Cato Event Podcast

More than a decade ago, Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution gave hope to the Arab world, showing oppressed peoples that longtime dictators can be peacefully ousted. That hope soon failed, brutally, in Egypt, Syria, and Yemen, but Tunisia kept on track throughout the 2010s, proving to be the best democratic hope in an otherwise autocratic and turbulent Middle East.

Yet since July 2021, Tunisia’s trajectory has taken an increasingly worrisome reversal as well. President Kais Saied suspended the parliament, claimed all executive power, prohibited public gatherings, arrested political opponents, and imposed travel bans. As Cato senior fellow Doug Bandow recently observed on a visit to Tunisia, this authoritarian turn risks the freedoms Tunisians have been enjoying in the past 10 years and can throw the country back to arbitrary rule by a strongman. The change is concerning for the broader Arab and Muslim world, where Tunisia used to be a rare example and source of inspiration. Join us as we discuss these changes and what Tunisia’s future may hold.

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The virus that causes COVID-19 has now become endemic after it first emerged two and a half years ago. In the pandemic’s early days, many countries’ public health officials curtailed economic and social activity to various degrees, prescribed social distancing, enforced lockdowns, required masking, and pushed for other nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce illness and death. Those NPIs imposed an enormous economic and social cost by greatly reducing individual liberty in exchange for promised health benefits. Elsewhere, most famously in Sweden, public health officials were fiercely criticized for implementing less‐​harsh “light touch” NPI measures. Sweden’s approach presents a fascinating quasi‐​natural experiment to evaluate the merits and demerits of the more liberal approach to managing the COVID-19 pandemic and to evaluate whether the loss in personal and economic freedom was partly compensated by a decrease in illness and death. Sweden’s outcomes on viral spread, excess mortality, and the socioeconomic consequences of COVID-19 compare well with other countries and suggest that strict NPI policies imposed more harm than good.

Joining us to discuss how well Sweden’s approach worked are Jeanne Lenzer, an independent investigative journalist and regular contributor to The BMJ who has studied this issue; Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH, an epidemiologist and public health policy analyst who is an associate professor at University of California San Francisco School of Medicine; Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration that urged a pandemic policy of “focused protection”; and Johan Norberg, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, who resides in Stockholm, Sweden, and has studied as well as experienced his country’s pandemic policy. The discussion will be moderated by Cato Institute senior fellow Jeffrey A. Singer.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.