Study
| EST. READ TIME 1 MIN.Pandemic exposes inept risk-management abilities of governments worldwide
COVID-19: The Risk in Perspective
The global reaction to COVID-19 was unprecedented. Government actions proposed, promoted, mandated and enforced to modify the risks to individuals and society as a whole were orders of magnitude more intrusive than any other risk-intervention policies ever promoted, proposed or implemented by most governments in the past. This was a truly radical global intervention by governments to control a novel biological risk.
But the wildly diverging impacts and likely effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, of these various strategies suggest an equally wild divergence in the understanding of COVID-19 itself—its size, mass, shape, physical nature, potential interactions, exposure, viral uptake, established infection, reproduction and so on. Today, in the pandemic’s wake, perhaps we can put some of those risks and risk-management strategies in perspective to help make sense of COVID public policies—what was suggested, what was mandated, what was rational, and what was irrational.
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Kenneth P. Green
Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute
Kenneth P. Green is a Fraser Institute senior fellow and author of over 800 essays and articles on public policy,published by think tanks, major newspapers, and technical and trade journals in North America. Mr. Green holds a doctoral degree in environmental science and engineering from UCLA, a master’s degree in molecular genetics from San Diego State University, and a bachelors degree in general biology from UCLA.Mr. Green’s policy analysis has centered on evaluating the pros and cons of government management of environmental, health, and safety risk. More often than not, his research has shown that governments are poor managers of risk, promulgating policies that often do more harm than good both socially and individually, are wasteful of limited regulatory resources, often benefit special interests (in government and industry) at the expense of the general public, and are almost universally violative of individual rights and personal autonomy. Mr. Green has also focused on government’s misuse of probabilistic risk models in the defining and regulating of EHS risks, ranging from air pollution to chemical exposure, to climate change, and most recently, to biological threats such as COVID-19.Mr. Green's longer publications include two supplementary text books on environmental science issues, numerous studies of environment, health, and safety policies and regulations across North America, as well as a broad range of derivative articles and opinion columns. Mr. Green has appeared frequently in major media and has testified before legislative bodies in both the United States and Canada.… Read more Read Less…
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