The experts who loved lockdowns until it was cool to hate them.

Three years after the virus first emerged in Wuhan, China is the only major country in the world still attempting to stop transmission of COVID-19 - a “zero COVID” approach that requires forced constant testing, confinement to your apartment if anyone on an adjacent floor tests positive, and mandatory removal to quarantine centers. After three long years of not knowing if you can leave your apartment complex tomorrow, the Chinese population appears to be cracking. A fire in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region that killed 10 people is rumored to be the result of COVID containment measures triggered mass protests in a country that essentially doesn’t allow mass protests.

The response from Western academics and the media to the Chinese protesting strict COVID-19 protocols was immediate. CNN reporters just a few feet away from Chinese police officers dutifully captured the ‘shocking’ video of young Chinese calling on dictator Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party to step down. Popular New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci tweeted “to appreciate the collective bravery of these young people.”

zeynep tufekci @zeynep

Many photos/news of protests coming out of China in the last day, following a fire in Urumqui, Xinjiang where residents, including children, died reportedly as their building was sealed. Whatever else happens, a moment to appreciate the collective bravery of these young people.

Manya Koetse @manyapan

Amazing photos coming from the Communication University of China, Nanjing, where students are protesting, making their voices heard at a time of growing unrest in light of zero Covid, following the Urumqi fire. https://t.co/uFp7ZeboQL

I couldn’t agree more with the sentiments but couldn’t help thinking of how this very same group of journalists and academics vilifyied and denigrated those in the West that dared protest their governments attempts at being locked down to achieve “COVID-Zero” at an earlier point in the pandemic.

Locking down the populace was actually never in any pandemic playbook. China broke the mold with its response in Wuhan, and quickly taught the world two things: 1. Populations can be controlled with a big enough stick and 2. Western public health intellectuals and the bureaucrats that follow them would leap at the opportunity to use emergency powers to mimic the China approach.

The calls for a China style lockdowns in the West were resisted in real-time by pockets of people that mostly didn’t share the politics of Western intellectuals, bureaucrats and their slavishly devoted media outlets. Ron Desantis, the Florida Governor who had won his prior election by the thinnest of margins, was one of the few policy leaders that sought out public health leaders that didn’t agree with the draconian path that the Fauci endorsed China loving public health establishment had adopted.

And for that, he was vilified.

Bernard Ashby, a Miami cardiologist who heads the Committee to Protect Health Care in Florida, admitted that she is "angry and ashamed" of DeSantis' handling of COVID in the Sunshine State.

"As a physician and a Floridian, I am frankly angry and ashamed. You know the Florida-man moniker, unfortunately, holds true in this particular circumstance," Ashby said.

"While hospitals in our state were filling up, DeSantis was shouting about 'Freedom over Faucism,'" Ashby continued.

Americans largely complied with closures but even as early as May 2020, a few months removed from COVID mayhem in hospitals in the Northeast, and in spite of online COVID dashboards and the media screaming about the failure of the American pandemic response… there was a beach to mingle at with family and friends.

Looking back, it is pretty obvious that American beachgoers, anti-lockdown protestors and rare politicians that bucked the zeitgeist of the time is why the US took a very different path than China when it came to COVID. For that we should be grateful, as I attempted to convey in response to New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci’s entreaties about Chinese protestors.

Clearly irked, the response from Ms. Tufekci was swift:

What’s going on in China has little to do with anywhere else… This is disrespectful to the bravery and suffering of the people in China. Let’s get a grip...

Ms. Tufekci went on to make the point that the severity of lockdowns implemented by a country that keeps a segment of its population in concentration camps was many degrees worse than anything faced by Americans.

She is technically correct.

Americans did not have to face the horrendous obvious consequences of being burned alive in a fire because the doors of the apartment complex were welded shut (technically soldering for the random dude on twitter who thinks the distinction matters), but ignoring the fact that China implemented the biosecurity state that the American academic/intellectual class wanted through much of the pandemic is to miss the forest for the trees.

It is not hard to understand why the people that got COVID so wrong now claim “no-one wanted to ape China”: the only way they stay anywhere close to the levers of power is to white-wash their role in the blatant trampling of individual rights that happened right her in the US of A.

Luckily twitter is forever.

A sampling of medtwitter finds that very smart nephrologists may be good at dealing with renal failure but may not have a strong grasp on what a free people should expect from their governments as they clamored to “Shut down everything” and bring “the national guard” out to enforce the lockdown.

Perhaps these brilliant physicians may want to spend some time away from nephrology to read the American Declaration of Independence that directly incorporated philosopher John Locke’s understanding of the relationship between rulers and their subjects.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Hapiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness

The Director of the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health at Duke University and a Professor of the practice of Global Health and Public Policy, Gavin Yamey wrote a column in Time Magazine in the Summer of 2020 with a Dean at UCSF extolling the beautiful COVID orchestra China was playing.

The current White house COVID czar, and former dean of public health at Brown University, Ashish Jha pleaded in April 2020 to set up a mass testing program to navigate opening up the country. No mention is made of how this would have been enforced, but the only country in the world that was successful with this approach forced its citizens into this path.

Not content with enabling an authoritarian approach domestically, US academics even attempted to export their COVID strategy to India. Noted evolutionary biologist and, ironically, author of a book titled “Calling Bullshit” recommended India implement a 30-day lockdown to reduce the fraction infected from 90% to 70% and thus save over 5 million lives.

Not only does Dr. Bergstrom have not-the-faintest clue about what the human cost of a 30-day lockdown in India would look like, he was also off by an order of magnitude with regards to what actually happened (165,000 reported deaths). As Ms. Lakshmi adroitly points out, even undercounting by 5x would still make Bergstrom’s estimate wildly wrong.

The medical journal of record, the New England Journal of Medicine, published an op-ed calling for a “forceful, focused campaign to eradicate COVID-19 in the United States… China did this in Wuhan.”

The list of luminaries in favor of China style policies goes on and on.

The president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, Neel Kashkari co-authored an editorial in August 2020 with Michael Osterholm, professor and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota asking for another “more stringent shutdown” for 6 weeks. Dr. Jeremy Faust, ER physician and current editor of Medpage Today wrote an editorial for CNBC calling for a “circuit breaker”…. in December of 2021.

Despite the economic damage done during the initial shutdown, including layoffs, thousands of failed businesses and mental health and education issues, the authors say another lockdown would pave the way for a stronger recovery.

Luckily, they failed. They did not get any of the more severe restrictions they wanted because the populace proved much less compliant than their Chinese counterparts. What they did do was bad enough. The most vulnerable in society, the elderly in nursing homes, spent much of the 2 years alone and confined to a single room. Doctors lost their jobs for refusing to be vaccinated. Hairdressers were put in jail for cutting hair.

In the midst of a once-in-a-century event, it is understandable that people will get a lot wrong. But what they don’t get to do is pat themselves on the back about how America is now in so much better shape than China when it comes to COVID. And they certainly don’t get to be champions for individual liberty when they chose repeatedly to plow a tank over individual liberties when given the chance.

Never forget. I won’t.

Anish Koka is a cardiologist in Philadelphia. Follow him @anish_koka