Rebuttal of Hendy, Wiles, Binny and Plank

Abstract

In their comment on my paper ‘Government mandated lockdowns do not reduce Covid-19 deaths: implications for evaluating the stringent New Zealand response’ Hendy, Wiles, Binny and Plank [hereafter HWBP] (Hendy et al, 2022) make several incorrect claims. I deal with these in the second part of this response. Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of their comment is the fact that out of their 27 references just one is to a study in an economics journal or working paper series; the reference to my own paper. Some of their confusion that I discuss belowmight perhaps have been avoided if they had made greater use of the economics literature. There are at least two interpretations of this failure to cite economics studies. The first is that HWBP are willing to insert themselves into the scholarly conversation of a discipline in which they have no background but lack the scholarly politeness to acknowledge literature in that discipline.1 The second interpretation, which is even more disturbing, is that these authors actually believe that economics has nothing to say, in the sense there are no findings in the economics literature either more broadly or specifically related to Covid-19 that merit their attention. IfHWBPwere unknown academics, questions ofwhether they are conscientious and careful scholars who acknowledge relevant prior findings in the literature they publish into, and whether they have a skewed view of what economics can offer for crafting responses to Covid-19, could probably be ignored and the lack of citation to any economics literature in their comment could be put down to an oversight. However, three of these authors (all except Binny) have assumed dominating positions in public discussions in New Zealand related to Covid-19. A review of advice on Covid-19 received by the New Zealand government (Lally, 2021) notes that the research centre that links the HWBP authors, Te Punaha Matatini (TPM), came to displace public health academics as the source of technical advice on Covid-19. Yet authors of the key initial TPM study (James, Hendy, Plank, & Steyn, 2020), which includes two of HWBP, had no prior record of producing cost benefit analyses (CBA) of health interventions. Other commentators, such as Brash (2021) have also noted that the New Zealand government took Covid-19 advice from some unlikely sources, while neglecting input from economists. Thus, there may be something in the HWBP comment of interest to a future historian trying to explain why economists were so absent from the public discussion in New Zealand about appropriate responses to Covid-19. Relatedly, a future historian might note Hendy’s response to a later critique of the implausible prediction of 83,000 Covid-19 deaths in New Zealand without interventions (as made by TPM in James et al., 2020), where the response was to deride the critique by saying it is: ‘one for the economists-shouldn’t-do-epidemiology files’.2 If some of these influential advisors have