Lee Cain, Boris Johnson’s Director of Communications during the early stages of the pandemic, has responded to ex-Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s claim that the U.K.’s lockdown policy was based on fear and questionable scientific advice, with the trade-offs not even discussed. Writing in the Spectator, he says none of it is true, labelling it “Covid revisionism”.
I know because I sat around the cabinet table as politicians, scientists, economists and epidemiologists agonised over the extent to which lockdown would devastate lives and livelihoods. It was not an easy decision for anyone. We locked down because we knew the cost of ‘letting Covid rip’ was far more damaging to both the health and wealth of the nation. But as the pandemic fades into our collective memory – and critics try to rewrite history – it’s clear that the biggest mistake we made was not locking down but doing so too late.
I vividly remember the morning of Saturday, March 14th 2020 when, as part of a small team of advisers gathered in the Prime Minister’s office, Boris Johnson was told that the initial plan for managing the pandemic was failing. Without urgent intervention, the country’s healthcare system would collapse under the strain of tens of thousands of seriously ill patients. The challenges facing us in that first wave were immense. We knew the NHS didn’t have enough beds, there was a massive shortfall in PPE and a severely limited number of ventilators.
The initial modelling used for crucial decisions, we found out, was very wrong. A review conducted by data experts recruited by Dominic Cummings uncovered that, unless we changed course immediately, the NHS would be overwhelmed within three weeks.
The PM sat in silence as three scenarios were sketched out on a whiteboard. The first looked at no restrictions, the second at social distancing measures and the third considered a national lockdown. Only under the last option would the NHS avoid collapse. But it took the PM a week to declare a national lockdown. That decision eventually saved tens of thousands of lives.
What I don’t recognise is the idea that, as Mr. Sunak suggests, lockdown’s trade-offs were never properly discussed. Since the interview, other lockdown sceptics have used his comments as evidence of a failed policy. Mr. Sunak is an incredibly talented politician and Covid remains his finest hour. The furlough scheme provided a safety net for which millions remain grateful and ranks alongside the vaccine roll-out as the high point of the Government’s pandemic response. However, the suggestion that the trade-offs were ignored is simply false.
As a Government we asked a huge amount from the people of this country. For more than three months we told them to “stay home, protect the NHS and save lives” because, having analysed the options, we knew that restricting social contact was the best action people could take to keep themselves and others safe.
But the trade-offs were highlighted daily by Chris Whitty in our morning Covid meetings. They weighed heavily on everyone involved. But we believed that – morally, politically and practically – lockdown was the right thing to do. Yes, it was a flawed, blunt tool, but it was the best one we had in a very limited toolbox. We desperately needed more time to improve NHS capacity, buy more ventilators, develop drugs, purchase PPE. And, of course, create a Covid vaccine. Lockdown gave us that time.
Or, I should say, the public gave us that time. They trusted the government. They stayed at home. They applauded NHS workers. They made a difference. It wasn’t these actions we should regret – it was the weeks wasted by a government too pusillanimous to act. The truth is that we locked down late because we had become paralysed by the fear of the trade-offs.
Opponents still say lockdown was a mistake. What do these critics think would have happened to transmission rates – rising exponentially – if we had failed to lockdown? What would they have done instead?
Lee Cain may have been there, but so was Rishi Sunak. I suspect the argument over whether alternative viewpoints were allowed comes down to the fact that Cain is talking about March 2020 whereas Sunak is probably talking about the period between then and December 2021, when lockdown became a go-to tool, imposed for months on end to ‘control the virus’, and dissent was routinely crushed and even demonised. Sunak knows what he experienced at Cabinet meetings during the pandemic when he tried to suggest alternatives to lockdown, and we don’t have to take his word for it as we know that censorship existed at all levels during the ’emergency’, and continues to be exercised against sceptics. We also know that, whatever Chris Whitty might have been mentioning to ministers behind closed doors, no proper cost-benefit analysis was produced by the Government in relation to Covid lockdowns or restrictions.
But Cain’s argument here is interesting mainly because it shows that lockdown proponents are still stuck in March 2020 and no amount of contrary evidence will disturb the serenity of their self-congratulation. Cain repeats the discredited claim that “Covid’s exponential growth meant that for every day that decisive action was delayed, the magnitude of the problem would soar”. The Spectator even kindly printed immediately below Cain’s letter this week a letter from Edinburgh mathematician Professor Simon Wood, which sets out once again (as he has numerous times before, including in the Spectator) the clear evidence that new daily infections in England, far from “rising exponentially”, were already falling before lockdown on March 23rd 2020. This crucial point is shown in Professor Wood’s chart below, taken from his peer-reviewed study on the subject. Yet rather than conceding that his entire argument is built on a falsehood, Cain expanded his letter into a full-length article which the Spectator published Thursday morning and which repeats the demonstrably false assertion that lockdown was necessary to address “exponentially rising” infections. Why the Spectator editors have allowed him to publish the unsubstantiated claim (twice) without addressing the contrary evidence, which they have themselves published beneath it on the letters page, is frankly baffling. At what point does this qualify as spreading misinformation?
Professor Wood also notes in his letter that Imperial’s React-2 study, which asked a sample of those with Covid antibodies when their symptoms started, gave similar results.
Professor Wood is far from alone in making these observations. Already in April 2020, Oxford’s Professor Carl Heneghan noted in the Mail that by projecting back from the peak of deaths on April 8th it could be inferred that the peak of infections occurred around a week before the lockdown was imposed. Indeed, Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty himself told MPs in July 2020 that the R rate went “below one well before, or to some extent before, March 23rd”, indicating a declining epidemic. Yet Cain remains blissfully unaware of this evidence, still clinging to the falsified belief that without the “blunt tool” of lockdown, infections would have risen “exponentially” and “overwhelmed” the NHS, causing it to “collapse”.
Professor Wood points out that the modelling on which Cain relies for his counterfactual projections predicted that more than 80% of the population would be infected in the first wave of an unmitigated epidemic, whereas in fact no more than 10% were infected across European countries, including Sweden where no lockdown was used, irrespective of what restrictions were imposed. Modellers also assumed that up to 2% of the infected would require critical care, which was much higher than was actually the case, and so wrongly predicted an overwhelmed NHS.
Many published and peer-reviewed studies have looked empirically at the general question of lockdowns and found no relationship between restrictions and outcomes. Here is a sample:
- “Full lockdowns and wide-spread COVID-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality.” “A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes” by Rabail Chaudhry, George Dranitsaris, Talha Mubashir, Justyna Bartoszko, Sheila Riazi. EClinicalMedicine (Lancet) 25 (2020) 100464, July 21st, 2020.
- “We find that shelter-in-place orders had no detectable health benefits, only modest effects on behaviour, and small but adverse effects on the economy.” “Evaluating the effects of shelter-in-place policies during the COVID-19 pandemic” by Christopher R. Berry, Anthony Fowler, Tamara Glazer, Samantha Handel-Meyer, and Alec MacMillen, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA, April 13th, 2021.
- “Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.” “Covid-19 Mortality: A Matter of Vulnerability Among Nations Facing Limited Margins of Adaptation” by Quentin De Larochelambert, Andy Marc, Juliana Antero, Eric Le Bourg, and Jean-François Toussaint. Frontiers in Public Health, November 19th, 2020.
- “Comparing weekly mortality in 24 European countries, the findings in this paper suggest that more severe lockdown policies have not been associated with lower mortality. In other words, the lockdowns have not worked as intended.” “Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison” by Christian Bjørnskov. CESifo Economic Studies, March 29th, 2021.
- “While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs.” “Assessing Mandatory Stay‐at‐Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID‐19” by Eran Bendavid, Christopher Oh, Jay Bhattacharya, John P.A. Ioannidis. European Journal of Clinical Investigation, January 5th, 2021.
It’s well past time lockdown proponents were asked to address this contrary evidence and no longer given a free pass in making the unwarranted assumption that lockdown restrictions are necessary to control an outbreak or even effective at doing so.
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