Get America Back to Work, Immediately

The coronavirus created a panic by governors, mayors and many politicians to lock down Americans. They prescribed what jobs were essential and non-essential, ordered nursing homes not to transfer corona patients to hospitals, closed schools from elementary through colleges, ordered masks in public places, and told everyone to social distance. The restrictions continue to go on and on. Appreciating the enormous financial, social and personal impacts of these government edicts, FreedomWorks has been a strong advocate for “getting America back to work.”

Jeffery A. Tucker at AIER makes a cogent and strong case that most of these edicts are misguided and harmful. Tucker writes, “We have been used as non-player characters in a social experiment, untried in the whole history of humanity, and in ways that conflict with all values in which we previously believed as free societies. No one in charge asks your opinion or mine. We are here merely to play our role in an agent-based model. It’s the gamification of despotism.”

Critical of government edicts, Tucker cites the opinions of Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology, and her team of experts at Oxford University, that travelling, mixing, associating, and moving exposes everyone to diseases and helps develop antibodies. These antibodies protect healthy people to survive a new and potentially lethal virus.

Tucker writes:

Gupta’s claim is that when we live in isolated tribes that are sheltered from exposure, those people gradually become weaker and more vulnerable. The wrong pathogen arrives at the wrong time and the people have not been biologically prepared for it. It wipes them out in shocking ways. But with modern capitalism came the end of such sterile isolation. It gave us new methods of travelling, mixing, associating, moving, and hence led to more exposure to disease and the resulting antibodies. Hence, it is not just better therapeutics and vaccines that helped us conquer some plagues but immunities themselves. Our biological toolkit for fighting disease became improved simply through travel, trade, and global commerce.

Gupta warns against the lockdowns:

The way to counter it now is to say, actually, not only is it a good thing for young people to go out there and become immune, but that is almost their duty. It’s a way of living with this virus. It’s how we live with other viruses. Flu is clearly a very dangerous virus, but the reason we don’t see more deaths from flu every year is because, through herd immunity, the levels of infection are kept to as low a level as we can get. … “Herd immunity” is a technical term for the proportion of the population that needs to be immune in order to prevent the disease from spreading, which is the central concept in vaccinations.

We the People of the United States of America have generally gone from ignorance about pandemics to being dictated to by the politically powerful, and have suffered great economic and personal disruptions. It is time to protect the vulnerable — who are basically people over 65 years of age with underlying conditions — and reopen America. Fortunately, FreedomWorks has long advocated for “get people back to work” and has the political power to make it happen. Please participate at https://www.reopenoureconomy.com/. As Tucker strongly stated, “the gamification of despotism” must be stopped, while implementing the best workplace practices to protect the health of our citizens.