Pandemic policies: 'safetyism' and its unacknowledged costs

Gabrielle Bauer

July 11, 2023 2 Reactions

The thought leaders featured in the book address these tensions head-on. Individually and collectively, they argue that we can mitigate risk, but not eliminate it, and that we cannot manage a pandemic humanely without making some tradeoffs. None of them “deny” the virus; they simply understand that mitigation strategies will not succeed unless they respect biological realities, civil rights, and human nature.

Safety first: says who?

Some people have argued that “safety comes first.” But at what cost? As frightened people missed cancer diagnoses, as people deprived of social contact sank into despair, as people lost businesses they had worked for decades to build up, the costs of the Covid mitigation policies kept piling up. Not just that, but the policies threw the young (who had their lives ahead of them) and the working poor (who couldn’t shelter at home) under a bus.

During Covid, the public’s preoccupation with “safety at all costs” reflected an ongoing value shift toward what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, authors of the 2018 bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind, call “safetyism.” The book defines safetyism as “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.”

Society was already leaning hard into safetyism before the pandemic. Covid just built on this momentum. No rule was too costly or absurd if it promised an extra increment of safety, and the experts promised us that the rules would do just that.

Ah yes, the experts. From the get-go, we were advised to listen to them and avoid “doing our own research.” But which experts? Why were we listening exclusively to epidemiologists and public health experts? Where were the mental health experts? The child development specialists? The historians? The economists?

After all, pandemic policy is not just about controlling an infectious disease. It’s about balancing the need to protect life and to live it, to stay safe and stay sane, to risk a respiratory illness or a mental breakdown — trade-offs you don’t need a PhD in viral load kinetics to have an opinion about.

“Although we can’t all be experts on epidemiology, we are all equally qualified — and, in a democracy, all obliged — to think through those questions ourselves,” says Stephen John, a senior lecturer in the philosophy of public health at the University of Cambridge.

Winston Churchill went a step further: “Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialised character.”  That’s it, exactly. The experts don’t know where it hurts.

As an essayist and memoirist, I also enjoy weaving some storytelling into the mix. From therapy with a Zoom shrink and attendance at a freedom rally to a trip to lockdown-free Sweden and an LSD trip on a lake, I recount several personal experiences that sprang from my despair about the Covid policies.

If you have shared my despair, I hope the thought leaders in the book speak to you as they spoke to me. But I also wrote the book to help those on “the other side” understand why some of us chafed at the policies they cheered on. Because if there’s anything we all need, as we absorb the shockwaves from the past three years, it’s more understanding.

BLINDSIGHT IS 2020 currently sold on Amazon stores as a print edition, e-book, or audiobook. Spanish speakers can find it here.

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Gabrielle Bauer is a Toronto health and medical writer who has won six national awards for her magazine journalism. Along with Blindsight is 2020, her books include Tokyo, My Everest, co-winner of the Canada Japan Book Prize, and Waltzing The Tango, a finalist for the Edna Staebler Creative Nonfiction Award.

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