Remember the ill-advised “stay-at-home” orders during the pandemic? In all, 43 State governors issued emergency (i.e. illegal) orders directing residents to stay at home and non-essential businesses to close in response to the coronavirus pandemic (see here, for example). But as I explained as early as April of 2020 to anyone who would listen (here), those State and local lockdown policies were not only unreasonable restrictions of liberty; worse yet, they also constituted unconstitutional “takings” of property rights: one’s right to labor. Now, over five years later, Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean’s new book about the pandemic, aptly titled “The Big Fail“, contains the following scathing critique of those same lockdown policies:

… lockdowns would be China’s default strategy whenever a cluster of people were infected in a Chinese city. ***

Here’s the odd thing, though: lockdowns also became the default strategy for most of the rest of the world. Even though they had never been used before to fight a pandemic, even though their effectiveness had never been studied, and even though they were criticized as authoritarian overreach—despite all that, the entire world, with a few notable exceptions, was soon locking down its citizens with varying degrees of severity.

In the United States, lockdowns became equated with “following the science.” It was anything but. Yes, there were computer models suggesting lockdowns would be effective, but there were never any actual scientific studies supporting the strategy. It was a giant experiment, one that would bring devastating social and economic consequences.

Nocera and Bethany McLean, The Big Fail, pp. 32-33

File under: “Lockdowns as Takings“. Hat tip: Alex Tabarrok.