From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker from the Wall Street Journal editorial

page. Thanks very much for joining us. If you're not already, please become a subscriber at Apple

podcast, Spotify or elsewhere. And please also leave us a nice review, if you would. This week,

learning the lessons of COVID. It's now two and a half years since the onset of the pandemic,

and the more we learn, the more we can see that our public health response was deeply flawed.

Decisions by state and local governments to impose lockdowns did huge damage to our economy,

the consequences of which we're still seeing today. Closure of schools has had catastrophic

effects on children's education and psychological well-being, with test scores way down and

incidents of mental illness way up. Doctor and hospital visits were postponed for many

months leading to late diagnoses of serious illness that might well have been prevented if earlier

action had been taken. And yet, with another winter approaching some parts of the country,

some authorities seem eager to do it all again, with some states warning that they're ready to impose new mandates in the event of an increasing cases. What to talk about all this, I'm joined, I'm delighted to say, by Dr. J. Baticharya. Dr. Batichari is Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University and the Director of the Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.

He's also a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. Dr. Batichari was an early critic of lockdowns, certainly the extreme lockdowns that we faced, and was widely lambasted by

public officials and indeed fellow academics. Yet much of what he has said then and has said

throughout the pandemic has

proven to be true. And I'm delighted to say that he joins me now, Dr. Batichara. Thank you very much indeed for being here. Thank you, Jerry. It's just a real honor to talk to you. Thank you. So let's start, if I may, with, I'm going to take a sort of slightly contrarian position. Is it not the case that lockdowns at least saved perhaps many millions of lives?

I don't think it saved million millions of lives.

I think what lockdowns did least saved perhaps many millions of lives? I don't think it saved million millions of lives.

I think what lockdowns did, Jerry, is that for a certain class of people, in particular people who could afford to work from home without losing their job, without losing their livelihood, those people, I think lockdowns protected for short times.

It moved the incidents of cases forward from, you know,

March or 2020 to forward to maybe six months a year. That is the extent to which I think lockdowns

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