Monthly Archives: April 2026

In Covid’s Wake (5 of 6): China’s zero-Covid

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The book we have been reviewing has noteworthy things to say about the origins of Covid19 in China, including the speculation that it originated in a laboratory.  It also has interesting things to say about the interest of certain US officials in closing down any debate about it.  It states that ‘we now have more evidence of Covid transmission months before the first cases associated with the Wuhan wet market’. (p230-1) For our current purposes, the most relevant Chinese experience is the example it set for the policy of zero-covid.

It would be naïve to believe that the outcome of any review of this approach now would force reconsideration by its supporters; the general experience of much of the left is that it quickly moves on, muttering about the revolutionary party being the memory of the working class while forgetting what it did the year before, especially when experience calls into question their previous approach.

The slow car-crash that is Brexit does not seem to have affected British and Irish left support for it, except for parroting the same excuses that the right wing supporters of it have – ‘it wasn’t properly tried’.  In both cases the world in which they claim it could have been a success does not, and did not, exist.

The recent book ‘Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future’ has a chapter setting out the authors experience of living in China during the pandemic.  He explains that at first the zero-Covid policy seemed to work, so that by spring 2020 the ‘strategy had broadly halted the transmission of the virus. (p133)  If the app on your mobile showed green you were free to enter most public spaces but if it was yellow it indicated that you ‘had had some degree of proximity to a positive case’, while if it was red, you were probably already ‘hauled off to quarantine.’  Unfortunately, simply walking past a restaurant with a previously known case could turn it yellow even if you didn’t go in.

Later, in 2021, the strict policy caused more significant issues.  A story went viral of an eight-month pregnant woman refused entry to a hospital until she had negative test who bled heavily and miscarried outside.  In 2022 a few cleaning staff were infected in Shanghai, and following mass testing and tracing, lockdown meant that everyone in the apartment buildings, no matter how high-rise, were not allowed to leave, while those testing positive were quarantined in a centralised facility.

The authorities in Shanghai claimed on the 24 March 2022 that there were no plans for a lockdown, except two days later they said that Shanghai was too important for the global economy and announced a lockdown would start the next day.  Drones flew over the city with megaphones attached barking orders to those on the street without a mask or involved in an illegal gathering. “Repress your soul’s yearning for freedom” began blasting on loop from the drones with their lights blinking, with an additional message “do not open your windows to sing, which can spread the virus.”

‘Over April 2022, stress in Shanghai spiked to unimaginable levels’ (p139). Failure to warn about the lockdown meant the failure of people to stockpile food, which became ‘the primary worry for most people . . . when they could not leave their homes.’ (p139). The authorities promised food deliveries (of random items) but these ‘ran out of steam,’ while ‘much of the food that made it into the cities rotted before it could be delivered to residents.’ (p139 & 140).

One reason the policy failed was that each person had to report for a test, sometimes twice a day. Everyone in a compound had therefore to report to the medical team, and either caught it from a neighbour while waiting for the test or caught it from the person doing the testing.

On top of the government doing ‘everything it could to frighten people’ for two years, those found positive, including their whole household, were taken from their home and moved to huge quarantine facilities to be disinfected.  In Shanghai the largest such facility contained 50,000 beds, with one CNN producer placed there describing lights that never turned off, loudspeakers demanding residents attend tests at 6am the next day, and ‘everywhere the stench of toilets or unwashed laundry.’ (p144)

Children and babies were separated from their parents and, just like other countries, prioritisation of Covid meant cases of more serious disease were downgraded or ignored.  This involved making the provision of fever medication difficult, including ibuprofen, that might have allowed people to disguise their Covid infection: it ‘denied its people fever medications during a fever-producing pandemic.’ (p165)

The author of the book notes that people had a variety of experiences, ‘from the nightmarish to the merely difficult’, leading to protests –‘banging pots and pans during the night became a much-shared form of protest, with a few videos portraying whole buildings of people engaged in cathartic screaming . . .’  (p 145 & 146). Protest videos posted online were deleted quickly by state censors, while the author recounts the original censorship by the state at the beginning of the pandemic to ensure that no negative news emerged while an important political meeting was taking place.

The focus on zero-Covid was bound to lead to excesses, leading to bizarre episodes of fresh-caught fish and pandas being tested, and workers streaming out of their office when a rumour would circulate that everyone in it might be put into lockdown.  The author judges that, in comparison to the US, ‘in retrospect, China’s response to Covid looks shambolic as well.’ (p158). The problem was zero-Covid meant excesses that were not bizarre or amusing. In Sichuan, people fleeing buildings during an earthquake were prevented from leaving their trembling structures, and ten people died in a fire in Urumqi when pandemic-control barricades prevented the fire service from putting water directly onto the fire.  

Despite the fear of the pandemic generated by the state, protests against the controls introduced by lockdown began to develop as anger against them grew.  These included workers at Foxconn factories facing off against riot police, and a late night protest by young people chanting ‘Down with the Communist Party! Xi Jingping step down!’ While ‘the number of protesters was never very large . . .  they were special because they involved upper-class Chinese families: wealthy people who didn’t want to suffer lockdown and well-off youths who attended good schools.  The Communist Party had always counted on these people for their support.  The denouement of China’s Covid experience features broad exhaustion’ By December 2022 many controls were no longer enforced while ‘the government’s response grew erratic.  Nearly three years after it began, zero-Covid was over’ but ‘unfortunately, the state has suppressed any official memory of Shanghai’s lockdown . . .’ (p163-165 & 168)

A bit like the Western left supporters of the same policy.

Back to part 4

Forward to part 6

In Covid’s Wake (4 of 6): The Cost

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Lockdown came with a cost, an enormous cost.  In the United States, Congress approved $5 trillion of new spending – more than was spent in the responses to the economic crash in 2009 and the New Deal in the 1930s.  Only 10 per cent was spent on direct health costs while a similar amount went on fraud.  In the UK, friends of the Tory government were given fast-track contracts worth billions of pounds with many also involving fraud.  All this expenditure increased state debt and fed into the subsequent demand for austerity.

Unemployment grew, especially among low wage workers, and particularly among women, with the increases higher in Democrat-run states than Republican ones due to their more stringent lockdowns.  Economic and social inequality grew with the authors noting that the effect in poorer countries was greater when, with younger populations, lower welfare services and a bigger informal economy, the effects of lockdown would be more severe.

The authors quote that “more than 40 million additional people in Africa [were] in extreme poverty by late 2021 when compared with 2019.  Some 4.5 million children [were] removed permanently from education in Uganda alone . . . [with] huge increases in child marriage.”  Another author is quoted stating that double the number of people suffered from severe hunger in 2023 than in 2019, the primary cause being the response to the Covid pandemic. (In Covid’s Wake, p185-6)

That all this would have made even less sense, and caused greater suffering, had a ‘zero-covid’ policy been adopted will not faze its proponents.  At the time I noted that it was nonsense to demand greater welfare payments to people while preventing them from working, and therefore not producing the goods and services that the extra welfare payments were supposed to buy.  Not surprisingly inflation increased.  The different politics of reformism and Marxism could not be clearer. Reformists habitually think that the capitalist state can and should provide subsistence to the working class in a crisis, while Marxists seek always to advance the self-organisation of the working class and the objective of seizing control and operating the productive forces of society.

Other effects are still with us.  ‘The response to the Covid pandemic entailed the most extensive and lengthy disruption to education in history.’  (In Covid’s Wake, p187). In the US, and elsewhere, school closures continued long after it was clear, if it was not already clear from the start, that schools did not drive transmission.  It has led to a continuing significant increase in absenteeism from school with long lasting damage to the children involved and to wider society.

Also, like everywhere else, health service provision was reduced while populations faced repeated demands by governments to protect them. I can’t have been alone in wondering at the time – is it not supposed to be the other way round?  Populations also responded as desired by delaying treatment out of fear.  Lockdown was to apply to everyone, not just those at higher risk, so the virus was presented as a threat to everyone.  In the US the effects of mandated and ‘voluntary’ avoidance from using health systems meant that ‘both overall health care spending and health sector employment in the United States actually fell during the pandemic, despite the pressures on the system caused by Covid.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p191)

A lot of the effects on health caused by the pandemic and lockdown have yet to be analysed, and reports on its effects are still being produced.  This one is on excess cancer deaths in the US: ‘between March 2020 and the end of 2022, the United States is estimated to have experienced nearly 1.7 million excess deaths.  It is not fully clear how much of these increases in mortality have their roots in reduced health care provision and use, economic dislocation, and other harms associated with pandemic policy.’  The book records one Canadian study attributing 17 percent of the increase in excess deaths in the US to non-Covid causes.

‘Increases in excess mortality during the pandemic were due primarily to rises in deaths from heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, overdose, and homicide.  Minority populations were especially adversely affected.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p192). Not only physical health but also mental health suffered from lockdown. Karl Marx noted of human nature in the 19th century that the ‘human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.’   Lockdown drastically broke many of these relations – what else was social distancing, stay-at-home orders and working from home – if you otherwise didn’t lose your job?  How could it be a surprise that this also damaged and broke millions of individuals?

‘After years of recommending social distancing, who can fail to appreciate the painful irony of the 2023 surgeon general declaring a “public health crisis of loneliness and isolation”?’  The authors note that ‘public officials were simply never very clear about precisely what restrictions were supposed to achieve.’  (In Covid’s Wake, p198 & 200)

So not only did they not factor into account the costs of their policies, they were never quite clear about what the mechanisms employed were supposed to achieve.  The rhetoric of flattening the curve, protecting the health system, reducing the R number, testing and tracing targets, reducing, suppressing or eliminating Covid, were all quoted as if they all formed a coherent approach.

‘Zero-Covid’ made for a simple objective but the mechanisms to achieve it were never clear. A disease that had spread round the world before its potential was even determined, and which developed quickly to infect hundreds of millions, many without realising that they had it, was not going to be eliminated even by the most drastic of lockdowns.  Its proponents, like those in authority who they criticised, had no intention of ascertaining what the cost would be and whether it would be worth it.

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 Forward to part 5

In Covid’s Wake (3 of 6) The US as a laboratory

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The authors of In Covid’s Wake note that the United States formed a laboratory in which an experiment on the different approached to the Covid-19 pandemic was played out.  In Democrat controlled states the speed at which restrictions were imposed, the length of stay-at-home orders, length of school closures, and the stringency of Covid restrictions were all faster or greater.  The willingness of residents to be vaccinated was also greater.

The resulting pattern was noticed in late 2023:

  • Until vaccines became available, there was little difference in COVID death rates between blue states and red states.
  • After vaccines became available, there were clear differences, with red states having higher death rates.

The book therefore states that ‘variation in vaccination rates can account for fully 47 percent of state-by-state mortality.’  (In Covid’s Wake, p 140, 142) It also records that the lack of difference evident by the summer of 2020 ‘went broadly unreported, despite its inconsistency with the epidemiological models that had seen so much media coverage earlier in the year.’ One of these models reported “substantial reductions in peak attack rates “due to school closures”. (In Covid’s Wake, p 146, 148)

In the UK, a review of the literature to March 2023 reported that ‘there are still many uncertainties and unknowns’ while the Scottish official inquiry concluded that “there was insufficient evidence in 2020 –or alternatively no evidence.”  So even after the pandemic the authorities were claiming not to have learned much, if anything, about their basic approach. (In Covid’s Wake, p 154)

Some countries with light restrictions fared well while others didn’t; ‘Japan fared better than Australia and only slightly worse than New Zealand in terms of Covid mortality, despite never imposing a lockdown or widespread business closures nor making much use of Covid testing and contact tracing . . .  The underlying determinants of population health–poverty, education, comorbidity profile–shaped Covid pandemic outcomes far more reliably than non-pharmaceutical interventions.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 157)

 In the US the two Democrat-leaning authors lament that ‘rather than learning from the policy experimentation that was taking place, decision-making about pandemic policy was rigidly ideological and moralized’.  Democrats didn’t learn about the absence of support for lockdowns and Republicans, or at least some of them, didn’t learn about the efficacy of vaccination.  For the two authors this failure of ‘partisan politics is the main lesson of the pandemic.

As for the left that advocated even more severe restrictions, there is no evidence that they ever, at any point, looked in the rear view mirror; Covid may as well never have happened.  The morally right are right–by definition.  The idea of having any sort of cost-benefit analysis was dismissed as involving a straight comparison between saving lives and saving money; ‘health versus wealth’ as the book puts it.  The world’s capitalist governments were charged with being more interested in the economy than public health and people’s lives.  Further shutting down the economy was being opposed, it was claimed, in order to protect capitalist profits, in the process risking workers’ lives. 

At the time this blog noted that capitalist economies produce commodities with a use value as well as an exchange value, without which they cannot assure their sale and realisation of profit. It was never clear just exactly what production was not ‘essential’ and could be shut down, and how massive reductions in production could be accomplished in order to achieve ‘zero-Covid’ while also creating correspondingly massive income flows for those now unproductively unemployed.

Even the view that the governments’ response was focused on maintain capitalist profits hardly squares with the single focus on public health by those state officials tasked with leading the response who consciously excluded economic and social experts. The mathematical models that were so influential only looked at the effects of policy on Covid transmission, hospitalisation and deaths.  None looked at the health, social and economic consequences of lockdown to see were its costs exceeding its benefits. A point not strongly made in the book is that with models predicting catastrophe this might seem understandable, but as we have noted, when the models failed to correspond with reality the experts doubled down on lockdown.

The media played its role by stating that the pandemic closed schools and travel etc., not that it was the lockdown, and that this was a choice.  Rather like wages causing unemployment or inflation, or the war in Ukraine causing high energy prices, the conditions and interventions that actually caused them were rendered invisible.

What also became invisible was that it was overwhelmingly white collar workers who were working from home.  Blue collar workers kept working and were a stranding rebuke to those who claimed that lockdown was needed to prevent ‘mass death.’  A left more in touch with this section of the working class might have appreciated this.  The authors of the book note that, while stoking fear of the pandemic, the lowest paid and vulnerable workers were expected to show up.  So did all those calling for ‘zero-covid’, unless they didn’t actually mean zero.

The policy of lockdown was popular among trade unions and among the majority of their members.  The book records the Chicago Teachers’ Union tweeting that ‘the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny’, while the head of United Teachers of Los Angeles described school reopening as a recipe for propagating structural racism.’  (In Covid’s Wake, p132)

In fact, schools were not a vector for transmission while those workers tasked with continuing to work as normal probably included a large proportion of women and black workers.  Not for the first time politics based on identity got it wrong, ironically weakening the cause of women and black workers in the process.

Back to part 2

Forward to part 4

Should we be inspired by the fuel protests?

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The fuel protests in Ireland have involved the blocking of main roads, including O’Connell street in Dublin city centre, the M50 motorway around the city, sea ports and an oil refinery, leading to disruption of supplies and closure of hundreds of petrol stations.  Originally taken by surprise, and then taking a softly-softly approach, the state has moved the Garda to clear some protests away while negotiating concessions with representative bodies of some of the protestors, including seeking permission from the EU for cuts to excise duties.

The protests are mainly formed by hauliers, agricultural suppliers and farmers; in general, small businessmen and the self-employed.  In class terms, the petty bourgeoisie.  The mass of the population, including workers, are also badly hit by the rise in prices and there is general sympathy with the demand for measures by the government to reduce the impact of rising prices; especially given the large budget surpluses the state has garnered in the last number of years through the Irish state being a tax haven for a small number of US multinationals.

A number of far right figures have attached themselves to the protests and the People before Profit TD Paul Murphy was more or less chased away when he went to meet one protest in Dublin. A flavour of some of the self-appointed protest spokesmen who have attempted to sideline the trade associations is James Geoghegan who has revenue judgements of more than €500k against him, plus animal cruelty convictions.  Another prominent figure has previously stated he couldn’t care less if Greta Thunberg got raped or beaten, while claiming that instead of ‘free Palestine’ flags, some people will be waving ‘free Dublin’ ones.

The ignorant and abusive taunts by some protesters received by Paul Murphy has not stopped him stating that the protests should be supported.  He has called on ‘ordinary people’ to take mass action in effective protests; yet the existing protests are by ‘ordinary people’ in so far as this means anything at all, and they have had some effect.  He states that the working class should take inspiration from them and calls on it to take mass action while trade unions should take the lead.   

While there is evidence of limited prior organisation, the protests are essentially spontaneous.  The principal participation is by forces that the two main bourgeois parties rely on as a base, and they are not forces that the working class should take inspiration from.  The prominence of reactionary and far right figures is not accidental while there is no form of democratic control of any sort of progressive movement or organisation.

The social base of the protest is not therefore working class and claims to be representing the ordinary people of Ireland simply exposes the vacuous nature of basing politics on ‘the people’ that we have criticised before, and which Murphy’s party has been guilty of.  He is right that the working class should have a mass campaign and the trade unions should take the lead, but they haven’t and they won’t.  The left has not built a larger movement or an opposition inside the trade union movement and cannot rely on a working class spontaneous movement to rival that which has just erupted.

This weakness of the left has been reviewed before and the current situation is illustrative of the results.  The perspective of a left government championed by People before Profit has now obviously nothing to do with a left movement that would act in situations like this. The putative components of it, such as the Labour Party, Social Democrats and Greens have all opposed the protests while People before Profit supports them.  Sinn Fein, as usual, triangulates. Any such future government would therefore simply be an administration put together by horse-trading jobs and policies and would have no social movement that could conceivably drive it forward and represent it, which is presumably what PbP envisages?

The weakness of this perspective, demonstrated by the protests, is shown in two other ways, one significant and one symbolic.

Murphy says the protests should be supported because they have the same aims as People before Profit, which had previously sought to introduce price caps through legislation in the Dáil.  First, it’s not clear that the protests do have the same objective and are not directed at caps on the fuels used by the protesters.  Secondly, the idea of price caps is a utopian one in any case.

They cannot provide the ‘security’ claimed for them because they can’t promise to cover massive price increases such as have been incurred, which is precisely their purpose; and claims to stop ‘profiteering’ don’t work in a system in which profiteering is its whole purpose.  This is, after all, why socialists think an alternative socialist society is required.  If profiteering could be eradicated, we wouldn’t need socialism.

The second, symbolic reason, were the reactions of the protesters to Paul Murphy’s presence at the protest.  They portrayed him as simply another politician, which in so far as he thinks legislating in the Dáil will do away with profiteering, is actually close to the truth!  The far right get away with this because of the grain of truth involved–that the left has built only an electoralist base in a few working class areas based on their own variety of clientelist practices.  The jibes about Murphy’s identification with gender identity simply illustrate how easily the right can paint the left as divorced from working class concerns, aside even from the stupidity of the view itself that we have repeatedly demolished.

There is nothing wrong in seeking measures to get amelioration of sudden price increases but that is all they can be and it is misleading to pretend otherwise.  Oil and gas prices are set on the capitalist world market and cannot be avoided by any country and certainly not by one like Ireland.  It’s why socialists are internationalists, because socialism can only be international for it to make sense and to work.  Within capitalism, the working class can defend itself by actually doing it themselves; by fighting for higher wages and by building a movement that seeks to go beyond these struggles towards the only definitive solution.

It is also true that socialists should seek to win over middle layers of the population to the cause of the working class, but this is only possible if the working class itself has been won and has built a movement that can convince others.  Before this, it simply means surrendering to all sorts of misleading and reactionary petty bourgeois ideas.

Numerous people have commented that because the crisis has been caused by Trump and the US imperialist attack on Iran, it would have made more sense to protest and blockade the US embassy.  Far from the existing protests inspiring such an action, much of the social base of the protests is as likely to support an Irish O’Trump as protest against US imperialism.  Once again, we have a lesson that not all those who oppose our enemies, in this case the Irish government, are our friends.

In Covid’s Wake (2 of 6): ‘mass death . . . is a benefit to be sought’

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The imposition of lockdown that was justified as ‘following the science’ did not quite achieve the consensus that the claim implied and there were a number of voices challenging it at an early stage.

One epidemiologist in the Washington Post stated that ‘of the first 1,023 people to die in Wuhan, China . . .  only one was younger than twenty.’  He wrote that “The high death rate from the coronavirus is driven almost exclusively by the oldest cases . . . the virus causes severe disease almost exclusively in older adults.”  In March 2020 an op-ed in the New York Times was entitled ‘Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse than the Disease?’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 72). This blog also had enough information to point this out in March 2020. 

Unfortunately, ‘war’ had been declared on Covid-19 and the cliché that the first casualty of war is the truth proved only too true.  The consensus in the US was supported by Harvard’s Safra Center on Ethics, the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, and the ‘progressive’ Center for American Progress and focused on testing, tracing and quarantining the infected.  The policy that had previously been predicted to be unsuccessful was now the establishment view that brooked no dissent.  Yet it made little sense when the virus was already widespread, was asymptomatic while infectious and completely asymptomatic in many who had contracted it.

Sweden presented an alternative in which large gatherings were banned; people over seventy were advised to limit contacts with others; it was advised not visit to nursing homes, and recommended but not mandated that those who could work from home should do so.   Society-wide lockdown was not advised: “The storm was already here,” judged Sweden’s health authorities and what remained to be done “was to protect the most vulnerable.” No large-scale test-and-trace regimes were attempted.  Masks were never mandated. No stay-at-home orders or restrictions on movement were imposed’ and restaurants, gyms and schools for younger children and adolescents remained open. (In Covid’s Wake, p 85).

The head of Sweden’s Public Health Agency, Anders Tegnell, thought that “the world has gone mad” while ‘many thought Sweden had gone mad’ or ‘insane’.  The New York Times described Sweden as a “pariah” and some European media described it as like “a banana republic” (In Covid’s Wake, p 86-7).

The Great Barrington Declaration published online in October 2020 was another alternative view to Lockdown that pointed out the costs and proposed a policy of ‘Focused Protection’: “Our goal should therefore be to minimise mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.”  Those who had such immunity ‘could play an especially important role in helping the sick and frail.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 96 & 97)

Herd immunity, however, became a term of abuse, as “simply unethical” and a call to “let it rip”.   It was ‘dangerous’ and came from ‘fringe’ and ‘maverick scientists.’ (p 74, 97 &106). One doctor, who had earlier in March gathered 800 signatures warning of the costs of lockdown had seemingly changed his mind; “I have no more fucks left to give.  Except those peddling pseudoscience, bankrolled by right-wing, libertarian assholes can kiss my queer ass …. This fucking Great Barrington Declaration is like a bad rash that just won’t go away.” (In Covid’s Wake, p 100)

The vitriol involved in such denunciations reflected not so much a long established scientific consensus as a moral consensus that had especially gripped the ‘left’, becoming the left position because the left had adopted it, assisted by most of the support for the Great Barrington Declaration coming from the right, confirming that this was indeed the right-wing position.  The effect was to close debate and remove critical thinking–in moralistic arguments there is simply no arguments in favour of the ‘bad’.

Who made the arguments defined what was right and not the arguments themselves so that ad hominem became de rigeur.  From liberal Democrats to the ultra-left, moral condemnation could not be strident enough: The Great Barrington Declaration became ‘A manifesto of death’; ‘mass death, is a benefit to be sought’; ‘the White House’s embrace of the document is a statement of intent for mass homicide’; ‘the ruling class’s drive to allow the mass infection of the population can be imposed only by violence’.  Those who defended it on the left were from ‘the pseudo-left’ while ‘the herd immunity policy has found support not only within the capitalist oligarchy, but among sections of the upper-middle class.’

The pandemic was an unprecedented suppression of the most basic civil rights employing the weapons of fear and state surveillance, yet the largest part of the left not only endorsed it, its policy was to intensify it.  This was the policy of ‘zero-covid’ that could only ‘be imposed by violence’ as lockdowns began to be relaxed in 2020, only to then be reimposed.

The left website above stated that ‘Workers around the world must welcome the categorical and courageous stand taken by public health experts in opposition to the ruling class’s policy of herd immunity’, except the experts were divided and previous advice stood squarely against lockdowns.  Not unsurprisingly, the moralistic and catastrophist argument proved more attractive to a left for whom socialism will only come through capitalist crisis and repression, through force of circumstances, and not through the building of a class conscious movement committed to socialism that is the result of years of political education, clarification and struggle.

The authors of the book note that ‘if recovery from infection would not afford immunity, it is not clear by what mechanism vaccines would confer immunity either.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 102).  In June 2020 the World Health Organisation website defined herd immunity as “indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 104).  In November the reference to acquired immunity was removed.  The voice of ‘science’ was to be put in the service of government policy.

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