We’re publishing a guest post by Dr David McGrogan, an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School, asking whether the state is ever justified in imposing a lockdown? Dr MrGrogan thinks it might be justifiable in certain limited circumstances, but those haven’t arisen over the past 16 months and are unlikely to rise in the near future.
Whether we like it or not (spoiler alert: none of us does), lockdowns, mandatory face mask wearing, social distancing and so on are now tools of public health policy and will be deployed again – probably next winter. We must continue to oppose this. But we must also recognise that for most of the population – and certainly for our politicians – the question simply is no longer whether these restrictions should be imposed, but which ones and in what circumstances. My personal answer to those questions is ‘none’ and ‘never’, but I have to recognise that insisting on ideological purity on this point will get us nowhere.
We need, in other words, to think seriously about when governments should be permitted to use these extraordinary powers if we have to accept as a matter of fact that they evidently do in practice have them.
Our courts have been singularly unhelpful in providing any guidance on this, having repeatedly spurned opportunities to do so. So have our legislators, who – with honourable exceptions such as Steve Baker and Charles Walker – have at best been pusillanimous, and at worst simply egged the Government on. It is incredible that 18 months into all of this it should still be the case that Government ministers simply appear on TV and in newspapers to tell us what we can and cannot do from month to month without any principled or evidentiary basis, let alone any reference to legal principle. But that is indeed what is happening. This is a humble attempt to remedy that situation.
First, let’s begin by granting that governments should have emergency powers and that this is arguably ultimately what being a government is all about. Few would suggest that the Government’s widespread use of emergency powers during WWII was illegitimate, to use the paradigm example. And let us also grant that there may be circumstances in which governments should exercise those powers to protect the health of the population through controlling disease. If the ‘brain-eating amoeba’, which has an IFR above 95%, were to somehow become airborne and communicable, for example, then there are few who would suggest that the government should not act to attempt to restrict its spread. Magistrates have for many years had the power to order quarantines and restrictions on movement for individual people or groups of people in order to stop the spread of disease, and there is nothing unusual about it – although one does have to say that in cases of truly serious emergency like the imaginary one described above, there probably would not need to be any legal restrictions because people would just stay at home anyway.
Second, let us make clear that where governments do exercise emergency powers it is axiomatic that they do so on the basis of law, because that is what the rule of law requires. Government ministers do not get to just appear on TV and tell people what the law is (although one would be forgiven for thinking that they do, if the evidence of the last 18 months is anything to go by). They have to get their powers from somewhere.
Given, then, that governments should have emergency powers for controlling the spread of disease, and given that those powers have to derive from law, what then should the law permit? When should lockdowns and associated measures be lawful?
Up to this point, the lockdowns and related restrictions have been imposed on the basis of powers deriving essentially from one Act, the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. There are cogent arguments as to why this Act does not in fact permit the making of such restrictions, but sadly the Court of Appeal, when given the opportunity, did not agree. Be that as it may, the Act does not provide a great deal of clarity. The Court of Appeal’s view appears to be that the Secretary of State for Health can do more or less whatever he likes thanks to the existence of the Act, because it contains the magical phrases “special restrictions or requirements” of a “general nature”. This gets us nowhere – it is basically carte blanche for Sajid Javid to make whatever restrictions or requirements pop into his head.
We must start from the position that in a liberal democracy (assuming we still live in one) people ought to be free by default as long as they are not harming others or some overriding public emergency of some kind. Even most lockdown proponents would by and large agree with that proposition. The difficulty comes in the definitions of “harming others” and “overriding public emergency”. For the pro-lockdown position, if exercising your freedom means you might spread a harmful virus, then you are potentially “harming others” and therefore your freedom should be restricted. Those who take this position also argue that there is an overriding public emergency because if left unchecked the viral spread might overwhelm the NHS. For those who are against lockdowns, the possibility of spreading a virus that is harmless to most people is not in itself sufficient to qualify as “harming others”, and there is no overriding public emergency because it has never been a realistic possibility that the NHS would be overwhelmed.
How are we to resolve the impasse? One way to think about this is in the language of rights. People in a liberal democracy have the right to liberty – to go where they choose. This can and should be limited by competing rights, such as those to property. I am not allowed to go into your house and use your bathtub, because you have a competing right to enjoy your own property. Similarly, I am not allowed to go around punching people, because those people have the right to protection from being punched. Those competing rights are rights, because they are legally enforceable. Your property rights can be upheld by a court. So can your rights not to be punched in the face.
Now, do people in general have a legally enforceable right not to be infected by disease? No, they do not, and it would be absurd to suggest otherwise, because the only way such a right could be legally enforced would be for the Government to mandate that each individual must inhabit a hermetically sealed container for her entire natural life. The idea that the right to liberty should be restricted to prevent the “harm” of the potential spreading of COVID-19 is, therefore, nonsense. There is no competing right.
Another possibility does, however, present itself: should the right to liberty of individuals be restricted because it has the potential to interfere with the right to receive healthcare, which arguably does exist (certainly in the U.K.), and which might be critically undermined if hospitals were overwhelmed? The answer to that question I think has to be ‘yes’, with the caveat that it has to be plausibly demonstrated that hospitals are going to be overwhelmed if the right to liberty is not restricted (which also requires evidence that lockdowns actually work!), that everything has been done reasonably to increase hospital capacity, and that it does not involve the closure of schools, where for reasons we do not need to go into the competing rights arguments grow complicated. There might in other words be a justification for partial lockdowns on a competing-rights basis if it were true that the NHS simply could not cope with the pressure otherwise and would have to start refusing treatment.
The “overriding public emergency” justification collapses into the above, in that if the public health system collapsed then that would probably constitute an overriding public emergency, meaning restrictions on liberty would be permissible. Again, it bears emphasising that the mere spreading of disease and the fact of illnesses and deaths occurring, while sad, is not in itself a public emergency.
Where does that leave us, then? First, it suggests that without a strong evidentiary basis, the mandating of the wearing of face masks and social distancing really ought never to be permissible, because without that strong evidentiary basis it is not rationally connected to the goal of preventing hospitals being overwhelmed. ‘It makes people feel safer’ is not a valid reason for the making of such requirements.
Second, by the same token, it suggests that stopping people developing ‘Long Covid’ or dying from disease is not in itself a valid justification for any restrictions on liberty. I am not being facetious in making clear that I do believe that all human lives are precious, but I think freedom from state coercion is too.
Third, it suggests that ‘hard’ lockdowns, not including schools, might be permitted where there is a strong case to be made that hospitals will not cope otherwise and all that can be done to remedy that problem (for instance, the use of Nightingale hospitals) has been done. I do not believe we have ever been at that point during any stage of this pandemic, and we certainly are not at that stage now. We might be at some stage in some future health crisis, though.
Fourth, it suggests that vaccine passports, mandatory ‘track and trace’ and the like ought not to be permitted, because – again – there is no good evidence that such measures are rationally connected to preventing the NHS from being overwhelmed. If it were to get to the point that hospitals could not cope with the influx of patients, vaccine passports and ‘track and trace’ would be fig leaves at best, and ‘track and trace’ has manifestly failed to have any significant impact on viral spread.
Of course, all of these arguments disappear if one is happy with the prospect of not living in a liberal democracy in the first place.
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“Of course, all of these arguments disappear if one is happy with the prospect of not living in a liberal democracy in the first place.”
Regrettably I suspect that is where we are going, and I suspect the additional funding source of the majority of our universities over the last 25 years may be to blame.
That’s the problem with market based solutions. Those who pay the piper call the tune. And now we have a population remarkably well attuned to social credit.
So you’re saying we need to cut university funding from government?
If so I agree. Students need to pay for their education, not people who don’t have degrees.
Lucan, those of us who voted for Boris Johnson thought we were getting the liberal Conservative libertarian he purported to be when, in fact, we finished up with exactly the opposite. The true conservatives in the Tory party represent less than 25%, and I shall never vote for them again. I hope by the time the general election comes around, there is a new party with the principles of personal freedoms, honesty and fairness, otherwise I will only be able to vote for “none of the above”.
It’s a good argument were we not now living in evil clown world where behavioural scientists assist politicians who are run by corporate and pharmaceutical interests that worship at the technocratic church of Davos.
In this world Liberal Democracy was part of the old normal.
I think Toby has an incredible ability to avoid the red pill.
What virus reemoved the concept of free will from the population .So we have to go along with any kind of plan do we becaus there are only 60 million of us Oh i see
I believe it was Mandelson who, a decade or so ago, said that the age of Democracy was over. It starts with Blair – who is so enthusiastic about a Global Health Surveillance system – and the ability to introduce a social credit system.
You need to also add alternatives. So, not only do you need evidence that lockdowns would work, but you also need to compare the efficacy of lockdowns honestly with the available alternatives such as “focused protection” and then demonstrate that the lockdowns would work significantly better than the more liberty-preserving alternatives.
One thing that I’ve found quite distressing about this whole affair is how the fears and predilections of one (large) group of society totally overrode the freedoms of the other group.
Why did we not see freedom-preserving measures in place. How about supermarkets have mask policies on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday whilst going mask-free on the other days? That way we could all exercise our judgement.
If we are worried about the hospitals being overwhelmed, how about letting those who sign papers saying that they’ll refuse COVID-19 treatment if the hospitals are full, go free and party? Why not?
Why did we as a society not search for solutions that respect everyone, but rather just exercise a tyranny of the majority and bulldoze over everyone who disagreed?
There was scope for compromise on many of these issues, but no quarter was given by the media or the elites as they condemned us to be incarcerated in our own houses.
Excellent points.
A few conclusions to be drawn :
“I have to recognise that insisting on ideological purity on this point will get us nowhere.”
Au contraire mon ami, NOT insisting on ideological purity on this point will get us into big trouble, which is where we are.
Given that it is clear that governments cannot be trusted with these powers, and cannot be trusted not to manufacture or prolong emergencies and use the state’s power to lie to people, they should never ever be used under any circumstances.
Inalienable rights are inalienable rights after all
They and that concept reining supreme, over utilitarian goals and concepts, were introduced in response to their abuse due to and in the name of utilitarian goals.
The Nazi Germans, Stalin, Mao&co were all convinced that they acted utilitarian and for the greater good of their people.
Not insisting on ideological purity GOT us into this big trouble already.
Masks and invasive testing mandates were infringements upon our right of bodily autonomy, accepting them opened that box of the Pandora.
The acceptance of some professions deemed not being ‘essential’ was another such infringement and box.
I’ve been disappointed how few people have presented the argument as ideological. The anti-lockdown movement has often been on the back foot, conceding too much.
The biggest error is agreeing with lockdown proponents that restrictions are cautious, they are not, they are disastrous.
A cautious exit from lockdown is like a cautious reduction in the number of times Frank Bruno punches you.
The necessity of adherence to fundamental principles is indeed what all this revolves round.
“If the ‘brain-eating amoeba’, which has an IFR above 95%, were to somehow become airborne and communicable, for example, then there are few who would suggest that the government should not act to attempt to restrict its spread.”
I would. Whatever the government does will make it worse. Presumably the government would panic and clear the hospitals of brain-bug infected patients and send them somewhere full of susceptible people.
I would argue that that particular amobea has already successfully spread to 95% of the people anyway.
Them being easily identifiable by their vaxx passports and/or masks.
We very much didn’t “beat Covid” in the UK, so your title image should be showing not Boris Johnson but Jacinda Ardern or Xi Jinping…
I think it is a projection into the future…
Beating your own people using “COVID” as pretext is not the same as “beating COVID”. Not to mention that it’s physically imposible to “beat” viruses.
However, rather like the clown Johnson we can be assured that the lovely Jacinda will be doing her erstwhile best to make life intolerable for the vaccine aware, i.e. those who do not want the Pfizer poison running through their veins and clogging up their arteries.
“Third, it suggests that ‘hard’ lockdowns, not including schools, might be permitted where there is a strong case to be made that hospitals will not cope otherwise and all that can be done to remedy that problem (for instance, the use of Nightingale hospitals) has been done.
in the situation you describe, something has to ‘give’. That something would be the ability of hospitals to cope rather than my liberties.
Not my government
A dictatorship
There is evidence but it is ignored. e.g. there is over 90 years of epidemiological modelling and yet we are bombarded with squawking about exponential growth.
Furthermore there has been a problem with people not seeking the evidence. e.g. for months we were told the Kent variant was more deadly until someone pulled their finger and did the actual work.
What is needed is more post-hoc epidemiological analysis and massively less inaccurate predictive ‘modelling’ (computer guess-work)
Every few decades we send hundreds of thousands of young men off to battle to defend our liberties (as perceived at the time). They give their lives for our freedom.
How odd then to throw away all our rights to attempt to prolong the TV watching of some care-home geriatrics.
Would we now make a peace with the Nazis because in defending our freedom someone might get shot?
Odious the way the govt have used war imagery regarding the coronamadness when we have surrendered rather than fought
If the point of lockdown was to save the NHS then it failed miserably
Try getting a doctors appointment or a knee replacement
The NHS is fucked, it seems it’s only purpose now is to pay it’s employees
No the NHS is there to protect us against the Chinese army as it is our only organisation that is big enough
Good luck with that.
Most of the nursing staff are too fat to do any fighting.
Pretty good at dance routines though.
I’m still a Nurse and former soldier I’m ready for the initial engagement with our own Government.Death to all those cunts
makes sense, really, more work for their nationalised industry…
not to mention it’s opened a massive can of worms. BBC this morning were pushing the “we need salt + sugar taxes” line to … “save the nhs”. if we save the nhs from everything then what is the fucking point of it?
This is a point I’ve made a lot. How many illnesses or accidents can genuinely be said to be no fault of the person affected? Genetic diseases perhaps, dementia, some cancers, perhaps some respiratory ailments but only if the patient has never smoked, taken regular exercise etc. We could rule out most heart disease/strokes, lots of cancers, anything smoking-related/COPD etc, ditto anything related to alcohol such as liver failure and so on, bad knees and hips if the person didn’t keep fit (which would need to be proved), pretty much all accidents and trauma since you could always have been more careful, couldn’t you? And with the new precedent set by covid, anything infectious was probably your fault for not social distancing or washing your hands enough. I guess people could be allowed to have babies, but only the minimum required to continue society, so more than two would be a no-n0. Where does it end?
The NHS is a service for humans, so surely it has to accept that human folly is part of that?
There is no such thing as “an avoidable accident” except in (3rd party) hindsight. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have happened. And same goes for diseases claimed to be caused by lifestyle choices someone happens to disgree with.
Ie, it’s not so much human folly which has to be accepted but human limits in correctly perceiving and correctly reacting to externel events. Even the most dilligent person will make mistakes.
If the studies on the Hunzas before their way of life was altered by contact with the outside world are to be believed (and there have been other “disease free” peoples), precious few of the ailments we see affecting Western populations on a large scale need to happen. Unfortunately, I suspect most of our politicians (and some of our doctors) can’t even spell the word “orthomolecular”..
Ah, you noticed that too! I said yesterday that banning pizza ads was the answer to heart deaths. Perhaps I shouldn’t give them ideas…
Ever wonder if the framing of lockdowns as being to “protect the NHS” is fundamentally about discrediting the NHS?
The article seems to be summarised as
“lockdowns are ok if they work”
which I don’t agree with
Indeed. As I’ve posted below, if you concede they can be OK in some set of circumstances, you’re lost.
It’s clear that the default position now has to be limit government power as much as possible. Of course you’ll never limit it completely and governments need power to function, but the aim should be to have as many barriers as possible to prevent the state overreaching. It was the starting point of the people who framed the US Constitution (not just the bill of rights but their structure of government, states’ rights etc).
Coronamadness was not some one-off aberration, it was the culmination of long term trends. Governments globally have overreached in synch in an unprecedented way. If there is no “great reset” that on principle leaves people believing in inalienable rights then they will overreach again and again, forever.
very few people seem to believe in the importance of rights. been too long since the WW2 I suppose
‘Lockdown’ is a term invented in the american prison system
Lockdown meant locking all inmates in their cells in order to quell disorder
I don’t recall any disorder when they did it to us
Or perhaps in terms of a lockdown of a city after a terrorist attack?
You’re definitely over the target Toby and thank God for men like yourself.
Stay strong.
My sense is a much greater proportion of Brits agree with you than we currently appreciate. Polls are cycnically and routinely manipulated to say the opposite, the Media is wholly bankrupt, and Boris and chums have their sights on a the Reset.
Meanwhile, in the streets and thoroughfares of Britain ordinary folk are losing patience.
Please, please keep banging on.
I think this argument in favour of “lockdowns” doesn’t really make sense. NHS capacity is a direct function of the amount of money the government is will to spend on building and maintaining such capacity even despite it migtht not be needed most of the time. Eg, in Germany, the talk for the people is “hospitals in danger of being overwhelmed” and the talk for the spending beancounters is “hospital excess capacity to be reduced to save costs”.
Consequently, the government failed to provide the facilities for excercising one’s right to medical treatment. Punishing the people for that make no sense.
Governments around the world made exactly the same arguments for lockdowns, two weeks, three weeks to flatten the curve, and are still under restrictions well over a year later.
The state of the NHS is immaterial. They’d have said the same thing if we’d had the best health service in the world.
This was a reply to an argument put forth in the text: As there’s a right to medical treatment, lockdowns are justified if the health service would otherwise be overwhelmed. I don’t think so because “health service would be overwhelmed” means “government failed to provide enough capacity”. Conveniently, the government also claims that “expanding capacity” wouldn’t make any sense due to “exponentiell growth”.
Considering this, punishing the people for failures of the government makes no sense, especially if the government is also unwilling to rectify these failures. Politicians are supposedly responsible for the outcome of their policies. Hence, if people die because “the health system got overwhelmed”, this should result in some “Mr Austerity” going to the dock (or block :-)) and not in shutting down all of everything and putting everyone under house arrest.
“In What Circumstances are Lockdowns Justified?”
Never.
The only other alternative is ‘sometimes, we’ll tell you when we get there’
Steve
Do you have access to the latest Covid Symptom data? It looks as though the unvaccinated/vaccinated ratio has narrowed again since that summary earlier to-day.
only what I posted earlier
https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/new-cases-plateau-aead-of-freedom-day
would have been nice if he included a graph like before but I expect they don’t because it doesn’t look so good
Clare Craig has tweeted the following graph
https://twitter.com/ClareCraigPath/status/1415677813919678486/photo/1
Vaccinated : 16093 UP from 15537
Unvaccinated 16827 DOWN from 17581
I’m not sure where she gets this from. Perhaps it’s a feature for app users.
Purely observational data – but the last two instances I know of actual SARS infection and illness were both vaccinated.
An enjoyable read. A well argued case but seriously undermined by failing to take into account the current wider situation.
Bozo’s handlers have decided we will no longer enjoy a Liberal democracy and by use of the 1984 Public Health Act (1984, can’t believe this was not done on purpose) and the ensuing emasculation / buying off of the judiciary and Parliament have ensured that our normal forms of redress have been taken from us.
Professor McGowan is therefore extremely naiive in the case he makes.
I would be more interested in the arguments he could put forward in terms of dealing with our current Orwellian situation than I am in his genteel suggestions about a world we shall never enjoy again.
When the prison is rioting
All lockdowns are standing in fundamental opposition to the correct answer to the trolley problem:
Their collateral damage will always be unknowable in advance, therefore, they can never be justified.
That our lockdowns were for a pathetically undangerous disease in the big scheme of things, that the scientific basis for anything was minimal to absent, that scientific dissent was censored instead of engaged with to arrive at better sutions, that treatments were badmouthed and withheld instead of professionally trialled, promoted and made available etc. are just sideshows here and in truth crimes comitted in conjunction with all Covid ones.
It is a scandal that no cost/benefit analysis or collateral damage assessment was and is undertaken.
Much has been said about the domestic collateral damage already, but our Western lockdowns also put 120 million people in the 3rd world into poverty and into being hungry again, most of them will die soon and much sooner than otherwise, and Britons alone now have the blood of 5 million of them on their hands.
That and most of the other collateral damage was evident from the start, but some unknowable in advance one is also occurring, for example in
New Zealand, which now sees children falling ill and hospitalised due to immunity debt due to its Sentinelese approach.
Which brings me back to and confirms my first two paragraphs:
the trolley problem and the only correct answer to it.
“Now they got the whole country sectioned off, you can’t make a move without a form”
Harry Tuttle (played by Robert De Niro)
Brazil (1985)
I was just rewatching Gilliam’s masterpiece now, hadn’t seen it in thirty years. The film’s Ministry of Information ain’t got nothing on the world’s health ministries and their Big Pharma bosses. Truth really is even stranger and more terrifying than Gilliam’s dystopian vision.
Oh for a beautiful woman in a big truck to come and save us
Never.
If the airborne “brain eating amoeba” were to make an appearance, we would all require our own oxygen supplies and our own suspension tanks to live in for a few months. The government would be powerless to stop its spread, just as it’s been powerless throughout this experience to do anything about the spread of any airborne pathogen.
That’s the whole “lesson” to learn from lockdown. The lesson that the government implied it already knew when it said “three weeks to flatten the curve” or “slow the spread”. Lockdowns cannot hope to stop transmission. They only slow the inevitable under the flimsy pretext of helping the health services to cope. There isn’t even any evidence they can do that. By the time you get to “20 months to control the virus and reshape society”, you should stop asking whether these measures could ever be justified and pick up your pitchfork.
The thing is, people are pretty good at saving their own skin. So if there was an ACTUAL pandemic we wouldn’t need all these new regulations, restrictions and rituals. People would do these things voluntarily because on the whole they don’t want themselves or their families to die! We’re like genetically programmed to instinctively do what’s best to survive.
We may have needed some emergency laws to cope with loo roll looting, distribution of N95 masks, ivermectin black market etc. Medics would’ve been allowed to just turn up and volunteer at the Nightingales. Even the sheep would’ve realised that scotch eggs and 10pm curfews wouldn’t work.
A good argument about the fundamental issues that have been undermined over the last eighteen months.
The only positive in this quagmire is that, to the rational mind, the notion of the adequacy of our legal-constitutional framework has been comprehensively blown out of the water.
… but the exposure comes too late.
In response to the statement :
“They [the government] have to get their powers from somewhere.”
… that relates to the same issue : the total inadequacy of current parliamentary arrangements in protecting fundamental rights.
Dr David McGrogan, the author, is an absolute asset to this site with his analyses. He wrote something of similar quality back in the winter.
“First, let’s begin by granting that governments should have emergency powers“
The argument falls down at this point, imo, at least insofar as peacetime is concerned.
Once you concede that the government should have access to emergency powers, experience suggests that “emergencies” will arise.
Better to have clear lines beyond which the government is barred from stepping under any peacetime circumstances, ruat caelum. One of them, imo, should be a complete ban on opinion management by propaganda or by behavioural manipulation. Such a thing is counter to the most fundamental idea of democracy, and while it seems harmless and useful on its face, we have just had a harsh demonstration of just how costly it can be.
Ahmm, no, overwhelmed hospitals is not an excuse for anything. Let’s say you know 100% for sure that hospitals will be overwhelmed a lot if you don’t do some kind of restriction – it still does not justify it.
Having a right to be protected from illness is a stupid way to consider things. Unless someone on purpose stops a hospital car with a patient from going to hospital or disperses a capsule full of viruses among crowds, they are in no fault of jeopardizing anyone’s health. We live in a world of pathogens and interact with them and transmit them all the time and it’s no ones fault if that pathogens leaves their body and enters someone else.
Maybe epidemiologists (real ones like Sunetra G, Martin K, John I, etc. not those pop-star “scientists” from Imperial-CL) can average R numbers over whole population, apply some math and try to guess how quickly the virus will spread and what will it do. But when it comes to law and personal responsibility and morality, no one needs to do anything to slow the spread (even if you knew 100% what could slow the spread).
The state should prepare the healthcare system, good idea to increase the wages of healthcare workers during pandemic, employ police and army to carry medical equipment around so nurses and doctors don’t have to, carry food to those who chose to self isolate for their own health (much better use for cops/army than harassing people for being outside “for no good reason”), but at no point does the state or any authority have the right to limit freedoms.
Also consider that the state of hospital care without pandemic is a relative one. It is not some kind of absolute level at which comparisons are to be made. You could always make a better public health by diverting resources from other public areas to public health and “saving lives”. Even during non-pandemic times, someone can argue that you are “killing people” by not increasing health care budget 2x or 3x times. So what then, the state could force people into force labor camps and steal their salary to fund public health? Or it can forcibly take a kidney from person who has 2 of them and give it to someone who needs one in order to survive?
Since on this topic, official c19 deaths are the same age (or a bit higher) as all-cause mortality for each country. In UK about 600k die every year. A lot of these deaths are preventable. If you increased the health care budget 2x or 3x times (at the expense of everything else), a lot of very old people could live a few years more (and then would die in large numbers in the next few years), some old people could live 5-10 years more, some middle age few decades more and some young people maybe 50 years more.
Even if you take the >100k c19 deaths figure at face value for UK, there is no reason why these people deserve special attention than all 600k that die every year.
It would be a start if they would provide scientific evidence to support emergency measures, after say a few months.
This wouldn’t be so hard for them to sort out if they knew that they needed to obtain it.
As it stands we’ve got ‘elephant trumpet’ science — they’re telling us the elephants will come back if they stop blowing their trumpets, but no-one has seen any evidence that trumpet playing scares elephants.
Not a start, sorry. They would just lie and subvert the scientists. It has not been that hard.
Mr Young, if we were dealing with reasonable people who practiced real dialogue and could negotiate rational solutions based on logic, law, and the scientific principles, your arguments would be sound. Unfortunately the last 18 months has increasingly demonstrated that we are not.
We therefore have to fall back on to some fundamental principles of rights on which we cannot give way.
This whole episode has been based on nations taking rights from their citizens to support supposedly ailing health provision. For a disease with an IFR of 0.15%. And with plentiful evidence that cheap generic drugs can relieve most symptoms.
Now we face even further restrictions as evidence grows that all ’emergency use’ vaccines that we are being coerced to take are useless in stopping transmission and infection.
There are two interlinked aspects to this; lockdowns and coerced vaccines.
Your piece is worthless without inclusion of the second of these which is being used as the vehicle for introducing biotech IDs worldwide.
There is an element here of debating detail in the long grass while the focus on the ball has been lost.
The simple answer to the question is “None!”
Bullying other people can never be justified. Not even if you give yourself moral permission to do it.
Very interesting. You lose me, however, at the suggestion that a “right” would be implicated by the overwhelming of a medical system and consequent rationing based on maximum capacity. To observe that, at some point under extraordinary circumstances, demand for health care may outstrip the capacity of a medical system is simply to observe that scarcity exists in the medical field as elsewhere.
If we are terrified even by such simple economic facts as the fact of scarcity, we are much too fearful.
If there is a famine, I am hungry, and I face the reality that food though often seemingly plentiful in our supermarkets is, in fact, scarce. Likewise with illness and health care. In either case, we should act together to mitigate such problems of scarcity.
But only mitigate. We cannot pretend to eliminate the fact of scarcity altogether, and we cannot eliminate the possibility of extraordinary circumstances overwhelming our best-erected defenses against pains of scarcity and need. If we think we can do that, then we really are fantasists, and we are in for some real disappointment.
We would not be the first generation to think we had cracked it, only to find out the hard way we have not. But we might be the most comfortable, so have the farthest to fall.
We must integrate meaningfully and acceptingly the fact of scarcity (and indeed of death, in which scarcity achieves its fullest and most sorrowful expression) into our understanding of the world. We must be wise, and do our best, without imagining we can will away these things altogether.
Then we will recognise the importance difference between those things that are truly “rights” and those things that are merely great achievements from which we should be glad to benefit and to which we should be glad to contribute.
Demonstrating that lockdown is communist, simultaneously immoral and impractical, is the key
https://www.bitchute.com/video/Y792MBqICVPz/
Former WHO whistleblower interviewed about the people really behind what’s going on.
Unfortunately there are far too many authoritarians in SAGE, Parliament and the mainstream media who enjoy, benefit from and/or are simply desperate to use their power to restrict other people’s Rights.
Protection of a State Bureaucracy and their totemic symbol of Socialism in the UK, the NHS, will trump any argument for Civil Rights, however well it is made.
The best thing Libertarians (who can’t move to Florida) can do is insulate themselves as much as possible from the lunacy and try to live life as normally as possible.
Q: “In What Circumstances are Lockdowns Justified?“A: NONE
Let’s face it, our NHS has become the CHS Covid health service, and a very poor service at that. As earlier in this update, it has refused to authorise the use of inexpensive drugs in common safe use which have a proven beneficial use against Covid-19. Its use against all other illnesses has been severely curtailed, and people are dying or will die as a result of its poor service. Why does no media give the daily death figures from all purposes to demonstrate what a small proportion Covid-19 represents and the resulting correct focus that it should be given, and the corresponding lack of justification for the restrictions that persist?
There is so much evidence for the uselessness of face masks to prevent virus transmission, but the naive who believe they should continue never see it because they don’t bother to research it, and it is certainly not any part of the information publicised by the media.