BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY?

My wife, Ellen, who has good judgment, has advised me to shorten my posts. Though she says I don’t listen to her, I usually do. So here goes the new, shorter format.

Typically, to illustrate a point, I begin with a true story. This week, I’ll begin with two stories.

“Wait, you just said that…”

Don’t worry, both are short.

First, in 1979, my younger brother’s best friend, Rob, whom I knew and lived two blocks from us, was home alone, with his sixteen-year old classmate, David. Rob knew his father stowed a pistol in a drawer. Rob pulled the gun out. David requested to handle it. Rob passed the gun to David, who playfully pointed it at Rob. There was a loud blast. Rob took a bullet in the throat.

Somehow, Rob survived. When I came home from college months later, I saw Rob. He still had a bandage over the area of the wound in the—dead—center of his neck. I don’t know how he pulled through. You could say he dodged a bullet, but that wouldn’t actually be true.

Both David and Rob were considered college material.

Second, a dozen years ago, I backcountry backpacked in Zion National Park with two friends, Richie and Bill, whom I’ve known since I was 10 years old. There are countless Zion locations high enough to kill any hikers who fall therefrom; this happens multiple times every year in Zion and other such places.

At one particularly scenic outcropping, we were over 2,000 feet above the canyon floor. Both Richie and Bill—also college graduates—took turns approaching the edge and putting half of one foot over it. Bill took a downward-facing photo. I stood ten feet behind them and averted my eyes as they did this; call me sensitive, but I disliked the idea of seeing either nearly-lifelong pal plunge a very long way to a rocky death. Besides, the view from where I stood was nearly as good, without the added risk.

FWIW, I’ve jumped and dived—into water—off cliffs higher than they have. Risk assessment is—or least should be—largely personal and situational.

Because the stakes can be high, there are things one doesn’t—or at least shouldn’t—do unless s/he is sure it will turn out OK. One doesn’t point a gun at a friend unless he’s certain the gun is unloaded; nor even then. One doesn’t swim across a body of water unless one is sure s/he can handle the distance. One doesn’t eat a wild mushroom unless he’s sure it’s not toxic. One doesn’t put half of one’s foot over a 2,000—or even a measly 100—foot drop; at least I don’t.

The list of hypothetical, but fundamentally easy, risk/reward assessments could be quite long.

Federal, state and local governments implemented lockdowns/lockouts via decrees, based on a wildly exaggerated emergency. There was no legislation, no hearings or even any debate. Despite analyzing cost/benefit and risk/reward in all non-Covid contexts, our officials induced a societal coma without considering lockdown/lockout, mask and vaxx decrees’ psychological, social, economic or health costs.

Some foolishly, stubbornly insist that locking down all but the (tens of millions of) essential workers and closing schools, parks, many offices, stores and churches was the right thing to do. They parrot that it was done out of “an abundance of caution;” that it was “prudent” or that they were applying “the precautionary principle.”

This was/is complete bullshit. Using self-serving adjectives or labeling a vague notion a “principle” confers no analytical or epistemic support for a drastic action, in this instance the lockdowns, lockouts, masks, tests or mRNA shots.

Rather than applying the precautionary principle, the Scamdemicians inverted it. Prudent, cautious officials would have avoided such extreme, previously unused “mitigation” measures because their effects were so predictably bad and the interventions were unneeded and unlikely to work.

While handling civil litigation for thirty years, I both sought, and opposed applications for, various preliminary injunctions. In order to obtain such an injunction, a plaintiff must establish: 1) a substantial likelihood of success on the merits, 2) that the plaintiff will suffer irreparable injury if the injunction does not issue, 3) that the threatened injury outweighs whatever damage the proposed injunction may cause a defendant, and 4) that the injunction will not contravene the public interest.

The blanket lockdown/lockouts were, in practical effect, a comprehensive social and economic preliminary injunction: nearly everyone, stop doing what you normally do.

Except that there was no due process. In litigation, the party seeking to change to status quo has the burden of proof. Those seeking to lock others down or out clearly could not have fulfilled the four injunction requirements. They were never asked to.

The risks of these extreme measures plainly outweighed their rewards. Lockdowns/lockouts were clearly meritless and foreseeably adverse to the public interest. The law exalts precedent. But governments lacked facts to support locking down healthy people for the first time in human history and, by so doing, trashing young peoples’ lives, social life, generally, and the economy in a disingenuous attempt to slightly extend the lives of a tiny fraction of fundamentally sick people. The lockdowns’ foreseeable harms far outweighed their purported potential benefits, which were always unlikely to be obtained.

And weren’t obtained. The most restricted jurisdictions had more deaths than did those less restricted.

“Prudence” and “an abundance of caution” were cheesy, amorphous, cynical blather used to justify a wide array of irrational action. In comparison, preliminary injunction standards are more specific and balanced. The governmental failure to consider the cost/risk downside of the mitigation was strategic, evil and extremely harmful.

But they saw political and economic opportunity and exploited it. The damage is permanent.