by | Jul 26, 2024 | The Hill
Stricter COVID-19 restrictions could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the states that refused to institute them, though efforts to close nursing homes and schools likely caused more harm than good, a new study has found.
Between 118,000 and 248,000 more Americans would have survived the pandemic if all states had followed some restrictions practiced in Northeastern states,
published on Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
The most effective responses were mask mandates and vaccine requirements rest, the JAMA study found.
“COVID-19 restrictions saved lives,” the researchers wrote.
“The death toll was probably considerably higher than it would otherwise have been in states that resisted imposing these restrictions, banned their use, or implemented them for only relatively short periods of time.”
Vaccine requirements and mask mandates have been politically controversial, and continue to cast a shadow on politicians in Washington.
Bu the JAMA research extolled these policies, and said they should help guide public health response in future pandemics even as
hits the West.
At first, there was little difference in COVID-19 response between red and blue states, the researchers noted.
For the first four months of the pandemic, most states pursued overlapping and
strategies like closing businesses and schools and imposing mask mandates.
About
supported the mask restrictions, according to polling from The University of Texas. Those numbers are roughly in line with the 62 percent nationwide
that the lives saved were worth what nearly 70 percent acknowledged as a considerable economic costs.
But by the middle of 2020, as
to these restrictions, conservative governments in states like Texas reacted
.
As late as 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) was telling conservative talk show hosts that he would keep his pandemic-derived emergency powers in place until state legislators “codify my executive orders that ban mask mandates, that ban forced vaccines and things like that,” the Texas Tribune
.
The cost of these reactions in conservative states was tens or hundreds of thousands of additional deaths — a cost that would have been even worse if all states had followed their lead, the JAMA researchers found.
If all states had followed more lenient practices in the Southeast or Texas, as many as 200,000 people would have died, the study found.
At its most dramatic, Mississippi — the state with the weakest restrictions — saw five times as many deaths per-capita as Massachusetts, a state with among the strongest restrictions, the study found.
The findings emphasized that all interventions weren’t equally helpful, and that particularly when it came to closures of public spaces, the costs may have outweighed benefits. As much as three-fourths of the lives saved by restrictions could be attributed to just two — masks and vaccines.
By contrast, the researchers found, benefits were weakest for school closures, which hurt students’
and
without achieving much benefit in reducing the death rate.
For high-poverty school districts, this disparity was particularly stark. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research
that low-income districts that went remote in the 2020 – 2021 school year, for example, “will need to spend nearly all of their federal aid on academic recovery to help students recover from pandemic-related achievement losses.
The data suggests that school closures “may have been too aggressively pursued in some states,” the researchers found.
On the other hand, requiring students and teachers to wear masks was “probably more effective and imposed lower costs.”
Another area where researchers argued that the costs of restrictions likely outweighed benefits was social isolation for nursing home residents — which seem to have saved people from death by COVID-19 but caused them to be
.
The researchers acknowledged that simply saving lives was “not necessarily sufficient to justify imposing restrictions because they also imposed a variety of costs,” though they noted that some of these — like “loss of liberty” — were difficult to quantify.
But by using accepted actuarial numbers for the monetary value of a life — from about
to
— they found that the lives that could have been saved by stronger restrictions was on the order of $1.2 to $5.2 trillion.
That’s the equivalent of between 6 and 22 percent of 2021-era GDP.
by | Jul 26, 2024 | The Hill
President Biden on Friday paid tribute to the veteran Middle East peace negotiator, Ambassador Martin Indyk, who died on Thursday from complications with cancer, as a “voice of clarity and conviction” in his commitment to peace.
Biden, as vice president in the Obama administration, worked closely with Indyk who served as Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations, but acknowledged the diplomat’s broad influence across Washington as a mentor to current administration officials and the broader community of academics on Middle East policy.
“Martin Indyk dedicated his life to the pursuit of peace,” the president said in a statement. “His legacy lives on in the many officials across my Administration who were mentored by Martin and learned firsthand from his vast knowledge, integrity, and heart. His unshakeable optimism and commitment to peace is as important today as it’s ever been.”
Indyk, who was born in Australia, cited living in Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur war as a formative experience in the decision to devote his life to helping resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.
“His commitment to peace was rooted in witnessing that conflict and realizing that Israel’s existence is fragile, peace is the only path to lasting security, and the United States must be a part of that endeavor,” Biden said.
“More recently, he has been a voice of clarity and conviction since the horrific October 7th attack by Hamas and during the war in Gaza.”
A two-time ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration and negotiator for Israeli-Palestinian peace during the Obama administration, Indyk helped advance significant progress on Middle East peace even as a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remained out of reach.
Most recently, he criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as undermining U.S. support for Israel in its defense against Hamas and Iran’s proxies, and blamed Netanyahu’s refusal to accept the establishment of a Palestinian state for killing the opportunity to broker ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
“Wednesday, May 22, 2024. I never thought I’d live to see this day when Israel’s government rejected a full-fledged offer of peace from Saudi Arabia, the leader of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Wake up Israel! Your government is leading you into ever greater isolation and ruin,” Indyk posted on X.
Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz paid tribute to Indyk, saying in a meeting they held earlier this year, “I was reminded of his deep commitment to Israel’s security and concern for Israel’s future, serving as testament not only to the strategic importance he assigned to Israeli-U.S. relations, but the personal importance they held to him.”
Indyk’s career in Washington began as the founding executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where his research and policy recommendations brought him to the attention of the Clinton administration, where he served as a senior official on Middle East policy and then as two-time ambassador to Israel.
He was America’s envoy in Israel when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, and Biden acknowledged Indyk’s rush to the hospital that night and personal consolation of Rabin’s wife Leah as “representing the American people’s empathy and grief at a pivotal moment.”
Biden’s message Friday came amid an outpouring of gratitude and appreciation from former President Clinton and prominent diplomats involved in Middle East policy.
“Martin Indyk was an extraordinarily skilled diplomat who, no matter the obstacles, never gave up on the prospect of peace,” Clinton said in a post on X. “I’ll always be deeply grateful for the important role he played in my Administration’s efforts to end the conflict in the Middle East. The world would be better off if there were a lot more people like him.”
“We shared a deep commitment to Arab-Israeli peacemaking. May his memory be a blessing and inspiration to all who share that dream,” Aaron David Miller, who served advised both Democratic and Republican secretaries of state, posted on X.
Likewise Dennis Ross, Indyk’s colleague at the Washington Institute and who served as Middle East peace negotiator during the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations, praised his friend as living “a life of meaning; he pursued peace-making between Israel and its neighbors with passion, skill and decency.”
Outside of government, Indyk was the founding director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, Brookings’ executive vice president and director of its foreign policy program, and then, most recently, as the Lowy Distinguished Fellow in U.S.-Middle East Diplomacy at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
He was also an author who published books on Henry Kissinger’s diplomacy, and a memoir of his public service, “Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East.” He co-authored a book on former President Obama’s foreign policy.
“From the Oslo process to the policy of ‘dual containment’ of Saddam’s Iraq and Islamic Iran, Martin left a deep and lasting imprint on the making and shaping of American Middle East policy,” said Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute and who succeeded Indyk at the helm of the research organization.
“In a region known for volatility, whatever progress America made to advance the cause of peace and security was due in no small measure to Martin’s enormous contributions.”
