DONALD HENDERSON

© MMXX V.1.0.0
by Morley Evans

WHAT SHOULD WE DO?

Is this a prison or is it a library?

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.

Who said this? Epidemiologist and Smallpox Eradicator Donald Henderson

READ MORE

Edward Peter Stringham 

– May 21, 2020

ECONOMISTS have been writing for hundreds of years on the role of government in solving economic and social problems. A theme has emerged throughout: policy officials are quite often ill-informed or have bad incentives compared with what individuals, markets, institutions, and society can achieve on their own. Economists have documented how government intervention leads to various unintended economic consequences and even human rights abuses.  

We prefer private governance to public governance. We have applied this logic against socialism, fascism, war, macroeconomic planning, public goods, monetary policy, countercyclical fiscal policy, environmental regulation, and a hundred other issues. We’ve made a solid case for pure freedom.

And yet here we are living in times when the state is controlling our movements, shuttering businesses, defining who and what is essential, dangerously disrupting supply chains, forcibly closing schools and churches, and restricting travel. A shelter-in-place order is something of a liberal nightmare, the worst-possible use of coercive power against individual rights, and the results have been catastrophic.

It’s my view that we have been ill-prepared to deal with this onslaught. We have a very thin record of writings that make the case that freedom, market forces, and private governance are better than government quarantines and closures in dealing with pandemics. So where do we turn for better arguments and a better case?

Part of the problem is that as economists, historians, and political philosophers people are telling us to stay in our lane and not comment on medical matters. In general that is good advice. But there is a problem. The computer scientists and theoretical physicists who dreamed up this lockdown haven’t really had serious medical training either and they sure haven’t stayed in their lane. They certainly have cared very little about the economic implications of their plans.

Where do we turn for competent commentary on the medical aspects of quarantine and lockdowns? Where is our credentialled and experienced expert who can provide weighty evidence that this is the wrong course?

Let me introduce you to Donald A. Henderson (1928-2016). He was the twentieth century's most acclaimed disease eradicator. In particular, he is credited with ridding the world of smallpox. He was born in Lakewood, Ohio, son of a nurse and an engineer. He went to Oberlin College for undergraduate and graduated in medicine from the University of Rochester. He trained two more years at the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the Communicable Disease Center and moved to Geneva to head the World Health Organization’s division focussed on smallpox.

I encourage you to read his entire biography posted at Johns Hopkins, where he headed a brilliant epidemiological team.

In 2006, at the order of the Bush administration, some computer science programmers with a small group of public health officials began to resurrect a premodern idea of quarantines, closures, and measured lockdowns. This way of thinking is not just premodern; it turned the logic of modern medicine on its head. It was based on a theory that we should just run away from viruses, whereas Dr. Henderson’s whole life had been devoted to implementing the great discovery of modern virus theory that we need not flee but rather build immunity through science, either natural immunities or via vaccines.

At the age of 78, Dr. Henderson swung into action and composed a masterful response to the new fashion for quarantines and lockdowns. The result was Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza. Henderson, though listed last, was the primary author along with co-authors  Thomas V.Inglesby, epidemiologist Jennifer B. Nuzzo, and physician Tara O’Toole.