The Great Covid Panic and how lockdown leaders are failing us all
Disastrous Covid stay-at-home orders aren’t helping the war against this disease. It now turns out this rock-hard government decree is founded on a fairy’s wing, a new book reveals.
The Covid-19 lockdown strategy is like a game of Simon Says: someone barks arbitrary orders at you, and you’re supposed to follow them. Except in our version, we’ve been at it for 18 months, nobody’s having fun, and also, like the game, what’s the point?
To prove you can follow orders?
To what end?
Such is the argument of The Great Covid Panic. Two of the authors are professors at well-known universities. The book has 30 pages of bibliography. It describes how panic-stricken governments around the world ditched their pandemic plans and adopted the unproven, untested strategy of quarantining the healthy.
Turns out, this rock-hard government decree is founded on a fairy’s wing.
On March 16, 2020, Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton’s official advice was that “the health costs [of closing schools] are often underestimated and the benefits are overestimated”. A week later, he and his Health Minister Jenny Mikakos warned that models predicted thousands of Victorians would die from Covid, which only the government’s mandates would restrict. Conveniently, Sutton and Mikakos reported the worst-case scenario and couldn’t produce the figures for alternative estimates when asked. The Education State closed schools without any evidence strong enough to justify so doing.
Health officials underplayed the harm to children’s education, but unlike other experts (mechanics, plumbers, etc.) public servants don’t suffer the consequences of their bad advice.
Much bad advice is based on bad research. Strident lockdown defenders rarely compare research papers and are naive about how true any peer-reviewed article might be. The authors of this new work have experience in academia, which allows them to give a first-hand description of what can and does go wrong.
Say, for example, a study makes a shocking claim about how many people will die from the virus or the benefits of a particular strategy. A journal is more likely to publish studies that show a huge finding of any sort, because that way it gets more attention and thus more advertising money. Published in a journal, the assumptions of a study are magically validated and then repeated in other studies. (Think of a typo replicated on photocopies of photocopies.)
When Covid insolently refuses to vanish, the fault is always with the citizen rather than the restrictions or the studies they’re based on. In fact, it’s proof that the restrictions should have been imposed earlier or more severely.
Thus, the lockdown strategy is vindicated even while it fails. Governments obsequiously accept the doomsday scenarios, don’t ask for other kinds of advice, and ignore it when it’s offered to them.
They also ignore the costs of the lockdowns. It’s pointless to repeat banalities like “follow the science” because whether restrictions are justified is not a purely scientific question. The effects on people’s jobs and savings, the effects of unfathomable government debt, the stress of lockdowns and masks, the effects they have on social and political stability, the pain of missing friends and family, the delayed treatment of other illnesses, the inability to make long-term plans, the theft of freedom and privacy, the moral questions about how much burden a government can dump on its citizens – what expertise do epidemiologists have in these matters?
We elect representatives to resolve these conflicting interests. Pursuing one goal while ignoring all others, they have failed their duty.
Their one goal seems to be to retain as much power as possible.
The authors compare governments to religious authorities because they, the governments, allow no doubt and demand complete obedience. The comparison isn’t perfect: restriction zealots can’t even decide on a saviour (is it hand sanitiser, testing, social distancing, border closures, masks, lockdowns, or vaccines?)
Abusing emergency powers, our governments and their toadies in the media can easily produce a new terror and a new unlikely goal to ensure they keep the hook in your nose and the bit in your mouth. Big businesses don’t complain because governments buy their products and enforce constraints which destroy their smaller competitors. The zoomocracy drinks champagne while labour’s share of income decreases even further.
The Great Covid Panicis a sober assessment of how we got here: this endless carousel of vain and impotent measures which punish the innocent and productive. The lockdown cheer squad will insist it doesn’t prove that lockdowns aren’t needed. But the burden of proof isn’t on the authors. It’s on the lockdown defender to prove it’s morally certain that the restrictions are needed to prevent the potential harms of the virus and that these harms are greater than those mentioned above and supplant the natural rights to earn a living, go to church, and visit family.
We await such proof. Until then, forget Simon and his demeaning commands. A wiser authority says: end restrictions now.
William Poulos is a freelance journalist.
The Great Covid Panic: What Happened, Why, And What To Do Next