Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City

Journal. Joining me on the show today is

John Tierney. He's a city journal contributing editor. He writes about science, economics, politics,

culture, and he spent more than two decades as a reporter and columnist for the New York Times.

His work has appeared also in the Atlantic, Esquire, The Wells Street Journal, Washington Post, and many other publications.

He's the author of several books, including co-authored, The Power of Bad,

How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It.

Today, though, we're going to discuss his recent essays on the impact of the government's response to COVID, something he's

been covering extensively for City Journal. So, John, welcome. Thanks, Brian. You know,

states' responses to COVID varied widely. So some imposed restrictions on residents for varying periods of time, sometimes weeks,

others limited residents social, medical, and economic activities for more than a year.

These policies, these lockdown policies, were historically unprecedented. And two recent studies show that their consequences were in fact very far-reaching and disastrous,

as you have detailed in a recent essay for City Journal.

So I wonder if you could just give us a sketch of what those reports found, both how they approached, you know, this methodologically

and what the results were. And what, you know, according to these studies, what damage did the

lockdowns cause? And did they do anything to constrain the spread of COVID?

Sure.

I've already about the lockdowns, and there's been a lot of evidence over the last couple of years that they were not working and that they were causing a lot of damage.

But these two new reports are originally because they're so exhaustive.

They're really, one of them was done by a team of American from Sweden, from Johns Hopkins

and the Danish researcher.

And they sifted through nearly 20,000 studies of, you know, they're comparing lockdowns

...