By Bret Swanson at Brownstone dot org.

The experts have not been quick to assess, let alone apologize for, their performance during Covid. I took note, therefore, when two elite institutions that led the pandemic response co-hosted a retrospective event on Thursday, November 6.

Johns Hopkins University is home to a world-renowned medical center and the Bloomberg School of Public Health. The American Enterprise Institute is one of Washington, D.C.'s oldest and largest public policy think tanks. Both helped shape pandemic policy and perception from its earliest days.

The two organizations have been collaborating for the past year, and they framed their first event on November 6 around the book In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, a critique of lockdowns written by two Princeton political scientists, Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo.

Given their vocal insistence on maximal Covid impositions, Hopkins and AEI deserve credit for finally highlighting an opposing view.

Let's recall how central the two organizations were in the early days, and even before. In October of 2019, Hopkins had, with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and World Economic Forum, co-hosted Event 201, a tabletop pandemic planning exercise. Participants from the CIA, the Chinese CDC, and various public relations firms discussed how they would manage a future novel coronavirus outbreak, focusing especially on how to combat "misinformation" and shape public behavior. Just two months later, Covid hit.

Then, in the spring of 2020, AEI fellow and former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Scott Gottlieb co-authored with Johns Hopkins infectious disease specialists a major lockdown blueprint. Gottlieb was a key Republican demanding lockdowns. Meanwhile, millions of people were hitting refresh on Johns Hopkins' Internet dashboard map, which counted Covid "cases" and helped drive panic across the globe.

There are still giant holes in AEI and Hopkins' understanding - especially on the Covid vaccines - and I'll address those in the second half of this article. But first, the good stuff.

The Good

"A wartime mentality took hold," Frances Lee explained at the November 6 event. The message was, "'We all have to pull together, we've chosen a strategy.' We didn't get a servicing of the necessary questions."

"Educated elite institutions," Macedo followed, "were pushing a point of view that seemed to be worth questioning, and was to a remarkable extent not questioned adequately."

"There's not enough dissent in public health," Macedo charged. They suffer from "tunnel vision and groupthink," Lee followed up.

Macedo briefly criticized social media censorship, noting that "Not a single law school conference that we know of has been held to discuss the First Amendment issues with regard to speech."

The authors emphasized a central defect of Covid policy interventions - the failure to weigh not just supposed benefits but also costs. Science advisors and policymakers simply denied any potential trade-offs.

Macedo and Lee found that lockdowns radically departed from pre-pandemic recommendations and were not effective in slowing virus spread or reducing mortality. Benefits were elusive. Lockdowns did, however, impose gigantic economic and social costs.

AEI's Roger Piekle, Jr., seemed to approve of some "shadow science advice" efforts, such as the Great Barrington Declaration, though he didn't elaborate.

Macedo and Lee especially condemned extended school closures, noting that most European schools had reopened in spring 2020, to no harmful effect. The US media was loath to report this fact, Macedo highlighted.

I myself had advised former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who in the spring of 2020 was president of Purdue University. He wanted to open the campus in the fall of 2020 and asked for empirical support. We assembled the data showing young people were at near-zero risk, which he relied on in May 2020 to courageously announce, first among all major US colleges, t...