Why are epidemiologists and infectious disease doctors still so bizarrely afraid of Covid?

And why must we listen to them, or even pretend to, anymore? They don't share the same risk-reward calculus as the rest of us.

Michael Osterholm has Covid.

That’s not the interesting part.

You may remember Osterholm. If not: he’s an Minneapolis epidemiologist who is widely quoted on Covid, helped advise Joe Biden’s transition team, and runs a epidemic policy research center at the University of Minnesota. He’s a big kahuna in public health.

And when the epidemic began three years ago, Osterholm seemed briefly to be among the more rational voices. In March 2020, he wrote a prescient op-ed in the Washington Post titled “Facing Covid-19 reality: a national lockdown is no cure.”

But Osterholm did not stay calm for long. Five months later, he and another writer demanded not just that lockdowns continue but that the federal government require them nationally - and tighten them:

We should mandate sheltering in place for everyone but the truly essential workers… people must stay at home and leave only for essential reasons: food shopping and visits to doctors and pharmacies while wearing masks and washing hands frequently.

(Osterholm did not offer details the frequency of the hand-washing, or how the government would enforce it. Hygiene monitors in every bathroom? Drones? Federally paid paper towel wipers? The mind reels.)

Again, Osterholm wrote those words in August 2020, long after the worst-case scenarios of hospital overrun and Covid striking down healthy adults - much less children - had proven false.

That’s not the interesting part either, though it is the beginning of the interesting part.

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