The over-empowered technocrats running public health at the NIH, CDC, and WHO are needlessly panicking the public over COVID-19.  Although coming from different scientific backgrounds, those decision-makers share certain attitudes and abilities that brought them to their high office.  They are not scientific innovators, but people whose shared philosophy, analytical intelligence, and social skills helped them build their careers and institutions. 

In coping with a completely new situation such as COVID-19, as the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu once sniped, "In the absence of knowing what to do, they do what they know."  Indeed, in the complete absence of any real human data on incidence and lethality of COVID-19, our technocratic rulers blended decidedly lowbrow theories of how new viruses interact with human bodies with highbrow computer simulation to produce some of the scariest graphs and images the world has ever seen.   

Although Dr. Fauci is well aware that such simulations amount to little more than SWAG (scientific wild-ass guess), he and the WHO luminaries felt justified in crying "pandemic" for strictly logistical reasons: it was necessary to quickly scare people into obedience, they felt, because the prospect of overwhelming hospitals with the presumed coughing and dying scared them in a very personal way.  How would they have enough ventilators?  What would be done with patients suffering from heart attacks or other emergent problems, if all the hospital beds were suddenly filled?  These are the questions they asked themselves that led to the current worldwide quarantines. 

But that very ordered response was anything but logical, scientific, or appropriate to this COVID disease at this time in history.  Instead of the knee-jerk response to COVID the technocrats have taken, as if this were a straight re-run of the 1918 flu, Fauci & company should have:

1) convened a televised international sit-down committee of health authorities from many countries to discuss and debate best public health approaches so we could all watch and learn;

2) met with Dr. Luciano Gattinoni to discuss whether COVID-19 actually causes an acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) at all;

3) discussed and debated how much of management of patients could be done in relatively low-tech ways, possibly at home, as ventilators are turning out sometimes to cause more harm than good. 

Perhaps the biggest oversight of our lions of global public health is their complete lack of emotional intelligence in not seeing that frightening people — sometimes to death — by scaring them for purely logistical reasons is a bad policy not just for public health, but for economic stability.  Our pandemic of anxiety will cause and is causing untold numbers of suicides and it will exacerbate hypertension, mental illness, addictions, and other chronic diseases.   

God knows, scientists are not known for their emotional intelligence.  But in our scientist-policymakers, we may need to start demanding that they have the same blend of analytical and emotional intelligence that our elected leaders have.  Right now, our president and vice president seem to have a better sense of the total situation than our technocrats do.  

I have always been liberal politically but conservative as a scientific and health thinker.  What Fauci and the technocrats are doing is the worst kind of radicalism.  They need to slow down and take a careful look — not just at the virus in a test tube, but at this new disease and the millions of human beings whose lives they are so radically changing.

File photo from YouTube screen grab (cropped).