Immunologist warns: Excessive germophobia and safety obsession damage society.
A Culture of Safety: How It Impacted the COVID-19 Pandemic
A culture promoting safety above all else was a means of establishing unprecedented limitations of the public’s freedom during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Steven Templeton, an immunologist and author of the recent book, “Fear of a Microbial Planet: How a Germophobic Safety Culture Makes Us Less Safe.”
Mr. Templeton shared his thoughts in a recent interview for EpochTV’s ”American Thought Leaders” program, saying that this safety culture has become extreme, evolving to something irrational that could—together with the spread of misinformation about the real risks involved—lead to unprecedented misery via lockdowns and other extreme measures.
Although he’s not a psychologist, Mr. Templeton said he is interested in the psychological aspect of what happened in the past three years.
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For example, why did governments shut down hiking trails and skating parks during COVID? There was no evidence supporting these measures, but they nevertheless were implemented, as another instance of extreme safety culture that just gives an “appearance of safety.”
This extreme safety culture can be traced back to how some children have grown up in recent decades, Mr. Templeton said, such as not being allowed to play without supervision. Children who grow up under such conditions have become doctors, nurses, and public figures, with a mindset of feeling entitled and trying to control everything.
This extreme safety mindset has lead people to believe there is no advantage to taking any risk, a mindset nonexistent 20 or 30 years ago, according to Mr. Templeton.
Healthy With Microbes
To put things into perspective, Mr. Templeton said that first of all, microbial exposure is beneficial for healthy people, and it can strengthen a person. The advent of antibiotics and the era of “the only good bacteria are dead bacteria” came with a trade-off, as the healthy microbial balance in a human body was affected.
Using microbes, or mimicking their effects, can lead to development of therapeutics to lower allergies, autoimmune diseases, and gluten sensitivity, according to Mr. Templeton. Microbial disbiosis can also be relieved.
Killing all microbes with potent antibiotics has the disadvantage of the emergence of diseases that were not common in the past, he said, also called first-world diseases.
This observation can be seen more clearly by comparing the susceptibility to certain diseases in developed and developing countries.
One could expect that people in developing countries with somewhat poorer sanitation would not be able to stay healthy, but real world observations show something different.
For example, the Amish population, who live a life without electricity and modern amenities, is exposed to more microbes, their gut microflora is different, and they are healthy and exhibit fewer first-world diseases compared to other populations.
Mr. Templeton said this can be interesting for finding potential new therapeutics for first-world diseases.
Safety or Irrationality?
Speaking of some effects that the COVID lockdowns had, Mr. Templeton mentioned that the “monomaniacal” fear of a single threat lead to ignoring other problems, such as skyrocketing obesity in children in the United States during the COVID years.
New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio was giving $100 to children 5 to 11 years old and telling them “it buys a whole lot of candy.” Mr. Templeton cited this as an example of a COVID policy that could lead to deterioration of children’s health.
The governments wanted to give to the public something they would believe makes people safer, and given the lack of evidence supporting the measures, this was just an “illusion of control,” Mr. Templeton said.
“Up until early 2020, the idea that you would wear a cloth face covering to prevent giving someone else a respiratory infection or acquiring it yourself—there was no evidence to support that. But after things had been shut down for a while, there seemed to be a need to give the public something that they could believe was going to make them safer—convince them that maybe they could go out if they just wore something over their face. That was enough. That was the appearance of safety, giving them that control—the illusion of control.”
The same feeling was used with the vaccines, despite the small amount of evidence regarding their effectiveness, Mr. Templeton said.
Misinformation via the ‘Research Industrial Complex’
He said the “research industrial complex,” which works for years producing misinformation, reinforces this irrational safety culture.
As an example, Mr. Templeton talked about the initial years of HIV and the fear campaign targeting heterosexual men. He said that in reality, those at very high risk were homosexual men with 10 or more sexual partners, whereas heterosexual men did not experience the same level of risk. There was, however, an effort similar to what happened during COVID, to persuade the general public that heterosexual men were also in very high risk, and that the disease could spread to people outside its vulnerable group.
In other words, it was a misinformation campaign.
The goal of this was gaining more power and influence, something that survived to the COVID response, according to Mr. Templeton.
During COVID, federal agencies tried to play with the emotion of fear in people, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying that more than 2,000 children died of COVID. The CDC did not specify whether those children were healthy, and the accuracy of this research should also be questioned, according to Mr. Templeton.
“Whether it’s even accurate is not important. It’s important to say that it’s possible that a child could die. It doesn’t matter whether it’s likely, they are trying to eliminate risk completely. They were saying that anybody can get it, and anybody can die from it, which is not really true,” Mr. Templeton said.
“For a healthy child, the risk is almost zero. That was completely lost in the media coverage.”
Mass Hysteria
People are more likely to click on sensational things online, such as fear-mongering articles, and media companies make money from clicks, according to Mr. Templeton. The media “use scary models, and pretend their predictions are not just hypotheses or worst case scenarios, but the most likely outcomes.”
Experts are also used to provide “a veneer of authority in your otherwise subjective, bias-confirming piece.”
This has lead to the majority of Americans not knowing the actual hospitalization rate from COVID in late 2020, according to Mr. Templeton, citing Gallup research.
The mass hysteria over the fear of death can itself lead to adverse effects, even without any physical infection.
Mr. Templeton gave the example of a soap opera in Portugal with a storyline in which there was an epidemic disease spreading. As a result, girls who were watching the show massively fell ill in Portugal, without any real epidemic existing.
This was a “mass psychogenic illness,” according to a report by Smithsonian Magazine.
During COVID, the reality was that children were not getting seriously sick and healthy adults were also fine, according to Mr. Templeton. However, symptoms could still manifest in healthy people as a psychogenic illness, due to their fear, or COVID stress syndrome.
“That’s just basically a version of being a germophobe, activated by COVID,” Mr. Templeton said regarding COVID stress syndrome, citing the book “The Psychology of Pandemics,” which was published just before.
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