The Lockdowners Aren’t Done with Us

DR. MARTY MAKARY: Look at China. They’re reporting 26,000 cases. They probably have thousands per day. They reported one severe illness. Well, we know from the Wall Street Journal that’s inconsistent, there had been outbreaks in nursing homes there. They had a significant scientific miscalculation.

They’re trying to use covid zero against a highly more contagious variant than the Wuhan strain. BA.2 cannot be squashed through lockdowns. They failed to use the time they bought to vaccinate their population adequately and they have a less effective vaccine. So they’re looking at Hong Kong realizing that’s gonna happen in their country soon, and I believe it will. It is seeded all over China, and their strategies are not just cruel, they’re not gonna be effective.

BUCK: Not just cruel but ineffective. Look. The lockdowns in Shanghai right now or the overall lockdowns, the lockdowns that China has been through — welcome back to the Clay and Buck show, by the way — are cruel and ineffective.

They are monstrous and useless, another way of saying this, and really, really catastrophic for your economy over the long term because what you end up doing is a version of what we’ve done here, too, which is you dramatically cut back your actual productivity and you start just writing the equivalent of IOUs, right?

You start debase your own currency by sending people checks in the mail or by using monetary policy to try to pretend that everything is as productive as it was beforehand within your economy. I think what we’re seeing in Shanghai is a reminder to everybody right now of just how extreme people are willing to go in the fight against covid, and we’re not done in this country, either.

We’re not quite at China levels of authoritarianism here. A lot of people, I mean even this morning, Clay, a bunch of people in the elevator with me, everybody had a mask on, all of a sudden. It’s starting to come back here.

And just yesterday we had the announcement here that the city of Philadelphia has said that, you know, masking is coming back. Here you go. Play 14. Their mask mandate’s going back into effect. It’s not a particularly sensible one, but then again it’s never sensible ’cause doesn’t work.

DR. CHERYL BETTIGOLE: This is our chance to get ahead of the pandemic. We do not believe that there’s any reason to panic or to avoid activities we enjoy and that are important to us. By wearing masks consistently, we can continue to go about our daily lives and continue to take part in the life of our city without contributing to increasing transmission of covid-19.

BUCK: I mean, that’s the Philadelphia health commissioner, Dr. Bettigole. And I would like to sit down and have a really in-depth, heart to heart conversation with her about whether or not so that he has to be a total moron. I actually would like to have that conversation with her.

CLAY: I think she probably is. Also, Buck, they’re not starting this until April 18th. So they announced a full week before they mandate the return of masks that masks are going to come back. Well, hopefully by April 18th they’re already going to be on the backside of whatever BA.2 surge we’re going to get.

And my concern is as soon as we get one city like Philadelphia, as we were telling you yesterday, deciding to bring back masks, New York City, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco, L.A., so many other places immediately typical get in line because there’s a rush to that consensus of “we have to be masked up” because there is that fear which is not going to go away.

I don’t know how this ends for the 10 or 15 or 20 percent of people who are broken by covid. And, Buck, there are a lot of people broken by covid, but what we are going to see unfortunately is this idea that nothing else in the world existed but covid which is what they’re still trying to do in China.

The joke the Chinese share with each other is you can die of anything so long as it isn’t covid. What’s going to happen for our young children, what’s going to happen for other people’s health for issues outside of covid, and what’s gonna happen with this economic situation, for all the talk about the recovery, Buck, we’re still around two million people who were working in March of 2020 when we hit the lowest unemployment rate and we hit the rising wages, when everything was rolling with Trump, we’re still at basically under two million people. We still haven’t even caught back up to where we were then.

BUCK: You brought up the people who have been broken by this, which is clear, and I see it. And it is sad all over New York City. I mean, I get angry at the airline attendant who is masking us up between bites ’cause that’s just tyrannical and stupid, don’t have to do that. But I do feel sad for the people who are choosing on their own to walk ordinance outside on a relatively nice day here in New York City, you know, talking about earlier in the week when the weather was a little bit better or last week. And they’ve got an N95 mask on.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: You know, you walk around, you say, well, hold on a second, why are they doing this? But not only has covid broken them emotionally, the government’s response to covid — and this brings us into the accountability that needs to happen here, people need to be very honest with what has gone on as a result of these government policies. Yes, people are broken emotionally because of covid. Some of them are gonna go broke down because of the response to covid, essentially.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: This is right now, what we’re seeing with inflation, yes, it was worse under Biden. Yes, Biden bears a lot of the responsibility. But I’m just gonna say it. It was not a good idea to have lockdowns period, ever, including in 2020.

CLAY: You and I were arguing this when nobody else would talk about about it back in March and April. I was doing a frigging sports show and I was saying, what are we doing? How are we shutting down sports leagues? We gotta find a way to play. And it was so infuriating. You could see what the natural result was gonna be.

BUCK: Here’s what I tweeted out almost two years ago, May 12th, Clay, 2020. I wrote “We’re moving toward eventual herd immunity as a society. We’re just doing it more slowly and at the price of 30-plus million jobs and existential risk to our economy and way of life. People are figuring this out. Just not nearly fast enough.”

A hundred percent true, by the way. That was two years ago.

CLAY: And a lot of people still haven’t figured it out. That’s what’s frustrating.