The Political Economy of Pandemic Policy: 3rd Quarter

This paper provides the 3rd quarter update to an earlier analysis of the record on the first six months of the U.S. public policy response to the COVID-19 epidemic, The conclusion remains crystal clear: The U.S. had one of the worst policy responses to the pandemic in the world, certainly among large, high-income democracies, including Asian (e.g., South Korea, Japan, Taiwan), European (e.g., Germany, Denmark, Finland, Norway), and other nations (e.g., Australia, New Zealand). The update has stronger findings based on new sources of data and analysis. Three months of recent data, a period that was particularly harsh in the U.S; More than doubling the number of data sources to over 350, which include reports of multinational and national public health and economic institutions, academic papers, trade association analyses, detailed accounts from investigative journalism, and dozens of publications in the field of public administration. Evaluating and incorporating the recent Woodward book (Rage). Cross-national Comparisons: Comparative cross-national studies show the heavy price of bad policies in the U.S, compared to the results achieved by others in three areas: Public Health: 200,000 avoidable deaths, six million avoidable infections and hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations. Economic: trillions of dollars of lost output and budget deficit, as well as millions of lost jobs. Political: a severely net negative perception of Trump’s handling of pandemic policy at home and abroad followed by a precipitous decline in his overall job approval and deterioration of his standing in the head-to-head match-up with Biden. Misrepresenting the Research on Good Policy to Defend the U.S. Failure: The single study (the Imperial College epidemiological report to the World Health Organization) on which the Trump administration relies for its claim of 2.2 million lives saved is misread and misrepresented. The analysis focuses how good things could have been under good policy. Under the “best” policy and the spread of the virus that results from it, the study projects the number of U.S. deaths between 6,600 and 24,000 over two years, not the 230,000 that will have perished in the U.S. in less than 10 months before election day. The projected results for good policy are close to the results achieved by other nations. These results are consistent with other epidemiological studies published shortly thereafter, which were dismissed by the Trump administration and its supporters as “political hit jobs.” The Flu: The effort to excuse the poor U.S. outcome by claiming COVID is like the flu fares no better under close scrutiny. In the U.S., COVID has already killed 4 times as many Americans as the most severe flu season in the past decade and 20 times as many as in the least severe flu season in that decade. COVID has killed over twice as many as the worst flu season in the last 50 years. Globally, COVID has killed only one-twentieth as many people who died in the worst flu season ever (1918-1919). In the U.S. it has already killed about one-third as many and that number of deaths continues to rise. The world appears to have learned something the Trump administration has not. The Complete Breakdown of Public Administration – Four dozen academic papers identify the principles for sound public administration during a crisis, demonstrating the cause and effect of the complete breakdown of public administration under Trump. Woodward’s book gives the “backstory” on the Trump administration’s response, recounting the president’s private thoughts and actions (or lack thereof),” Cooper said. “The data and policy analysis in the update give the publicly available “front-story.” They strongly agree. The Bottom Line for Policy The data and studies support the conclusions of others. Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, that ‘Trump is his own worst enemy.” Bob Woodward, “Trump is the wrong man for the Job.” The New England Journal of Medicine, in a rare election editorial. “When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent.’” The tragic irony of the research is that the Trump administration misinterpreted and the advice of its own experts that it disregarded, is that there never was a conflict between good policy (known as non-pharmaceutical interventions) and the development of a vaccine. We could have had both, but we got neither in an avoidable year of suffering. There never was a tradeoff between public health and economic performance. Controlling the virus first was the key to minimizing its economic impact. The only conflict was between the lifecycle of the virus as dramatically altered by good policy, and the political spin cycle of the of Trump administration that undermined an effective U.S. response. Learning the lessons about how not to react to a pandemic in the biosphere is urgent, because we face an ongoing pandemic in the atmosphere, climate change, in which the Trump made exactly the same policy mistakes two years earlier.”