5/4/21 - Philippe Lemoine (Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology)

Faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, most Western countries ordered lockdowns to reduce the spread of the virus, which took very different forms in different places but heavily curtailed individual freedoms everywhere. However, in making the decision to implement such policies, governments didn't pay much attention to their costs and focused on their alleged benefits. I argue that most restrictions did not pass a cost-benefit test and that it was not even close.