Kerby Anderson

The authors of a new book remind us that for the first time in history, the world shut itself down—by choice—because of a virus that was spreading. We did not understand the nature and danger of the coronavirus, but we understand much more now. I had Dr. Jay Richards on my radio program to talk about the book, The Price of Panic, written by him and two other authors. The subtitle of the book expresses some of their concerns: “How the tyranny of experts turned a pandemic into a catastrophe.” They illustrate with lots of facts, figures, and graphs the reality that the human cost of the emergency response to the pandemic far outweighed the benefits. They recognize that other books will be written in the future about the response to the virus. But they wanted to publish these results now because there is another push to close down the economy. In previous commentaries, I have documented some of the economic, educational, emotional, and medical costs of the lockdowns that took place. This book goes into even more detail to talk about the total costs in dollars, lives, and livelihoods as well as the ongoing problems with emotional and medical issues. One of the biggest surprises for the authors was how ineffective the lockdowns actually were. They assumed that the lockdowns would do what they were predicted to do but you would still have to count the other negative costs. But if you look at the charts in the book, you will discover the lockdowns weren’t very effective. In chapter nine (with the title: Did the lockdowns work?) are a number of graphs for a dozen states showing when the lockdown was implemented and what happened more than a week later to the number of reported cases. The impact was much less than we were led to believe. Our elected leaders and our newly elected leaders need to read this book before they make any decisions about another lockdown.