The US COVID public health emergency officially ended in May. Most people exhibit an understandable impulse to forget about it—memories of illness, death, business and school closings, and isolation are not pleasant to revisit. In so doing, however, we are missing out on opportunities to learn from our pandemic experience, especially mistakes that are likely to be repeated in the future. Three of the most important of these lessons concern public health officials: The tendency of leaders to overstate dangers and, therefore, the measures necessary to counteract them; a failure to exhibit sufficient forthrightness and self-correction; and the active suppression of alternative points of view.

It is becoming increasingly clear that US efforts to reduce COVID transmission caused considerable suffering. School closures and the shift to online learning—which disproportionately affected students from disadvantaged backgrounds—resulted in dramatic drops in achievement scores across the nation. Rates of social isolation and associated depression, anxiety, and drug overdose increased sharply. The economic impact was little short of catastrophic, especially among the poor, with millions of jobs eliminated, hundreds of thousands of businesses permanently shuttered, and trillions of dollars lost. In these and other ways, the “cure” proved worse than the disease

Too often, COVID’s dangers were exaggerated. Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci told Congress in March 2020 that COVID-19 was at least 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu, citing the World Health Organization’s fatality rate estimate of 3.4%. Asked to estimate total fatalities in the US, he declined to give a number, but said, “If we’re complacent and don’t do really aggressive containment and mitigation, the number could go way up and be involved in many, many millions.” The problem, of course, was that the disease had already spread widely and that many infected showed few or no symptoms. The true fatality rate turned out to be 0.2%.

Of course, this figure applies across the entire population, which blurs some important distinctions. Those at highest risk of death from COVID-19 were the elderly and those with chronic illnesses, in whom rates were orders of magnitude higher than in the young and healthy. In fact, among healthy school-age children, the risk of death was virtually non-existent, and teachers were at no greater risk of death than others. The pandemic’s real threat to schoolchildren was not posed by the virus but by policy overreactions that kept kids out of school, stunting learning and spawning a youth mental health crisis. Schools should never have closed.

Why would public health leaders overstate the dangers of COVID? We cannot know for sure, but individuals whose whole professional career centers on public health are likely to overly esteem health and threats to it. This is one reason that the nation’s response to public health threats should be informed but never controlled by public health officials. They should present their case to officials with a broader portfolio, who can then balance the protection of health against other goods, such as education, the vitality of social and community life, and standards of living. Public health officials need a seat at the table, but they should never drown out other key voices. 

Secondly, when mistakes are made, they need to be corrected. Officials should have acknowledged that lockdowns were far less effective than supposed, masks have not been shown to be effective in reducing transmission, and vaccines, while effective in protecting against death, do not prevent people from contracting or spreading the disease. Especially early in such outbreaks, mistakes, though not inevitable, are at least forgivable. But as new information emerged, too many public health officials and policymakers did not admit their errors, depriving the public at large and even health professionals of important learning opportunities.

Third and most egregiously, the truth was actively suppressed. Consider the case of the drafters of the “Great Barrington Declaration.” This 2020 document heavily criticized pandemic lockdowns, instead urging policies more narrowly focused on protecting the elderly and those with chronic medical conditions. One of the declaration’s authors, Jay Bhattacharya, conducted one of the first epidemiologic studies showing that COVID-19 was already far more widely spread in the general population than experts had supposed. By substantially increasing estimates of the number of people infected, the study provided early evidence that the virus’s lethality had been dramatically overstated.

The high degree of opposition that public health officials could mount to such information was amply demonstrated by a memo that National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins sent to Fauci and another public health official on October 8, 2020. The text of the email includes a link to the Great Barrington Declaration followed by this text: “This proposal from three fringe epidemiologists who met with [Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar] seems to be getting a lot of attention. . . . There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet. Is it underway?”

The problem is not that Collins, and by his response, Fauci, disagreed with the declaration’s authors about the appropriate response to the pandemic. Physicians, scientists, and public health officials often disagree with one another. Instead, the problem is Collins’ proposed remedy. He is not urging caution until more evidence can be accumulated. He is not calling for a point-by-point scientific rebuttal of the Declaration’s premises. Nor is he calling for a public meeting or the publication of a point-counterpoint article in which both sides of every question could be thoroughly explored. Instead, he is calling for a quick and devastating “takedown.” 

Such suppression of alternative points of view by public officials is profoundly dangerous to a democracy. If the people are to rule, or at least knowledgeably select representatives who operate the government in their stead, then they should have an opportunity to consider dissenting points of view. Misinformation from disreputable sources may be ignored, but this perspective was supported by very strong evidence, and it emanated from eminent scientists and scholars. The conjunction of political power and intellectual closed-mindedness is toxic to a free and open society, and only by learning from such mistakes can we prevent them from recurring in the future.

It is said that General Motors Chair Alfred P. Sloan would table any matter before the board when its discussion produced no dissenters or alternative proposals, saying that they would return to it at a later meeting, after board members had an opportunity to consider it more fully. Likewise, after the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation, leaders in the Kennedy administration realized that their deliberations had been informed by only one side of the argument—namely, those in favor of it. In the future, they resolved to appoint a devil’s advocate, ensuring that risks, costs, and alternatives received a hearing. Public health officials should adopt such an approach, ensuring that dissent is never “canceled.” 

Takedowns are not the modus operandi of science, academia, or even sound public policy. Takedowns are the technique of autocrats, or at least those who exhibit autocratic tendencies. To prevent leaders from seizing on public health challenges as opportunities to consolidate and augment their power, it is vital that Americans insist on accountability. We should never simply accept without question the presumptions that an emerging pandemic calls for extraordinary countermeasures, that government officials seek truth before all else, or that naysayers can be dismissed as “fringe” elements. The best disinfectants are not masks or vaccines, but truth and the civil liberties essential to its pursuit.