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.’

Registered nurse Rachel Chamberlin steps out of an isolation room where Fred Rutherford recovers from COVID-19 at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, in Lebanon, N.H., on Jan. 3, 2022. Steven Senne/AP Photo

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

Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, made the remark during a recent appearance on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

“I was on the board of my kids’ school during COVID. I wanted a harsher lockdown policy, and in retrospect, I was wrong,” Mr. Galloway said. “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 they were making decisions based on “imperfect information.”

“But here’s the bottom line. Myself, our great people at the CDC, I’d like to think the governor—we were all operating with imperfect information, and we were doing our best,” he continued. “So, let’s learn from it. Let’s hold each other accountable, but let’s bring a little bit of grace and forgiveness in the [expletive]-show that was COVID.”

The topic was part of a discussion with Mr. Maher, which included former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mr. Galloway is the author of “Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity,” which was published in late 2020.

“First, the pandemic’s most enduring impact will be as an accelerant,” he wrote in a book summary. “While it will initiate some changes and alter the direction of some trends, the pandemic’s primary effect has been to accelerate dynamics already present in society.

“Second, in any crisis, there is opportunity; the greater and more disruptive the crisis, the greater the opportunities. Pandemics, wars, depressions—these shocks are painful, but the times that follow are often among the most productive in human history. The generations that endure and observe the pain are best prepared for the fight.”

In a 2022 New York Times article, Mr. Galloway declared the United states “absolutely overdid it” in spending $7 trillion on stimulating the economy during the pandemic.

Cuomo Comments

Mr. Cuomo told Mr. Maher the decisions in the early part of 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 pointed to a ProPublica article that accused Mr. Cuomo of underreporting COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes because the state did not record 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 said.

The former governor said this involved data from 1,000 hospitals, and that it was months into the pandemic when people began asking how many of the people who died in hospitals were originally in the nursing homes, and that this required extra calculations.

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

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

More ‘Hindsight’

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he had regrets regarding COVID-19 restrictions he imposed in his state during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“I think we would’ve done everything differently,” said Mr. Newsom, who insisted his actions were based on the knowledge he had at the time about the virus.

The Democrat governor was the first in the nation to impose stay-at-home orders and the last to reopen schools.

Dr. Houman David Hemmati wrote in a social media post on X that many experts had been shamed or silenced for pushing against misguided restrictions that forced healthy children to wear masks, closed schools, and shut down 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,” Dr. Hemmati wrote.