The Price of Panic

The last months have been unlike anything we’ve ever seen, with extreme measures taken around the world to slow the spread of COVID-19. The policy of lockdowns and mass quarantines were widely adopted — but each passing day begs the question, did we take the right approach?

COVID-19 is no doubt a real disease that should be taken seriously. But, our efforts to control it have come with high costs and unintended consequences. The government’s unprecedented strategy of halting the U.S. economy may have been well intentioned, but it has yielded lost businesses, broken dreams, and even death due to depression, addiction, other untreated diseases, and even starvation in some parts of the world.

In this event and in their insightful book, The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe, Discovery Institute Senior Fellows Jay Richards and Doug Axe grapple with crucial questions of how we responded to COVID-19.