NYU Professor Who Called for Harsh COVID Lockdowns Says ‘I Was Wrong’

Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, made the remark on HBO’s ‘Real Time With Bill Maher.’

A business school professor at New York University who advocated for strict lockdown policies during the COVID-19 pandemic now admits he was wrong.

The remark was made by Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, during a recent appearance on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
“During COVID, I was on the board of my children’s school.” “I wanted a stricter lockdown policy, and in retrospect, I was mistaken,” Mr. Galloway admitted. “The damage to kids from keeping them out of school longer was greater than the risk.”

Mr. Galloway went on to say that those who wanted restrictive lockdowns should be given “a bit of grace” because their decisions were based on “imperfect information.”

“However, here’s the bottom line. “Myself, our wonderful people at the CDC, I’d like to think the governor—we were all working with imperfect information and doing our best,” he went on. “Let us learn from it.” Let us hold each other accountable while also bringing some grace and forgiveness to the [expletive]-show that was COVID.”

The subject came up during a conversation with Mr. Maher, who also discussed former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mr. Galloway wrote “Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity,” which will be released in late 2020.

“First, the pandemic’s most enduring impact will be as an accelerant,” he wrote in a book synopsis. “While it will cause some changes and alter the direction of some trends, the pandemic’s primary effect has been to accelerate dynamics already present in society.” “Second, there is opportunity in any crisis; the greater and more disruptive the crisis, the greater the opportunities.” Pandemics, wars, and depressions are all painful, but the periods that follow are frequently among the most productive in human history. The generations who have endured and witnessed the pain are best prepared to fight.”

Mr. Galloway declared in a 2022 New York Times article that the United States “absolutely overdid it” by spending $7 trillion to stimulate the economy during the pandemic.

Cuomo’s Remarks

Mr. Cuomo told Mr. Maher that early decisions in the pandemic were based on “disinformation,” and that the virus had already been spreading in Europe and the United States for months by the time U.S. health officials identified it.
Mr. Maher cited a ProPublica report in which Mr. Cuomo was accused of underreporting COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes because the state did not keep track of the number of nursing home patients who died in a hospital.

“Every day, I did a briefing, and every day we collected information from hospitals and from nursing homes, and we printed two numbers on the screen every day: this is the number of people who died in a hospital, this is the number of people who died in a nursing home,” he told reporters.

According to the former governor, this involved data from 1,000 hospitals, and it wasn’t until months into the pandemic that people began asking how many of the people who died in hospitals were originally in nursing homes, which required additional calculations.

“So you wouldn’t do anything differently?” Mr. Maher inquired.

“I would run that number now, which nobody asked me for until months later,” Mr. Cuomo said.

Added to the ‘Hindsight’

California Gov. Gavin Newsom expressed regret over COVID-19 restrictions imposed in his state during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“I think we would’ve done everything differently,” Mr. Newsom said, insisting that his actions were based on the virus knowledge he had at the time.

The state’s Democrat governor was the first in the country to issue stay-at-home orders and the last to reopen schools.

In a social media post on X, Dr. Houman David Hemmati stated that many experts had been shamed or silenced for opposing misguided restrictions that forced healthy children to wear masks, closed schools, and closed businesses, and that this information was available at the time.
“Totally fake apology and under NO circumstances should he be forgiven for anything he did,” she wrote.