It’s a shift worth marking. New York Magazine is featuring an article called ‘Covid Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure‘. The authors are two excellent journalists, Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean, who have also written a new book called The Big Fail, which I have not read but intend to. The ascent of the book and thesis is hugely important, if only to further blunt the impact of Michael Lewis’s The Premonition, which came out in 2021 with the purpose of valorising the absolute worst of the lockdowners.
The worry at the time was that Lewis’s book, like The Big Short, would become a major movie that would codify lockdowns as the right way to deal with infectious disease. That does not seem to be happening, and the cleverly titled book by Nocera and McLean seems to assure that this will never happen. Thank goodness. This is progress. Be grateful when we see it. It is also a tremendous credit to all those who have been pushing the Nocera-McLean thesis since the spring of 2020.
Lockdowns were always an impossible means of pandemic management. We knew that from a century ago. It was not even controversial. The orthodoxy in public health survived even up to a few weeks before the lockdowns began.
Out of nowhere, settled wisdom was completely upended. Suddenly, as if straight from Orwell, lockdowns became “common sense mitigation measures”. Meanwhile this country and most other countries around the world were being utterly tortured by a crazed bureaucracy determined to master the microbial kingdom by bullying people and wrecking their businesses, schools, churches and lives.
If nothing else, this era proves for this generation the astonishing capacity of the human mind to undertake utterly insane policy experiments on a grand scale without the slightest evidence that they could ever succeed, even while they trample on all established norms of rights and liberties.
This is a revelation, at least to me. We’ve never seen anything like it in our lives. Speaking personally, this reality utterly shattered a worldview that I didn’t know I held: namely, I genuinely believed humanity was on a path, even an inevitable one, toward greater knowledge, learning and the embrace of freedom. After March 2020, I and everyone discovered otherwise. That was both intellectually and psychologically traumatic for me and for millions of others.
We are still figuring out how and why all this happened. In order to do that, we at least need a consensus that this was a terrible mistake. Even three and a half years later, we haven’t even had that. To be sure, it is very difficult to find defenders of lockdowns [in the U.S.] They have mostly evaporated into the hedges. Even those who pulled the trigger and defended them at the time are all denying that they had anything to do with them. My favourite: we never had a real lockdown.
Regardless, the mere appearance of the Nocera-McLean article takes us quite a distance to where we need to be at least for now. Yes, it is 42 months late, but we take progress wherever we can find it.
Just some quotes from the article:
One of the great mysteries of the pandemic is why so many countries followed China’s example. In the U.S. and the U.K. especially, lockdowns went from being regarded as something that only an authoritarian government would attempt to an example of ‘following the science’. But there was never any science behind lockdowns — not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. When you got right down to it, lockdowns were little more than a giant experiment.
Unfortunately, there is no shortage of policy failures of which to take stock. We do an accounting of many of them in our new book, The Big Fail. But one that looms as large as any, and remains in need of a full reckoning in the public conversation, is the decision to embrace lockdowns. While it is reasonable to think of that policy (in all its many forms, across different sectors of society and the 50 states) as an on-the-fly experiment, doing so demands that we come to a conclusion about the results. For all kinds of reasons, including the country’s deep political divisions, the complexity of the problem, and Covid’s dire human toll, that has been slow to happen. But it’s time to be clear about the fact that lockdowns for any purpose other than keeping hospitals from being overrun in the short term were a mistake that should not be repeated. While this is not a definitive accounting of how the damage from lockdowns outweighed the benefits, it is at least an attempt to nudge that conversation forward as the U.S. hopefully begins to recentre public-health best practices on something closer to the vision put forward by [Donald] Henderson.
You will notice the hedge here: “for any purpose other than keeping hospitals from being overrun.” Another way to put it: lockdowns are fine for rationing healthcare. There is reason to emphatically disagree. Hospitals wildly exaggerated how overrun they were. There were two hospitals in New York boroughs that had high traffic, but this was due to exigencies of ambulance contracts. The rest were largely empty as they were around the country. This was due to lockdowns that restricted medical services to Covid only even in places where there was no community spread, plus public fear of leaving the home.
(I had a conversation last week with the head of a company that sells ventilators and diagnostic equipment to hospitals in New York. He said that in the early months of lockdown, he had never seen hospitals so empty. This was confirmation to me of what we already knew.)
This whole subject needs some serious unpacking. To my knowledge, we still don’t know where the edicts came from to lock down hospitals all over the country. That is a research project all its own. In other words, carving out an exception for “overrun” hospitals is deeply dangerous: it only incentivises the lockdowners next time to game the reporting in a way that is favourable to more lockdowns. This is precisely what happened in the U.K., where the main and even only justification for lockdowns was the rationing of healthcare services.
So this proviso is actually dangerous in every way.
Now we must deal with another piece of this article that is far from correct. I quote (with emphasis added):
As the United States gains more and more distance from the Covid pandemic, the perspective on what worked, and what did not, becomes not only more clear, but more stark. Operation Warp Speed stands out as a remarkable policy success. And once the vaccines became available, most states did a good job of quickly getting them to the most vulnerable, especially elderly nursing-home residents.
The perspective is what we might be called the exogenous theory of the jab. The idea is that the lockdowns and masking and the whole apparatus of disease control exists in a separate system of ideological confusion, whereas the vaccine came from the outside to intervene but otherwise was not part of the planning apparatus.
I certainly once shared this view. About the vaccine in 2020, rumoured to come along at any point, I care next to nothing about it. I assumed it would be useless because my reading on the topic showed that a coronavirus is in the class of pathogens against which one cannot vaccinate.
That aside, there is a real danger associated with attempting to vaccinate your way out of pandemic. You can create the conditions that drive mutations even more, and introduce the prospect of what’s called original antigenic sin. What I had not anticipated was that the shot would be actually deeply dangerous, much less that it would be mandated.
The more research we do, the less plausible this theory of exogenous intervention is. From the very outset, the vaccine was planned and a huge part of the entire pandemic control agenda. And consider this question. Would it have been possible to drive the emergency use authorisation, indemnify the results from any liabilities, retain patents, elicit tax funds for development, plus push innumerable institutions to mandate the shots in absence of the national emergency, the frenzy, the demoralisation and the population-wide panic? I’ve asked many people this question, and the answer is always: no way.
There is no world in which Warp Speed would have taken hold absent the lockdowns. They are all part of the same system and policy. So, yes, it is strange for our authors to isolate the vaccine as good in the context of everything else which they label bad. Emergencies elicit bad actors and bad actions. They are all of a piece.
At this point, most of us have become jaded about media and messaging from mainstream sources. So an easy tag to put on this important article in New York Magazine is: limited hangout. Let’s admit failure where possible, concede mistakes and disasters along the way, even while sneaking in an approving and passing remark about the thing which in the end is the most important part of the whole epoch, namely the vaccine itself. That way, the rubes will be satisfied that there is some accountability going on, even while the biggest and deepest caper of them all gets away without a scratch.
There is no need here to chronicle the innumerable and now widely known failure of the shot. In any case, among those who still want to claim it to be a great success, their messaging is not long for this world. The evidence is too overwhelming, and felt in every part of society the world over.
What we have with this book and article is an important step. It is just one step. Lockdowns utterly shattered the protocols of public health, settled law and freedom itself all over the world. They wrecked myriad institutions, wrought an incredible economic and cultural crisis, demoralised the whole population and built up a leviathan of command and control that is not only not backing down but growing ever more. Far more will be required to utterly and completely repudiate the methods and madness of our epoch.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared.
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As always a first rate piece of writing from Jeffrey Tucker, very importantly pointing out that the limited hangout gifted to the vaccines by the authors Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean, is just that.
These words resonate deeply:
“I genuinely believed humanity was on a path, even an inevitable one, toward greater knowledge, learning and the embrace of freedom. After March 2020, I and everyone discovered otherwise. That was both intellectually and psychologically traumatic for me and for millions of others.”
Truthfully the revelation that in just a few weeks we would revert to a medieval view of the world and science has absolutely shocked me to the core. It is why I now no.longer respect any authorities or institutions. My contempt for mainstream anything is off the scale. I cannot even believe the history I was taught and which I have continued to research.
I no longer understand the world and my view of it. I seeth with anger and frustration.
Great article and perhaps the truths are slowly forcing their way in to the wider public consciousness. If that is correct then the potential ramifications may well just knock the Davos Deviants off their self-ordained perches. Chuckles might even face a repeat of history. That would be nice 🙂.
What a great post! You have coherently articulated my thinking. I’ve been a sceptic and contrarian about politics and current affairs for over 25 years, but since Spring 2020, I’ve found myself questioning eveything I have always accepted as the truth / received wisdom / historical fact.
I’m also angry and frustrated and find myself reassessing a lot of my “cherished beliefs”. I’m a lot less certain about many things – but also more open minded and accepting that my opinions and views may well be wrong.
Thank you for your generous response 👍
Yes, with you there Huxley – seething with anger is how I’d broadly describe my response to officialdom of all kinds too. Been bubbling away for years (decades), but since 1997, then 2016, and then since 2020…. ooh boy, I’ve not calmed down. In John Major’s day the word was about the utter destruction of the Left and how this country was unchallengeably conservative. Would the Left ever get back into power, people asked. 25 or 30 years later and conservatism is the dirtiest word in the English language. Meanwhile, my wife is utterly indifferent to it all; the power of lifestyle tv and the blue pill.
We clearly share similarly trodden paths.👍
“Truthfully the revelation that in just a few weeks we would revert to a medieval view of the world and science has absolutely shocked me to the core. It is why I now no.longer respect any authorities or institutions. My contempt for mainstream anything is off the scale. I cannot even believe the history I was taught and which I have continued to research.
I no longer understand the world and my view of it. I seeth with anger and frustration”
Huxleypiggles – you have summarised my position precisely. I might, however, say that after 43 months of research and evaluation I now understand far too well the world and loath those who have corrupted it.
Many thanks for your kind words.
It was a bizarre combination of medieval and technocratic dystopia.
What was the medieval view? If there is to be any rebuilding we would need to know, and describe how to go on from there.
There was another passage in this article and book evcerpt that made it very clear to me that the authors are still living in cloud cockoo/limited hangout: criticizing the magic goo is verboten! land:
“And when the Chinese government finally abandoned lockdowns — an implicit admission that they had not been successful in eliminating the pandemic — there was a wave of COVID-19 cases as bad as anywhere in the world. (To be fair, this was partly because China did such a poor job of vaccinating its citizens.)”
Amazing denial of reality in light of the high profile collapse of the transmission reduction narrative since a year.
Indeed.
How to spot a lockdown numpty:
An individual who believes that there was a pandemic of unprecedented danger, that lockdowns were the only way to save the nhs/country/world/universe/grannies (‘The whole country is fecked, hundreds of thousands will die, the sky will fall in!) but not frightened enough to believe that they personally had to strictly adhere to lockdowns in every detail.
How many lockdown numpties were there?
Clue number one: the ones that thought it was okay to organise a karaoke evening because singing wasn’t really socialising and it was in the office so work, really; totally legal, obvs……
Clue number two: no-one, but no-one, strictly adhered to lockdowns in every detail (outside of China where they were concreted into their homes! Great model! Let’s all do that…..not).
Never forget that the Bonus Hole, who was Health Secretary for 6 years and left the NHS completely incapable of coping with a Low Consequence Infectious Disease with low mortality rates, wanted the UK to do lockdowns properly, like the Chinese.
I hope there’s a special place in Hell reserved for him.
…and essentially, believes that there were no alternatives, e.g. the truly safe & effective medicines that were banned and ridiculed, e.g. as “horse de-wormer”.
An island of (general) good sense, which the planted stooges at the Hallett Inquiry clearly have absolutely no intention of heeding. And HP’s remarks strike such an accurate chord: like so many, three years later I am still seething and consumed with a level of hatred and loathing I would never have thought possible. And then along come Hallett (ennobled by May, so I should not be surprised) and m’learned friend, with their oven-ready prepared conclusions, to abuse us all over again, making Peter Cook’s “summing up” sketch seem positively well-balanced. With respect, your honour, the key questions for Cummings, Johnson et al are not “why did you swear a lot” or “why didn’t you have more women in your team”, but, for starters: why did you lock up healthy people on the basis of (at best) no evidence at all? Why did world leaders all use the same approaches, even the same words and phrases, at the same time? Who were their orders coming from? How did they find the time and energy to set up myriad units to monitor and blacklist anyone who disagreed with them? Exactly when did development work on vaccine passports begin? (…continues, ad nauseum…)
Exactly.
Well-said. The entire ideology of lockdowns needs to be completely eradicated, root and branch, laying waste to the remains for good. NO EXCEPTIONS. The specious “overrun hospitals” exception was the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent, that ultimately led to the mission creep of the rest.
It’s too bad they didn’t get to the root of the problem, which is safetyism. “Safety First” needs to be demoted to “Safety Third”, utter heresy as that may be nowadays.
Safetyism will always prevail as long as there are lawyers around to sue the backside off anyone with any kind of oversight.
@ Jeffrey Tucker
You have had a revelation. Let me sketch an explanation which makes sense of it:
the changing relationship between politicians and the experts who advise them. It goes without saying that experts should be consulted about policy, and if anything too few scientists, not too many, were consulted about Covid. What’s new is that governments increasingly specify in advance that they will consult this or that advisory body and no other.
A science body of this kind will attract scientists of a certain type, activists who regard science as an endeavour serving purely practical ends. Activists never, ever recommend inaction. They treat the precautionary principle as a law of thought. They see a presumption that correlation is causation, because disaster might strike if it is not. They adopt the most alarmist hypothesis, rename it “The Science”, and denounce calls for evidence and falsification as attacks on science in general which ought to be suppressed.
Conversely, politics no longer attracts activists with clear aims but the type who regard being important as an end in itself. To this end, the leadership of any country less important than France or Australia is no longer enough: hence the proliferation of EU representatives, NATO satraps and UN high commissioners. Politicians have always liked spending other people’s money, but these days they live in symbiosis with mega-rich philanthropists seeking to spend their own. If only you could spend a fortune on taking inaction, but alas you can’t.
“We never had a real lockdown”: just like “Socialism has never been properly tried”. Masochism on the grand scale.
“…Covid’s dire human death toll…” ?
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-covid-death-toll-in-perspective-and-some-homework/
Three years in different parts of the world, and I personally encountered no ‘dire human death toll’. I suppose it depends on what “dire” is intended to mean.
Don’t understand this sentence:
“There is no world in which Warp Speed would have taken hold absent the lockdowns.”
Can someone explain? Doesn’t seem to make sense. Does it have an in-the-know meaning which I’m unaware of?
I think he means that lockdowns were a way to prevent person to person interactions, and to ensure that the only messaging getting to people was from “trusted sources,” eg the entirely untrustworthy BBC, etc, who made it clear from the outset that they would brook no alternative to the official line. Thus all those so isolated from common sense and others without the fear response advocated by the psychologists working out of Downing street would accept the “solution” to the “problem,” ie the deadly enjabment.
The writer is still 42 months behind the curve. Infectious particles called viruses do not even exist, and vaxxines were “emergency countermeasures” mandated by the US DoD, not the WHO / CDC, etc. Sasha Latypova will disabuse him of all his deep misperceptions of what the entire criminal enterprise was all about, if he will let her; suffice it to say it was all about depopulation, and had nothing whatsoever to do with public health.
As usual a great piece of writing just a pity Lady Hallett and her gang of F***wits haven’t caught up with lockdowns being a complete disaster.
It wasn’t a mistake. It was planned and deliberate. Allowing them to get away with “we made a mistake” …. not that they’ll even admit that …. would just be setting us up for their next punishment beating.
My (UK) MP still claims the vaccine was a great success, and dismisses the litany of excess deaths now being seen, and spoken about by Andrew Bridgen MP in the recent Commons adjournment debate (with unprecedented and totally disparaging and contradictory subtitles during it by the BBC). I have sent him a link to this article, quoting “In any case, among those who still want to claim it to be a great success, their messaging is not long for this world. The evidence is too overwhelming, and felt in every part of society the world over.”.