From the start I vigorously opposed Covid lockdowns and protested the hysteria that lures people to tolerate such tyranny.
Although I wasn’t the most eloquent of lockdowns’ critics, I – like Scott Atlas, David Henderson, Phil Magness, Jeffrey Tucker, Toby Young and the team at the Daily Sceptic, and the heroic authors of the great Great Barrington Declaration – never wavered from this opposition.
Not for a nanosecond did I as much as toy with the idea that lockdowns might be worthwhile. Every impulse within me, from my marrow to my mind, confidently informed me that lockdowns were destined to unleash Orwellian oppression, the terrible precedential consequences of which will plague (pun intended) humanity for decades.
Given all that we’ve learned since early 2020, I’m sad to say that my – and the relative handful of others’ – opposition to lockdowns and other Covid diktats was fully justified.
My blood still boils at the thought of lockdowns, and my anger at those persons who imposed them is as intense a sensation as I have ever experienced. It continues to be so.
I relate my early, unequivocal and unending opposition to lockdowns not to applaud myself. I do so, instead, to put into context the case that I’m about to make in opposition to any and all calls for attempts to impose formal liability or sanctions on those individuals who inflicted lockdowns on humanity, or who were prominently positioned to encourage their use. I believe that attempts to hold lockdowners personally accountable by imposing on them formal punishments would create yet another terrible precedent, one that would only compound the troubles that we’re destined to suffer from the precedent that was set in March 2020.
Before explaining my opposition to attempts at imposing formal punishments on lockdowners, I note that my argument isn’t about forgiveness. While a case can be made to forgive lockdowners, that’s not the case that I’ll make here. Forgiveness, being personal, is beyond my capacity to recommend or to oppose. To forgive or not is exclusively your call. My argument here is simply a plea to my fellow anti-lockdowners not to call for, or even to wish for, the imposition of state-imposed sanctions on prominent lockdowners.
Nor do I oppose formal hearings that aim to expose the truth about the Covid-era actions of Government officials. While I worry that such hearings will, like Covid policies themselves, be infected with excessive politics and misunderstanding of science, as long as such hearings threaten no formal punishments or sanctions on officials found to have acted wrongly, the likelihood that such hearings will unearth and publicise important truths is high enough to warrant their occurrence.
Perhaps ironically, one reality that leads me to oppose formal efforts to sanction lockdowners for their infliction of harm is a reality that plays a prominent role in my opposition to the lockdowns themselves – namely, political action is inherently untrustworthy. Summoning Government today to penalise officials who imposed lockdowns is to call for action by the very same political institution, if not the same flesh-and-blood officials, that imposed the lockdowns.
The danger is too great that a Government agency or commission empowered to sit in judgement over individuals who were in office during the two years starting in March 2020 will abuse its power. The risk is too high that the pursuit of justice will descend into a hunt for revenge. No such agency or commission will act with the requisite objectivity to make its decisions just. To suppose that any such formal inquiry into personal guilt or liability would be adequately apolitical is as fanciful as supposing that lockdown-happy officials in 2020 were adequately apolitical.
In this imperfect world of ours, officials who were responsible for pursuing even horribly destructive policies yesterday are best left immune to being formally punished or sanctioned by officials who are in power today. The dangers of empanelling tribunals to punish recently dethroned officials for their policy choices include, but go beyond, the above-mentioned risk of today’s officials pursuing revenge rather than justice.
An equally fearful danger springs from the reality that almost every significant change in policy can be portrayed by its opponents as an unwarranted assault on humanity. Because real-world complexities will always enable opponents of the challenged policy to muster some ‘evidence’ of extensive damage that the policy allegedly caused, empanelling tribunals today to punish officials whose policy choices were implemented yesterday will, going forward, discourage not only the active taking of bad policies, but also the active taking of good policies.
And the disproportionate attention that the public (and politicians) pay to the seen at the expense of the unseen makes it likely, in my view, that the discouragement of good policy moves would be much greater than the discouragement of bad policy moves.
Suppose that a precedent is set that encourages those in political power today to persecute, with charges of having pursued harmful policies, individuals who held political power yesterday. Further suppose that when COVID-28 hits, officials then in power wisely follow the advice offered in the Great Barrington Declaration. I have no doubt that choosing this policy course would minimise deaths. But no policy will completely avoid deaths. COVID-28 will indeed kill some, perhaps many, people.
When COVID-28 is finally over and a new political party takes power, there’s nothing to prevent the new party from empanelling a tribunal to hold those officials previously in power personally responsible for the deaths that occurred on their watch when COVID-28 raged – deaths that will be blamed on what will be said to be the reckless following of Great Barrington Declaration guidance.
While such a tribunal might be made to appear akin to an ordinary court of law following the same rules of procedure, evidence and proof that operate in ordinary courts, the reality is that any such tribunal would be a political body. Each such tribunal would be used, above all, as a forum for the politically ascendant to publicly flaunt what they and their compatriots are certain is their moral superiority over the degenerates now in the dock.
A task almost as important for the individuals prosecuting such ‘trials’ would be to damage as much as possible the future electoral prospects of the party with which most of the accused are associated. Each proceeding would be incurably and poisonously political, as would each finding, verdict and sentence. If such a tribunal were ever to mete out true justice, it would be only by pure chance.
As satisfying as it would be for me to see the likes of Neil Ferguson, Anthony Fauci, and (thankfully now former) Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison behind bars – as gratifying as it would be to know that Deborah Birx and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer are bankrupted by hefty fines, while Justin Trudeau and former British cabinet minister Matt Hancock are confined for years to house arrest – that satisfaction and gratification would be swamped by fear of the actions of future tribunals.
This price is far too high to pay.
By all means we must hold accountable any and all officials who broke the law. If any lockdowners are credibly believed to have committed actual criminal offences, then those individuals should be arrested and tried, under a presumption of innocence, in proper courts of law.
Similar treatment should apply to officials accused of committing civil violations. But also, and above all, the court of public opinion should remain in session and vigilant. In this court, I will continue, whenever appropriate opportunities arise, to be both an active prosecutor of those who fuel Covid hysteria and authoritarianism, and an active defender of those who resist this hysteria and authoritarianism.
I will also, however, steadfastly oppose any attempts to hold Covidocrats personally liable for their inexcusable policy actions taken in 2020 and 2021. To go down such a road of holding personally guilty or liable those officials whose policy decisions turn out to be mistaken would be a one-way trip down a rocky road to a treacherous destination.
Donald J. Boudreaux is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He writes at Café Hayek. This article was first published at AIER and the Brownstone Institute.
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JMJ
For whatever reason, I couldn’t find my comment in the original Telegraph article, so I thought I better post it here.
“The question, then, is how governments came to adopt highly restrictive policies in the first place.”
Anne Elisabeth-Moutet answered this question in her latest Off Script interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQzYp_Ez2Yw&list=PLJnf_DDTfIVBbOIrHRuz70AnbLV2US-FX&index=32): McKinsey
“Why was the experience of emergency planners, and two decades of pandemic preparation, abandoned everywhere except Sweden?”
Well presumably because Tegnell was making recommendations based on the actual virus.
That’s certainly not what Midazolam Matt and Fat War Criminal were doing.
It is fervently to be hoped that Midazolam Matt is unlikely to make old bones.
I expect due for a peerage and knighthood.
And plenty of pharma share options, directorships, chairmanships of quangos; the usual things that these deadbeat crooks are in line for. Perhaps he can wipe Gates’s derriere as well.
Please refer to the former Health Secretary by his proper name of Fart Hancockwomble and the Prime Minister as Kim Jong Johnson.
Sweden reacted in a sensible manner, everyone else went bat sh*t crazy.
It is a very inconvenient fact that the idiots in charge would rather you ignore.
As long as the mainstream doesn’t report it they’ll be fine.
The mainstream media are constantly sniffing out the news that support their world view and the interests of their masters and only report that.
So they did report on Sweden briefly when they had an uptick in hospital admissions towards the end of 2020 and the king was recruited to criticise Tegnell’s approach. That was widely reported. The rest, not a peep.
The MSM also pretends that what Sweden did was somehow a ‘gamble’ and completely contrary to accepted pandemic practice – when in fact it was the normal and recommended way to respond, as set out in most countries’ pandemic strategies.
It was the Covidian rituals which were a ‘gamble’, which failed on its own terms (it didn’t cause any reduction in infections or deaths) and caused all the damage which many predicted – and we haven’t even seen the worst of the economic impact yet.
How many of those who cheered on the piss-money-up-the-wall schemes like ‘Eat out to help out’, ‘Nightingale hospitals’ which received little or no use, and all the rest of it, are now outraged by inflation, rises in national insurance, cuts to rail servces, etc, etc? Some of us tried to warn then what would happen but they didn’t want to know as they were too busy banging pans for the NHS.
Yes, i noticed that Sweden supposedly gambled when, in fact, everyone else did and lost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oq8-mOldEg
Analyses by Ivor Cummins
The lockdown zealots’ standard response to outlier Sweden is “it’s not as densely populated as the UK”
There is always some bullshit excuse, lent to these brain-dead morons by the media, for any piece of evidence they dislike
As people have pointed out at various times: The population of Sweden isn’t evenly distributed over the country, but mostly resides in a few urban centers which are as densely populated as urban centers in the UK.
They knew masks, lockdowns and social distancing did nothing. But they passed laws to make us do them.
They knew the injections didn’t work and carry risks yet still encourage parents to inject children as young as five. They want a fourth booster too.
For all of the above they used an array of psychological manipulation techniques to overcome people’s natural resistance, much of which exploited their decency as well as inducing fear.
All of the above is known and easy to find information on with only a little searching. Much of it has been published here on DS.
Why would anyone think any of this is about health or the government trying to help people? Does anyone still think that? Does anyone believe those same people will care about public enquiries?
Only those stuck in the mental prison that has been created for them.
So regrettably, still most people.
Almost everyone I know.
And me.
I had a discussion with a colleague earlier in the week – intelligent, articulate bloke, but a full-on Covidian and believes everything the MSM and government says on it. He still thinks that wearing face nappies is a good idea and trotted out all the usual about they must at least reduce the viral load and thereby save people from a worse infection (“if it saved a few lives it was worth doing”), and the government must have had a good reason for mandating them. He clearly didn’t believe it when I told him that the stats across the world show no impact on infections or deaths caused by nappy mandates. Same unquestioning support of all the rest of the Covid theatre.
Got onto Ukraine later – I’m sure you can predict his MSM-fed viewpoint on that subject…
It is rather interesting that a country like Sweden that is quite plugged in to the western global order managed to chart a more or less sensible course, at least initially, before huge international pressure was brought to bear on them.
I suppose it may have something to do with the fact that Sweden is a real technocracy supported by a population that trusts its technocrats. That trust presumably is based on the perception by the population that their technocracy has not been hijacked by narrow interests and functions in the best interests of the population.
I agree with what you say about Sweden and technocracy.
Sweden is different in a few ways:
It also seems to have a responsive technocracy:
https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments–cash/payments-in-sweden/payments-report-2021/3.-the-riksbanks-work-and-policy/the-position-of-cash-as-legal-tender-needs-strengthening/
Interesting, although it seems that their definition of cash includes electronic cash, which isn’t really cash.
The problem I find with Swedes is that they seem to have an astonishing strong belief in the good intentions of their bureaucracy and extreme skepticism that it can be hijacked for nefarious purposes and used against them.
They went all in on immigration too. Or, rather. Their trusted elites bought into multiculturalism.
Just like NL. NL’s initial approach was a ‘lockdown light’, with no home incarceration at all, no shops or offices closed, no masks, the head of the Outbreak Management Team was quite adamant about that and reiterated the point over several months. Indeed, it was not the intention for schools to shut, PM Rutte was quite categorical about that when the measures were announced on a Thursday afternoon. Come the Sunday evening, he announced the schools would close, as parents had made it clear they would not send their children to school and teachers made it clear they would not come in.
Things changed the following winter, due imo to pressure from Berlin/Brussels. This past winter saw another strict lockdown, for absolutely no reason – other than to introduce 2G on the apartheid app, i.e. only vaxxed/recovered – and we know that they’ve time-limited the recovered option, so that after x number of months you would have to get vaxxed to keep the rights and freedoms guaranteed to you by the constitution and any number of human rights treaties.
Another thing that needs to be reviewed is just how much pharmaceutical companies (particularly Pfizer, whose Bourla seems to have fewer than 6 degrees of separation from EU chief von der Leyen) determined what measures needed to be taken as of the time the vaxx was introduced. Seeing as from then on all measures were predicated on people getting an unproven vax – follow the money.
But the Dutch, like the Swedes, trust their government, trust their bureaucrats, and can’t believe they would be incompetent, disingenuous or corrupt. Funny, as they have no problem believing that about any random politician from a Medeterranean country.
Electronic cash is great. It allows government to create money without even needing a printing press
There’s a big difference between fiat currencies (which have existed for a long time) and getting rid of cash entirely.
1984, A warning or a roadmap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZgcOj47ToE
Isn’t the biggest fact that the appropriate people in the medical establishment (in this case Tegnell) have the power to make these decisions, rather than weak politicians who will follow the herd as in most other countries?
Of course many in the medical establishment would also have followed the herd once the pressure was applied – Sweden was lucky in having a sensible person in post who was strong enough to stand his ground.
But knuckling under to Russophobia.
Sweden already has its people in an iron grip of control freakery, masquerading as a democracy.
Allegedly twice as many people died ‘from Covid’ in Sweden as compared to Finland. Does that count as a ‘success’?
They are not that clever in Sweden – even the Swedish Government themselves are admitting that their experiment of ‘multiculturalism & diversity’ has gone all pear-shaped.
There is no virus. So the question is, why did Sweden suffer more excess deaths (however minor they may have been when compared to other Western countries) than its Scandinavian neighbors ?
Bercause it had low mortality in 2019?
Correct. Sweden’s benign flu seasons prior to 2020 are well documented.
“There is no virus.”
Derek Toyne will be along shortly to say he had a dose of ‘the Covids’ which is absolute proof that the virus exists.
Who knows who died in Sweden and why… perhaps they just died of boredom, as Sweden is a particularly boring country.
Lockdown saved no lives whatsoever and Sweden had no deaths from lockdown because they didn’t lock down.
They had fewer deaths than locked down Belgium, with the same population
Swedes were not allowed out of Sweden for some time in 2020, so they were locked up in their own country.
I don’t think anyone will ever get to the bottom of ‘Covid’ – the real facts have millions of people covering them up, and ‘anti-vaxxers’ have jumped on the bandwagon. My basic outlook is that there was no pandemic, it’s all been a massive fraud for control of people and for making profits out of it.
But perhaps there was ‘a virus’… plenty of people keep saying they ‘had Covid’ and lost their sense of smell and taste for a while.
If anything, it’s probably ‘flu re-branded. No dead bodies littering the streets during this ‘pandemic’, no wheezing and gasping their last breath folk in Tesco’s…. but the same with the ‘Killer Vaccines’ – no people dropping dead on the streets, no people slumped over the radishes in the shops with heart attacks, no commercial jet planes crashing.
It’s all been a bit of a mystery, yet a very unfunny state of affairs with people having been denied seeing their relatives in care homes, the elderly forced to die alone in ‘isolation’, the deliberately induced fear by behavioural psychologists working for The State, the coercion to take experimental so-called ‘vaccines’, and the taking the piss out of whole nations getting the citizens to wear face masks for 2 years whilst those doing the ordering and getting the Police to dish out fines weren’t wearing face masks themselves, nor doing any ‘social distancing’.
Unfortunately the ‘Covid scam’ continues to this day. Those responsible for it, and those who have profited from it, are unlikely to be brought to any kind of justice.
It’s all been very sordid, and quite scary when we’ve been shown just how thick and obedient the people around us are.
Good points made.
“Allegedly twice as many people died ‘from Covid’ in Sweden as compared to Finland.”
Congratulations, I was hoping someone would point that out, the old argument of “Sweden had the most deaths out of all the Scandinavian countries”
Population by nation (2020)-
Finland 5.131 million
Norway 5.379 million
Denmark 5.831 million
Sweden 10.35 million
So why do you think they had more deaths?
The “multi culturalism” was foisted on them, the same as all the other European countries.
“Allegedly twice as many people died ‘from Covid’ in Sweden as compared to Finland.”
Congratulations, I was hoping someone would point that out, the old argument of “Sweden had the most deaths out of all the Scandinavian countries”
Proportionately, obviously. So many per 1,000.
You should be careful EF, cherry-picking like that might lead some to regard you as a silly, negative troll.
Try including Germany, Poland or more importantly any of the Baltic states into the analysis – all in close proximity to Sweden – and you’ll see a different picture.
And just to pre-empt a typical troll counter of “yes but Finland has a land border with Sweden, those countries don’t” – there’s only about eight people who live on Sweden’s land border with Finland.
What cherry-picking?
“there’s only about eight people who live on Sweden’s land border with Finland.”
I bet there is no-one at all who lives on that border – it consists of two rivers, and I can’t see anyone living in the middle of a river or in the middle of a bridge. There are many small towns and villages beside that border, though – much more than 8 people.
Nobel prize for this man?
Having sanity whilst all around where loosing their heads.
And while they are reviewing Sweden’s lower than average excess deaths, they must also carry out a genuine review of the excess deaths that have been occurring since January 2021, particularly in months when there was a low prevalence of coronavirus – but a high prevalence of covid vaxx shots.
I think it would be a lot harder to impose strict lockdowns again. I’m not so sure it will be that difficult to get people to roll up the sleeve and take a 1x (2 tops – until it becomes 3, of course) year jab, particularly if this once-a-year (or twice-a-year, or thrice-a-year) shot will be required to activate your apartheid app.
“I’m not so sure it will be that difficult to get people to roll up the sleeve and take a 1x (2 tops – until it becomes 3, of course) year jab, particularly if this once-a-year (or twice-a-year, or thrice-a-year) shot will be required to activate your apartheid app.”
I’d like to share your optimism regarding that assertion Jane, but for the bulk of the people I know, the call to be jabbed has created, if you like, a sense of ‘habit’, you get your “call”, you don’t do your own thinking or research, and you just go to jabbing centre and roll up sleeve, especially if it is to mean that your smart phone won’t work like the “entry device” they are trying to turn it into. I’m seeing so much dumbing down, go with the flow, just do it mentality around me, and such an absence of hard logic or even just thinking so I’m not hopeful.
We’re in agreement, I wasn’t being optimistic. I may have worded that sentence a little clumsily.
I do not think they can impose another strict lockdown easily. I do fear that it will be reasonably easy to get too many people willing to get what will initially be called a one-off shot at the beginning of flu season, which may be topped up around Christmas. Particularly if the apartheid app is made dependent on it. Some people may be okay with a 1x a year and happy to get their green check. If they are at risk of having the green check switched off, they will probably trot along and get their 2nd jab.
Let us hope there are enough judges who do not care to become pin cushions just to make pharma shareholders richer. About time they remembered why the trias politica exists and what their role in it is.
And Once Again, for the Hard of Hearing – not many on here I’m glad to say – so, just for the interlopers and, hopefully, those of influence :-
This was not, is not and never will be, about a Virus.
It is only about TRPTB taking advantage of/creating a climate of fear in order to achieve their wet dream of absolute control and power.
May they and their ilk rot in Hell, forever. (And, especially Blair.)
Their “vaccine” house of cards is collapsing, so they need diversions.
I wonder what further pleasures await us.
‘The question, then, is how governments came to adopt highly restrictive policies in the first place.’
No, the question is why? We know how they did it.
The same question Why? are they adopting highly restrictive and ruinous practices to try to bring about impossible changes to the Earth’s climate system.
‘The question, then, is how governments came to adopt highly restrictive policies in the first place. This must be the starting point for any national inquiry. Why was the experience of emergency planners, and two decades of pandemic preparation, abandoned everywhere except Sweden?’
At the start of the claimed pandemic it looked like the Tory goverment were going to act sanely and implement the accepted pandemic protocols which basically meant advising people to wash their hands a bit more.
Then all of a sudden fatty Johnson imposed the lockdown despite SAGE not supporting lockdown.
If ‘The Science’ (SAGE) were not initially pushing lockdown who convinced fatty to impose it?
Fear won over logic.
When you have as much money as Gates, it’s just a matter of throwing a few million here and a few million there in order to get the desired result.
Gates…..meeting they had in February 2020 but no Minutes taken.
Sweden panicked less badly than most of the world. But it panicked nonetheless.
Life in Sweden at the height of the covid panic that was occuring elsewhere in Europe –
Banned mass-gatherings. Shut down schools age 15 and above. Paid citizens to stay home and work. Urged country vacations. Strongly urged social distancing. Later, knuckled under altogether and instituted local lockdowns and mandated masks on public transport.
But vaccination wasn’t mandated upon threat of otherwise losing your job, which in the UK was a massive factor in forcing compliance with the illegal rules.
They were not perfect by any means but it was different enough to provide a powerful counterfactual, and when I was there in autumn 2020 it certainly felt utterly different to the UK – quieter, yes, but much freer and more relaxed.
Life in Sweden at the height of the covid panic that was occuring elsewhere in Europe
No, Sweden didn’t panic.
Wasn’t it Belarus whose president told the IMF to get lost after offering him a payment of $950 million if he would impose the same covid lockdown theatre that was foisted upon most of the world?
Makes you wonder who else was made a similar bribe and accepted it.
Tanzania, eventually.
WHO then died in mysterious circumstances…
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong –
“WHO Figures on Sweden’s Excess Deaths Must…”
Lyrics
You like tomato and I like tomahto
Potato, potahto, Tomato, tomahto.
You say, Must, WHO says, F Off
Let’s call the whole thing off.
Anders Tegnell has been removed from his post and given a non-job at the WHO, so he won’t be able to make the same ‘mistake’ next time.
Last I heard, the WHO don’t have a job for him after all.
Perhaps he wanted to form opinions based on expertise and data analysis, rather than Tedros’ brown envelopes.
I’m still angry that so many gullible Muppets believed there was a deadly pandemic and went along with the masking, distancing and jabbing when it was quite obvious to any sensible person that nothing unusal was happening.
They put those of us who didn’t want injecting with a useless dangerous substance in a bad position.
i don’t think the masses do much thinking these days, as has been seen with trends on social media, from the ice bucket change, Harlem shake, BLM and now the virus, jab and ukraine followings, the majority will follow any trend that’s given to them without question.
It is so important to be trendy these days.
Don’t use WHO figures based on modeling.Use raw data real from the countries with the best death staistics in the world.Any pandemic death burden should be counted on excess mortality based upon standardized for age.Below is real data not bogus WHO model data.It is even better for Sweden.
All the idiot controllers like Johnson have changed their stupidity to what they call climate change and have found another way to rob the people and this time put that money into the so called green companies and their supporters. Its time to realise CO2 is not a pollutant but part of the basis for life on earth and we humans are just returning some of it that plants have removed from our atmosphere over millions of years while at the same time supporting better new plant growth. There are pollutants from ICE vehicles and fossil fuel generators and we should concentrate on reducing that, rather than worrying about recovering the balance of CO2 in our atmosphere to closer to what it was in very ancient history when animal life emerged.