Exaggerating the fatality risk associated with Covid-19 and portraying unscientific guesses as unqualified facts stood out as key Administrative State failures in the early days of Covid. Take the Administrative State’s early statements regarding Covid case fatality and mortality rates. A case fatality rate is a ratio of how many people infected with a particular…

When Covid arrived in the United States, all 50 governors declared a state of emergency They shut down schools, offices, stores, churches, and public parks—initially justifying these unprecedented restrictions as the now-familiar “two weeks to flatten the curve.” With few exceptions (e.g., Georgia, Florida) these emergency orders quickly morphed into abuses of power that continued…

In stark contrast to widely accepted understandings of what constitutes science, “the Science” that emerged during the Covid era eschewed unbiased observation, systematic experimentation and debate, replacing those careful, deliberative processes with rushes to judgment and stifling of opposing viewpoints.[1]  By the time Covid-19 reached epidemic proportions in the United States, public health authorities had concluded…

The Framers understood that property rights comprise an indispensable bulwark against government.  Covid taught us, however, that bureaucrats believe that bulwark ought to be more notional than real.  After state-level bureaucrats imposed on our liberties by confining us to our homes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) imposed further by forbidding landlords from…

The government’s authoritative response to Covid proved particularly devastating for Americans nearing the end of their lives and those whose loved ones were dying or died during the Covid years. As the authors of The Legal and Ethical Dimensions of Hospital Visitation Bans in the COVID-19 Era noted, “[t]he scope and intensity of these visitation…

Forced closure of houses of worship during the Covid pandemic demonstrated how far-reaching administrative edicts could be. In the early weeks of the pandemic, amidst uncertainty about the virus, most Americans were willing to adjust their normal behavior out of an abundance of caution in the face of a virus with an unknown lethality. They…