Elites got focused protection, masks, and vaccines wrong.

I share Tyler Cowen’s genuine desire to see “elites” flourish. That is — if they really are elite, in temperament, intellectual prowess, and virtue.

But I think he’s letting our incumbent elites off way too easy in a column meant to convince us that they aren’t doing so bad and don’t deserve so much populist backlash. He writes:

A lot of people do not want to admit it, but when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic the elites, by and large, actually got a lot right. Most importantly, the people who got vaccinated fared much better than the people who did not. We also got a vaccine in record time, against most expectations. Operation Warp Speed was a success. Long Covid did turn out to be a real thing. Low personal mobility levels meant that often “lockdowns” were not the real issue. Most of that economic activity was going away in any case. Most states should have ended the lockdowns sooner, but they mattered less than many critics have suggested. Furthermore, in contrast to what many were predicting, those restrictions on our liberty proved entirely temporary.

Not reopening the schools was a big mistake and meant a lot of lost learning, but plenty of elites protested at the time. A lot of the problem was with risk-averse school districts and teachers unions, acting out of self-interest rather than scientific investigation. (Believe it or not, I even know some elites who think that teachers unions should not exist.) Other mistakes were hooking Covid patients up to ventilating tubes (corrected pretty quickly), dumping Covid patients back into nursing homes (not corrected quickly enough), and dismissing the lab leak hypothesis (corrected only slowly). In each case, ask yourself whether elite methods of scientific investigation failed us, and mostly they did not, even when the elites did.

This is shockingly incomplete and unconvincing. First, the entire balance of elite reputation goes into the gutter if you believe, as I do, that the evidence around Covid points to a virus that escaped from a lab, and which lab was empowered by research money that was deliberately routed by public health elites around what they viewed as anti-elite objections to their work and expertise.

Second, elites almost everywhere but Florida and Sweden got the biggest and most costly question wrong. The more correct approach — equally effective or better at saving lives, and less costly to other social imperatives — would have been the focused protection of the elderly and those with comorbidities.

Third, even when elites were more right than the most outlandish populists, they undermined their authority with false claims in order to manipulate the public. For fear that nobody would take the vaccine, public health authorities basically denied the effect of “natural (acquired) immunity.” Joe Biden and others routinely exaggerated the effect of vaccines, implying that there would be no more infections if everyone got them.

Elites got masks wrong, and in America they got masking children and toddlers more wrong than anywhere else. This is made worse by the fact that some, like Dr. Fauci, knew that cloth and surgical masks were mostly useless. Though he would eventually concede that they were a “symbol” to remind people to do other things, like stay socially distanced. Because elites got focused protection, masks, and vaccines wrong in the way they did, children in blue states stayed masked at school — or in speech therapy — for up to a year after vaccines had been made available for the adults caring for them. Elite opinion assumed that children could not be liberated from pandemic measures until they, too, were vaccinated, even though children by and large weren’t in mortal danger and the vaccines were much less effective for them.

It is easy for an older man like Tyler to dismiss the damage that elite opinion had on childhoods because, for men his age, years pass by at light speed. Whereas for the young, those early years are crucial given their neuroplasticity — and they’re unrecoverable.