The Hoover Institute study is synopsized in New Report Details Horrifying Cost of Fauci’s Failures. Its basic theme is that COVID policies in education have yet to be felt or appreciated and will ripple through the world economy for years.

“Based on the available research on lifetime earnings associated with more skills, the average student in school during the pandemic will lose 5 to 6 percent of lifetime earnings,” they found. “Because a lower-skilled workforce leads to lower economic growth, the nation will lose some $31 trillion (in present value terms) during the twenty-first century. This aggregate economic loss is higher than the US GDP for one year and dwarfs the total economic losses from either the slowdown of the economy during the pandemic or from the 2008 recession.”

The author of the post contends, without much fear of contradiction, that a perfect storm of rapacious teachers' unions, fear-addled educrats, and wrong-headed policy pushed for very unclear reasons by Trump at the behest of Francis Collins at NIH, Anthony Fauci at NIAID, White House COVID Coordinator Deborah Birx, and Robert Redfield and Rochelle Walensky at CDC has had immense and lasting damage on the US economy.

He contrasts Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' approach to those of socialist and totalitarian governors and finds liberty wins.

But Florida was one of the few states, and perhaps the only large one, to make reopening schools a priority, despite the objections of teachers unions and media outlets that attempted to label the governor as “DeathSantis.” 

And it’s going to pay off, relatively speaking. A figure presented in the research shows that Florida’s economic state loss in GDP is nearly equal to Pennsylvania, despite a population that’s nearly 75% bigger than Pennsylvania. And California’s estimated losses, roughly $1.3 trillion, are more than 116% higher than Florida, much larger than the population difference. Similarly, New York’s economic losses far exceed Florida’s, despite a smaller population.

Finally, he notes that there has not been, and very likely will not be, any accountability for the grossly negligent or criminal (take your pick) official actions that brought about this generational disaster.

The Committee to Unleash Prosperity is a conservative economic advocacy group. Their report focuses on the health, economic, educational, and civil liberties implications of COVID policies. The authors are formidable. Scott Atlas was Trump's COVID advisor and, while maligned by the medical establishment, has been proven prescient in retrospect. Steve Hanke, an economist at Johns Hopkins, was a skeptic of lockdowns and labeled a COVID denier or some such twaddle. Rounding out the group are former chief economist for Trump's Council of Economic Advisors Casey Mulligan and conservative policy analyst Phil Kerpen.

Here are the high points.

Lesson #1: Leaders Should Calm Public Fears, Not Stoke Them 

Conventional wisdom pre-COVID was that communities respond best to pandemics when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. During COVID, the public health establishment followed the opposite principle: they intentionally stoked and amplified fear, which overlaid enormous economic, social, educational, and health harms on top of the harms of the virus itself. Non-COVID excess deaths from lockdowns and societal panic are estimated at about 100,000 per year in the United States and zero in non-lockdown Sweden. 

In my view, this observation is only valid if you assume the leadership during COVID cared about mitigating the panic. Rather, it seems that Fauci, Birx, and others deliberately ratcheted up panic for reasons that one can only speculate about.

Lesson #2: Lockdowns Do Not Work to Substantially Reduce Deaths or Stop Viral Circulation 

Most lockdown measures were realized around the time when hospitalizations peaked, which due to the time lag between infection and severe disease, necessarily occurs well after the infective peak. They were timed to claim credit for declining waves, but rarely had any discernible causal impact. ...  A much wiser strategy than issuing lockdown orders would have been to tell the American people the truth, stick to the facts, educate citizens about the balance of risks, and let individuals make their own decision about whether to keep their businesses open, whether to socially isolate, attend church, send their children to school, and so on.

Lesson #3: Lockdowns and Social Isolation Had Negative Consequences that Far Outweighed Benefits 

Their results suggest that the Swedish policy of advice and trust in the population to reduce social interactions voluntarily was relatively successful. Sweden combined low excess death rates with relatively small economic costs. In future pandemics, policymakers should rely on empirical evidence rather than panicking and adopting extreme measures. 

In my view, this section misses the point because it takes at face value claims that lockdowns were instituted for public health rather than societal control reasons. The bizarre set of rules shows no one who promulgated them cared about public health. Closing churches, breaking up funerals and private gatherings, arresting moms on deserted playgrounds, shutting down beaches, and identifying some products as essential and others as non-essential even though they were sold in the same store demonstrates that the real purpose was to socially isolate families and fragment communities.

Lesson #4: Government Should Not Pay People More Not to Work 

Congress authorized $600 per week unemployment bonuses early in the pandemic, despite warnings that the consequences would be substantial, prolonged unemployment and associated economic underperformance. The evidence shows conclusively that bonuses for not working increased unemployment rates, which plunged rapidly when the original $600 bonus ended, before stalling when a $300 bonus took effect. 

Duh...

Lesson #5: Shutting Down Schools Was a Major Policy Mistake With Tragic Effects on Children, Especially the Poor 

This issue covers a lot of the ground in the Hoover Institution report but usefully points out that parents of means could work around the damage caused by school shutdowns, while poor parents could not.

Lesson #6: Masks Were of Little or No Value and Possibly Harmful 

There was no high-quality evidence in support of community masking for respiratory viruses in spring 2020; in fact, the randomized clinical trials regarding masking for influenza found it to be ineffective for protecting the wearer and for preventing spread. Unfortunately, rather than commission cluster randomized controlled trials to produce high-quality evidence on masking with respect to SARS-CoV2, global and US public health authorities overstated the benefits of masking and persisted even as evidence to the contrary accumulated. Mask mandates were likely imposed as a way to calm people’s fears and help them re-engage in society. But they ended up doing the opposite – amplifying fears by creating the irrational belief that an unmasked face presented a threat, causing conflict and division among citizens, and giving high-risk people the mistaken impression that masks were protective, potentially resulting in some people risking exposure who otherwise may not have. The CDC continues to recommend, contrary to evidence, masking for respiratory viruses, undermining its credibility. 

On any given day, I can spot someone in their car, alone and wearing a mask. It has become a useful marker for letting idiots self-identify.

Lesson #7: Government Should Not Suppress Dissent or Police the Boundaries of Science 

A poisonous interplay between America’s media, Big Tech, and the academic science and public health community has severely harmed the public. Scientists used the media to bully others, and the media gave them the imprimatur of “the experts” to disparage the opposing views. Censorship took many forms, including legacy media, social media, preprint servers, and university campuses. Scientific journals published character smears and social media actively suffocated voices that dissented from the accepted COVID narrative. Anthony Fauci, the head of the largest federal grantmaking entity, created an environment in which it was very difficult for most medical experts to break with the dominant narratives on lockdowns, masks, or overwhelmed hospitals. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) became the principal advocate of lockdown policies, but failed to run high-quality trials of repurposed drugs and non-pharmaceutical interventions. 

This section doesn't go far enough. The Fauci-bros did carry out a very sleazy campaign of character assassination against those who opposed the approved narrative (Great Barrington Declaration). More poisonous was the production of fake research to support stupid policies or to hide the truth. The prime example of this is “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” paper that appeared in Nature and was written at the behest of Fauci and other NIH officials with the role of obscuring NIAID's possible role in the development of the COVID pathogen, to sanitize the role of the Chinese government, and to stomp down any discussion of a "lab leak" theory.

A House investigation summed it up:

• Former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and Former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins were directly involved in the drafting, publication, and public promotion of Proximal Origin — a paper written to suppress the COVID-19 lab-leak hypothesis.
• There was a coordinated effort between public health officials in the United States government and expert scientists to craft a narrative that would advance the zoonotic origin of COVID-19 in order to protect the Chinese government from any potential criticism and repercussions.
• The conclusions drawn by the co-authors of “Proximal Origin” rest on insufficient evidence, draw inaccurate assumptions, and have never been proven or verified by the wider scientific community.
• Dr. Kristian Andersen confirmed the U.S. funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell below recommended bio-safety markers.
• Scientific integrity was abandoned by Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins, and the co-authors of Proximal Origin in favor of political expediency. Suppressing a legitimate scientific theory to advance the preferred narrative of senior government officials is egregious and must be fully investigated.
• There is still more work to be done to hold public health officials accountable for their actions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Select Subcommittee emphasizes its outstanding request for transcribed interviews and documents from Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins.

RELATED: 'S--tshow': Scientists Downplayed Lab Leak Theory re: COVID Origins for Fear of China's Reaction if Blamed

Lesson #8: The Real Hospital Story Was Underutilization 

The tragedy of the non-COVID death pandemic was in large part driven by record-low hospital utilization - with very few exceptions - throughout the entire pandemic period. This was a result of public health messaging and political orders canceling medical procedures and intentionally stoking fear, causing people to cancel their own appointments for serious medical care...This underutilization was likely a significant contributor to non-COVID excess deaths in the United States.

RELATED: So Far the Navy Hospital Ships Have Treated 18 Patients and the People Who Caused This Frenzy Must Be Held Accountable

Lesson #9: Protect the Most Vulnerable 

The authors of the aforementioned Great Barrington Declaration proposed to do exactly this. Their treatment by the public health bureaucracy should serve as a cautionary tale that these people stand ready to kill you to prove their point.

Lesson #10: Warp Speed: Deregulate But Don’t Mandate 

Perhaps no part of the governmental response to COVID was more controversial than bullying, shaming, and coercing Americans into taking a vaccine that may not have been safe and definitely was not effective in the sense that vaccines had historically been. Attributing any noble motive to anyone associated with this fiasco is difficult.

Conclusion: Limit Government Emergency Powers and Earn Back Public Trust 

One result of the government’s error-ridden COVID response was that the Americans have justifiably lost faith in public health institutions. Lockdowns, school closures, and mandates were catastrophic errors, pushed with remarkable fervor by public health authorities at all levels. We recommend that Congress and the states define by law “public health emergency” with strict limitations on powers conferred to the executives and time limits that require legislation to extend. Additionally, term limits should be established for all senior health agency positions. Grantmaking should be independent of policy-making and public communication, and NIH funding itself should be decentralized or block-granted to the states. Congress should require full transparency of all Food and Drug Administration (FDA), CDC, and NIH discussions with immediate posting to public forums. In addition, statements from all advisors in those meetings should be made widely visible to the public. It should be definitively restated that CDC guidance is strictly advisory and the CDC does not have power to set laws or mandates. The U.S. should halt all binding agreements with the World Health Organization until satisfactory transparency and accountability is achieved. Unless and until key institutions openly acknowledge that lockdowns, school closures, and mask/vaccine mandates were catastrophic errors that will not be repeated in the future, the American people will – and should – withhold their trust

RELATED: Year-in-Review: The 2020 List of the 10 Worst Governors in the Nation

Now that we are a little over four years from the beginning of the pandemic panic, it is time for a governmental "truth commission" to examine the role of federal and state officials in deliberately stoking panic and imposing anti-science and totalitarian population control measures at the expense of public health. These two studies provide a great starting point for framing an indictment of the architects of this travesty.

Committee to Unleash Prosperity Report

COVID Lessons Learned by streiff on Scribd