I was honored to be invited to Hillsdale College to provide an overview of my work on pandemic policy and lockdowns. Modeling played a crucial role. In that sense, pandemic policy seems to have repeated many errors that afflicted economics in decades past. This lecture assesses the predictive merit of these models and their speculative attempts to manipulate and mitigate viruses through coercive policies. 

My argument traces the evolution of epidemiology of traditional public health wisdom into the deployment of “non-pharmaceutical interventions” that presume all kinds of knowledge to which scientists do not have ready access. The results in this case are not different from the results of economic central planning.