The stance is basically against intervention that is heavy handed, like lockdowns, mask mandates, etc. Maybe that’s okay but we should keep in mind that the pandemic resulted in more excess deaths in the US than both world wars combined. I think I am still on the side of not having the state take away individual’s civil rights in the event of emergencies. But it’s still worth keeping in mind.

As for this take:

> We should learn from recent example: a metabolically healthy population, physically active and eating nutritious food, will cope far better in the face of a novel pathogen than a population facing a severe chronic-disease crisis.

> Sweden, without lockdown or school closures, was the best in the world at protecting human life during the Covid pandemic. It had the lowest level of age-adjusted, all-cause excess deaths in the world between March 2020 and December 2024. Sweden succeeded in part because its people are relatively metabolically healthy. By contrast, the U.S. chronic-disease crisis all but guaranteed that Americans would have one of the highest mortality rates in the world.

I think there is a big assumption here that Sweden succeeded because people are metabolically healthy. Maybe that’s true, but no evidence is offered and this assumption is mentioned in the article very casually, even though it is the main point behind their suggestion of a “new pandemic playbook”. Sweden may simply have succeeded because people voluntarily followed government guidance even if they were not strictly required to - and that type of high-trust high-compliance society can claim to not have lockdowns. Their cities are also different - less dense than many American cities, for example.

Also, a background on the source/authors of this article:

City Journal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Journal

Jay Bhattacharya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya

Matthew Memoli: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Memoli