Perhaps the most shocking but not really surprising aspect of the Covid lockdown was the ‘scientific’ justification of it and its associated measures that upended previous accepted views.  It was also generally successful in imposing a silence on dissenting views, treating them as dangerous blasphemy.

For example: ‘most pre-Covid plans for addressing a respiratory pandemic were skeptical of masking . . . the U.S. surgeon general tweeted “STOP BUYING MASKS!” because they gave no protection to healthy individuals. (In Covid’s Wake p234). Yet those least at risk – those at preschool – were one of the last to require universal masking up to September 2022. (p236).  The scientific uncertainty around masking was considered an obstacle to getting the population to do as it was told.

This was just one aspect of what the authors of the book consider ‘groupthink; and ‘a sense of moral and intellectual superiority’, justified by those making the decisions because of who they were. (p254) Just as many on the left justify their demands as left wing because they are the ones making them.

This included ‘the long suppression of reasonable suspicions about a possible lab leak origin of the virus.’  This involved calling the idea a “conspiracy theory” or “racist conspiracy theory”, and smearing dissenters as “fringe epidemiologists”, indulging a form of “decidedly unscientific discourse”.  All, the authors say, ‘moralistic performances aimed at marginalising dissenters and closing down discussion.’ And all redolent of arguments employed on the left for a very long time. (p297 & 294).

This moralistic view, with its attendant features, meant that ‘Covid policies were generally unresponsive to actual pandemic conditions’, which ‘tended to a wholesale abandonment of rationality.’  ‘Even as late as summer 2021, after more than thirty million Americans had tested positive for Covid and vaccines had been made widely available, the director-general of the World Health Organization was still demanding that governments attempt to track and trace every case . . . The zero-Covid frame locked policymakers into costly, futile policies with no exit strategy.’ (p291 & 293)

However, behind every moralistic policy lies material interest.  In the case of denying the lab leak from gain-of-function research at Wuhan Institute of Virology was the funding of the research by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, denied to a Senate committee hearing by the top administration health official Dr Anthony Fauci.

A number of scientists wanted an open discussion on the origin of the virus but the book records that a WHO investigation into it in 2021 was ‘compromised’ because it included someone whose organisation funded the research in the Wuhan Institute.  Top public health officials engaged in ‘oversimplifications, half-truths, and noble lies’ in order to get the population to follow its diktats. (p 263)

This was the case with the policy of lockdown itself, as we have already seen. It involved ‘White House officials and public health experts to work in secret with social media companies to amplify messages favouring government policy while censoring or muting dissenting voices and points of view.’  When it came to the weakness of the evidence for Covid boosters one paediatrician and professor of vaccinology was told that although ideally it was only high-risk groups who should be encouraged to receive them, ‘nuance garbles the message’ (p271 & 272).

‘Following the science’ became following the government and what was true was what the Government decided it was.  In the UK current and former BBC journalists stated that there was a “climate of fear” with experienced reporters “openly mocked” if they questioned the wisdom of lockdowns.  The threat posed to everyone had to be driven home even while ‘the actual risk to more than half the population was extremely low.’  In the UK ‘the BBC News backed up this misperception by regularly reporting rare tragedies involving low-risk individuals as if they were the norm.’ (p112 -113)

The authors note a paper, published after the pandemic was effectively over in August 2023, by a number of scholars associated with the US Department of Health Promotion and Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  It was published in the prestigious journal of the American Medical Association JAMA Network Open, which targeted misinformation on Covid by medical professionals on their social media platforms with a view to the government agencies and professional associations taking “actions to regulate and discipline” them. (p 276)

Among the “misinformation” was the allegation of a cover up of the possibility of a laboratory leak; the claim that the government withheld key information regarding Covid-19; that the effectiveness of masks was doubtful; that natural infection and recovery contribute effectively to herd immunity, and that “Government actors” were in contact with Twitter and other social media companies telling them what to censor. The censored included two authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which emphasised the range of harms caused by lockdowns and proposed an alternative.

The authors of the book note that these ‘may actually be correct, or, at a minimum, within the scope of reasonable disagreement.’  They also note various sources that acknowledge the truth of this ‘misinformation.’  Perhaps the most astonishing thing about these scholars case is the lack of awareness that it was actually many of the claims made by the government and public health officials that were untrue. (p 277 & 282)

The book’s authors also say that ‘some evidence suggests that today’s scientists are more inclined than those of the past to censor research they perceive as socially harmful.’  Editors of academic journals ‘are granting themselves vast leeway to censor high-quality research that offends their own moral sensibilities.’ (p 283).  As one senior US academic put it – there is “a real peril in a public health approach steeped in moralism”. (p 122). This is, for example, a strong feature of the approach to research by those promoting ‘gender affirming’ medical and surgical intervention.

A recent article in the Financial Times reports a professor of epidemiology at Colombia University stating that the most important legacy of Covid was “a lack of trust in public health and the implications for people refusing vaccines.” 

Unless the left that demanded zero-Covid accounts for its error it must be assumed it has learned nothing. This includes regard for the truth. Once more a quote from a dead Russian is apposite – ‘We must speak the truth’.

Back to part 5