] What’s happening is the amount of quarantine that we’re putting in has created strain on the system, because what we do now is we spend much more money per case than we did in the summer, because we have more respirators, more isolation, more special uniforms, more special ambulances, and so forth.
But also on the other side we’re going to see a very strong reaction. The self-quarantine that you’re seeing taking place in New York, where I live, this is hugely voluntary. I have so many friends, not only are they going into quarantine, anybody who has a house in Connecticut or New Jersey, in the suburbs, they go out and they’re spreading this thing out there. It’s like the days in England when people would leave London during the plague and head off to Oxford.
So I think all of these forces are going to take hold fairly quickly. And the Italian situation, well, what’s the problem there? This is a national health-care system, and the way in which national health-care systems ration, since they typically do not devote enough resources and they charge no prices, is they ration by queuing, which is they have people wait. And so the stories that come out of Italy, there was one in the Jerusalem Post, said that they had a consistent policy of not giving a respirator treatment to anybody who got the virus who was over sixty. Well, that’s going to clearly change the mortality rates. [Italy does not have a consistent policy on ventilators but has had to ration their use. New York City officials have warned that they, too, may run out of equipment. On Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said, “We’re going to need at least several hundred more ventilators very quickly.”]
And, if you start looking at the mortality rates in Italy, ninety per cent or eighty-five per cent of the deaths are from people over seventy, which suggested something like this is going on. [The number appears closer to seventy-five per cent.] In the United States, we don’t have quite the skew, and we have a little bit better supply on things. I think we have a greater ability to ramp up in terms of things. So my guess is you will see real stresses in the short run in the New York area, but that given the time that’s available, I first of all did not think that the runoffs will be as great anywhere else throughout the system. All right? But, on the other hand, I think there’ll be more preparedness. My fear is that there will be overpreparedness if it turns out that the numbers that they’re preparing for are too high. Illinois declared that the state was on lockdown when they had twelve cases. By the way, Bill Gates agrees with me, I’m happy to say.
What does he agree with you on?
He thinks you have to relax the economic, lockdown restrictions. They are too severe.
Just to clarify, this is from a Vox Recode article, “Bill Gates rebuked proposals, floated over the last two days by leaders like Donald Trump, to reopen the global economy despite the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak, saying that this approach would be ‘very irresponsible.’ ” Gates said, “There really is no middle ground, and it’s very tough to say to people, ‘Hey, keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, ignore the pile of bodies over in the corner. We want you to keep spending because maybe there’s a politician who thinks GDP growth is all that counts.’ It’s very irresponsible for someone to suggest we can have the best of both worlds.”
I misread him then. Whatever Mr. Gates said, that’s fine. That strikes me as more populist than I am. The question is we managed to survive all of these things during the periods of flu vaccine. Nobody wants to trivialize death. You’re trying to minimize them. The point that I’m making is, you shut down the economy and put it on lockdown, you’re going to get medical deaths, when people don’t get adequate supervision and care for other kinds of conditions that also kill.
Right. I think the point that Bill Gates and others are making is that if we don’t shut down the economy or large parts of it, we’re going to get the economic devastation anyway down the road, because we’re not going to stop the virus.
That presupposes that the basic model is correct, that they’re relying on it. I think it is wrong. And the whole point of writing that article was to attack that model. Let’s put it this way: if in fact that model is right, it’s not at all clear that shutting down the economy will do any good, because it may well just be so devastating. And, if it’s wrong, it’s absolutely clear that the model is devastating.