One of the claims put forward by the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration is that lockdowns unfairly shifted the burden of COVID-19 onto the working class. As Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta argued in a piece for the Toronto Sun last November:
Low-risk college students and young professionals are protected; such as lawyers, government employees, journalists, and scientists who can work from home; while older high-risk working-class people must work, risking their lives generating the population immunity that will eventually help protect everyone.
The same idea was captured in a viral tweet by the art critic J.J. Charlesworth:
To evaluate this claim, let’s begin by looking at some of the data from Britain. Last July, the ONS attempted to quantify the extent to which different jobs can be done from home. Unsurprisingly, they found that higher-paying jobs in the professional and managerial classes are much easier to do from home, whereas lower-paying jobs in the skilled and unskilled working class are much harder to do from home. (‘Front-line doctor’ is an exception.)
While “key workers” are drawn from all income deciles, a relatively large percentage are drawn from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th deciles – particularly in the food and necessary goods sector. And according to the ONS, 15% of such workers were at an increased risk of COVID-19 because of a pre-existing health condition.
In January of 2021, the ONS computed age-standardised mortality rates for COVID-19 in different occupations. They found that men in professional and managerial occupations were substantially less likely to die of COVID-19 than those in service and elementary occupations:
The pattern among women was similar, although somewhat less pronounced. (The highest age-standardised mortality rate was for women working as plant or machine operators.)
In a study published in Nature, Elizabeth Williamson and colleagues analysed data on a large sample of British adults, and found that individuals from the bottom quintile for area deprivation were significantly more likely to die of COVID-19, even after controlling for age, sex, ethnicity and a number of pre-existing health conditions. This may be because such individuals had greater exposure to the virus, although there are other possible explanations.
It’s important to note that men in elementary occupations and skilled trades are more likely to die for any reason than men in professional and managerial occupations. In other words, there is a mortality gradient across occupations for all-cause mortality, as well as for COVID-19. This means that the two gradients may be partly caused by the same factors – such as more men in working class occupations having pre-existing health conditions.
Furthermore, the fact that people in working class occupations were more likely to die of COVID-19 does not, by itself, prove that lockdown shifted the burden of COVID-19 onto the working class. Such people might have been more likely to die of COVID-19 even in the absence of lockdown – say, because they were less able to engage in voluntary social-distancing.
In order to evaluate the claim that lockdown shifted the burden of COVID-19 onto the working class, we need to compare countries or states that did lock down with those that did not. Of course, the only major country in Western Europe that did not lockdown is Sweden.
In an unpublished paper, Sunnee Billingsley and colleagues analysed Swedish data, and found that workers in frontline occupations were not more likely to die of COVID-19 when adjusting for individual characteristics. Their findings indicate “no strong inequalities according to these occupational differences in Sweden and potentially other contexts that use a similar approach to managing COVID-19”. This supports the Great Barrington Declaration authors’ claim.
Another way of testing the claim that lockdown shifted the burden of COVID-19 onto the working class is by comparing infection rates across social classes before and after lockdown.
In a study published in BMC Public Health, Nathalie Bajos and colleagues analysed French data, and found that individuals in the highest social class saw a substantial decline in the risk of infection after the country went into lockdown, whereas individuals in the lowest social class saw a much smaller decline. Though it’s possible these differences emerged due to voluntary changes in behaviour that happened to coincide with the start of the lockdown.
Overall, there is tentative evidence that lockdown did shift the burden of COVID-19 onto the working class. However, comparative studies will be needed to investigate this claim more systematically.
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“The right to a fair trial presupposes the existence of impartial judges.”
For once, I find myself agreeing with the unconscious bias industry. No such thing as impartiality. The arbiter is part of the outcome.
Trying to politicise it?
That happened when the Rule of Law was abandoned with Acts of Parliament – such as race, sex discrimination – giving some groups of society advantages backed by the State and legal system that others don’t have, and which can be used by the State or others for political, ideological reasons, gain, or just malice and spite.
Under the Rule of Law, it must be clear when a particular action by a citizen breaches the law, so they know they are acting illegally and in any case their action can be shown in a Court to be in breach.
The so-called hate crime act makes it an offence if just one person is offended by an action. So it is not the action that causes the breach, it is the reaction. This leaves it entirely unclear to a citizen whether their action is illegal. If nobody claims offence it isn’t, if someone does it is – and there is no time limit. The Gestapo can turn up weeks, months, years later because somebody read or heard about what was said and is “offended”.
The Rule of Law, like our other Common Law Rights no longer exists.
Yes, I think David Starkey makes this point too that “rights” laws give minorities a higher level of “justice” than everyone else: that is, if I understand him, that the minority rules the majority. For instance, a rapist who can’t be deported and the majority are expected to subsume him.
Off-T.
No articles dealing with this so it has landed here.
An absolutely fascinating article which outlines were this country is headed if we don’t pull our fingers out in the next few years. Target date is 2030 as i keep stating.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/uk-leading-global-test-bed-ai-enforcement/5877274
“Klaus Schwab convinced him – as well as his compatriot the King of England – that this is the future. “If you want to keep your job for the next four years you had better set about it right away” warn his minders.
An upright turbocharged goose step march into state controlled surveillance; big data; central control and a subservient brain damaged social constituency – is what is actually being announced by the British prime minister.
The Guardian newspaper boldly announces
“Keir Starmer will launch a sweeping action plan to increase twenty fold the amount of AI computing power under public control by 2030.”
Hello, there’s that infamous 2030 date looming up again. Everything is supposed to be in place to have achieved full spectrum dominance over freedom loving members of the human race by that date”
The area where AI seems to have the most potential is in snooping and censoring and generally making our lives more difficult – it doesn’t matter too much if it makes mistakes one way or another, it’s a case of “never mind the quality, feel the width”.
Luckily (!) we won’t have enough electricity to keep the lights on in 2030, let alone run AI systems
Lol
The internet is powered by unicorn farts
Correct.
Interesting to see that nuclear reactors are OK for powering AI installations but not steel plants or chemical works… which actually create real wealth and proper jobs.
It would be extremely helpful if the author had at least summarized what he’s criticizing. Or maybe at least provided a link. As It stands, I have no idea what he’s writing about save that he’s opposed to something.
The nice thing about human rights is that their definition is often vague enough that it can be interpreted to mean anything. The COVID era right to life included force masking people, enforcing certain distances between them and regulating who might legally meet whom under what circumstances, all claimed to be motivated by the state protecting people’s right to life by ensuring that they wouldn’t come into harmful contact with other people.
Likewise, a right to life, that is, to enjoyment of human rights, had the ECHR find that the Swiss state was not doing enough to combat climate change to protect elderly climate activists from the dreadful consequences of heat waves in summer in Switzerland, a country not exactly known for its hot climate because it’s location in the Alps.
Hence, if Hermer wants to intertwine rule of law and human rights, he most likely simply wants to make arbitrary unaccountable political decisions about stuff, eg, end all deportations of foreign criminals because of their right to whatever suggests itself and – at the same time – send any British people who critcize this to jail for incitement to whatever comes to mind first.
To import ‘human rights’ into the notion of the rule of law is misconceived
The important thing for our rulers about “rights” is that they are in the gift of the government. This is in contrast to freedom, which belongs to each individual. This is the reason for the interesting modern fact that as “rights” proliferate, freedom diminishes, and government power increases.
I like what the incomparable US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has to say about “human rights” and the law: that rights should be understood as conferring freedom from government interference rather than entitlement to government benefits.
What they want is courts run by and for the elites. That way lies perpetual socialism snd no freedom.
Surely, the law was politicised by Blair in 1997?
ECHR, Supreme Court? Lefty judges?
Wasn’t Lord Hermer the guy who pressed for the prosecution of Tommy Robinson for a civil offence which is unusual for the AG to
do? Presumably Robinson had no human rights to appeal to such as being kept in perpetual solitary confinement!
Going to the source of Human Rights, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I can find no actual rights at all, only well meaning aspirations. No wonder they have become so malleable for politicians and so lucrative for lawyers.
The last paragraph and Southport so much for lawyers