Biden’s health adviser’s plan to save the economy and lives: Pay people to stay home for 4-6 weeks
“When Covid is running out of control, the economy is going to be suffering mightily. So the things we have to do to get Covid under control will ultimately affect the economy in a positive way.”
A nationwide lockdown of four to six weeks would help contain the coronavirus pandemic and need not cause economic hardship, according to Dr. Michael Osterholm, a top health adviser to President-elect Joe Biden, who said that paying people to stay home would limit the spread of Covid-19 in the United States and put the country on track for a smoother recovery.
In an interview with CNBC earlier this week, Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a member of Biden’s coronavirus advisory board, acknowledged that people have clashing interpretations of the meaning and consequences of a “lockdown.”
Part of the problem, the epidemiologist explained, is that public health and economic health have been pitted against each other, the implication being that too many people view far-reaching interventions to get the pandemic under control as economically harmful.
“It’s a false notion to keep the economy going versus Covid,” Osterholm said. “When Covid is running out of control, the economy is going to be suffering mightily. So the things we have to do to get Covid under control will ultimately affect the economy in a positive way.”
“Look no further than Asia, which has done a remarkable job of bringing these cases under control, and look what’s happening to their economy,” he added.
On Wednesday, Osterholm told Yahoo! Finance that “we could pay for a package right now to cover all of the lost wages for individual workers, for losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, [and] county governments.”
The federal government “could do all of that,” he noted, and if it did, “then we could lock down for four to six weeks.”
One of Biden's new coronavirus task force doctors floating the idea of a 4-6 week lockdown:
“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the lost wages for individual workers … if we did that, then we could lockdown for 4 to 6 weeks."pic.twitter.com/zNmuQvPpIJ— Zack Guzmán ♻️ (@zGuz) November 11, 2020
“And if we did that, we could drive the numbers down, like they’ve done in Asia, like they did in New Zealand and Australia,” said Osterholm. “And then, we could really watch ourselves, cruising into the vaccine availability in the first and second quarter of next year, and bringing back the economy long before that.”
The alternative—continuing with the inadequate and haphazard measures that characterize the status quo—ensures that the U.S. will remain on a bleak trajectory, public health officials say.
As Common Dreamsreported Wednesday, the coronavirus crisis is entering an extremely dangerous phase that has some epidemiologists worried about whether the U.S. has a sufficient number of mobile morgues.
Yet, at precisely the moment when the ongoing catastrophe warrants a stronger, more effective response, President Donald Trump is engaging in what journalist David Dayen on Wednesday called “the world’s worst coup attempt.”
By hampering Biden’s ability to get a head start on facilitating a well-coordinated response to the Covid-19 emergency and its economic fallout, Dayen explained, Trump is relegating even more Americans to “death and suffering.”
“The next three to four months are going to be, by far, the darkest of the pandemic,” Osterholm toldCNBC earlier this week.
“What America has to understand is that we are about to enter Covid hell. It is happening,” said Osterholm. “I don’t think America quite gets this yet. This is going to get much worse.”
“This is not to scare people out of their wits,” he added. “It’s to scare people into their wits… We can basically limit the contacts we have with people, [which] will dramatically impact our risk of getting this disease.”
To save thousands of lives and the economy, however, Osterholm stressed on Wednesday that a comprehensive and stringent lockdown is necessary.
He referred to a New York Timesop-ed, co-authored in August with Minneapolis Federal Reserve president Neel Kashkari, in which they argued that the U.S. “reopened too quickly.”
“To successfully drive down our case rate to less than one per 100,000 people per day, we should mandate sheltering in place for everyone but the truly essential workers,” wrote Osterholm and Kashkari. “We have the resources to support those who have been laid off… Congress should be aggressive in supporting people who’ve lost jobs because of Covid-19.”
“There is no trade-off between health and the economy,” they noted. “Both require aggressively getting control of the virus.”
“History,” Osterholm and Kashkari added, “will judge us harshly if we miss this life- and economy-saving opportunity to get it right this time.”
This article first appeared on Common Dreams. You can read it here.
The first time the placebo effect really got under my skin was when I read that roughly one-third of people with irritable bowel syndrome improve on placebo treatments alone. Usually this statistic is presented as a fascinating quirk of medicine. My reaction was anger.
Humanity possesses an extremely effective treatment, with essentially zero side effects – and patients need someone else’s permission to use it.
The placebo effect refers to the improvements in symptoms that patients experience after they’re given an inert treatment like a sugar pill. Driven by expectation, context and social cues rather than pharmacology, the placebo effect is often dismissed as all in the mind. But decades of research have shown it is anything but imaginary.
Placebo treatments can trigger measurable changes in the brain, immune system and hormone function. In studies on pain, placebos cause the brain to release endorphins, the body’s natural opioids. In Parkinson’s disease, placebo injections increase dopamine activity in the brain. The placebo effect isn’t magic. It’s biology.
Having spent nearly a quarter-century teachingevolutionary medicine, I’ve come to see placebos not as curiosities of clinical trials but as windows into how human biology responds to social signals. And it’s that relationship that is exactly what makes the placebo effect unsettling.
When testing a new drug, scientists compare its effects to what patients experience on a placebo treatment like sugar pills, saline injections or sham surgery. If the drug doesn’t outperform the placebo, it rarely reaches the public. Placebo responses are common and powerful enough to rival active treatments.
Even surgery isn’t immune to the placebo effect. In several well-documented studies of knee procedures, patients who received sham operations – incisions without the full surgical repair – improved almost as much as those who received the real procedure.
Clearly something real is happening inside the body. But the strangest part of the placebo effect is not that it works. It’s what makes it work.
The prescription of belief
Placebo treatments tend to be more effective when delivered by credible authorities. Pills work better when prescribed by doctors wearing white coats. Expensive pills outperform cheap ones. Injections produce stronger responses than tablets.
Some researchers have even removed the deception from placebo experiments entirely. In open-label placebo studies, patients are directly told they are receiving a placebo; and yet many still report significant improvement.
But look more closely at how these studies are run. Patients are not simply handed a sugar pill and sent home. They receive an explanation from a clinician, in a medical setting, within a structured ritual of care: a context that may be doing much of the biological work.
Even when the deception disappears, the social scaffolding remains. The permission to heal is still being granted by someone else.
The placebo effect extends beyond the patient
The placebo effect is often framed as something happening inside an individual. But it does not operate in isolation.
Consider what happens in veterinary medicine. Dogs and cats cannot believe a treatment they’re given will work; they have no concept of receiving medication. Yet when owners and vets believe an animal is being treated, they consistently report improvements in pain and mobility that medical tests do not confirm.
In one study of dogs with osteoarthritis, owners reported improvement roughly 57% of the time for animals receiving only a placebo.
The animals themselves may not have improved. But the humans caring for them perceived they had. The healing signal, it turns out, travels through the humans in the room.
When healing makes things worse
There have been times when going to the doctor made you less likely to survive. In the 19th century, mainstream medicine was built on bloodletting, purging and doses of mercury and arsenic – treatments that killed as often as they cured.
Homeopathy emerged in the late 18th century precisely in this context. Its founder, Samuel Hahnemann, was a physician horrified by the harm the conventional medicine of his time was causing. His highly diluted versions of contemporary remedies did nothing pharmacologically. But they also did not kill people, which put them decisively ahead of the competition.
Homeopathic patients not only survived but also reported dramatic recoveries from chronic ailments and acute infections alike. During the cholera epidemics of the mid-1800s, patients at homeopathic hospitals had lower death rates than those receiving standard care. Why was that?
The standard cholera treatment of the era was aggressive and exhausting; for a disease that already caused massive fluid loss, doctors often prescribed further bloodletting, along with toxic purgatives such as calomel – a form of mercury – to “flush” the system. In contrast, homeopathic care involved extreme dilutions of substances in water or alcohol, effectively providing hydration and a calm, structured environment without the physiological assault.
Death rates were lower not because homeopathy worked but because the placebo effect – combined with not poisoning patients – was more effective than the medicine of the day.
Healing is not free
The body needs resources to heal from injury and disease. Activating systems such as immune responses, tissue repair and inflammation at the wrong time can be dangerous.
Some researchers have proposed that placebo responses reflect a kind of biological health governor: a system that regulates when the body invests heavily in recovery. Cues from trusted individuals may be exactly the signal the body waits for before committing resources to recovery. A caregiver’s reassurance, a physician’s authority and the rituals of medicine may tell the body that conditions are finally stable enough to devote energy to healing.
If that interpretation is correct, the placebo effect is not a trick of the mind. It is an ancient biological system responding to social information.
Body under stress
The placebo effect resembles another system people struggle with today: the stress response.
Stress evolved to keep you alive in the face of acute danger – predators, famine, immediate physical threat. These days, this useful piece of biological engineering might fire when someone hasn’t replied to your email. The system that once saved people’s lives now makes many miserable over things that would have been unimaginable to their ancestors.
You can talk back to the stress response, consciously reappraising the threat – in other words, reframing a looming deadline not as a catastrophe but as a manageable challenge – to help quiet it. But notice what you cannot do: You cannot simply decide to activate your placebo response. You cannot will yourself to release pain-relieving endorphins by believing hard enough in a sugar pill. For that, you still need the ritual, the white coat, the authority figure. You need someone else.
The stress response, misfiring as it is, remains yours. The placebo response has been outsourced: not because it wasn’t always social, but because even now, people still can’t seem to access it on their own.
The uncomfortable implication
The placebo effect is not a trick of the mind. It is a feature of human biology that people have largely surrendered to whoever performs authority most convincingly.
If belief can activate biological healing pathways, belief can also be manipulated. Charismatic figures, elaborate medical rituals and expensive treatments may produce real improvement in symptoms even when the underlying treatment is physiologically inert. That is how wellness culture works. It leverages the same social scaffolding of care to trigger the body’s internal pharmacy, regardless of whether the treatment itself does anything.
The placebo effect is often celebrated as proof that the mind can heal the body. But I believe that may not be its most interesting lesson. It also reveals that human physiology evolved to take its cues from other people. Your brain, immune system and pain response are not isolated machines. They are deeply intertwined with social signals, expectations and trust.
In a world filled with doctors, advertisements, wellness influencers and elaborate medical rituals, that insight is both fascinating and profoundly maddening. People are walking around with one of the most powerful healing systems ever documented locked inside them, and they can reliably access it only when someone in a position of authority gives them permission.
She was right to be touched. He had actually thought about what she would like. She’s health-conscious, so he tailored the meal to her preferences. As they sat down he proudly explained what he’d made and why.
It was designed, he told her, for her prostate health.
A visibly confused woman tries to think. Photo credit: Canva
Sedlak asked him if he meant his prostate health.
He confidently said no. He meant hers.
Sedlak, an actress and filmmaker with 145K Instagram followers, shared the moment in a video posted on November 22, 2025 under her handle @alexandrasedlak. She described the progression from delight to confusion with great precision. “I am dating a dummy,” she concluded in the video. “But he is my little dummy, and no one can take that away from me ever.”
For reference: the prostate is a gland in the male reproductive system, located below the bladder. Women do not have one. A study published in PMC found that men’s knowledge of gynecologic anatomy tends to be significantly lower than women’s, which at least provides some scientific context for this particular gap running in the other direction.
The comments were predictably delighted. One person suggested she invite him over and cook a meal focused on his ovulation health, then casually ask what part of his cycle he’s in. Another compared him to a golden retriever who should be given head scratches and told he’s a good boy.
He is very caring. He cooked her a whole meal. The organ was wrong but the intention was right.
For more relationship-based content, follow @alexandrasedlak on Instagram.
This finding, based on my team’s synthesis of six decades of research, may come as a surprise. Gender differences in adults’ social sensitivity are famous. Women outperform men at recognizing faces and emotions, and they score modestly higher on measures of empathy. They are likelier to take jobs working with people, such as in teaching and health care, whereas men are likelier to choose jobs working with “things,” such as in engineering or plumbing.
But how early do these differences emerge, and are they a matter of evolution or social learning? For years, some theorists have argued the former: that the difference is innate, built into the brain hardware of girls and boys through Darwinian selection. But this perspective relies almost exclusively on just one high-profile, yet deeply flawed, study of 102 newborns.
Mining the neonatal research trove
Realizing that psychologists have been studying newborns’ social orientation for decades, my team of neurobehavioral researchers and I set out to collect all the data – every published study that has compared boys’ and girls’ attention to social stimuli in the first month of life. Our goal was to better test the hypothesis of an inborn gender difference in attention to, or interest in, other people.
Our study was a systematic review, meaning we searched through every published report indexed in both medical and psychological databases from the 1960s onward.
We cast a wide net, looking for any research that measured newborns’ attention to or preference for human faces or voices and that reported the data separately by gender. Importantly, we did not limit our search to the terms “gender difference” or “sex difference,” since these would bias the collection by potentially excluding studies that failed to find boy-girl differences..
As expected, we unearthed dozens of studies comparing newborn boys and girls on social perception: 40 experiments reported in 31 peer-reviewed studies and involving nearly 2,000 infants. The majority of studies measured the amount of time newborns spent looking at faces, either at a single face or comparing a baby’s preference between two faces of differing social value, such as their own mother versus a woman who was a stranger.
Our data collection was large enough that we were able to carry out meta-analysis, which is a statistical method for combining the results of many studies. Meta-analysis essentially turns many small studies into a single large one. For studies measuring neonates’ looking time at faces, this included 667 infants, half of them boys and half of them girls.
The result was clear: nearly identical social perception between baby boys and girls. There was no significant difference between genders overall, nor was there a difference when we focused only on studies measuring babies’ gaze duration on a single face, or only on studies measuring babies’ gaze preference between two different faces.
Our search also netted two other types of studies. One focused on a remarkable behavior: newborns’ tendency to start crying when they hear another baby cry. An early study found this “contagious crying” to be marginally more common in girls. But when we performed meta-analysis on data across nine contagious-crying experiments, including 387 infants, there was again no solid evidence for male-female difference.
The last dataset we analyzed compared babies’ orientation to both social and inanimate objects using a newborn behavior assessment scale developed by legendary pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton. Across four studies involving 619 infants, girls did pay somewhat greater attention to the social stimuli (a human face or voice), but they also paid more attention to the inanimate stimuli (a ball or the sound of a rattle).
In other words, girls in this test seemed a bit more attuned to every type of stimulus, perhaps due to a general maturity advantage that they hold from fetal development through puberty. But there was nothing special about their interest in people, according to the Brazelton assessment.
Boys, too, prefer faces
Our findings align with other well-designed studies, including one finding that 5-month-old boys and girls equally prefer looking at faces over toy cars or other objects, and another finding that 2-month-old boys actually perform better than girls at detecting faces. So taken together, current research dispels a common myth that girls are innately “hardwired” to be more social than boys in early life.
The truth is that all babies are wired for social engagement at birth. Boys and girls are both primed to pay attention to human faces and voices, which, after all, belong to those who will keep them fed, safe and comforted.
Despite their best intentions, most parents cannot help but stereotype their infants by gender and begin treating boys and girls differently early on. Presuming that sons are already less social is not a recipe for remedying this bias. Our research can help dispel this myth, giving every child, male or female, the best possible start for connecting with and caring about other people.
