Retrospective: How Did Government Handle COVID?

COVID Revisited 

By Lawrence W. Reed

Five years ago this week, a local writer in my town of Newnan, Georgia, pronounced that the COVID-19 pandemic proved capitalism to be “woefully inadequate to sustain itself through any type of major crisis.” He suggested that we must embrace a massive expansion of government without offering the slightest hint that this prescription might create a problem or two of its own.

What a breathtaking claim! Not only was it ridiculous at the time (the pandemic was only weeks old), but it also now seems laughably knee-jerk and uninformed, considering how the government handled it. Left-wing academics, as they say, “never let a crisis go to waste,” and I suspect that sentiment was at work in this case.

Now that the pandemic is over, we can ask, “How did the government do?” Polls show that most Americans are wary of handing a similar situation over to the government ever again, so maybe it wasn’t capitalism that proved “woefully inadequate” after all. The fact is, government as a pandemic fighter was mostly a big flop—so much so that its chief architect, Anthony Fauci, required a presidential pardon to keep him from facing justice.

If you’re among the fanatical few who still see government as our savior in the crisis, you need these reminders:

The virus’s origin was almost assuredly a government lab in a Big Government country, China.

A U.S. government employee named Fauci sent your tax dollars to that Chinese lab to support the “gain of function” research that produced the virus. Then he lied about it before Congress.

Government regulations from the CDC and the FDA slowed the introduction of effective COVID-19 tests, according to epidemiologists at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Government-endorsed mask mandates and social distancing requirements were distractions that proved intrusive, expensive, and ineffective.

Lockdowns of schools and businesses by various levels of government crushed the economy instead of the virus.

Government agencies and bureaucrats waged war on free speech to shut down dissenting views about the origins and alternative treatments for the virus. They were more interested in pushing drugs than truth.

Blue state (Big Government Democrat) Governors like Andrew Cuomo of New York forced nursing homes to accept COVID patients, which caused the virus to spread like wildfire among those most vulnerable to it. They also were the same governors (most famously, Newsom of California) who told you to stay home and masked while they enjoyed meals out at fancy restaurants, maskless.

Cuomo, incidentally, covered up the shocking death toll in nursing homes until a court order revealed the numbers. Health policy analyst Bill Hammond of New York’s Empire Center recently revealed in the Wall Street Journal that the Cuomo administration “arranged priority COVID testing for the governor’s friends, associates and family members when test kits were scarce” and a few months later, Cuomo himself raked in cash from a book on his supposed “COVID leadership lessons.”

Overall, the one-size-fits-all response to COVID-19 by Big Government was heavy-handed and often dead wrong (excuse the pun). Remember that the next time some ideologue breathlessly urges you to turn everything over to it in the name of “crisis management.”

#####

(From the Newnan Times-Herald in Newnan, GA, 2 April 2025). Lawrence W. Reed, a resident of Newnan, is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education. His most recent book is “Was Jesus a Socialist?” He can be reached at lreed@fee.org.)