What to Watch For in the Coming COVID Critique

by Cory Franklin

March 22, 2023

COVID is now three years old and like any ill-behaving  3-year-old it can be hard to fathom. But that won’t stop scientists, physicians, science journalists and politicians from attempting to interpret its idiosyncrasies. As COVID winds down from an uncontrolled pandemic to a more manageable endemic phase, be prepared for all sorts of commentary – self-serving and otherwise – on how public health officials and politicians have reacted. For those wish to keep score, here are some handy bullet points:

There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and revisionist history.

Revisionist history will be rampant as people cover their tracks regarding what they said and did three years ago compared to what they say and advise today. 

The worst, most corrupting lie is the truth poorly told.

The quote from the French author Bernanos perfectly encapsulates so many of the COVID controversies  including masks, vaccines, and lockdowns. 

It’s far easier to judge the past with today’s  knowledge, than it is to  judge the past with what we knew at the time.      

Regarding things like lockdowns and school closings, the preferred path seems more obvious to us today than it did then.

Hindsight is 20/20, but not for everybody.    

But even with today’s knowledge many people will still draw the wrong conclusions                                               

The worst harms done during the pandemic were generally done by people who were most certain what they were doing was right.

“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” Famous words written by  Oliver Cromwell  in a letter to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland in August 1650.  

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Shakespeare’s words from Hamlet are a reminder that all human knowledge has its limits. 

It’s foolish to ignore the experts, but it’s just as foolish to believe them all the time.

Science by authority has its limits as well.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool”

One of the wisest bits of scientific advice ever was given by Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, who knew that the road to scientific disaster was by convincing yourself of things that weren’t true. 

“Data are not facts.” 

“Facts are not information.”

“Information is not truth.”

“Truth is not knowledge.” 

“Knowledge is not wisdom”

The gap between data and wisdom is wide.

Study the pandemic carefully and you will learn the answers to questions. That is the good news. But the bad news is that you will also learn there exists a greater number of questions without answers and that the number of those unanswerable questions never stops growing.                                                                                   

The pandemic is essentially an infinite jigsaw puzzle,  and even with our best efforts all we can do is fit an occasional piece.

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.                                                                                               

You may read that the pandemic unfolded the way it did because of something like systemic racism or Donald Trump. These are emotional conclusions, not borne out by facts. The pandemic unfolded, not because of these things, but because Nature has always behaved this way.     

When you inject a little politics into science, it’s politics.

No matter how tempting, never inject politics into scientific analysis, because that scientific analysis will invariably be compromised. 

Generals fight the last war, public health officials fight the last pandemic.

It wasn’t so much that they didn’t learn from history, it’s that they unthinkingly adopted the old playbooks. And those didn’t always work. 

Every pandemic is distinct in its own way.                                                                                               

Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each unhappy in its own way.

“Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” 

Attributed to several authors. What they didn’t say was that even if you do learn from history, you are condemned to repeat it.    

Nature gets the last word.

Every time.

-30-

Cory Franklin, physician and writer is a frequent contributor to johnkassnews.com.

He was director of medical intensive care at Cook County Hospital in Chicago for more than 25 years. An editorial ng the pathologists who studied it intently but had no idea what body part it could be. This was before it was known as trolling.)

There is a lesson here. The next time someone tells you, with unmistakable conviction, that he believes in “the science,” gladly offer to discuss science with him over a sandwich. Give him a choice, chorizo or perhaps kosher salami. board contributor to the Chicago Tribune op-ed page, he writes freelance medical and non-medical articles. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times, New York Post, Guardian, Washington Post and has been excerpted in the New York Review of Books. Cory was also Harrison Ford’s technical adviser and one of the role models for the character Ford played in the 1993 movie, “The Fugitive.” His YouTube podcast “Rememberingthepassed” has received 900,000 hits to date. He published “Chicago Flashbulbs” in 2013, “Cook County ICU: 30 Years of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases” in 2015, and most recently coauthored, A Guide to Writing College Admission Essays: Practical Advice for Students and Parents in 2021.

Comments 22

  1. Thank you for succinctly summarizing what we need to remember about the last three years and how, despite making so much sense, we will indeed be condemned as humans to repeat the same mistakes. It is so interesting how those individuals and groups who purport to support the breakdown of our current society (oppressed vs oppressors) become the first to establish a new version of the same society when they learn that having the power of coercion allows them to interpret and enforce their versions of reality and those who don’t obey must be crushed.

  2. This does sum up Covid well.

    I wonder now about the medical “trends” that will be in its aftermath. I remember the days when 10% of each of our classrooms had a child with ADD, for example. Then it became ADHD. Parents, usually of boys, were convinced that their child had it because it was on Oprah or some other talk show. They doctor shopped until they found one that agreed with the parent’s diagnosis.

    Now I have concerns that the same thing will be happening post-Covid, especially in light of the fact that politicians want Covid shots added to the immunization roster like the chicken pox vaccine.

    1. Covid reminded us that our first mistake was trusting government to fix a problem that they created. For decades the FDA has been owned by Big Pharma and Big Food. For decades, the USDA has been owned by the processed food and beverage industry. US dietary standards have been corrupted by powerful interests that put profit ahead of public health. Millions of Americans and millions of other country’s populations have chronic metabolic diseases because they relied upon US dietary standards. Heart Disease and Cancer have continued to account for most premature deaths and disabilities. As a population, Americans are sick and getting sicker. They are also fat and getting fatter. Covid exposed millions of people with weakened immune systems. Many of those immune systems were weakened by pharmaceutical drugs that treat symptoms of medical problems but never root causes. The medical industry profits mightily from treating chronic lifestyle diseases that hardly existed a century ago.

  4. Here’s what we do know Doc,
    1. We are being systematically poisoned through our food supply by corporations and oligarch who are getting filthy rich off of keeping us all obese and chronically ill.

    2. Our for profit health care system profits off of the chronic illness so there is every incentive to give us essentially a lifetime monthly subscription to various pharmaceuticals and not to counsel us to improve our nutrition and fitness levels so that we can fight off chronic illnesses.

    3. Our politicians are bought sand paid for by big corporations and, yes, the oligarchs; Soros, Gates, Buffet, Koch, Bezos, Musk. These people could not give two shits about you, us, or anyone else. All they want us money, power, and self aggrandizement. Keep kissing their ass while they rob us blind.

    4. Corporate consolidation had concentrated the money and power in the hands of too few people and this has resulted in the demise of our local economies, culture, and has exacerbated so-called, cultural and political unrest.

    5. There are but a relative few companies in every industry. They have created de facto monopolies and use every opportunity to squeeze more money out of us and DC does nothing ad they get their cut every election cycle. 50% of this inflation has been caused by corporate greed and governmental inaction and incompetence.

    6. The media is used as a tool by those in power to manufacture consent for needless war, and to divide us politically so that we are distracted by the outright malfeasance, theft, fraud, and utter contempt those in power have for the American people. They want us to fight. They trot out abortion every four years to use as red meat, they want cheap labor streaming over the border, other wise they’d stop it. They make money off of the smuggling or they’d curtail that.

    7. In a representative republic, it seems to me that the representatives should have the best interests of the people first and foremost in their minds and this is clearly not the case. Otherwise you would not have the lawlessness, so many people who are obviously mentally ill, drug addicted, or just plain sick, on the street, defecting on sidewalks and sleeping in tents in the park in winter.

    8. Doc, it costs France and Germany half of what it costs us in America to build a mile of road or a mile of rail, and their workers have health care, pensions, and all theses other goodies that many of our workers do not have. We blame labor, and yes, public employee unions have been co-opted by dem pols, but connected industrialists are, by far the biggest recipients of welfare, tax breaks, credits, a special deals. Instead, we blame the mom on food stamps and her kids.

    9. If you want to make things better in Chicago, make the streets safer first. Then we can attract investment and bring jobs in. You’ve got to improve the schools too. One of the best ways to do that is to by pass CTU. Give the money to the parents and let them choose the best school for their child. Thwart the school to prison pipeline. Close down the schools where kids are unsafe and cannot read. Close down half empty buildings that waste resources. Bring volunteers i to the schools to help out. Make parents accountable for their children’s poor behavior and refusal to do schoolwork. Make the schools about learning how t read, write, do math, and learn hoe it think and keep political agendas out of school!

    10. If a mom wants to send her son to Leo, se should be able to.

  5. My parents both earned science degrees in the 1950s: Dad in chemistry, and Mom in microbiology. They always taught us that the science is settled… until better science comes along. And better science always does.

    Covid was absolutely a case of better science coming along – later.

  7. Great article! We’re already hearing a lot of revisionist history as Covid authoritarians are confronted with their previous statements as they tell us how “out of context” their statements were taken.

  8. “It’s far easier to judge the past with today’s knowledge, than it is to judge the past with what we knew at the time. Regarding things like lockdowns and school closings, the preferred path seems more obvious to us today than it did then.”

    This is everything. All the Fox News ghouls screaming for Dr Fauci’s head need to repeat this over and over again, same for all the gloating Governors who bragged about ‘opening up their status sooner” as if a state with thousands of miles of coasts and tropical weather is exactly the same as Illinois, a place where more than half the population lives in one city. This was our first pandemic, no one knew what they were doing, but everyone was trying to do the right thing.

  10. Another valuable, independent-minded article by Mr. Franklin. But if I’d had a chance to make editorial suggestions, I might have asked the author to incorporate the distinction between honest mistakes and dishonest mistakes.

    There is a reasonable perspective that Fauci’s mistakes were dishonest. This perspective is not based on “(judging) the past with what we knew at the time.” It’s based on a president absolutely outlawing gain-of-function research. That president was not some sinister Republican; it was the saintly president, Obama. All of Fauci’s later smoke-blowing denials notwithstanding, his oversight of U.S. gain-of-function research was, after being outlawed by President Obama, outsourced to a bioweapons lab in China.

    That mistake was not merely dishonest. It was deadly.

  11. Well I don’t know what you were doing at the onset of this pandemic Cory. But for me, I was if not at the proverbial front lines, certainly up close and personal. As an anesthesiologist sticking my face in someone’s infected airway during intubation, and at 74 yrs old, I would say I was high risk. No? As such I had an intense interest in “following the science” as if my life depended upon it … since it did. And yeah, many things were not obvious early on, but some were. Amongst them: this was a respiratory pathogen unleashed on an immunologic naïve population. Case mortality was hovering around 1.5 – 2% which made the likely infectious mortality one percent or less. But more importantly in terms of allocation of resources, triage and strategy, the elderly were “exponentially” at higher risk than the otherwise healthy mid-age or young. It was obvious early on that the mortality pattern was not that of the 1918 flu where mortality was a patterned W. Anyway, I could go on about the early mask fiasco, how the CDC ignored it’s own data (?facts) regarding the efficacy of masks or lack thereof, but then this would be a “column” and not a comment. And yeah, as someone who for 40 years routinely wore a mask at work I did know something about masks … perhaps a lot more than many of the so called experts. And yes, do listen to the experts. But always remember that in the hierarchy of scientific evidence, expert opinion is dead last.

  12. Dr. Franklin has provided some helpful perspective on the last three years of Covid hysteria. However, I think there are several of his points which need to be clarified if we are to garner some of the important lessons from this unfortunate time in history. In particular, Dr. Franklin said:

    “It’s far easier to judge the past with today’s knowledge, than it is to judge the past with what we knew at the time…Generals fight the last war, public health officials fight the last pandemic.
    It wasn’t so much that they didn’t learn from history, it’s that they unthinkingly adopted the old playbooks. And those didn’t always work.”
    –Although these thoughts are true up to a point, they ignore the important fact that much of the authorities’ conduct during the pandemic was wholly inconsistent with prior knowledge and practice relating to pandemics. Early on in the disaster, highly-credible public health experts recognized this in the Great Barrington Declaration. However, rather than engaging in a proper debate, the authorities simply attempted to suppress any expert knowledge contrary to the official narrative. This was not a matter of incompetence or good faith attempts to deal with a unprecedented situation. It was a matter of malicious intent. That fact is further established by the authorities documented attempts to also suppress the origin of the novel coronavirus, suppression of the use of repurposed drugs that had a long record of safety and efficacy with respect to prior coronaviruses, and lack of proper testing of the experimental gene therapy pushed on the public as a vaccine.

    “It’s foolish to ignore the experts, but it’s just as foolish to believe them all the time.”
    –Again, this sounds true, it fails to recognize that we should NEVER believe the “experts” when they go beyond describing the state of current scientific data relating to policy decisions that need to be made, and try to dictate the policy decisions themselves. Determination of policy requires a balancing of costs and benefits that was never done with respect to Covid responses. Dr. Franklin’s statement also fails to acknowledge that when experts are employed by the government or industry, their opinions are going to be largely driven by the narrative the government/industry for whom they are working. We needed to listen to independent experts relating to Covid, but they were aggressively suppressed by the same government/industrial forces that were pushing a narrative which was unrelated to public health. This is well-documented in the “Twitter Files” stories.

    “You may read that the pandemic unfolded the way it did because of something like systemic racism or Donald Trump. These are emotional conclusions, not borne out by facts. The pandemic unfolded, not because of these things, but because Nature has always behaved this way… Nature gets the last word. Every time.”
    It is indeed important to be humble in the face of natures’ challenges, and one of the worst mistakes of the authorities was to suppress and ignore information relating to our own natural immune systems’ ability to handle Covid. However, Dr. Franklin’s comments ignore the essential fact that humans can nonetheless impact how infectious disease affects people. In the case of Covid, the facts related to how best to achieve herd immunity (people with low risk should be mingling, not locked in their homes) and support our inherent immune systems (e.g., Vitamin D supplementation would have reduced the impact of the disease) were well-known and documented. More strikingly, note that there is a high probability that the apparent disease vector itself (i.e., the novel coronavirus) was not natural but was man-made…created in a lab with participation from the same people in the US who thereafter (a) intentionally exaggerated cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, and (b) forced a largely untested experimental drug on the world’s population which created sales for the drug companies in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

    Perhaps the fundamental problem is that as indicated above, authorities did not “adopt the old playbooks.” They created a new playbook which was unsupported by scientific evidence and which was very destructive of society around the world. It is always difficult to ascribe intent to the conduct of people, but it seems clear to me that the conduct of official authorities with respect to Covid was obviously driven not by legitimate public health concerns, but by an agenda which starts with massive financial gain to the pharma/government/NGO complex and may end with total control by WHO globally of health (and other, much broader issues) under the terms of the new WHO treaty/agreements which are currently being negotiated. The Biden administration has already indicated that he intends to sign that treaty (which abrogates the national sovereignty of the US and all other countries who participate) without seeking the constitutionally-required consent of the US Senate. This potential new WHO treaty is a matter which should be opposed by anyone, regardless of political persuasion who has any concern for the future of personal liberty in the US. For more info on this, see Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s website: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/who-proposals-sovereignty-totalitarian-state//

    1. In my opinion, I suspect that the fundamental problem was that at the time the American economy was strong, there was broad support for then-Pres. Trump’s foreign and energy policies and the left saw the pandemic as the only chance they had to defeat him in the 2020 election. At the very start no one knew what we were facing, but as things developed the left decided that blaming Trump for every death where someone tested positive for COVID was a winning strategy and that deriding any science that might show ways to mitigate its effects was essential.

  13. Thank you Cory for the enlightened recap of current events revolving around “the big lie!” Fauci is desperately trying to cover his own butt, and is caught in his own lies, which were put out to the public as “facts,” and “science!” But as was stated, when you inject a little politics into science – it’s politics! SO TRUE. That quack should have been fired by Trump long ago, and yet…here we are..again!

    2. Mr. Manta, you seem very much concerned with facts, so here are some – based upon my 25 years in federal service and review of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.

      The Director of the NIH is a Presidential appointment. The Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, formerly Dr. Anthony Fauci, is not. As such, Dr. Fauci is “protected” under the rules and regs of the above Act. In other words subject to firing “for cause” – through the chain of command – which in the real world means virtually impossible to fire. “For cause” is an enormously high bar in the federal system. We used to joke that the only way federal employees (and Dr. Fauci was a federal employee) could be fired was to commit murder … and even then it might be difficult. My point: Mr. Trump practically speaking, under the law, could not fire Dr. Fauci even if he wanted to. To assume otherwise just reflects a misunderstanding on your part as to how the federal bureaucracy is structured. What a President can do to a disfavored high profile non-presidential appointee public servant – for better or for worse – is what President Trump ultimately did to Dr. Fauci: he “sidelined” him.

      1. So I’m clear, Dr Fauci, who has devoted 40 years to the study of infectious disease, and bears the responsibility of guiding policy during the first global pandemic of the modern age, which had already killed hundreds of thousands across Europe (including my great Uncle in Palermo..) was ‘sidelined’ by Donald Trump, malignant narcissist who advocated for bleach injections, unproven drugs and ultra-violet light cures, is that correct? So your lament is that Trump, the man with no medical background, could bot ‘fire’ Dr Fauci. You know what else he couldn’t do? Understand anything about infectious diseases. Emperor Trump ‘sidelined’ Dr Fauci because his base demanded he do so, and to facilitate the angry right wing narrative about Dr Fauci’s POV, nothing more. I’m surprised given your education, that you are still under Trump’s manufactured spell..

        1. No you are not clear at all. Did you even read my comment? I made NO judgement in regard to Dr. Fauci. My remarks were directed to a previous poster (Mr. Manta) who said that President Trump should have fired Dr. Fauci. I merely pointed out that under the law this was largely impossible. I also pointed out that the only thing Mr. Trump could do – or for that matter any President to a disfavored non presidential appointee public servant – was to do what he did: “side line” him i.e. replace Dr. Fauci with his own favored expert – in this case Dr. Scott Atlas who assumed the role as Special Coronavirus Expert. At no time did I engage in any discussion related to Dr Fauci’s expertise, or leadership during these trying times. Nor did I make any statement suggesting I agreed with what Mr. Trump did. In fact I did not agree, but that is moot as to the topic at hand. Once again. I will repeat myself so even you can understand: I pointed out Dr Fauci under the law could not be fired but could be sidelined i.e. removed as the coronavirus expert to the President. I made no statement as to whether I agreed with that or not since (in fact I did not agree with that decision for what it’s worth) it was not germaine to the discussion at hand. What was germaine was what the POTUS can and can not do to federal employees under the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. I’m curious. Can you think about anything beyond Trump or are you so fixated that it’s Trump 24/7? Do you see Trump in everything … every where … even when the topic is explicitly about something else? Third reminder: the topic at hand was whether a President in this case Mr. Trump could actually fire a public servant such as Anthony Fauci. I pointed out, he could not. End of story

          1. “Donald Trump, malignant narcissist who advocated for bleach injections, unproven drugs and ultra-violet light cures, is that correct?”

            Trump never called for bleach injections. There were no proven drugs at the start of the pandemic and subsequent studies have shown that Ivermectin DOES have efficacy when administered early in an infection, and the only reason that use of that drug was derided as “horse medicine” and immediately discredited without actual consideration of the science I can only ascribe to anti-Trump hysteria. Ultra-violet light is widely used to destroy airborne viruses and bacteria but Trump never claimed it was a cure-all.

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