The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe
About this audiobook
For the first time in history, the world shut itself down—by choice—all for fear of a virus, COVID-19, that wasn’t well understood. The government, with the support of most Americans, ordered the closure of tens of thousands of small businesses—many never to return. Almost every school and college in the country sent its students home to finish the school year in front of a computer. Churches canceled worship services. “Social distancing” went from a non-word to a moral obligation overnight. Moral preening on social media achieved ever new heights.
The world will reopen and life will go on, but what kind of world will it be when it does? It can’t be what it was, because of what’s just happened.
Professors Jay Richards, William Briggs, and Douglas Axe take a deep dive into the crucial questions on the minds of millions of Americans during one of the most jarring and unprecedented global events in a generation.
What will be the total cost in dollars, lives, and livelihoods of this response from governments, on advice from Science? What role have national and global health organizations such as WHO played in this? To whom are they accountable? What evidence do they rely on in sounding the alarm? How did science bureaucrats, relying on murky data and speculative computer models, gain the power to shut down the global economy? How did politicians, who know nothing of the science, decide whom to trust?We need to know what and how it happened, to keep it from ever happening again.
About the author
Douglas Axe is the Maxwell Professor of Molecular Biology at Biola University, the founding director of the Biologic Institute, and the founding editor of BIO-Complexity. His work and ideas have been featured in the Journal of Molecular Biology, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Nature. Find him on Twitter at @DougAxe.
William M. Briggs holds a PhD in statistics from Cornell University. He is the author of Uncertainty: The Soul of Modeling, Probability & Statistics and the author or coauthor of over one hundred scientific papers. He tweets at @FamedCelebrity.
Jay W. Richards is a research assistant professor in the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, coauthor of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery, and author of Money, Greed, and God. Follow him on Twitter at @DrJayRichards.
John McLain is an award-winning storyteller with over 200 audiobook credits. He delights in narrating across many genres: detective noir, suspense and thrillers, westerns, nonfiction, biography, and more. John is a SOVAS Voice Arts Award winner, a two-time nominee for the prestigious Audie Award, and a winner of the Audiobook Reviewer Listeners' Choice Award.
