When considering a policy as unprecedented and far-reaching as a nationwide lockdown, you’d assume the Government would carry out a cost-benefit analysis. After all, such analyses are routine in policy-making.
For example, the Treasury maintains a document called ‘The Green Book’, which gives detailed guidance on how to compute the costs and benefits of particular actions. It refers to concepts such as opportunity cost, discount factors and adjusting for inflation.
You might say there wasn’t much time to carry out a detailed cost-benefit analysis before the first lockdown last March. (Though the Government could have provided a few rough numbers for the public to scrutinise.) However, it’s now more than a year later, and there still hasn’t been any attempt to weigh the costs and benefits.
In a report for the Institute of Economic Affairs published last December, the economist Paul Ormerod argued that the Government’s refusal to crunch the numbers reflects a general overreliance on epidemiological expertise, at the expense of economic expertise.
As Russ Roberts, another economist, has observed, “Knowing a lot about the human body does not make you an expert in risk analysis, tradeoffs, or unintended consequences.” Note: this is not to imply that all or even most economists are opposed to lockdowns, but simply that key insights from that discipline have been overlooked during the course of the pandemic.
Several cost-benefit analyses of the UK lockdowns have been published by persons outside the Government, and each one has concluded that the costs almost certainly outweighed the benefits.
Since the NHS typically pays up to £30,000 to extend a patient’s life by one quality-adjusted life-year, a reasonable estimate of the benefits of lockdown can be obtained by multiplying the expected number of life-years saved by 30,000.
For example, if we assume (generously) that lockdowns saved 50,000 lives and prevented 500,000 people from getting long COVID, then the total benefits would be about £16.5 billion. This figure then has to be weighed against some measure of the costs (including effects on the economy, health, education and civil liberties). Given that the fall in GDP alone last year was over £220 billion, it seems very unlikely that lockdowns would pass a cost-benefit test.
The Government’s lack of interest in cost-benefit analysis was highlighted in a recent LinkedIn post by Daniel Fujiwara – an expert in policy evaluation. Fujiwara was apparently invited to “meet with senior Government officials to discuss the pros and cons of lockdown”. However, despite offering his advice and input pro-bono, he “never heard back from them”.
In the post, Fujiwara goes on to say, “Lockdowns should have stopped at the point where an additional day of #lockdown causes more damage to our society than it benefits us… My analysis of the impacts of lockdown last year suggests that we have gone well beyond this threshold.”
One can only assume that the Government’s failure to publish even basic estimates of the costs and benefits of lockdown is due to fear of what those estimates might show…
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Why don’t we just ask Amazon, Walmart, Tescos, Google, Apple, HSBC and Facebook – I’m sure sure they would confirm that the benefits far outweighed the costs.
Yes, and let’s not forget Big Pharma and all the businesses given contracts by Government cronies.
LONDON -~TOMORROW
Sat, 26 June, 1pm
The Next Big One!
Freedom from Vax Passport Enslavement
Hyde Park, North Carriage Drive Entrance
https://t.me/londonrallies
https://www.standupx.info/
Thoughtful piece, but it goes without saying Hancock and his Great Reset cabal have no interest in justifying their actions.
They have a PCR test which exaggerates ‘cases’. Their chums in big pharma are raking in billions. With every passing day they achieve their aim of eradicating small and medium sized businesses.
Expose the PCR scam and the whole rotten edifice will fall.
It doesn’t need exposing, it’s in black and white if people can be bothered.
“RT-PCR detects presence of viral genetic material in a sample but is not able to
distinguish whether infectious virus is present.”
It’s on the government’s own website – https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cycle-threshold-ct-in-sars-cov-2-rt-pcr
The whole sham is based on the lie of ‘cases’ = infections and yet this isn’t a headline every single fucking morning. I sometimes think that people enjoy this fucking nightmare.
My sister law “works” for the council loving it, the fat cunt can hardly waddle out of the door after 18 months not going to work not that she ever could explain what she actually did for a job. Never missed a wage packet sunning he fat form in fucking Cuntville Cornwall at the moment. I hope a fucking meteor hits.
It has been exposed, nothing has fallen down, because media are looking the other way.
Don’t know about looking the other way, think the media are fully complicit in promulgating the lie
Because they’re complicit in the whole shit show in fact they’re the ones pumping petrol onto the fire, and people are to blind and stupid to think for themselves.
Putting out the fire with gasoline, much missed Mr Jones.
I wrote to my MP the day lockdown 1 was announced. I said we have to consider QALYs in our risk/benefit analysis.
Hardly heard QALYs mentioned since!
No analysis will find lockdown to be worth it. Any way you do the calculations. Some very old people died – we trashed the economy (which is the thing that pays for the health service). The only way you can think lockdowns are a good idea is not to consider the disbenefits at all (which is what they’ve done).
When I’ve discussed the issue with medically trained panickers they generally try to dismiss QALY’s as “not appropriate”, either generally or “for infectious disease situations”.
I’ve never really got to the bottom of that issue as we’ve generally moved on to other aspects.
But as you say, it’s really impossible to see any plausible basis on which the panic response to covid could pass any cost effectiveness test. The assumptions required are just too outlandish, and getting more so as time goes on. It’s incontestably been a disaster.
they generally try to dismiss QALY’s as “not appropriate”
LOL
a month of an old person in a care home with dementia is worth the same as the entire life of a 5 year old
I know, any rational analysis will say that no child’s care should be affected by a disease with an average age of death of 82.5 – and yet all cancer treatment, for example, has been impacted. The NHS, NICE, MHRA have been an absolute disgrace this past year and a half. There should be prosecutions.
Well in fairness they aren’t always making that juvenile error, but it’s surprisingly common. Look at the trouble Sumption got into when he made the mistake of assuming he was conversing with adults.
A child dying loses not only >60 qaly’s but consider the potential family tree lost by them not being able to procreate it´s millions of qualy’s taken to the extreme. This “vaccination” nonsense needs to stop!
Correct. I wonder what NICE have been doing this past year? I wonder what MHRA are doing right now? ALL the people paid to gather data and make rational decisions have flat refused to do their jobs. And the big question, why?
cowardice
There was a brilliant article last year which calculated the cost per QALY of lockdown. The lowest estimate was around £125k, over three times the NICE limit for a treatment. The upper limit was something like £3M!
If lockdown were a medical treatment, NICE would/should not have funded it.
“The Government’s lack of interest in cost-benefit analysis was highlighted in a recent LinkedIn post by Daniel Fujiwara – an expert in policy evaluation. Fujiwara was apparently invited to “meet with senior Government officials to discuss the pros and cons of lockdown”. However, despite offering his advice and input pro-bono, he “never heard back from them”. “
A familiar problem with technocracy in general. Who gets to choose which experts get listened to?
As we’ve seen with the disastrous influence of the SAGE charlatans and exploiters, it’s crucial.
Vallance is the lead of SAGE & it is he who decides which experts are members.
It’s not just the membership of SAGE. The politicians and media can listen to, and give platforms to, whomever they want.
SAGE is a platform, albeit a powerful one, and an “insider group” with privileged access to info and to policymakers.
Another excellent piece from Noah Carl, thanks.
The QALY figure of around £16.5bn is probably much lower given the AVERAGE age of a Covid death is 83… hardly savings loads of lives with 50-60 years ahead of them – I would wager suicides and early deaths due to drinking, overeating, drug use, general malaise and missed cancers alone would outweigh the QALY benefit of lockdown. (This doesn’t even take into consideration so called Long Covid, which I am not a huge believer in to be honest.)
I would be keen to know though, on that Long Covid point, why that is so much worse than any long term inducing of spike protein related illness long term from getting the mRNA vaccines which seem to be coming to light more and more.
Have they saved any lives? Hard to argue that case from the evidence.
Good point well made
Yes I wonder if Long Vaccine will ever become a thing.
Because it would prove that lockdowns work
Only joking
“As Russ Roberts, another economist, has observed, “Knowing a lot about the human body does not make you an expert in risk analysis, tradeoffs, or unintended consequences.”
But that’s just it! They couldnt even get that right…or more likely, they chose not to. They refused to listen to any other medical opinion, which offered suggestions that could have lessened the impact of this “crisis” on our lives, and, instead they bulldozed their way through them in their desperation to get their agenda in place.
I am a retired HQ civil servant and was responsible for, among other things, drafting and implementing legislation. Even the simplest two page piece of legislation had to be accompanied by a full cost benefit analysis (CBA). This could well be longer than the draft legislation. CBAs were also required to be published alongside the legislation or as an Appendix to the legislation (I can’t recall which, but, suffice it to say, the considerations and conclusions were fully transparent) as a matter of course.
On more than one occasion in my experience progression was held up because the CBA was considered to be lacking in sufficient depth and was sent back to us to be reconsidered and expanded. We were constantly reminded how the CBA was just as important as the legislation itself. In order for draft Regulations or a Bill to be laid before Parliament, the CBA would have to demonstrate beyond any doubt that the benefits of the proposed legislation outweighed the costs. And, before passing such legislation, parliamentarians would have to satisfy themselves individually that the conclusions in the CBA were comprehensive and accurate. Without that, no legislation.
My point is that, in days gone by, the most important aspect of the regulatory process was proving that the benefits outweighed the costs and everyone with a role in that process was fully aware of that. The requirement for a CBA was stipulated in all official instructions from the Cabinet Office about the preparation of legislation, presumably based on some official government procedural directive. So I wonder what happened, and when, and on whose instruction, it was decided not to follow the normal parliamentary protocols.
Even if there is a legal provision somewhere allowing corners to be cut in a so called ’emergency’ situation, surely that wouldn’t forego a requirement for a CBA at the earliest juncture – as the ATL article says, we must be at least a year past that point now and we have the additional benefit of experience and hindsight to produce an accurate CBA and evaluate whether the measures can be justified. All MPs should be doing their duty and demanding to see one. Sadly, I suspect the final sentence ATL says it all.
That was pre MMT.
Now, money is free, so their is no financial cost, only benefit.
As such, CBAs aren’t necessary anymore.
I know you’re being ironic, but we should bear in mind that the cost side MUST include a huge consideration of the cost of lost happiness, enjoyment of life for the whole population, destruction of democracy. Any CBA that doesn’t include that is not worth much. Let’s say you were falsely imprisoned, but paid your salary. Is that zero-cost? Of course not.
“ Even the simplest two page piece of legislation had to be accompanied by a full cost benefit analysis (CBA).”
I’d forgotten that requirement.
Another example of the executive destroying the props of democratic decision making – the fundamental issue underpinning all this.
Interesting insight, thanks.
Your experience reflects that fact that cost benefit analysis is the sine qua non of rational policymaking.
Conversely, making emergency policy in response to perceived threat without considering cost/benefit is the very definition of panic.
Like you, I find it remarkable that they have gotten away with this aspect so flagrantly.
The bottom line is, I suppose, they got away with it because all the institutions that should have blocked them or criticised them – opposition, parliament, media, courts, without exception, failed to do their jobs.
And I suspect that, like Ferguson, even they were rather surprised at just how much they could get away with.
‘opposition, parliament, media, courts, without exception, failed to do their jobs’
You should add the Church (all denominations) to that list.
On Tuesday someone in our prayer group proposed a letter to Welby. Several of us (including me) baulked at this because it would be very easy indulge in some very questionable emotions.
Anyway, I circulated an email asking:
An extract from an email from one member:
‘Our objective is to tell him that there are fervent CofE members (or simply fervent Christians) who are appalled at his weak-kneed failure to stand up for Christian values, and for ordinary human decency.
We hope to make him aware of the above fact. We want him to examine his conscience, if he has one. He is answerable to God for his appalling failures.’
Many, many Christians (there are a lot on this forum) are deeply aware of the complete failure of the Church. Sadly, there is an even larger number who are not.
I agree with you about the Churches’ failure, but I think (for good or ill) the days are gone when the Church plays a sufficiently significant role in our constitutional arrangements to make it relevant to day to day governmental decision making.
Granted the Churches should have played a role in forming the attitudes of their congregations, on issues like courage, not confusing self-serving and demonstrative virtue signalling with true virtue, putting death in its true perspective, etc. Instead they played a role in pushing in the wrong direction, promoting fearfulness and material obsession. That’s to do with the nature of the people who have prospered in the church hierarchy in the past few decades, I think.
Seems to me the letter you describe could be useful in that context (except that I think Welby himself is beyond any redemption – politically speaking), if it coves the important areas..If nothing else, drafting it serves to allow the issues to be discussed among the drafters.
Even Ferguson couldn’t invent a model that made their decisions look good.
Because there’s no possible way to show that blowing over £1 trillion, destroying the economy, destroying our way of life and mentally scaring millions of people has had a benefit?
“One can only assume that the Government’s failure to publish even basic estimates of the costs and benefits of lockdown is due to fear of what those estimates might show…”
No, sorry, I disagree. They don’t fear this, they know it for certain.
Well, of course, if the benefits are zero, the cost/benefit equation comes out as infinite!
Indeed, I often see even from sceptics some explicit or implicit concession that lives have been saved by anything the govt has done, and the evidence in this area rather points in the other direction.
How could they not?
They might be foolish, corrupt, weak, but they are not ignorant or stupid enough not to see in broad terms what the costs are, and there’s no forecast, even the ICL nonsense, that gives benefits that could possibly match them.
But those of course are not the costs that concern them – only potential political costs to them weigh in their scales.
“the Government’s refusal to crunch the numbers reflects a general overreliance on epidemiological expertise, at the expense of economic expertise.”
What ‘epidemiological expertise’?
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.625778/full
This guy did plenty of such calculations, incorporating QALYs and WELLBYs for many countries, mainly the figure for Canada was reported: 240x as many life years list as saved.
Prof. Raffelhueschen in Germany calculated a factor of 100 early on, but that was before the second lockdown.
https://www.mit-bund.de/content/professor-raffelhueschen-im-interview-der-lockdown-hat-uns-millionen-lebensjahre-gekostet
We all know the reaction and impact that had….
As a behavioural science trained researcher, I can tell you the economists really challenging this are few and far between. Some are sucking happily at the teat of research funding on Covid, many are anticipating lots of natural experiments where they can use econometric models to show the effect of restrictions on the economy. The Behavioural side especially are failing to use any of the policy analysis from CBA and policy evaluation such as RCT because they really don’t want to be at odds with government. They would be the first to tear strips out of the dodgy models. Health economists, many of whom devise the evaluation models have been publicly silent. They really on PHE funding and access Interestingly Ormerod was commissioned by a nominally free market think tank. I only know of a few who really contest the lockdown hegemony. More who are silently seething need to stand up to SAGE and the Panic modellers. This is as much a failure of the academy as it is of public policy.
Well, the only cost benefit analysis the government are interested in is with regards to the elite. And it is all benefits to them, except for the small risk of revolution.
They won’t publish anything to counter the narrative and her Majesties “opposition” won’t push for it because they are lockdown zealots too. Given the MSM were all in it’s not in their own interests to expose this either.
What might get the genie out of the bottle however is the economic disaster looming right in front of us. That and the collapse of the much loved NHS.
#CLOWNWORLD
Answer: for the same reason a crocodile doesn’t bite the back of its own head, it’s not possible
Let me think….. They won’t allow debate, even in Parliament, because not a single thing the Govt has done, can they substantiate the reason for. Why do they use PCR the way they are? What has a positive result, from a flawed test, within 28 days, got to do with a death? The virus attacks mainly the elderly, so let’s make no special provision, dump them from hospital to Care Homes to spread Covid there. Hospitals were the major site of infections. Let’s ban effective prophylactics. Let’s scare people, lock up everyone, despite most being at no risk from a disease not quite as lethal as flu, destroy businesses, cause suicides and death by denying healthcare. Lockdown is killing way more people than Covid. But yeah, says Johnson, let’s do a cost benefit analysis, or doesn’t.
“you’d assume the Government would carry out a cost-benefit analysis.”
Cost Benefit Analyses don’t apply to sovereign governments. They are tools for commercial operations. Hence why they are always couched in a denomination.
You assess sovereign government policies in the same way you would a military campaign. How many bodies for progress made.
The analysis tools we have are wholly inadequate to assess the impact of lockdown.
Cost benefit analysis is not limited to financially quantified numbers, unless a choice is made to limit one to those. If that is done it will usually then be included as part of the overall cost benefit analysis made by the decision-maker. All rational decisions include cost benefit analysis, formal or informal, by definition.
The problem with informal cost benefit analysis is that there’s no accountability for what costs and what benefits are included and what weights are given them.
“You assess sovereign government policies in the same way you would a military campaign. How many bodies for progress made.”
That’s a cost benefit analysis.
“The analysis tools we have are wholly inadequate to assess the impact of lockdown.“
On the contrary, they are perfectly adequate to establish right away that there is no possible rational justification for lockdown as a policy that does not require heroically unreasonable downside assumptions for the disease, or the inclusion of costs and benefits that should have no, or very low weighted, places in the decision (eg party political).
Only ulterior motives or irrationality can explain the decision.
Is the Covid debacle an argument AGAINST a national single-payer health system?
I ask this question after having read Covidonian’s comment earlier.
When the monolithic leviathan of Government & health system embarks on an imprudent course, and
how can the imprudent course be corrected?
“Is the Covid debacle an argument AGAINST a national single-payer health system?”
Yes.
Though it’s broader than that, imo. It’s an argument against the basic error of making government responsible for health. Once that principle has been conceded you are on a one way slide to a totalitarian nanny state. The only question is how fast you travel.
As has been highlighted here before:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience”
Health should be a matter for individuals, families and communities. Where charitable assistance is needed it should be genuine charity, not coerced pseudo-charity based on taxation.
“Is the Covid debacle an argument AGAINST a national single-payer health system?”
No. There is no rational argument against a single-payer health system because of the nature of how insurance works.
Unless you are happy that certain people should die due to lack of health care.
The structure of the NHS could be vastly improved, but the insurance backstop has to be the state. Nobody else can take that level of risk.
“Unless you are happy that certain people should die due to lack of health care.”
People do die due to “lack of healthcare” today, and always will in a world characterised by scarcity. That’s the whole point of the NICE/QALY system discussed elsewhere here – to ration resources. And it doesn’t matter how rich we get or how much we spend, there will most likely always be more that could be spent to prolong lives.
Giving assistance to someone voluntarily is charity. It is only charity that legitimately buys healthcare for those who cannot afford it themselves.
When we shifted from charitable healthcare to state healthcare we replaced charity with coerced entitlement. The result has been a vast shift in resource allocation, from just those seen as worthy recipients of assistance to those with a lobby that can get their preferred issues classed as “health”, from mental issues, through all kinds of medicalised syndromes and supposed addictions, to sexual preference and cosmetic treatment.
If all those who pontificate about the need to give more resources to health and welfare were to donate a fraction of their disposable wealth, that they spend on luxuries, to relevant charities, far more would go to these areas than currently does. But they are almost without exception virtue signalling hypocrites who pretend they shouldn’t have to live up to their fine words until others are coerced to do the same.
Unlessb of course you look at the superior 1st world health systems preferred & enjoyed by the citizens of Germany, Holland, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Japan, Singapore, Australia etc etc.
These all show the 2nd world system of the NHS to be an inferior solution with poorer patient outcomes.
I’m not overly familiar with those systems but is there not some kind of care of last resort provided by the state, or funded by it, for anyone who doesn’t have their own insurance?
I don’t think Lucan Grey is arguing that the NHS is ideal or that it’s superior to other variants, just that some kind of state involvement in healthcare is unavoidable in a civilised society “Unless you are happy that certain people should die due to lack of health care.“
I think you are missing the point.
The Gov &NHS are essentially a single monolithic leviathan, directly controlling the public sector health service, and indirectly through purchases and contracts a large part of the private sector health care industry, it being many companies largest single customer.
The question is not about how to pay for healthcare, there are many ways to do that.
It is about how to control the leviathan once it chooses to pursue an imprudent policy.
‘Why Hasn’t the Government Published a Cost-Benefit Analysis of Lockdown?’ Because the benefits to those that are organizing this are stupendous: subjugated populations (after the populist moment), biometric tracking, mad profits for Big Pharma and Big Tech, etc.
I thought this shit show was for OUR health not for any cost reason. We know they don’t give a monkeys fuck about any of US ergo lying cunts who need to be executed.
Why no lockdown cost benefit analysis ?
Probably same reason why there is no business case for 5G.
It’s quite simple – they daren’t.
From a liability point of view, surely it is better for the government to say there was no cost benefit analysis so they had to base their decisions on other ‘evidence’ outside their area of expertise (and therefore someone else’s fault if it goes wrong), than to try and defend their actions by proving that it was reasonable in the circumstances to ignore the conclusions of the cost benefit analysis?
This should have been the first question from the media during every press conference, TV and radio appearance of every government official since the day lockdowns were first announced.
To answer the question posed in the headline:
they can’t because they’re doing joined up writing this year and will only move on to difficult sums in 2022
Maybe Hancock was too busy getting his end away; following the moral examples set by Johnson and Ferguson?
It isn’t published through fear. Its not published because the goal is the destruction of the country so they can “build back better” aka ‘green’ infused communism.
Think I am mad, one of the first slogans from this time last year was about how you will own nothing, jobs, income are changing and how the ‘climate’ is now more of a focus too. The EU even sought to directly take control of vaccine production did they not?
Wake up. This is all about total control, nothing else. They will keep inventing and attempting new ways and means to have total control over you.
If you are keen on that sort of thing let me remind you that in a free society you can willfully allow others to boss you about and subjugate you. In an authoritarian/totalitarian/communist society you cannot willfully get the opposite.