Fauci Emails, States Re-Opening, & the Legacy of COVID-19 Lockdowns

June 18, 2021

What were the most telling revelations from the recent Fauci email dump? What is motivating many states to begin fully re-opening this summer? Are these decisions really scientifically-based or are there political calculations at work as well? Will people drop the masks or not—and why? And, what will be the long-term effects of the COVID-19 shutdowns on American society?

In this Lighthouse Briefing video, Dr. Magness is interviewed by Independent Institute Executive Director Dr. Graham H. Walker. They discuss how Dr. Magness was one of the first to point out the dubious scientific nature of the original COVID-19 modeling—especially the models coming from Dr. Neil Ferguson's team at the Imperial College of London—whose apocalyptic but vastly erroneous predictions of mass death influenced world leaders en masse to shut down society in their countries.

Dr. Magness has also shown how stringent shutdown orders have not correlated to the positive public health outcomes that were intended nor have they been popular among constituents. In this regard, please see below his article in the "Wall Street Journal" titled “Case for Mask Mandate Rests on Bad Data,” as well as his article, “The Origins and Political Persistence of the COVID-19 Shutdowns,” (co-authored by Dr. Peter Earle) in the Spring 2021 issue of the Independent Institute's quarterly, peer-reviewed journal, "The Independent Review" (part of our larger Symposium on “Virus and Leviathan: Public Health and Policy in a Free Society”).

Dr. Philip Magness is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, and he has served as Academic Program Director at the Institute for Humane Studies and Adjunct Professor of Public Policy in the School of Public Policy and Government at George Mason University. He received his Ph.D. in history from George Mason University. His books include "Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement" (with Sebastian N. Page) and "The Rules of the Game: How Government Works and Why it Sometimes Doesn’t" (with Paul Weissburg), as well as the forthcoming "What is Classical Liberal History?" (edited with Michael Douma) and "Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Bad Business Ethics of Higher Education" (with Jason Brennan).