No. of Recommendations: 16
Dope1: In other words, a lot of the guidance was seat-of-the-pants flying.
Well, duh.
Here's what the National Review did not include in its article:
QUESTION: The public health people, we talked about this earlier, if you're a public health person and you are trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is and that is something that will save a life. It doesn't matter what else happens. So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving the life, you attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people's lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered.
Do you think that that calculation, the infinite value to the public health measure versus the zero value to the other kind of unintended consequences was a mistake?
COLLINS: I'm glad you're asking. I made those comments in the context of what it was like in March or April of 2020. People have forgotten just how devastating the situation was with trailer trucks pulling up outside the morgue because the morgue couldn't handle all the dead bodies, thousands of people dying every day.
I am a public health person, I'm a physician. I swore the Hippocratic Oath. I was speaking about myself in that quote. For me trying to make a decision or contribute to a decision about mitigation measures, my number one -- basically my sole concern had to be saving lives. That's what I was there for.
I knew there were other parts of the government that were also a part of making big sweeping decisions, and I counted on them to cover such things as the economy, such things as education. But that was not my role, that was not why I was there.
So I'm unapologetic for focusing on saving lives. I think that was my responsibility, that was my calling. And especially at that point, that felt very compelling.
Keep in mind, in terms of the harms that were done that you've described with prolonged closures of schools, those were state and local decisions. The government made general recommendations. States had to decide what to do.
There were trailer trucks of dead bodies in major cities. Not enough PPE -- medical care personnel wearing garbage bags as gowns -- and Trump pitting states against one another to fight over masks and ventilators. They were recording one million cases of Covid every four days and 3,000 to 4,000 Americans dying every day.
Of course they were flying by the seat of their pants during the worst public health emergency in a century.
But some orange guy said it would go away like magic and if not, to just inject some disinfectant.
EASY-PEASY.
