A 2 Year Retrospective on the Greatest Peacetime Political Misstep in the Modern History of the West

I want you to run a quick thought experiment. Imagine yourself as you were 4 years ago. It’s 2018, and we’re coming into the winter months. You see some articles in the newspaper referring to the fact that this has been a particularly bad flu season, and that the ICUs in your country are beginning to come under significant pressure and are in danger of being overwhelmed. You recall seeing similar stories in previous winters (as has always been the case), and though you lament the fact that the healthcare system isn’t more robust or better resourced to deal with such seasonal surges, you set the story aside and move on with your day. Some days later, in the face of this strain on hospital capacity, one politician comes forward with the following proposal: ‘The hospitals are coming under a lot of pressure this winter, so we should declare a state of emergency. All sectors of society should be closed down, save for essential services. We should confine the entire population to their homes for an undefined period. This is for their own good, to minimise the spread of respiratory viruses, and save lives. The police will patrol the streets to ensure nobody breaks the quarantine. People may only be allowed to leave their homes with official dispensation, or to engage in short periods of exercise or to purchase essential provisions. A curfew will be imposed. We must protect our hospitals and save lives.’

Now ask yourself, honestly: What would my response to such a proposal have been at that time? I suspect, if you’ve conducted the thought experiment in good faith, and have shorn yourself of the radically altered expectations we have come to (mistakenly) internalise since the beginning of this pandemic, that your response would go something like this: ‘This proposal is an absurd overreaction, and would constitute an excessive use of state force and an unwarranted, draconian imposition on the basic liberties and rights of the public. Regardless of the allegedly noble objectives, such a move would be completely unjustified.’

This, I submit, would be a perfectly reasonable and morally defensible reaction. We (until recently) recognised that, though we could radically reduce the number of deaths in any given year from any number of causes by simply confining people to their homes for extended periods, to do so would be a moral abomination. We until recently recognised that death-minimisation is not an absolute ethic — though it ranks relatively highly in our moral calculus. We until recently recognised that, though our health systems are hugely important (and require very careful, nay better, management and protection), the health system does not have effective veto power over all other sectors of society. A faltering health system does not justify shutting down the entire society in an effort to protect that system. It may justify a rapid increase in investment and capacity, but shutting down all of society as an insulation measure would be — or rather, would have been — considered a preposterous overreaction.

So what on earth has happened in the intervening years, that our foundational moral and political standards could be so radically overturned?

Assessing the Bad Arguments

Before I trace the psychological and institutional forces that brought us to this bizarre point, I want to quickly address some immediate counterarguments that may occur to some in response to the above thought experiment. A person might be tempted to say the following: “Look, this thought experiment doesn’t make the point you think it does. SARS-Covid-2 is a new virus! And it is orders of magnitude more serious than other seasonal respiratory viruses! Therefore, our moral standards have changed in response to a very new situation. That’s not particularly surprising. Our hospitals are in danger of being even more overwhelmed by this virus than they often are during winter months, and it will kill more people. This is an emergency, a pandemic, so of course drastic measures must be taken!”

I don’t deny that SARS-Covid-2 is novel, has been significantly more serious than other seasonal respiratory viruses, and likely warrants some coordinated response and interventions (more on which below). However, the above response doesn’t work for several reasons. Firstly, novelty is ultimately irrelevant. The newness of the virus doesn’t explain why hospitals being overwhelmed — as they have been in previous winters — is suddenly sufficient justification for confining the entire population to their homes. Availability bias may be at play here, amplifying the perceived risk posed by the virus simply in virtue of its relative newness and prevalence in news cycles. Nevertheless, novelty alone can’t justify the sudden subversion of our longstanding ethical calculus. Secondly, the fact that this virus is likely to cause considerably more cases of death and/or critical illness is not by itself sufficient justification. The problem with this argumentative approach is that it is difficult to see how it is not fundamentally arbitrary. What number of excess deaths is unacceptable, to the point where people should be forcibly confined to their homes and businesses closed down? And why that number? I submit that it is impossible to identify any such number in a non-arbitrary way. And that’s why we have not yet seen any person — neither politician nor public health official — make such an argument explicitly. Because it is in effect impossible to make. Thirdly, there is the hospital capacity angle. Even if we can’t identify a specific number/threshold of excess deaths that is so unacceptable as to warrant confining an entire population to their homes, surely hospital or ICU capacity is a much more easily identifiable and objective criterion? Well, yes, it is much easier to identify the current capacity within a given health system in terms of, say, available ICU beds. But this still doesn’t establish the conclusion that we should confine the population to their homes when that capacity is exceeded! “The ICU capacity is X; we cannot allow the number of critically ill to exceed X at any given time; therefore, we must pre-emptively confine the entire population to their homes”. This is still not a good overall argument, just because we can objectively determine what X is! The obvious question here is, why does hospital ICU capacity have this kind of “veto” power over the operation of the rest of society? Again, nobody to my knowledge has so far filled in this argumentative gap. And again, it seems to me unclear how exactly that gap might be filled in convincingly such that population-wide confinement is warranted.

All of this is to not even mention the acute complexity of determining the collateral human damage of lockdowns in the medium-to-long term, not just locally, but globally. This complication itself renders the case for lockdowns even more tentative (more on this below). And much like the above failures of government officials to fill in the argumentative gaps, no government to my knowledge has yet publicly presented a comprehensive human cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns. This in itself is a moral outrage. No policy should be implemented without such an analysis being conducted beforehand whenever possible — and especially not a policy of such far-reaching consequence and authoritarian character.

Some might argue that we simply didn’t have the time to conduct such an analysis in the face of a rapidly evolving pandemic situation and systematic uncertainty about the novel virus. I’m willing to grant that that was a defensible position in the early months of 2020. However, during those first lockdowns, governments certainly did have ample time and resources to conduct such analyses and should have been scrambling to assess the human cost-benefit of their massive emergency intervention while it was taking place. And yet there was silence on this point, across the board. And a scandalous failure of the media class to press politicians on it.

How we got here (i): the first lockdowns

The story of how we got here is in many respects, surprisingly mundane. There is no need to resort to conspiracy theories, claims of corruption or nefarious intent. There certainly have been instances of conflict of interest and perverse incentives at play (see, for example, the dubious official investigations into the lab leak hypothesis). However, the vast majority of the slide into what I argue is a morally and politically grotesque circumstance can be explained by simply attending to the normal institutional and psychological incentives that currently prevail within our societies — albeit operating in an extraordinary circumstance, in combination with some unfortunate coincidences and chronologies. Notwithstanding the mundanity, the very fact that these forces could combine to bring us to this absurd point is itself a damning indictment of the dynamics and standards that prevail in many of our most venerated institutions. In other words, our institutions — whose importance I do not deny — have been exposed as falling shamefully short of the standards to which they should be oriented, and by which they should be judged.

Let’s trace this trajectory by returning to early 2020, around the time when the situation in northern Italy was rapidly deteriorating. What happened in that region was undoubtedly shocking, and the health system was completely caught off guard and ill-equipped. At least part of this surge in hospitalisations and deaths in that region can be accounted for by the fact that that particular part of Italy had one of the most elderly populations per capita in all of Europe. Nevertheless, this was clearly a serious virus that was far more threatening to the vulnerable than other coronaviruses. The rest of Europe was watching closely, and before that, had been watching (more circumspectly) China’s reaction — which, predictably, was incredibly draconian, with the government literally barricading swaths of people into their homes.

Surprisingly, in a moment of unprecedented panic, the Italian government eventually took the step of opting for the China-lite policy of confining the entire population to their homes save for occasional excursions for exercise or essential provisions. This was the first domino in the lockdown chain-reaction that would soon sweep across the rest of the continent. As British epidemiologist Niall Ferguson put it in a refreshingly candid interview with The Times several months later, the response in China and especially Italy essentially gave the “green light” to the rest of Europe’s liberal democracies to pursue what had until that point been considered an impossibly authoritarian and scientifically unprecedented, unsupported public health experiment.

I want to dwell for a moment on what happened in this period, and on Niall Ferguson’s retrospective assessment, as I believe they reveal so much about some of the key dynamics that eventually brought us to where we are. Firstly, Niall Ferguson’s comments reveal a lot — and not necessarily in any sinister sense. I don’t doubt Mr Ferguson has for the most part good motivations (or at least motivations about as good as your average person!), and is a good professional. The interesting thing is that he and other epidemiologists and public health officials, in recommending lockdowns, were not basing their recommendations on published scientific papers or past smaller-scale experiments with community lockdowns. The textbook Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) recommended by the WHO up until 2019 had decidedly not recommended nationwide lockdowns — even for hypothetical viruses far deadlier than SARS-Covid-2. The same goes for the UK’s erstwhile official guidelines on pandemic response and preparedness — again, for viruses with far higher assumed fatality rates. Scientists were instead recommending a lockdown policy on the basis of strong intuitions about what would be most likely to radically reduce or slow down infection rates, based on the assumed mechanics of discrete NPIs that were supported by scientific work and empirical analysis in the past. Essentially, they extrapolated from other NPIs, and inferred that nationwide lockdown would yield a greater effect on transmission reduction than all other discrete NPIs combined.

This was hugely problematic for several reasons. First, it belies the notion that lockdowns were a scientific policy in any meaningful sense. A subset of scientists recommended lockdowns. But this is decidedly different from saying that it was based on science — an important distinction that has been repeatedly elided in the mainstream discourse since. Second, the inference from the discrete efficacy of various NPIs to the efficacy of all such NPIs combined plus population-wide confinement is a non-sequitur. We simply did not know at that time that population-wide confinement would actually work better than those previously established pandemic response NPIs. It was a massive gamble based on questionable intuitions. With hindsight, there are huge open questions about the wisdom of shutting people indoors together in their own households while a respiratory virus moves through the population! But I will return to this below. And finally, it is quite remarkable that one of the most draconian interventions in modern western political history was not held to a more rigorous standard of evaluation than, effectively, the educated hunches of a subset of scientists and public health officials.

I want to deal immediately with an objection here, as it will reveal the two other major issues with lockdown policy and the intellectual backdrop that ushered it in in early 2020. A person might rehearse the line of argument mentioned at the beginning of this article: “We simply didn’t have enough time to rigorously analyse the scientific merits of lockdown! We couldn’t just say ‘let’s conduct some randomised controlled trials and publish some peer reviewed papers on the topic!’ We didn’t have that luxury, and we were facing a novel threat about which little was known at the time. And so resorting to the most radical response on the basis of the educated guesses of epidemiologists and public health officials in an emergency was warranted!”. This is fallacious for two reasons. Firstly, it fallaciously invokes the precautionary principle — something that has happened repeatedly throughout this pandemic. The precautionary principle essentially states that it is the responsibility of an activity-proponent to establish that the proposed activity (especially a novel one) will not (or is very unlikely to) result in significant harm. The principle itself is philosophically controversial, with several critics noting that it is at worst self-defeating, at best indeterminate. Regardless, proponents of lockdowns claimed that the precautionary principle was on their side. The idea seemed to be that, given our uncertainty about the magnitude of harm that the virus was likely to precipitate, inaction was an unacceptable risk. Therefore, lockdown was justified as a precautionary measure. This, however, doesn’t follow. Why? Again, we go back to the cost-benefit analysis. That conclusion would only follow if it could first be established that the avoided virus-induced harm achieved by lockdowns was greater than the harm expected to result from the lockdowns themselves. The problem, obviously, was that the cost-benefit analysis was never performed on lockdowns, and so there was never any way of knowing if the lockdowns could reasonably be expected to yield a net health benefit. It was therefore impossible to say that the precautionary principle implied the need for lockdowns or otherwise.

The appeal to the precautionary principle as a justification for lockdowns remains question-begging. It already assumes that we know that lockdowns yield a greater net benefit than the alternatives. And yet nearly two years on, we still have no strong evidence that that is the case (and, in fact, plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise), simply because the systematic cost-benefit analyses have never been performed by governments or public health bodies.

Therefore, we had essentially the educated guesses of a subset of scientists and a fallacious appeal to the precautionary principle as the basis for our new public health policy. So how on earth did that then end up getting implemented virtually across the board?

How we got here (ii): the (lack of) political leadership

Part of the answer is scientism and quasi-technocratic thinking. But at heart, it’s a question of a lack of leadership, and a lack of understanding both on the part of politicians and the general public, that politics is about more than just “following the science” on discrete policy questions.

It’s perhaps not surprising that in recent years, among respectable opinion, a mantra like “follow the science” should have become so enticing and sticky in the popular mindset. It signals a repudiation of the intellectual debasement of political discourse represented in recent years by figures like Donald Trump. It also seems to signal a commitment to progress in general, and to an alignment with the most intelligent among us and their (alleged) consensus on any number of important matters — from climate change to evolution. “I’m on the side of science, and by proxy I partake of the sophistication and insights that its practitioners embody”. Perhaps an uncharitable reading; but there’s no doubt this is part of the appeal. And of course it’s a no-brainer that one should want to declare support for the institution of science given that most of us at least want to appear to be smart, objective, and committed to truth.

In any case, events of recent years have perhaps given the mantra of “following the science” even more cultural cachet than before. We live in the time of climate change alarm and denial; in the time of Trump’s ascendancy to power and his repeated affronts to rationality. Of “fake news” and rampant conspiracy theories. And so it’s unsurprising that at the beginning of 2020 large segments of the population were primed to wield it as a defiant refrain. Then arrived SARS-Covid-2, and a subset of scientists’ alarming calls for lockdowns in the face of alleged impending catastrophe.

Perhaps we can forgive politicians for deferring to these most alarm-inducing scientists’ presumed expertise on the question of whether lockdowns would reduce the spread of the virus against the backdrop of the politicians’ own relative ignorance and public pressure to “follow the science”. However, what remains unforgivable is the fact that the politicians did not then step back and ask questions that any politician worth their salt should have asked: “Will lockdowns yield a net health benefit in this country, factoring in the probable collateral damage of lockdowns in the short, medium and long-term? How can we determine this as objectively as possible (i.e. perform a systematic human cost-benefit analysis)? What about the international effects of several developed nations imposing lockdowns in concert — what of the effect on the economies of the poorest nations via reduced demand for their exports and knock-on effects on the millions of people living on the verge of starvation and/or absolute poverty in such countries? What about the ethical and political implications of such a draconian imposition on the basic liberties of our citizens by the government? What about the potential precedent that sets? How should we weight our citizens’ own autonomy, differential risk-appetites and individual rights against collective health concerns? Is there a viable exit strategy?”

To put it plainly, politics is about more than just listening to what some scientists say about one specific problem and then deferring to their judgment (though incorporating the science is of course a necessary step). Politics is ultimately the craft of considering the whole complex of social, moral, health, cultural, economic, humanitarian, and legal ramifications of any given policy and then striking the right meta-ethical balance between all those variously competing and complementary concerns. Not a single politician or government to my knowledge fulfilled this fundamental prerogative of the responsible political agent throughout the pandemic. Not one. To their eternal shame.

The specific problem in the case of the pandemic is that epidemiologists and public health experts are not trained to think politically. They are trained generally to think along strongly demarcated dimensions. For an epidemiologist in an advisory role, they are confined to certain narrowly circumscribed questions like “What’s likely the most effective way of reducing the spread of this virus? How many more deaths from the virus would be avoided by doing X versus doing Y?” They are not typically trained to consider: “What are the likely international humanitarian effects of several developed nations imposing lockdowns in concert — what of the effect on the economies of the poorest nations via reduced demand for their exports and knock-on effects on the millions of people living on the verge of starvation and/or absolute poverty? What about the ethical and political implications of such a draconian imposition on the basic liberties of our citizens by the government?” It’s a case where the cliché ‘when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ does apply. What did surprise me, however, is that public health officials and epidemiologists did not even seem interested in — or aware of — the importance of performing human cost-benefit analyses on their proposed interventions, and of not just thinking unidimensionally about the intervention’s effect on one health vector. Even if they themselves were not to be the (only) ones to carry such analyses out.

In any event, the ultimate responsibility for doing that, or for requiring that it be done, lay with the politicians. And they failed catastrophically in this mandate.

How we got here (iii): negativity bias and the vicious media cycle

So a combination of fear of the unknown, China and Italy’s lockdown precedent, a subset of alarm-sounding scientists recommending scientifically unprecedented lockdowns on the basis of extrapolation and informed intuition, and a lack of political leadership — resulted in one European government after another falling in line with the new emergency consensus. As I conceded above, I can see at least some rationale for pre-emptive lockdowns early on in light of the prevailing uncertainty about the virus at that time. But during that first lockdown, systematic human cost-benefit analyses should have been conducted, and weren’t.

In any case, following quickly on the heels of ”follow the science”, “flatten the curve” became the new political mantra. As the weeks wore on, and the first signs of people’s psychological fatigue became more apparent, “flatten the curve” started losing some of its rhetorical power. It became more explicitly about protecting the hospitals, which soon gave way to saving lives and minimising deaths from Covid-19.

The rhetorical shift was of course understandable, perhaps even predictable. In order to keep people’s morale up and sustain their motivation to comply, one needed to resort to more and more powerful rhetorical appeals. And there aren’t many more powerful than “you don’t want to cause more people to die, do you?” However, as this shift took place from curve flattening to death minimisation, it became apparent that exiting the first lockdowns posed an intractable problem. Despite the fact that the first waves eventually started subsiding, we all knew the virus was still out there. And as soon as we started to lift the lockdowns — no matter how slowly or piecemeal — Covid-19 deaths would inevitably increase again. Essentially, as death minimisation became the new moral justification for the lockdowns, they essentially backed us into an impossible corner. Any move away from lockdowns, according to the alleged science of lockdowns, would invariably result in a greater number of Covid-19 deaths, other things being equal.

And so we now had a situation where there was no conceivable, coherent exit strategy from lockdowns, and the prospect of endless cycles of lockdowns became logically inescapable. (Despite early denials that this was necessarily the case, precisely this scenario has come to pass). Oddly, mainstream media outlets utterly failed to recognise this implication, and rarely if ever pressed politicians and public health officials on this point. Instead, the media settled into the first cog of the vicious cycle that was now underway — namely, the fear and concern racket.

It’s not news that, in the era of clickbait, bad news makes for the best news. And when I say best, I of course mean best for the coffers of the news outlets themselves. There’s a well-established psychological pattern known as “negativity bias” that effects all of us to at least some degree. In a nutshell, negativity bias is people’s tendency to pay far more attention to anomalous bad events, than to perhaps more representative good news stories. Mainstream news outlets may not consciously hack this bias in the stories they present and pursue; however, there is a happy convergence between the current economic model of online news media and this widespread cognitive bias. Presented with two headlines — one seemingly good, one bad — most of us will very quickly click on the bad news headline. In a choice between “Earthquake kills 30,000 in California” and “New malaria vaccine saves 100,000 lives in 2021”, most of us will choose the former. And over time, while news outlets may not consciously pursue negative news stories, the natural selection of the media marketplace will “select for” the publications that effectively communicate, on balance, more negative stories.

In the era of social media, this process has gone into overdrive. Increasingly, the public accesses news media indirectly, through social media feeds like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. Unlike in the pre-internet age wherein any given news organisation’s “selling point” was more of a package deal, in the social media age news organisations’ primary mechanism of revenue generation is discrete per-story footfall. Where in the past the economic unit was the entire newspaper or the entire news channel, nowadays it is the individual article or individual video that is the economic unit of the news organisation. Why is that significant?

Take the New York Times, for example. Pre-internet, its selling point was its (alleged) reputation for impartial, highly professional, authoritative journalism. No one purchased a single article. They had to purchase the entire paper. Now of course front page headlines needed to be somewhat eye-catching, and speak to the anomalous events that were already being talked about. But there was far more leeway beyond the front page regarding the kinds of stories that could be run, how they were framed, and the nature of the headlines. The content still needed to hold steady in terms of tone and quality; but headlines on pages two, three, four, didn’t need to do any commercial heavy lifting. They didn’t need to bring “footfall”, since the frontpage had already done the job in most cases.

Nowadays, with the decline of print media, every article is pushed out front and centre on social feeds. And so the impulse to have every headline and caption-photo “hack” our various psychological biases and blindspots is overwhelming. And negativity bias is right up there as one of the most powerful. The more “alarming” your headline, the more likely it is to generate clicks. The more clicks you generate, the more advertisers will be willing to pay your organisation to place its adverts on your article pages. Even for news outlets that avoid advertising and rely on voluntary donations, they can only solicit those donations once you are on the website, and so the dynamic and incentives are essentially the same.

During the pandemic, this dynamic only served to exacerbate an already panicked situation. Journalists were not so much incentivised to ask politicians the (sometimes glaringly obvious) logical questions, the more pedestrian and practical questions gestured at above. Rather, journalists were primed to solicit information that was more alarming. They were incentivized to focus on terrifying “what ifs” about the virus. They were compelled to ask politicians if they “should/could be doing more” to prevent COVID deaths.

In their selection of articles, the news media invariably framed stories about the virus in the most alarming ways possible. They sought out scientists who were most “concerned”. They enthusiastically ran stories (which later turned out to be false, of course) about how “perhaps” infection with COVID won’t confer immunity (an eventuality that was virtually without precedent in the history of infectious disease, but of course that didn’t matter). They habitually interviewed scientists who insisted that the government should be locking down longer, stronger, or should have locked down earlier! Few and far between were articles asking more measured questions about cost-benefit analyses; about second-order consequences; about the very clearly differential risk-profile of the virus across different demographics and how large numbers of people didn’t need to be quite as fearful as they had been initially.

This, in turn, only fanned the flames of fear among the general public; which, in turn, put pressure on politicians to “do more” to protect the public and health systems. Across most western nations, the main political opposition parties were almost entirely critical from the perspective of the current governments “not doing enough”, echoing the alarming reports they were seeing in the media. This in turn fed back into the media dynamic, reinforcing and justifying the fixation on alarming headlines, reporting on the fact that other politicians were calling for “more” intervention, rather than less.

And so on went the cycle. Media were increasingly motivated to seek out that subset of experts or scientists who were “very concerned”, who insisted constantly on “extreme caution”. This entire dynamic only pushed politicians further into the lockdown consensus. Harried by a concern-mongering opposition and media establishment, and a resulting petrified public, most leaders simply capitulated, varying only in degree of draconian intervention. A different flavour from one country to the next, with different timings and cut-off points here and there. But the degree of convergence on such a wildly illiberal set of measures was quite astonishing.

How we got here (iv): politicisation

Some of us naively thought at the onset of this pandemic that surely something as objectively determinate, immediately threatening, and scientifically salient as a viral pandemic couldn’t possibly be hijacked by politics. And for a very brief period at the beginning of the pandemic, there was some hope that perhaps this was a moment where political tribalism could be set to one side in the interests of coming together to fight an imminent common enemy. Alas, this turned out to be a relatively fleeting phenomenon, and those of us who had hoped to avoid politicisation turned out to be spectacularly mistaken.

Perhaps the earliest signs that this could indeed be politicised came from the US. Early on, Donald Trump suggested shutting the US border to Chinese travelers. At the time, this provoked uproar from the liberal commentariat and Democrat politicians, who predictably castigated Trump for yet another allegedly xenophobic proclamation and vast overreaction. Whether or not Trump was motivated by racial animus, in hindsight such a policy was not entirely unreasonable at that time; and indeed, in a bizarre reversal, aggressive border closures soon came to be a favoured policy option of the left (see the global left’s response to Jacinda Ardern’s hawkish stance on border closures). Nancy Pelosi’s defiant calls to people to visit their local Chinatown districts at the end of February 2020 as a means to downplaying fears about the coronavirus now looks pretty embarrassing in hindsight. Interestingly, the Democrats soon shifted their stance, and rightly adopted a very concerned and activist stance towards the virus. It was at that point that Trump’s administration then suddenly pivoted into downplaying the seriousness of the virus, in a classic case of partisan flip-flopping.

Over in the UK, we witnessed perhaps the most consequential piece of politicisation. Early on, Boris Johnson’s government was considering a range of options behind closed doors. It soon emerged that one of the alternatives on the table was a lighter-touch approach, focusing on protecting the vulnerable and elderly, and then issuing recommendations and guidelines to the remainder of the population on the basis of the UK’s official pandemic policy to that point (more on this below). The hope was that once the less vulnerable population achieved something close to herd immunity, the protective restrictions on the elderly and vulnerable could then be lifted as they were permitted to interact with a now largely immune population. As soon as the media got a hold of this information, they framed it as a “let it rip” or “do nothing” approach, emphasizing the part that involved issuing voluntary guidelines, and fixating on the phrase “herd immunity” as a shorthand for the policy.

Of course, those politically antagonistic to Johnson and his party jumped on this information, and presented it as a callous policy of allowing people to die en masse. The phrase “herd immunity” was now conflated with “do nothing” and used as a shorthand for the policy. This then led to the mistaken idea that herd immunity was a “policy”, one that required allowing everyone to get infected. Soon enough, there were thinkpieces dismissing the very concept of “herd immunity” as pseudoscience — a preposterous outcome caused by that conflation of the scientifically legitimate concept of herd immunity with the alleged policy plan that Johnson and his government were considering.

It was a sobering thing to see a scientifically valid concept being dragged through the mud and bastardised by mainstream media outlets that really should have known better. But so irresistible are the psychological pull of ideology and party politics (and the negativity bias dynamics of the modern press) that no concept was safe from their corrupting force.

Thereafter, the entire COVID conversation was coopted by bipartisan alignment with one arbitrarily compiled set of opinions or another. If you were on the left, you believed the virus was more fatal and dangerous than it in fact was; if you were on the right, you were more inclined to believe that the virus was far less fatal and dangerous than it actually was (or perhaps even that it did not exist!); if you were on the left, you believed in the need for and efficacy of lockdowns; if you were on the right, you were against lockdowns (or even thought they were part of some “globalist” power grab); if you were on the left, you were in favour of universal mask mandates; if you were on the right, not only were you against mask mandates, you were even (hypocritically) against private businesses voluntarily enforcing mask wearing on their own premises; if you were on the left, you were now suddenly in favour of shutting borders down to prevent the spread of the virus; if you were on the right, you were now suddenly against shutting down borders!

Why each set of policies clumped together along the left and the right in the manner they did is largely a matter of complete contingency. When the Democratic Party in the US pivoted to magnifying the risk of the virus as soon as it was clear it was indeed already in the US, it seemed as if the republicans simply reflexively pivoted to downplaying as an oppositional posture. Much of the rest of the policy clumping appeared to occur in that manner. I often ask myself if Boris Johnson and Donald Trump had immediately and early on locked down the UK and the US respectively, and aggressively shut the borders before anyone else, would the left in those countries have been fervently anti-lockdown and anti-border closures thereafter? I can’t help but believe that indeed they would have been! The very fact that that is a perfectly plausible counterfactual, is yet another damning indictment of the systematic irrationality that characterises our politics.

Once the political battle lines were drawn, objective reporting in the media was undermined even further, as most papers sought to pander to one political wing or another (and of course, journalists just being people, were themselves susceptible to political bias). And so their framing invariably reflected the preconceptions of their intended audiences, and consolidated an essentially arbitrary clumping of pandemic policy packages for the left and right.

How we got here (v): the counterfactual trap, self-selection, and self-protection

A fifth dynamic that has entrenched lockdown policy is a subtle yet powerful factor I call the “counterfactual trap”.

There is something like an inherent pessimism bias in modellers and public health officials in the context of a novel threat with substantial uncertainty. It seems to me that there is an outsized incentive for such people and groups to overstate both the magnitude and probability of negative consequences if we don’t intervene, and to recommend the most extreme policy interventions. Why? Because it essentially insulates them from potential criticism. It’s like the “equilibrium” strategy in a game theoretical sense.

Think of the possibilities you face as a public health official:

(i) The extreme interventions that you recommend are implemented with a view to pre-empting the alleged catastrophic outcome. In that case, if things still turn out really bad regardless of your recommended interventions, you can always lean on the counterfactual appeal: “Well, things would have been even worse had we not intervened”. You also get to say “See! Things were indeed very bad, just as we predicted!”

(ii) The extreme interventions that you recommend are implemented, and things turn out fine. In that case, you get to claim that the reason things turned out fine was because of your recommended extreme interventions! And had they not been implemented, things would have been as catastrophic as you predicted!

(iii) The extreme interventions that you recommend are not implemented, and things turn out really bad. In that case, you get to say “See! I told you so! If you had only listened to us, all of this could have been avoided. This proves that the extreme interventions were indeed required and justified”.

(iv) The extreme interventions that you recommend are not implemented, and things turn out fine. This is obviously the weakest branch of the decision tree from a self-interest perspective. However, there are still outs available. One can say, for instance, that the policy makers who ignored your advice just “got lucky” because some previously unknown or extrinsic variable got them off the hook; and that there was no way for modellers/public health officials to have known about that variable at the time. Or one can say that unforeseeable “voluntary behavioural changes” by the population pre-empted the worst-case scenario, but that we were “still right to be cautious”.

In other words, the “best” and “safest” approach from the modellers’ and public health officials’ point of view is always to err on the side of catastrophic predicitons, and err on the side of correspondingly extreme intervention recommendations. And what’s so dangerous is that, in the face of this pessimism bias on the part of modellers, the policymakers and politicians themselves face complementary incentives in the direction of the more extreme interventions. It’s incredibly risky from the perspective of their own political self-interest to “call the modellers’ bluff”. Since they only “win” in situation (iv) above. And even then, it’s not an unambiguous win.

This is the counterfactual trap. Having recommended the most draconian interventions, one can under most subsequent scenarios resort to these insulating counterfactual appeals to justify the recommendation — “well yes, things turned out bad, but things would have been even worse had we not done this!” or “see! Our interventions worked! Imagine what would have happened if we hadn’t done this!” or “look how bad things are now! See! You should have implemented our stronger interventions, things would have been much better!” So here we have another reason why we saw an irresistible pull among decision-makers and scientific advisors towards the more pessimistic projections and corresponding draconian interventions. It was the most “rational” (from a face-saving and ass-covering perspective) course of action.

We must also factor in the ever-present desire on the part of politicians to be seen to be “doing something” in a time of crisis. It’s a rare politician who has sufficient backbone to opt to do less rather than more, even when doing less will yield a net-preferable outcome relative to all available alternative courses of action. Very few people are capable of recognising that politics (and much of life) is about selecting the least bad from among a range of suboptimal options. We choose “least bad” options, because there are almost never unambiguously good or perfect courses of action that involve no negative externalities, costs, trade-offs, or unintended consequences. People are highly susceptible to this nirvana fallacy, whereby any policy option is compared against some “ideal” scenario or outcome which, in actuality, may be completely unrealisable (e.g. completely stopping the spread of the virus and eliminating it at little-to-no cost to society — especially the worst-off in society). The electorate and journalists alike typically brings this fallacy to bear when judging politicians’ actions. And the corrolary of failure to meet this impossible standard are accusations of “not doing enough!” or “could have done more!”. Under these kinds of pressures, politicians almost invariably err on the side of “more is better”. And so again, opt for the more draconian interventions.

Once this dynamic was established, it became self-sustaining. The politicians and policymakers recognised that “doing more” and listening to the more pessimistic projections was the most prudent course of action for the purpose of minimising the risk of being accused of incompetence. They therefore formalised and reinforced the authority of those advisors, granting them regular public platforms and affording them the imprimatur of representing “The Science”. Naturally, these bodies and advisors preferred that their opinions and recommendations were not made to look misguided or mistaken in public. And so it was in their natural self-interest to play down challenges and alternative perspectives, to dismiss naysayers and especially scientists with competing viewpoints. We often saw members of these bodies either step down or dismissed when they deviated from the new orthodoxy of cycles of lockdowns, mandatory masking, vaccine mandates etc.

While the extent of this self-selection and vilification of critics varied somehwat from country to country, there were quite egregious instances of intentional character assasination and demonisation that have since been brought to light. Through Freedom of Information Act requests and disclosures of private correspondence, we now know for a fact that in the US, Fauci and several of his advisors and fellow-travellers during the pandemic explicitly recommended behind closed doors the discrediting and vilification of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). They recommended publicly referring to them as “fringe epidemiologists” — quite an absurd characterisation for three of the world’s most reputable epidemiologists from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford Universities! Nevertheless, they pressed ahead with these efforts and “recommended” to media outlets to ignore these allegedly fringe scientists, questioning their motives and exaggerating their “links” with nefarious right-wing and libertarian forces. It was a shameful episode, but it worked very well. Media outlets routinely misrepresented the GBD as a “let it rip” policy, despite the GBD calling for very extensive government protection of the most vulnerable groups.

Where we stand now

Taken together, the above dynamics explain how we have gotten to a point where, in western liberal democracies, forcibly confining people to their homes for months on end no longer seems an inconceivable, outlandish abrogation of people’s basic rights. The potential for this convulsion of illiberalism and irrationality was already latent in our political and cultural institutions. It simply required a spark of panic and crisis to set the chain reaction in motion. That such a wholesale betrayal of some of our most foundational moral and political principles could occur so rapidly warrants a careful post-mortem on those same institutions, and the incentives and interrelationships that prevail therein.

We already see certain segments calling for a Covid “amnesty”, now that uncomfortable truths regarding the erstwhile “scientific consensus” are coming to light. We are already seeing the inevitable, highly predictable inflation resulting from massive government expenditures required to prop up western economies during lockdowns — something several of us predicted, but which fell on deaf ears. That inflation will continue to wreak humanitarian havoc, not only on developed countries but, more importantly, indirectly on poorer developing nations. We are now seeing that the lab leak hypothesis was not the “racist, right-wing conspiracy theory” that it was alleged to be in the early months of the pandemic. We are seeing, in fact, that that hypothesis was always at least as plausible as the alternatives. And that, in fact, behind closed doors, members of the NIH, Eco Health Alliance and more had a flagrant conflict of interest and a clear vested interest in playing down the lab leak hypothesis. Which is precisely what they did. We have discovered that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines had never in fact been shown to reduce the spread and transmission of SARS-Covid-2. Nevertheless, governments and health officials and journalists happily broadcast the assumption that they did, and backed those claims with appeals to a “science” which did not in fact exist — in addition to guilt-inducing claims that those who refused to get vaccinated were putting vulnerable lives in danger by exposing them to increased risk of transmission.

Of course, none of this is to deny that the virus was gravely serious, nor that the vaccines were effective in reducing severe disease and death. There were still very good reasons for many people to get vaccinated. However, the degree to which journalists and public health officials played fast and loose with appeals to science is shameful. More surprising still was the strange unquestioning alliance between the political left and giant pharmaceutical companies. I don’t mean to suggest that large companies are inherently untrustworthy. But that often is an axiomatic view of those on the left. And yet for some strange reason throughout this pandemic, the political left has become the most credulous cheerleader of giant pharmaceutical companies in the context of the vaccine rollout. It was a puzzling form of selective naivety that they instantly took everything such companies said at face value. Again, this is not to say that there is necessarily any corruption occurring behind closed doors at these companies. But the fact many on the left were not at least circumspect and uncomfortable about the closeness of the alliances between government officials and pharmaceutical companies during the vaccine rollout is puzzling, to say the least.

We find ourselves in a strange world. Though we have mercifully moved beyond the periodic lockdowns, one can’t help but shake the fear that there may be another one just around the corner if hospitals become overwhelmed enough — whether that be due to SARS-Covid-2 or the next novel pandemic virus that comes along. That seal has been broken, and it looks like it may never be closed again. That that is the case is a moral and political disgrace. But worse still is the fact that irrationality remains the order of the day on most questions pertaining to SARS-Covid-2. We are now living through a wave of ostensibly mysterious excess deaths in most countries that seem to not be directly attributable to SARS-Covid-2. However, there has long been evidence now that SARS-Covid-2 may do serious long-term damage to people’s cardiovascular health and immune systems. And yet this evidence is largely being overlooked in the excess death conversation! Some people are rushing to implicate the vaccines in these deaths. But the preponderence of evidence from independent sources suggests that the vaccines cannot explain these deaths (and I say this while accepting that in young men especially, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been associated with increased rates of myocarditis and pericarditis. The problem is that (i) those cases have been found to be very mild in most instances and (ii) the virus itself causes higher rates and more severe instances of those same conditions! There is also a strong indication that those adverse vaccine effects are the result of failure to aspirate during administration, and so those effects are perhaps not attributable to the vaccines per se). Undoubtedly some of the excess deaths are attributable to the lockdowns and disruptions caused by the draconian Covid interventions. But certainly not all, or even the majority. The most plausible available explanation is certainly longer-term sequelae from initial infection with the virus itself.

So what am I saying? Am I saying that lockdowns were justified after all? Certainly not! The evidence that lockdowns were even effective in reducing the spread of and deaths from the virus over the long-term is currently non-existent. Moreover, even if we were to grant that they did prevent some infection and death, one would still need to conduct the systematic cost-benefit analysis and establish that those avoided harms were greater than the indirect harms caused by the lockdowns themselves. And the evidence on those harms is rapidly stacking up — and they’re enormous. My contention is rather that we should have been focusing our protection very aggressively on the most vulnerable groups; investing massively in HEPA and medical-grade air filtration infrastructure in all public and commercial buildings; recommending actually effective masking for the most vulnerable groups especially; investing heavily in research on pan-variant vaccines and antivirals. And of course, with the benefit of hindsight, had the Chinese government, the Wuhan lab, the NIH, EcoHealth Alliance and WHO been transparent with all of their information from day one, we might have actually stood a chance of confining this virus to Wuhan in the first place and, ultimately, eliminating it, by stopping it at its source and preventing all travel in and out of China for a period in late 2019 and early 2020. But apparently that was “xenophobic”.

Instead, we’re now in an absolutely absurd place where lockdown apparently remains the policy-of-choice in the event that hospitals come under severe pressure. A place where, as the mainstream slowly and begrudgingly comes around to the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis, we are so far removed in time from the original outbreak event that it will be virtually impossible to retrieve the evidence needed to settle the origin question once and for all (not to mention the Chinese government’s flagrant lack of transparency and grossly suspicious conduct in the early stages of the pandemic). And answering that origin question could be vital to preventing future pandemics. We are now in a place where pharamceutical companies claim a right to withhold information that is clearly in the public interest for decades, without justification. And where politicians and journalists who made unfounded statements about vaccines and transmission, are just carrying on as if nothing happened.

We have disgraced ourselves over this past two to three years, and continue to disgrace ourselves to the extent that we refuse to step back, evaluate, and hold accountable those of us who got things so profoundly wrong. Untold damage has been done and will continue to be done as the indirect, unintended humanitarian consequences of our bungled policies play out across the world. While those responsible cry “amnesty” and insist we just “put it all behind us”. If we do, we are doomed to repeat and compound our repugnant mistakes.