Tag Archives: Zero Covid-19

In Covid’s Wake (6 of 6): Censorship and truth

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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’.

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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.

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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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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.

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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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In Covid’s Wake (1 of 6): the past is another country

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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

‘The Day the World went Mad’ – a review (3)

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No death from coronavirus is acceptable’ said Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, while the idiot Health Minister for the North of Ireland stated that the health service could not turn away any Covid-19 patient.  When asked whether this meant that a cancer patient may die, he replied “Yes, that’s as black-and-white as it is.”

Mark Woolhouse describes the first remark, if taken literally, as making it ‘impossible to tackle the novel coronavirus epidemic in a rational manner’.   He goes on: ‘unfortunately, it was taken literally, and not only in Scotland, and that’s a large part of the reason why we ended up in lockdown.’

His argument is therefore that the lockdown policy wasn’t rational because it was impossible to find a balance between costs and benefits.  The Health Minister in the north of Ireland took it a step further and in effect claimed to throw all clinical judgement out the window by making Covid-19 patients a priority no matter what.

What sort of priority? Why a political priority of course!  One so obvious he did a U-turn, but only after the absurdity was too embarrassing.

While statistics were regularly produced on test numbers, infections, the R number and other covid metrics, the health cost of lockdown was ignored by invoking a simplistic health versus ‘the economy’ argument.  The need to protect the NHS, especially exposure of its inadequacies – due in part to Tory policy – covered up both the failure of the Covid policy and the performance of the NHS.  Woolhouse notes that during the first lockdown bed occupancy was 65 per cent between April and June while television news homed in on the small number of hospitals close to 100 per cent capacity.

Woolhouse reviews the harms of lockdown under the headings of health care provision, mental health, education, the economy and societal well-being.  He could have added the political effect of the government and state taking on dictatorial powers, frightening large sections of the population, and determining very basic activities that would never have been thought before to require some right in order to exercise.  These costs are nowhere near being evaluated and quantified even now and were all but ignored during lockdown.

Even the argument of prioritising health over ‘the economy’ had to ignore the health effects of austerity, including that an ‘additional 335,000 deaths were observed across Scotland, England & Wales between 2012 and 2019’, according to research at the University of Glasgow.  Marxists are often accused of wrongly exaggerating the importance of ‘the economy’ to social life but in this case some went further than anyone in claiming its inconsequence.

As we noted in the previous post, the first models assumed a disease with very different incidence from Covid-19, yet a later risk estimation algorithm analysed from the data of over six million people found that ‘the 5% of people predicted to be of greatest risk accounted for a staggering three-quarters of all deaths attributed to Covid-19’. It should therefore have been possible to target protection of the population in the same way the disease discriminated, and Woolhouse makes some suggestions how this could have been done, saving lives and money.

But politicians disagreed, and Michael Gove declared that ‘we are all at risk’ – ‘the virus does not discriminate’, while Health secretary Matt Hancock claimed one localised outbreak was ‘disproportionately’ affecting children.   They followed the views of certain experts who claimed, according to the BBC’s Newsnight programme, that ‘ a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened . . . the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased . . .’

The media themselves played their part by ‘regularly reporting rare tragedies involving low-risk individuals as if they were the norm.’  Then, of course, we had some on the left for whom all this was far, far too relaxed, if not a calculated conspiracy to weed out the unproductive members of the working class.

Woolhouse recounts his experience of the second lockdown, in which the failures of the first were largely repeated – ‘the case for a second lockdown in England remains weak to this day.’  On the issue of lockdown at Christmas at the end of 2020 he argued that ‘we could focus not on reducing the number of contacts but on making those contacts safe’, but states that ‘this idea did not gain hold in what became an increasingly hysterical debate.’

He observes that ‘as the second wave raged across mainland Europe, the zero Covid campaign faded away when even its most ardent supporters were forced to admit that zero was not a realistic target.’  Woolhouse, however, is obviously not familiar with all its advocates, for whom the last politically correct stance by the Chinese state has now been surrendered.  One recent article has claimed that China embraces ‘forever Covid’ when what is really happening is that Covid is embracing China as it was always going to do, with the only appropriate response being to prepare for it in the correct way.

The arrival of vaccines is presented by Woolhouse as the cavalry, and the fact that China has failed on this while pouring its energy into repressive lockdowns should be yet another lesson.  Many, however, will let the whole Covid-19-episode retreat into the distance that is known as the past and become ‘history’.

Woolhouse reviews the experience of several other countries, including Taiwan, New Zealand, and Sweden, which was prominently disparaged but which he defends.  He also addresses the experience in Africa, where he has interesting things to say but is less definitive.  He looks at alternatives but is critical of The Great Barrington Declaration, despite its emphasis on protecting the vulnerable, although it is not clear to me that his criticism is not compatible with a version of its general approach.  Of the UK’s science advisory team, he accepts that the following could have played a part in its failures: ‘group-think, unconscious bias, tunnel vision, hubris, discouragement of dissent and lack of diversity . . .’

Though disliking the term ‘lockdown sceptic’, which he thinks makes him sound like a ‘climate change denier’ or ‘flat earther’, he still declares ‘why I’m a lockdown sceptic.’  He describes what happened as ‘following the crowd even while it is stampeding in the wrong direction’ because changing course would mean admitting being wrong in the first place, although he notes that the case to do so was so compelling the World Health Organisation did so.

He lists the thigs he did not expect to happen in the pandemic, including many ignoring elementary principles of epidemiology or scientists abandoning their objectivity, and finally that the world would go mad.

‘But it did.’

concluded

Back to part 2

‘The Year the World went Mad’: a review (2)

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In his book Mark Woolhouse provides the story of the Covid-19 pandemic in Britain and his role as an advisor to the British and Scottish Governments.

His restrained story does not cover all aspects of the pandemic and the Governments’ response, but it is nevertheless pretty damning.  He notes that that Scottish Government didn’t set up its own expert advisory committee and have its first meeting until three days after the first lockdown, ‘by which time the course of the epidemic in Scotland and the UK . . . was pretty much set’. He criticises the World Health Organisation (WHO) for only declaring a pandemic until well into March, so undermining early action in the UK, and by which time he deems it also ‘pretty much irrelevant.’ 

In fact, WHO comes in for other scathing criticism, including for its approval of China’s strict lockdown policy – “China’s bold approach . . . has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic’ it said at the end of February 2020, even as Covid-19 had already spread to forty-eight countries.  Nearly three years later China’s strict lockdown policy is falling apart and the call by the Director-General of WHO to follow its policy now looks foolish.

The UK had its own problems right from the start, including the assumption in its pre-existing planning that it was going to be fighting an influenza pandemic.  As Woolhouse puts it, the modelling group he sat on ‘had to contend with one challenge right away; it was set up to tackle the wrong disease.’

The difference this made can be seen in the models created to inform decisions on what action to take against the spread of the disease.  More appropriate for an influenza pandemic, the ‘new, bespoke coronavirus models’ included the impact of schools but not of care homes for the elderly.  Covid-19 was a disease massively disproportionately affecting the elderly, with the average age of death in the UK at 78 and 80 for deaths attributed to coronavirus, but having generally only mild effects on children.  The original influenza models also didn’t include lockdown.

Woolhouse says that ‘We’d done our homework, but we’d prepared for the wrong exam’.  He still claims that they ‘were useful tools’ but also that ‘I wouldn’t want decision-making to be over-reliant on models either’.  Unfortunately, he also says that ‘in March 2020 . . . you could easily get the impression that the UK government’s mantra of ‘following the science’ boiled down to following the models.  That’s how it looked and that’s how the media presented it.’

The models were used to produce an R number every week: the average number of cases generated by a single case. ‘The R monster turned out to be quite dangerous . . . The relentless focus on the R number detracted from the usual public health priorities of saving lives and preventing illness.’  This, for him, was part of a wider problem, accusing many scientists of ignoring elementary principles of epidemiology and abandoning objectivity and common sense.

One example, that was employed as an ignorant term of abuse also on the left, was the damning of ‘herd immunity’, and he criticises the editor of the leading medical journal ‘The Lancet’ for continuing ‘to rail against their straw man version of a herd immunity strategy.’

This criticism of the approach of many scientists is measured and unpolemical, and he presents it from an insider perspective in which models create scenarios and not predictions. He nevertheless finds a particular target in the Imperial College report number 9, which generated a worst-case scenario of half a million deaths in the UK by the end of July.  He admits to generating such a scenario himself.  ‘The problem was that these worst-case scenarios weren’t realistic and weren’t intended to be.’  This one however had the very real consequence of making lockdown ‘accepted as a necessity the first time it was proposed.’

The strategic objectives were presented as saving lives and protecting the NHS.  As Woolhouse notes, if this meant ‘trying to minimise deaths due to novel coronavirus while ignoring deaths from other causes, and if social distancing is the intervention of choice, then we don’t need a complex computer model to tell us what to do.’

Boris Johnson’s ‘flattening the curve’ to ‘protect the NHS’ had two problems according to him.  Firstly, flattening infections and hospitalisation reduced peak demand on NHS services but prolonged it, and the NHS couldn’t cope with either. The NHS therefore required more resources and, while it got new hospital facilities, these remained largely unused because it didn’t get the required staff.  Woolhouse claims the UK got what he predicted – ‘yo-yoing between intolerably severe restrictions and unsustainable pressure.’

In my own posts during the pandemic, I argued that protecting the NHS was attractive to politicians because it would also protect them from accountability for their prior policy of running the service down.  Ritual hand-clapping on the street became the substitute, while we are now invited to condemn NHS workers for striking to recover the fall in living standards incurred over the past number of years.  Perhaps these workers would be in a stronger position today if the failures of government had been exposed during the pandemic instead of demanding more of the same policy.

Woolhouse admits to supporting the introduction of the first lockdown despite concerns, because there was no other option on the table, he was unsure of the effect of earlier measures and he was not prepared to take the risk.  The central message of the book however is that lockdown was wrong and there was an alternative.  He argues that there were already marked shifts in people’s mobility before lockdown and that the latter ‘seems to have come late to the party and had surprisingly little effect.’  Imperial College published a counter-factual analysis ignoring this voluntary activity and exaggerating the effect of lockdown.  

Woolhouse notes some problems with its analysis.  Sweden never went into full lockdown but brought the epidemic under control. Imperial then claimed implausibly that its banning of mass gatherings had had the same effect. Other researchers came up with the quite different conclusion that the UK epidemic was already in decline before lockdown took effect.  He doubts that ‘anyone would claim now that the March 23rd lockdown saved anywhere near half a million lives.’

His alternative was to act earlier, but not to introduce the lockdown that was implemented, while lifting restrictions earlier.  ‘Lockdown was never going to solve the novel coronavirus problem, it just deferred it to another day, and it did so at a great cost.  Epidemiologists and modellers knew that it was going to be the case from the outset. It turned out policy-makers did not . . .’

‘Lockdown was conceived by the World Health Organisation and China as a means of eradicating novel coronavirus once and for all from the face of the earth. With hindsight, this plan was doomed from the outset . . . The world was given an intervention that only made sense in the context of eradication as the preferred means to control a disease that was clearly here to stay.’

Many on the left maintained this position – of zero-Covid – long after this was obvious, while the World Health Organisation eventually backed away from the policy.  In October 2020 it stated that ‘we really do appeal to all world leaders: stop using lockdown as your primary control method.’

As Woolhouse puts it – ‘tragically, this appeal came seven months too late and by that time a colossal amount of damage had already been done.’

Back to part 1

Forward to part 3

Covid, Brexit, Protest, and the Left too

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A couple of months ago in a Facebook discussion with a supporter of Zero Covid I argued that if he really did believe that Covid-19 represented the threat to humanity that he appeared to claim he should demand (albeit critically) more coercive restrictions on democratic rights from the State.  Nothing, after all, is more important than life.

He disagreed, insisting that socialists can never support restrictions on democratic rights by the capitalist state.

Unfortunately the proponents of Zero-Covid supported all the previous restrictions and if they are to be consistent then these new restrictions must also be an unfortunate necessity.  All the rest of the Zero-Covid demands have been made to the state and who else is going to implement them?  Again, it was they who have been hysterical in their claims that capitalism was engaged in what amounts to mass murder.

Of course, Covid-19 did not and does not represent the existential threat claimed and much of the left is wrong about this.  Their position becomes more and more untenable as people appreciate the personal threat to themselves, they tire of lockdown restrictions and more people, especially the vulnerable, get vaccinated.  Were it to become clear that Covid-19 is endemic and therefore requires regular vaccination, as with the flu, their policy would become obviously stupid.

So it should only be embarrassing that they now condemn the rough tactics adopted by the Metropolitan police when it broke up the protest of the murder of Sarah Everard.  To be consistent they should have defended the policy of the police while salving their conscience by condemning the roughness of its implementation.

Of course, the Tories have taken advantage of the widespread acceptance of restrictions of social interaction by proposing to introduce new laws that go a long way to criminalising protest altogether, as should have been feared from the start.  I recently posted another comment on Facebook pointing this out and suggesting that those who didn’t see this coming should avoid politics and find something else to do.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party is to engage in ‘parliamentary warfare’ over NHS pay while forgetting that austerity would be worse had the Tories implemented the greater lockdown restrictions demanded by Labour.  The cost would have been even greater had the Zero-Covid policy of some on the left been adopted; a policy that is the product of an opportunist attempt to attack the Tories but like all opportunism is incapable of taking a longer-term view.

It is no defence of this policy to declare that you also have a policy against austerity; one which makes heroic assumptions about the capacity of the working class to resist it.  Opportunism here is accompanied by ultra-left perspectives that envisages the capitalist class paying hundreds of millions of pounds for furlough payments, loans and grants to business and the shortage of tax receipts from workers etc.

Again, the Tories will claim the legitimacy of the bill to be paid and the left will again be exposed as it argued a policy that would have needlessly cost more. The policy of Zero-Covid simultaneously relies on the repressive apparatus of the state to work, while positing that this state can be defeated in the implementation of austerity that the policy requires.

We will leave aside any stupid notion that the combination of pandemic and austerity will somehow galvanise the working class to revolution; although these conceptions are precisely how much of the left envisages socialist revolution coming about – capitalist crisis producing a mass political consciousness that their political conceptions and interventions are incapable of envisaging coming about in any other way.

Despite their serial corruption and incompetence in most of their response to the pandemic the Tories are ahead in the polls.  Their bedrock support has relied, and continues to rely, upon their support for Brexit.  The pandemic has been used to hide the damage done by it and the Labour Party has been too afraid and too stupid to lead a political attack on it.

The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee can write that “Labour will plug away, exposing myriad flaws in the dreadful trade deal” but this is meaningless if you don’t oppose it.  It looks hypocritical, since Labour supported the deal, and it looks like the dishonesty typical of politicians given Starmer’s avoidance of even mentioning the word, refusal to seek renegotiation of the deal, and previous policy of pushing the Tories to ‘get Brexit done‘.

But once again, while Labour fails, much of the left is actually worse, having supported Brexit from the start and campaigned for it in the referendum.  The damage to working class living standards and the austerity it will entail is on them.  They too, just like the Tories, are relying on Covid and the Tory press to hide Brexit’s damaging effects and just like Boris Johnson they will – child-like – deny any responsibility.

Two alternative narratives have developed – the fault is with Brexit or the fault is with the big bad EU.  The left that thought it could move on will be cut in two by these scissors but there is little chance that it will fess up and admit a mistake.  As a rule the left does not admit mistakes and certainly not ones as big as this, especially as they cannot consign it to history.

A few years ago a comrade on the left from the Official Republican tradition said to me, while we were watching the May Day parade in Belfast, that so much of the left was rotten that it basically had to die away before a new generation of socialists could make progress. He may even have included his own tradition in that, and in my view this should certainly be the case, but it isn’t as simple as that.  The corruption of Marxism perpetrated by the nationalist and statist left both in Ireland and Britain will not be easily cleansed.

In the meantime, you can hardly blame the British working class if it ignores much of the left, it is quite right to do so.

People before Profit’s ‘Zero Covid-19’ Strategy

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This week the Dáil debated a motion tabled by opposition parties calling for a ‘zero-covid’ strategy.  It was supported by People before Profit and repeated a number of measures published in their strategy document.  Their approach has been supported by much of the Left in Ireland and in Britain. What can we make of it?

A number of questions are immediately raised that the strategy would have to answer. How long would lockdown have to last to achieve its objective; how much would this cost not only financially but also in the well-known drastic effects of lockdown, and what lives and health would be preserved by the strategy compared to the costs?  Is it demonstrated that the costs will not exceed the benefits?

You will search in vain for answers to any of these questions in the PbP document.

Government strategy is based on a balance of restrictive measures and permission to do certain things that have previously been taken for granted. It is accepted that this involves costs but also benefits that justify the costs, while some costs it refuses to accept.  The financial cost to the state in 2020 is estimated to have been €20 billion and Leo Varadkar has speculated that the final cost may be €50 billion.

The ‘zero-covid’ strategy means the balance is wrong but doesn’t say what the financial cost is of drastically shifting it (or the other non-financial costs e.g. deterioration in mental health, rise in domestic abuse and restriction of basic civil rights etc.).  The People before Profit (PbP) document calls for the ‘closure of all non-essential workplaces’ but doesn’t say what they are: how many more would be closed compared to the current lockdown?  Would the difference be significant?  What work is currently not essential and what would be the impact on the economy and the workers in the closed sectors?

PbP say that profits are being put before health but since we live in a capitalist society production is both for profit and to meet needs.  Socialists object that the former is an obstacle to satisfaction of the latter but they don’t claim that under capitalism needs can be met by closing down production for profit.  Even their organisation’s name seems an unconscious acceptance of this (and you could write a whole post on how incoherent that name is).

PbP says that Governments only care about people working and spending, but working class people care about these things as well, for quite obvious reasons, although this seems to escape those seeking to drastically reduce both.  Socialists of the Marxist variety also don’t believe that pieces of paper, or electronic data in bank computers, are a substitute for the actual production of the goods and services people use and consume.  The pieces of paper that capitalism presents as the universal equivalent of real wealth is useless without the production of that which really embodies the potential satisfaction of needs.

Their demand for economic security as a fundamental requirement of public health is equated with state welfare that has always been a permanent source of insecurity, as well as a more or less inadequate safety net.  Welfare systems are not meant to provide economic security for working class people and it fundamentally miseducates them to say they can.

So, the ‘zero-covid’ strategy doesn’t answer basic problems or objections.  To make big claims requires big arguments and big evidence but even obvious questions are ignored.

A second problem concerns the idea of the strategy itself.  It is called ‘zero-covid’ but appears to accept that you can’t get to a situation of absolutely zero.  Having reduced the number of cases to a low level it still envisages periodic eruptions of cases.  It does not mean ‘eradication’ but repeats that it does mean ‘elimination’, which means that control measures will still be required.  The problem is that for a zero-covid strategy these measures mean punishing lockdowns.

So, the ‘zero-covid’ strategy actually involves severe lockdown of indeterminate duration to reduce cases to very low numbers whereupon lockdown is relaxed, cases will again increase, which will require further lockdowns.  Its advocates think these lockdowns can be achieved by testing, tracking and isolation but widespread asymptomatic infection, incentives not to report, ineradicable errors in testing, more transmissible viral mutations, and drastic quarantine measures to impose isolation all point to something much more sweeping.

It should not be forgotten that cases reduced dramatically during the summer to something close to what I assume ‘zero-covid’ supporters would aim at, but was then replaced by an increasing number of cases giving rise to new lockdowns that the same supporters called to be more drastic.  Rather than the strategy looking like an alternative to repeated lockdowns it looks like a mutant variant of it, following what currently appears to be seasonal eruptions of infection.

The analogy used to describe the strategy provides something of an understanding of what is intended but analogies have a habit of leading to misunderstanding.  The example is put forward of a forest fire that requires maximum effort to put out, while recognising that embers may still remain that require to be put out when they again spark new localised fires.

The analogy fails because while forest fires destroy everything in their path the Covid-19 pandemic does not, and while new local fires can be quickly identified and ring-fenced new outbreaks of covid-19 are often without symptoms and can quickly become far from localised.

This brings us to a third failure of the strategy, which is really incredible but says a lot for its affinity to the current approach and its even worse failure to identify what the danger of the pandemic is.  While noting the importance of targeting Covid hotspots and ensuring the safety of vulnerable groups, it mentions in this category workers in meat plants, those in direct provision and migrant detention centres, and travellers and homeless people.  It fails to say anything at all about the vulnerable most at risk of dying.  Neither does the Dáil motion, which mentions that women are disproportionately bearing the burden of the pandemic.

Nothing is said about the median age of those dying being in their eighties or about over 90 per cent of fatalities having an underlying condition. Nothing is said about the scandalous multiple deaths in residential care homes, where older people should have been made safe.  Nothing about the failure of the state to secure them in its dedicated facilities or of the general failure of health services to protect them.  Nothing about the infection of older people by the heath service either in hospital or through then discharging them into homes.  Instead, infection rates in healthcare staff are put down to lack of money, as if infection control should not be a standing requirement.  The actions of the Health Service Executive has on the contrary demonstrated that this has not been seen as an absolute priority.

To say any of this would undermine the zero-covid approach advocated by PbP, including its reliance on the state and its determined refusal to accept the very limited risks posed to all but the identified vulnerable groups.  To do so might be seen to rob the situation of the sense of extreme crisis so necessary to its attempt to talk up the murderous policy of putting profit before people, and the hope that workers will wake up and smell the coffee.

What we therefore have is a strategy, not unlike the current one, that has ignored the real pandemic that has taken place, and has bought into the idea that it is a threat to everyone equally when patently it is not.  The priority given by the virus in killing people is ignored by a strategy that wants zero cases for everyone, and in doing so has ignored the priority of those whose lives are threatened by it.

The health bureaucracy has moulded its response in its own image to put itself in charge.  The left has moulded its response in the image of its own misguided political conceptions, including the potential benevolence of the capitalist state, despite that state’s obvious failure.  Which brings us to a last major failing of the strategy.

Again and again the state, especially in the form of a national health service, is held up as the answer when a quick look across the border will show that the NHS in the North has failed, has ceased to become a health service and become instead a covid-19 service.  The cost of this in future illness and death has not been a first concern.  Long waiting lists have become even longer while the latter is blamed on the former and previous failure becomes the excuse for its extension.

The PbP strategy is replete with references to the recruitment of new healthcare staff ‘to dramatically increase capacity’.  It wants ‘more public health specialists’ and to ‘recruit extra nurses and doctors’ but there are definite limits to how much can be done quickly.  Really significant increases cannot be created in months but only over years.  As an answer to the pandemic today it is a wish list that can only promise salvation sometime in the future.

It says the problem with the health services is ‘structural’ but then contradicts itself by saying it arises from lack of funding and ‘neoliberal’ management, and further contradicts itself by calling for the ‘nationalisation of private hospitals’, imposing the same structural model that has failed.

Because PbP believes that state ownership is socialist, and they think they’re socialists, then the solution is state ownership when the ‘structural’ problem is precisely this form of ownership and control.  An ownership and control beset by bureaucracy and bedevilled by narrow professional hierarchies and egos.

The problem is not a style of management but that health services are bureaucracies that privilege themselves, with the most powerful within them being best able to do so, including medical consultants who prioritise private work, although this is only one feature of the state capitalist service.  The policy of Governments to portray health service workers as heroes beyond all reproach is resisted by some staff but is pursued in order, not to protect the interests of these staff, but to protect the bureaucrats and politicians who govern the system.  The blinkered approach to the health system leads to mistakes such as the widespread responsibility for infection by hospitals and care homes being either ignored, downplayed or excused.

The absence of answers to key questions posed by the strategy; the inadequate understanding of what it would actually mean in Ireland; the failure to even identify the main threat from the pandemic, and the call for measures that cannot be implemented quickly enough to make the difference its authors say is needed; all this points to an underlying impotent political programme summed up at the end of the strategy document:

“. . . most of all, we will need to clearly articulate a vision for an alternative to the destructive instability of capitalism – in Ireland we can play our part by popularising the call for a Transformative Left Government that would reorganise the economy under democratic control, as part of an ambitious Just Transition. .  .  . A left government supported by people power and workers organised in fighting trade unions can deliver real change . . .”

Capitalism will not be changed by a ‘Left Government’, by a group of politicians seeking to transform society through wielding the power of a state that exists to defend it.  Neither can the economy be ‘reorganised’ top-down by such a Government that will in some way, somehow, then be subject to democratic control.  If anyone in PbP still subscribes to any of the fundamental ideas of Marxism they will know all this is false, and being false it is dishonest to sell such a strategy, which is why it is so threadbare.

It is not in any sense a socialist strategy either at the level of transforming society or in dealing with Covid-19, as ritual references to emulating New Zealand, Australia and Asian countries demonstrates. In what way are any of these socialist?  In what way are they safe from future infection, if it at any point they cease to separate themselves from the rest of the world in a way simply impossible for Ireland?  Australia itself provides evidence that there is no such thing as one big final lockdown that breaks the back of infection.  Numerous mutations in many countries belie the idea that these are necessarily foreign and can be avoided by border controls over any extended period.

The great advantage of the zero-covid strategy is that it presents an ideal outcome that compares brilliantly with any other potential approach; the more so since no cost is admitted and no account taken of any problems arising from, or consequences of, its practical implementation, even were such implementation possible in any relevant timescale.

That is why it is also ideal, unreal and hollow.  Not so much transformative as transcendental.