In 1349, as the Black Death ravaged Europe, a new pandemic-control strategy was adopted in cities across the continent. The protocol was precisely regulated by the experts. Three times a day, for a total of exactly eight hours, hundreds of men known as Flagellants would march in single file through town, wearing caps with a red cross and carrying scourges of knotted ropes studded with nails. “Using these whips,”
one witness reported, “they beat and whipped their bare skin until their bodies were bruised and swollen and blood rained down, spattering the walls nearby.”
This specific strategy is no longer in favor among public health officials, but the spirit of the Flagellants lives on. Instead of beatdowns, today’s regulators favor lockdowns, which are less bloody but inflict more social pain. For all the talk about following science, the authorities—and much of the citizenry—can’t resist the primal intuition that a pandemic can be quelled only through public penance. Consider two strategies for dealing with the Covid-19 virus: urge the public to spend time outside in the sun to build up their vitamin D, and to take supplements of the vitamin, repeatedly demonstrated to protect against viral infection; or shut down most businesses, deprive children of classroom education, and order everyone to stay home, a strategy never previously tested and yet to prove effective.
Which strategy would you try first? If you chose the vitamin D, you have no future in the public-health establishment. While a few researchers are touting the vitamin’s potential and advocating government programs to distribute the supplements during the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control can’t bring itself even to suggest that people take the pills on their own. In its Covid-19 guidelines, the CDC declares that “there are insufficient data to recommend either for or against the use of vitamin D.”
Somehow, though, the “insufficient data” problem disappeared when it came to lockdowns and mask mandates. Before the pandemic, the official expert consensus was
against those measures, but the consensus was promptly discarded in the hope that these sacrifices might help. The evidence since then could easily be called insufficient, given the lack of randomized studies and the inconvenient data showing that places with lockdowns
didn’t fare any better than the places without strict measures. And given what has emerged about the minuscule rate of transmission in outdoor settings, you could certainly say there’s insufficient evidence to order people to stay inside their homes or to mandate masks outdoors.
