Through Thursday morning, CBS has been the only major broadcast network (ABC, CBS, and NBC) to mention on its flagship morning or evening newscasts this week marked five years since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States and the life-altering lockdowns with its ramifications still playing out in American life.
On Tuesday’s CBS Mornings and CBS Mornings Plus, there were even discussions about how so-called experts got things wrong and gave mixed signals plus conceding school closures were a disaster.
Starting with the main show, co-host Gayle King — who was a longtime, dedicated believer in any and all restrictions — recalled “the coronavirus shut down life as we knew it, emptying the city streets and the office buildings, tanking the economy, bringing on social distancing and masking” and “killed more than 1.1 million Americans by the time the WHO said it was no longer a global health emergency.”
Of course, she started the conversation with former Brown University professor and Biden White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha by asking whether “Covid is still an issue today.”
Once Jha argued it’s only “still a bit of a problem...for elderly people, high risk people, immunocompromised people,” Jha shifted to learning from “mistakes we made” ahead of a future pandemic.
Co-host Tony Dokoupil struck the right chord for Americans whose lives were wrecked and crippled professionally and personally:
[O]ne of the ways COVID is still with us, and I heard this on the campaign trail when I was covering it, a lot of voters are still angry. They’re angry because their businesses were shut down. They’re angry because their kids weren’t in school for years, and still have learning loss. How can you maximize saving lives but also minimize all of these side negative effects?
Jha first defended the lockdowns as having happened because “we were not prepared” and “didn’t have testing” or “good surveillance.”
That cop-out aside, he stated the obvious that “shutting down schools was a disaster, so we should never do that unless we’re at an extreme point, but even all the other disruptions, I think we can avoid them if we have a good system in place.”
Further to Dokoupil’s credit, he invoked the Barrington Declaration and its benefits, but Jha argued it wouldn’t work because the elderly should be allowed to venture out in public (click “expand”):
DOKOUPIL: If we’re keeping schools open, why not go the full so-called Barrington Declaration, right? Where you protect the vulnerable, the elderly, people with underlying conditions —
JHA: Yes.
DOKOUPIL: — you let everyone else go about their lives.
JHA: Yes, look, it sounds good on paper, and I understand why people find that idea attractive. The problem is, the elderly don’t live on some island by themselves, right? We have to interact with them. They get their food, they go to the grocery store, they go to their doctor’s office, so the question is, how do you protect, you know, 30 percent of the population and let the virus run rampant in the other 70 percent? There isn’t a feasible way to do it. No state was able to pull that off. So it sounds good on paper, hard to implement. My view is, you’ve got to work really, really hard on making sure testing is available, but also treatments and vaccines. That’s actually how you get through a pandemic. That’s how we got through this pandemic. Focus on that. That’s the durable solution.
Featured co-host Vladimir Duthiers made sure the conversation turned back to the future and having “tools in place to properly combat” the next pandemic, which Jha naturally suggested was a “worry” of his with “this new administration.”
On CBS Mornings Plus, Dokoupil also set the table for this go-around:
Here’s an unhappy memory for you. Five years ago today, COVID was declared an international pandemic by the World Health Organization. We all remember that moment, the desperation, the lockdowns, the masking, the overwhelmed hospitals, the kids stuck at home, and the long-term effects are still being felt in people’s bodies, in people’s bank accounts, in our politics. What have we learned? What are the takeaways?...In the earlier two hours of this show, we talked a bit about the messaging, public health messaging. And I know that you think the public health community in general was overly certain in its declarations and should have been a little bit more, I don’t know, how would you describe it in terms of the — because clearly it became political very fast.
Jha was contrite, saying “there was a misunderstanding by a lot of people in the public health community that people were nervous, people were scared, and they were looking for certainty” when what they wanted in those early days was “guidance” on “what we knew and what we didn’t know.”
Then came the money quote: “I saw too many public health experts saying masks definitely work or masks definitely don’t work. And I think it confused people, and I think it sowed a lot of the — sort of discord that we saw.”
Dokoupil recounted to Jha, though, that the doctor was “one of those public health officials” and part of the “don’t question the science crowd.”
Jha replied “in the early days was when we really didn’t know a lot” and he wasn’t formally in “government until 2022, but I was out there publicly...trying my best” though “I got some of my own communication wrong...but...I do think there were times when too many public health people from the government to elsewhere conveyed a sense of certainty that we really didn’t have.”
Co-host Adriana Diaz turned to mistaking (click “expand”):
DIAZ: And you understand why the public likes, I think, certainty, but maybe not. Maybe they just want, you know, openness and honesty about what we don’t know. But now we are five years out, let’s look back. How effective were those masks, the social distancing? We changed our way of life. Did it really have an impact?
JHA: It’s a great question. I think the thing that had the biggest impact in ending this pandemic were the vaccines. There’s no question about it. The data on that is overwhelming here. And by the way, we owe a huge thanks to President Trump for Operation Warp Speed and bringing those vaccines forward and then President Biden for getting them distributed to the American people. So that I think is the thing that really ultimately made the difference. I think in the early days when we — when there was a lot of virus spreading, let’s think about New York, I do think that social distancing, I think high quality masks probably did make a difference, but those were stopgap measures. One thing that I do not think made a difference and actually had mostly harm but not much good was school closures. They, in retrospect, look particularly harmful. And even then it didn’t look like a particularly good idea, but a lot of places did it.
Later on trust in public health, Dokoupil returned to the outrage: “But the trust issue remains, trust in us, trust in members of the public health community. You mentioned the school closures, lockdowns, certain things that we now know didn’t work or were overkill. Does someone need to say, I’m sorry?...[H]ow do you recover the public’s willingness to believe the next time?”
“I do think people have to acknowledge mistakes...I have been public about things that I was overly cautious on. I don’t know any single person who got everything right. So I think it’s absolutely critical to acknowledge those mistakes,” Jha argued.
The one key disappoint with these segments that never came up? The years of declarations the vaccines were all-but ironclad in preventing transmission.
To see the relevant CBS transcripts from March 11, click here (for CBS Mornings) and here (for CBS Mornings Plus).
