How to prevent another scientific great leap forward

With a virus of unknown virility, these actions were socially persuasive.

Then there was politics.

The United States was in the run-up to an election. Former President Donald Trump was prone to a more liberal approach to internal restrictions and a more authoritarian approach to international ones. So he closed borders—which was construed as racist—and encouraged people to live life as best they could while he developed a vaccine, which was construed as madness.

This led to Democrats, from whom the U.S. and overseas media tend to take their cues, inveighing against border restrictions and in favour of lockdowns.

They were also casting doubts on vaccines, with Vice-President Kamala Harris saying she wouldn’t take a vaccine if President Trump told her to.

Added to this were models of the severity of COVID-19.

There was renowned epidemiologist John Ioannidis from Stanford University on the low end suggesting a need for more information and case fatality rates of somewhere between 0 and 1.31 percent depending on age and country.

At the high end, you had Neil Ferguson of Imperial College suggesting deaths of 200,000 in the UK without lockdowns and only 20,000 with lockdowns.

Mr. Ferguson has a career record of exaggeration, and as the pandemic progressed, the case fatality rate dropped so that it is now similar to flu.

Most of our governments chose to run with Mr. Ferguson. We have a bias towards fearing the worst, and politicians are disinclined to take risks in case they don’t pay off.

This combination of factors was the dry tinder of the precautionary principle providing the fuel load to “prove” that there was a problem so dangerous we had to focus on it to the exclusion of everything else.

So we did.