Day: 7 February 2021

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes Toby's reply in the ongoing debate with Christopher Snowdon, a summary of a new paper in the Lancet suggesting masks don't work and a warning about vaccine passports.

by Toby Young Blower's cartoon in the Telegraph on October 12th, 2020 Christopher Snowdon has now done what he failed to do in his original attack on lockdown sceptics in Quillette: he has engaged with the main plank of the sceptics’ case. Our central argument, as I explained in my reply to his article, is that lockdowns cause more harm than they prevent. I cited the wealth of evidence that lockdowns are largely ineffective, as well as the equally voluminous evidence that they cause social and economic damage. And I did my best to show that while some of this harm might be a ‘pandemic effect’ rather than a ‘lockdown effect’, the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that governments have made across the world have exacerbated this damage. In his response, Chris starts by making a pretty big concession: he acknowledges that the reduction in human interaction brought about by draconian stay-at-home orders could be achieved by people just deciding voluntarily to change their behaviour. He seems to think that lockdown sceptics are in denial about this – that we believe infections will rise and fall within a given region, irrespective of how much human interaction there is. Virus gonna virus. But I know few sceptics who believe that. On the contrary, we have been arguing from the start that the approach ...