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

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

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.

Back to part 1

Forward to part 3

The Irish government report on how the state handled the Covid-19 pandemic is due to report at the end of the year, seven years after it reportedly arrived in Ireland.  The delay says a lot, as was the original announcement of the review by the government – that the review was to have a “no-blame” approach and would “not be a UK-style” inquiry.  It would not have statutory powers and would be an “evaluation” on the grounds that anything greater would drag on for years.  This was not an empty threat given the many previous tribunals of inquiry held by the state, but it rather loses conviction when it took so long to establish in the first place.

Scepticism over its role was heightened by it rejecting the stronger powers of the UK inquiry, but since this failed to question the basic approach to the pandemic adopted by the British government these in themselves would not have promised a full reckoning.   A spokesperson for a patient advocate group stated that ‘the Evaluation model protects policies and decision makers from any scrutiny at all’.  We shall see.

Two liberal (Democratic Party-type) US academics have published a new book that has much wider relevance than the US, including why it is important that we do not just forget about the whole thing. The book, not surprisingly, is controversial as the consensus it critiques has, also not surprisingly, not gone away.  The authors have responded to some criticism here.

It is said that the past is another country but since almost all other countries had the same experience this doesn’t displace it safely to the past, not least because its impact is still with us, never mind the possibility of any repetition.  

From the point of view of this blog the focus is on what the book implies for an evaluation of the approach taken by much of the left.  Those who have read the coverage during the pandemic will know that it was severely critical of the groupthink that overtook the left and was very much a minority, but not idiosyncratic, view.  The Left’s groupthink showed it incapable of challenging the politics of the state and mainstream bourgeois opinion across the world, putting forward a policy–‘Zero Covid’–that was actually much worse.

The suddenness and severity of actions taken by states meant that ‘just a few weeks after the lockdowns spread from China to Italy and elsewhere, 3.9 billion people–half the world’s population–were living under some form of quarantine.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 3) What was also sudden was the adoption of the policy of lockdown that justified this approach.  Called “following the science”, it was adopted by overturning the science as it had previously been accepted and became the club to silence and stigmatise those who challenged or even questioned it.  The Left consensus simply adopted a more extreme version of this predominant approach.

Several non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), including “contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry and exit screening, [and] border closure” were “not recommended in any circumstances” in a World Health Organisation’s (WHO) assessment in November 2019 of NPI use in a respiratory pandemic.  Quarantine of individuals–never mind whole populations–was “not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure in most Member States.” Contact tracing was considered some help in “isolated communities” in the “very early stages of a pandemic.” (In Covid’s Wake, p 29) Other assessments also questioned the use of NPIs, including after reviewing the experience of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

This meant that when China introduced lockdown “public health experts in the United States and elsewhere responded with shock and disbelief”. (In Covid’s Wake, p 50). Dire predictions from Imperial College in London and China’s draconian embrace of lockdown were the occasion for a complete change of approach by the WHO so that now there was no alternative to unprecedented restrictions on freedom of movement backed by massive social surveillance.

Previously inconceivable restrictions became moral imperatives supported by governments, health bureaucracies, health academics and the mainstream media; plus the majority of the left for whom the unprecedented was not unprecedented enough and the draconian not sufficiently draconian.  That China’s apparent success kept on being implemented until its population started revolting was all in the future.  The WHO’s mission to China found that it provided “vital lessons for the global response” and its measures were the only “proven to interrupt or minimize transmission”, while early predictions were made that it would succeed within three months. (In Covid’s Wake, p 56 &58)

The book records how dubious this claim must have been, including the knowledge that pandemics proceed in waves; millions of people had escaped lockdown in Wuhan, and there could be no confidence in the effect lockdown would have against the progress of a novel virus. The WHO made matters worse by stating that “globally, about 3.4% of reported Covid-19 cases have died”, although it could not know how many people had been infected so could not say what percentage of them had died.  Without acting to implement stringent NPIs the modellers of Imperial College predicted “approximately 500,000 deaths” in the UK “and 2.2M million in the US”, along with the collapse of heath systems. “Suppression” of the virus was the only “viable strategy”, with China again held up as the exemplar. (In Covid’s Wake, p 63 &64)

If this didn’t scare you, or rather ‘convince’ you, this might be because you might have known of Imperial College modellers’ previous poor record.  In 2006 it had predicted “catastrophe”, ‘forecasting 150 million deaths around the world’ as a result of the outbreak of avian flu.  Nevertheless, the book’s authors note that Imperial College Covid projections ‘captured the headlines and grabbed the attention of Covid policymakers, including President Donald Trump.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 51)

Given the forces ranged against any possible dissent it is not surprising that the ‘global suspension of basic liberties was undertaken with widespread public support.’   This was despite the book stating that ‘it is important not to ascribe to policymakers’ views more coherence than they possessed with respect to the goals of the policies they pursued.  To some extent, policymakers failed to reckon with the choices between flattening the curve, attempting to contain the disease and eliminate it entirely, or suppressing the total number of infections over the whole course pf the pandemic.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 67)

In my own city of Belfast, the local hospital was converted into a ‘Nightingale Hospital’ for Covid-19 patients and apparently more or less closed for most of everything else. While claiming that Covid-19 would close it if it was not protected, it partially closed itself.   Cancer patients could die but no Covid-19 patient could be refused.  Yet even this stupidity did not give pause for thought that this whole policy was the latest example of the ‘madness of crowds.’  Moral panics demand that doubters are immoral and with so much mainstream opinion on-side it is easy to excuse the left who supported it, except it was a failure; they demanded even more of the same, and they ignored, when they weren’t denouncing, alternative voices.

Forward to part 2