By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

A leading columnist for the Washington Post just wrote: "Hantavirus has an incubation period of up to 8 weeks and kills 30-40% of people who show symptoms….It's not pandemic yet and probably won't be, but if it were, the rational action would be—lockdown." She added: "If this thing goes pandemic, I personally will be hiding in my house."

Yes, and let the workers and peasants deliver food and drink to you while you safely type and tell the rest of us what to do. We know how this works.

Keep in mind that no one thought this way a quarter century ago. No one was pushing for society-wide lockdowns in the event of a pandemic.

That changed in 2005. I wrote an article about it at the time. It was my first foray into commentary on pandemic planning. I can recall my shock that George W. Bush gave a presser in which he pushed for lockdowns. I was even more shocked that more people were not alarmed.

I wrote the following article reprinted below. So far as I know, I was alone in raising protest against this insanity. Here we are 20-plus years later and "lockdown until vaccinate" is the presumed protocol.

"Bush's Fowl Play," November 9, 2005 (reprinted from Bourbon for Breakfast).

In a classic case of News of the Weird, President Bush gave a press conference the other day to announce yet another central plan to deal with yet another disaster—this time an impending disaster, or so he claimed. It seems that some birds are catching a flu called Avian Influenza or, more commonly, the bird flu. It causes ruffled feathers and a drop in egg production. It can kill a chicken in two days flat. Scary.

The Chicken Littles at the White House got wind of this and decided to hatch a plan for dealing with the eventuality that it will wipe out whole cities inhabited by people. That's people, not birds. Bush wants $7.1 billion from you and me, in emergency funding no less, to protect us from the wrath of this disease, which, he says, could sweep the country and kill 1.9 million people and hospitalize another 9.9 million. Part of the money will go for "pandemic preparedness," and part will go to individual states so they can cobble together their own plans for our health and well-being.

As part of this plan, there is a website, pandemicflu.gov, which is also a helpful link if you haven't so far believed a word you have read. Here you can click around and find the Mother of All Flu Reports: The National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza. Be assured that "the federal government will use all instruments of national power to address the pandemic threat."

That includes FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security, and a hundred other concrete palaces in DC.

In this report you will find what you must do: be "prepared to follow public health guidance that may include limitation of attendance at public gatherings and non-essential travel for several days or weeks." The government, meanwhile, will establish "contingency systems to maintain delivery of essential goods and services during times of significant and sustained worker absenteeism."

Yes, we are really supposed to believe that the government will "maintain delivery" of "essential goods and services." Your job is to sit in your house and wait. Let's just say that government has a credibility problem here.

Also, the Bush administration has a role for the military to do for the flu what it did for terrorism in Iraq: "Determine the spectrum of public health, medical and veterinary surge capacity activities that the U.S. military and other government entities may be able to support during a pandemic." Remarkable what the military can do, from spreading democracy to liberating the oppressed to curing the sick—that is, when it is not making people sick or killing them for their own good.

Just to show that this isn't merely a perfunctory line, Bush went out of his way in his press conference to defend the role of the military. "One option is the use of a military that's able...