The men Bush chose to lead the effort believed that lockdowns could be an important component of a mitigation plan. When the Bush administration began debating what its pandemic strategy should include, it was only natural that Henderson be involved. He and his colleagues at the center had spent years trying to persuade government officials to take pandemics seriously - without much success. Henderson became so concerned that he started a small center focused on biodefense - which meant, in effect, defending against a pandemic. Ten years earlier, he had sat in on a series of top-secret briefings where he listened to a Russian defector describe how he had led a team that was trying to adapt the smallpox virus for bioweapons. Richard Preston, the author of The Hot Zone, would later describe this feat as “arguably the greatest life-saving achievement in the history of medicine.”īy the time Bush began pushing his administration to come up with a pandemic plan, Henderson was 78 years old. Henderson, perhaps the most renowned epidemiologist of the 20th century - the man who, decades earlier, had led the team that eradicated smallpox. In fact, there were people thinking about pandemic mitigation long before Bush read Barry’s book. “This happens every hundred years,” Bush is supposed to have said after finishing the book. Barry’s book The Great Influenza, about the 1918 pandemic. They had been discussed - and argued over - by scientists since 2005, when (as the story goes) President George W. Photo: Taylor Glascock/The New York Times/REDUXĭespite the lack of scientific evidence, lockdowns didn’t come out of nowhere, at least not in the U.S. When you got right down to it, lockdowns were little more than a giant experiment. especially, lockdowns went from being regarded as something that only an authoritarian government would attempt to an example of “following the science.” But there was never any science behind lockdowns - not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. One of the great mysteries of the pandemic is why so many countries followed China’s example. (To be fair, this was partly because China did such a poor job of vaccinating its citizens.) And when the Chinese government finally abandoned lockdowns - an implicit admission that they had not been successful in eliminating the pandemic - there was a wave of COVID-19 cases as bad as anywhere in the world. When a fire broke out in an apartment building, residents died because the police had locked their doors from the outside. People reacted with fury, screaming from their balconies, writing bitter denunciations on social media, and, in some cases, committing suicide. But by March 2022, when the government decided to lock down much of Shanghai after a rise in cases in that city, there was no more talk of patriotism. For their part, Chinese citizens viewed being confined to their homes as their patriotic duty.įor the next two years, harsh lockdowns remained China’s default response whenever there was an outbreak anywhere in the country. In mid-March 2020, by which time some 50 million people had been forced into lockdowns, China recorded its first day since January with no domestic transmissions - which it offered as proof that its approach was working. The Chinese government, however, was committed to this “zero-COVID” strategy, as it was called. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the Washington Post that “these kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.” “That the Chinese government can lock millions of people into cities with almost no advance notice should not be considered anything other than terrifying,” a China human rights expert told The Guardian. The word the citizens of Wuhan used to describe their situation was fengcheng - “sealed city.” But the English-language media was soon using the word lockdown instead - and reacting with horror. But that was very different from locking down an entire city the World Health Organization called it “unprecedented in public health history.” Yes, for centuries infected people had been quarantined in their homes, where they would either recover or die. Until the Chinese government deployed this tactic, a strict batten-down-the-hatches approach had never been used before to combat a pandemic. It had lasted 76 days - two and a half months during which no one was allowed to leave this industrial city of 11 million people, or even leave their homes. On April 8, 2020, the Chinese government lifted its lockdown of Wuhan.
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