Ross Douthat

Right.

So then the narrative, the sort of official public health narrative becomes...

This was an imperfect policy.

We went too far.

We closed schools for too long, maybe.

But we also probably kept a bunch of old people alive until the vaccine arrived.

And the, you know, more open approach was

might have been better for some people, but also might have cost more lives, right?

Just to clarify what you mean, through missed cancer screenings, through secondary, what is the mechanism?

I guess the fundamental error, I think, in the— Just in the sense of pushing some potential deaths into the future past the point where we got the vaccine.

That seems to me to be the strongest case.

You were a skeptic and a critic of the public health response.

There were a lot of different kinds of skeptics and critics of the public health response, right?

There were people who agreed with you that, you know, the death toll wasn't going to be 5%.

And there were people who said, it's no worse than the flu.

It's hyped.

It's a total myth.

There were people who said, you know, that it was a planned pandemic designed by, you know, evil global authorities to call the population.

And then once we had a vaccine, there were critics of how the vaccine was promoted who said, well, we shouldn't be mandating it and we've oversold its benefits.

And I think those critiques are correct.