On COVID, We Fought the Last War. And Lost is the latest installment in the Institute’s series on the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay, by Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, documents how much of the government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were inspired by practices used to combat the HIV pandemic decades earlier. But because the two viruses are so different, these HIV-inspired policies were entirely unsuited to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.