In my latest Spectator column I’ve revisited the theme of why lockdown sceptics lost the argument – and I say this in spite of believing another national lockdown in England is quite unlikely.
I’m optimistic that the government won’t implement ‘Plan B’, let alone impose another lockdown – but not because sceptics like me have won the argument. Why do I say that? Because the public debate is about whether another lockdown is necessary, with the participants on both sides taking it for granted that non-pharmaceutical interventions are an effective way of suppressing infections. For at least a year, sceptics have been arguing that these don’t work, pointing to numerous research studies showing that the rise and fall of infections in different regions of the world has no correlation with stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, business and school closures, etc. But this argument has fallen on deaf ears.
One explanation – the one I like best – is that we made the mistake of trying to appeal to reason. This was a point made by David McGrogan, a professor at Northumbria law school, in a piece for my sceptical website. ‘I am somebody who encourages students to investigate and debate facts for a living. So this has been a very bitter pill for me to swallow indeed, but the reality is that most people are just not actually interested in finding out the truth for themselves. They are much more interested in conforming with what they perceive to be the “moral truth” – the prevailing moral norm.’ The reason the vast majority of the public supported lockdowns is because they believed they were the ‘right’ thing to do.
Of course, the lockdown enthusiasts wouldn’t have been so quick to conform to that ‘moral truth’ without believing that lockdowns actually did what they said on the tin. But I was astonished by how many intelligent people just swallowed the government line without subjecting it to proper scrutiny – particularly as lockdowns meant the surrender of our liberty on an unprecedented scale, as Lord Sumption has pointed out ad infinitum. It was as if such people were yearning for the social solidarity usually available only during wartime. And the flipside of that – denouncing anyone who refused the accept the restrictions – also had wide appeal. No doubt the government helped this process along by spending hundreds of millions bombarding us with propaganda, much of it designed by behavioural psychologists to penetrate our reptile brains.
But I go on to say that sceptics have to accept some responsibility for their failure to persuade more people that lockdowns don’t work.
Common sense dictates that if you confine most people to their homes then infections will start to fall, so if we’re going to persuade people that lockdowns don’t work we need a compelling theory as to why that hypothesis is false. We never came up with one. We also got a lot of things wrong at the beginning, such as saying there wouldn’t be a second wave and, when the second wave was upon us, claiming it was a ‘casedemic’ not an epidemic. I don’t think we got more things wrong than the enthusiasts – take their prediction that daily infections would rise to 100,000 after ‘freedom day’, for instance – but given that we were arguing against the prevailing wisdom we couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. In retrospect, I wish I’d been more cautious.
Worth reading in full.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to the Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Toby, you need not of been more cautious.
The reason lockdowns don’t work is because of a class error in the logic:
1) Asymptomatic transmission does not drive respiratory virus epidemics. It is the very process of exhibiting symptoms that causes live virus particles to be expelled from an infected person’s body making them available for transmission to another person.
2) A person who has symptoms which include feeling unwell will normally extract themselves from society. They feel sick and stay home; they delay trips to shops, gyms etc. and most importantly do not go into work.
3) Respiratory virus infections are most effectively transmitted indoors where the concentrations of viral particles are highest without the effect of dilution in larger spaces and ultimately outdoors.
4) Therefore, the net effect of lockdowns is not to keep the infected away from society; they wouldn’t be there anyway but to keep the uninfected at home for nearly the whole time and in closer proximity to the infected.
It is also important to realise that the old and those with chronic illness (the ‘vulnerable’) are normally less mobile and more housebound so, this cohort is apparently unaffected by lockdowns but because everyone else… Read more »
Toby. The supposed common sense notion of a lockdown is that it equates to a quarantine, this is why the Great Barrington Declaration also called for the vulnerable to “lockdown” or shield themselves or whatever you want to call it. The point is for it to work it has to be a viable quarantine. A viable quarantine needs “disinfected” support from the outside so that those being quarantined can continue to live, unless the full means of living are within the quarantine. So then the argument is a society wide quarantine is actually impossible unless it is held at the boarders of a viable society. (Hence for a while at least Australia and New Zealand etc). Generally speaking however it is common sense that a society wide lockdown just cannot in any practical sense be a viable quarantine (unless held at the boarders) – because people in every single household still have to get out to live. All a lockdown does is change the way it would have spread and might slow things down a bit.
Of course it was a case-demic and still is, but it depends on what some people meant by it – what on earth did… Read more »
To add to my point: there would have no repeat lockdowns (the first one perhaps) if the pharma/medical/government establishments had stuck to their previous knitting and not successfully but fatally pre-determined that vaccines were the only way out. Allowing doctors to be doctors and treat sick patients rather than ignoring them unless they got so bad they had to go to hospital.
It is now been long and widely known that the success of those who did treat their patients
with pre-existing approved medicines, care and varied protocols of differing but similar design had a near 100% success rate. There would never had been the need for the carnage of the past 2 years.
If we truly are sceptics, this is the only conversation that we should be promoting. As I said, time to get the gloves off.
http://www.thedesertreview.com/opinion/columnists/freedom-and-ivermectin-prevail/article_05d8061e-3035-11ec-bfe8-2b94d8993caf.html
I have not seen any mention on this site of the Fuellmich Coronavirus Investigative Committee and its work. The evidence they have uncovered about the absurdities, illegalities and inconsistencies in what we have all been told, and upon which the whole regime we have been under is founded – and yet we see no-one else backing up their work and running with it.
Same with the work of others – Del Bigtree on the Highwire (in Jan ’20 i.e. before we had heard of the virus he blew the lid on the WHO and vaccines), Steve Kirsch and the Frontline Doctors in the USA (thank God for the USA as there is a spirit there that Europe does not have – except for the French perhaps and a few of us).
Toby, you have been too damn polite and all sceptics (that is an understatement of what we are) need to pull the whole thing together and tackle the lunacy and illegitimacy, the scientific fraud, of what has gone on. It is much more dangerous than simple ‘scepticism’ blogs permit.
Time to take the gloves off.
For sure, we sceptics got a lot wrong. We assumed that the virus would behave much like a ‘flu virus. We did not account for the jabs. When the jabs were trialled in India, South Africa, Brazil and the UK, we got the Indian variant, the South African variant, the Brazilian variant and the Kent Variant. As it transpired, the Indian variant almost totally escaped the vaccine and has become the dominant strain worldwide.
We’ve seen a few waves. The original Wuhan strain, the Kent variant, and the Delta variant. In all cases, there was initial epidemic spread, then herd immunity threshold was reached followed by a rapid decline in infections.
The jabs have messed up that trend. Delta has spread in ways that we didn’t expect and continues to do so, infecting the jabbed and the unjabbed alike. Only those who have already had an active infection are largely immune from reinfection whether or not they have been jabbed.
What can we conclude? That experts who said that only the elderly and most vulnerable should be jabbed and then let it rip in the rest of the population were right. It would have meant that the young and least… Read more »
I read somewhere along the waythat in UK, 95% of the population have negative attitudes, which leaves the remaining 5% with positive attitudes. If this be so, our Government could not fail to succeed in controlling our nation to the extent that they have.
I agree with Toby’s observations on this. But, I think there’s something to be pushed further from it.
I also came to the conclusion that Reason is not a very good means to convince people of things outside of a very tightly framed discursive context (ie MAYBE some kind of a classroom in which the rules are very clear and regulated). The whole covid thing has been frustrating in the extreme for exactly this reason. I had just completed a PhD and could not understand why rigorous investigation was being almost universally (globally!) rejected).
So the idea of moral truth that Toby mentions seems to be a good explainer.
However, I also now believe that there wasn’t ever going to be a way of reasoning out of this moral panic. There was what Walter Benjamin called a “Tendency”, and we were all on the other side of it. Like using a leaf blower against the wind. It simply won’t work, won’t do anything.
The real question… is this tendency still going, and where will the wind blow next?
Too late I am afraid, read Dr. Mercola’s great article in today’s Mercola’s newsletter.
“Common sense dictates that if you confine most people to their homes then infections will start to fall….”. It’s not common sense, it’s making an unfounded assumption, that appears to be common sense.
We can all assume that the sun goes around the earth, the evidence is common sense. It took a brave Galileo to turn this assumption on its head.
One piece of data that is being missed – or deliberately not discussed – is the ages of people in the UK who are testing as positive cases. The spike is caused by massive testing of schoolkids under 12 according to ONS data. All other age groups are largely unchanged. See Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey, UK – Office for National Statistics You will have to scroll down to “by age”
The cases are predictably dropping off because it is now half term and testing at schools has paused!!
“Why Sceptics Like Me Lost the Argument”
– except (ssshhh…) he still thinks the call from the PM is coming.
LS was NEVER a sceptical website, it was a compliant government partner (aka controlled opposition) set up to appeal to the chattering fringe of the more-or-less socially conservative to keep them happily discontent in their daily moaning.
And so today TY has finally confirmed the LS scam with an open declaration of his supposed success in controlling, deflecting and (in the end) sabotaging the opposition narrative. His statement only confirms that while he never convinced as a ’Sceptic’, TY always excelled as an ‘Opportunist’. His frequent weak-kneed deferential government friendly appearances on SKY, BBC etc might have appeared cringeworthy – but this was not failure, quite the opposite, as each chaotic appearance deliberately weakened the sceptic cause – or so he believed.
LS likewise would succeed in its core aim precisely because it too would ‘fail’ to make a comprehensive sceptical case that embraced a coherent anti-lockdown, anti-government, anti-Pharma narrative that a loyal but hesitant readership (‘dubious on some points but willing to be convinced on others’) could buy into.
Ironically it is now uncertain whether such unstinting but covert… Read more »
No one is saying lockdowns don’t reduce infections (I’m not anyway). They don’t reduce deaths though which I suspect is because fatal covid infections are usually acquired in a care home or a hospital, so lockdown makes no difference. We have data on the former but I’ve not seen any on the latter. Needs to be audited. Hugh Osmond has been big on this. Tbf saying a respiratory infection wouldn’t be back in the winter was always a bit contrarian Toby!!!
It’s quite simple, Tobes: you gave them an inch; they saw it as weakness and took a couple of miles.
Blimey, there are a lot of arguments here about something very simple.
40% of people depend on the State, they do as they are told ( most of the time)
40% of people got paid off to stay at home, most of them enjoyed that at least for 12 months or so.
20% of people, for many varied reasons, are reasonable immune to psyop in its many forms.
The State couldn’t afford to keep all of the 40% paid for being at home, working or not, so devised the escape route via injections and passes. This 40% having swallowed the pill , go along with the scam, and it helps them to see the 20% disadvantaged, everyone is open to a bit of schadenfreude.
As this cunning plan by the State enriches politicians, public health dignatories etc by crumbs from the Pfizer business model profits, so much the better. Even more so if it panders to inate totalitarian tendencies which are required for the bounty from ‘zero carbon’ investments.
Within this structure can exist various types of governing bodies, all ultimately driven by power and greed. And all bankrolled by the $trillions under management by the likes of BlackRock and… Read more »
“so devised the escape route”
Escape route from what?
From supporting 40% of the population financially which was never sustainable.
They dug the hole they had to find a ladder that was consistent with the psyop. So called vaccines and passports gave them the solution, even if they knew full well that the jabs may be useless. The passports gave the jab victims the ‘prize’ of ‘freedom and travel’ as well as the means of continued control for the great zero carbon scam.
So you support the “panic cock-up ” theory?
I wouldn’t agree with all of your assessment but the general thrust – that we are outgunned – seems obvious. I get that people don’t like to think things are as awful as they seem, but I am a bit puzzled by TY’s seemingly unfailing optimism in the face of the sad truth. He’s got far enough to see that all of this was wrong, but desperately wants to believe it can be fixed. He ought to know from his struggles to fight for free speech that we’re massively outnumbered.
For the last time, dialectic doesn’t work in politics. You need rhetoric.
“We have lost millions of jobs, thousands of cancer screening appointments missed, just so that Boris can show his girlfriend how hard he is! Gove might be impressed, but for what – a virus that most people stand a 99.9% chance of making a full recovery from. He’s a coward and a liar and an embarrassment to fat blonde people everywhere”
Imagine Farage stomping back and forth on a platform saying this. That would have been a million times more effective than Toby’s tweets.
Instead, he did a video outside some refugee camp where he said ‘these people come here illegally – you never know, they may have Covid’. Good use of rhetoric, just wish he hadn’t used fear of Covid in his spiel against immigration.
Like Trump, Farage has been quite cautious around the topic of Covid, possibly due to them themselves not being at trivial risk from it, given their ages, but also out fear of alienating their target audience.
“given their ages”
Farage is only 57.
Absolutely! At the beginning I thought TY might be up for it: instead he just gave in and now regularly sucks up to Bozo.
To add to this, ‘sceptics’ instinctively prefer dialectic and are bad at rhetoric. Prime examples: Steve Baker and Mark Harper.
Libertarianism has done better in the US than elsewhere precisely because of the founding myth of the United States; cries of ‘freedom’ have emotional significance there that they don’t elsewhere in the world, except maybe France.
Fear is incredibly powerful and even a skilled rhetorician like Farage could do no better than help put fire in the belly of, say, the 20% most sceptical part of the population. That is probably enough to prevent the most excessive response from the government.
The ‘anti vax’ message is quite powerful. That of course, is why the PTB label it as anti-science. Fight fear with fear, as it were. Doubling down in this department might be productive. No need to be ‘proportionate’ – it’s not like the other side bother with caveats.
As “lockdown” is not and has never been a response to a comparitively trivial disease and as governments have their instructions we could never have “won the argument” against it.
Could we have persuaded more people in the group who aren’t mentally ill but are just going along with the evil for a quiet life? Possibly, but it wouldn’t have made any difference, because see my first para.
I think this article is very defeatist. We haven’t lost the argument at all. I have been studiously following the internet ever since day one of the Plandemic. I believe its gaining traction.
Nil desperandum carburundum illegitami
Maybe not ‘lost’ (past tense) but we are far from ‘winning’. Note the recently mistakenly published then removed research paper from the HMG website (still available courtesy of the Internet Archive), which noted (bold added):
That’s your problem right there. Many of our fellow ‘citizens’ positively revere government. (I’ve observed repeatedly: State schools are faith institutions inculcating the worship of government more assiduously than any RC school ever cultivated faith in Christ.)
It is written to inspire defeat? Controlled opposition?
Reminds me of Peter Hichens public trumpeting of his own capitulation.
Maybe, deep down, many in this country still see themselves as serfs and will blindly follow the rules, as dictated to them by those perceived as ‘authority’. “It’s much easier that way, you don’t have to think do you, or be held responsible…”
You do have a point. Too many people think those in government are the creme de la creme and therefore completely trustworthy when in fact the opposite is true. Deluded or what??
Classic overthinking.
We “lost” the argument because while we were trying to have an argument, we were surrounded by the governments of the world simultaneously blaring through their enormous megaphones that everyone needed to lockdown.
There was never an argument. Nobody listened to us because they couldn’t hear us.
Because they didn’t want to listen! The Agenda had already been set.
I felt sure that the battle had been lost by end March 20 because too few at that time spoke out against the way the situation was being handled.
By then, the momentum was un-stoppable. It may have been so by early March 20.
But too few had the background knowledge and it took a while for many to learn, understandably so
Too many people benefited from lockdown as a result of the ease with which people could work from home and still be fully paid (but with much less expectations for productivity) or be furloughed and have very little do to at all.
just one small problem with that – at no point were most people confined to their homes and I’m not sure that’s even possible without the total collapse of society and complete anarchy.
There’s also the question of how it’s actually transmitted. How do all those people on boats get it after testing negative prior to boarding? (or the people at the south pole who got flu weeks after arrival).
Indeed. Only China came close to doing that, but not nationally. It was regional, and the sent people in to do essential stuff. We never had a lockdown here, as such, just theatre.
Exactly. As Luke Johnson said, lockdown in reality involved “middle class people staying at home and working class people bringing them things”. There was plenty of scope for the virus to spread.
just one small problem with that – at no point were most people confined to their homes
Even when granting that, for most people in cities (much more so in China(!)) being confined to their homes meant a fair lot of people spending unusually long times in pretty close proximity in flats in shared houses with fancy gadgets like shared ventilation systems ensuring that whatever is in the air somewhere inside the house will eventually end up everywhere. In order to achieve isolation, individual people would need to be confined to hermetically sealed cells with suitable filtering to prevent contamination getting inside via air intake. People used to do preparations for ABC emergency situations in the course of a future war in the past and the idea that everyone staying at home would help against contagious biological warfare agents didn’t feature prominently in them. They were using something seriously more elaborate.
Similar to that, PPE and open plan isolation procedures to protect against COVID in hospitals. That’s certainly not what they did for Ebola when that was current and even what they were doing back then didn’t reliably protect people from getting infected.
Unfortunately, common sense frequently equals the BBC… Read more »
Common sense dictates that if you confine most people to their homes then infections will start to fall
It’s not common sense which dicated that but Chinese state propaganda. The people in favour of lockdowns were always carefully cherry-picking their example of the day, jetting around the globe at a breathless pace in order to make the most of whatever chance gave them. In contrast to this, the lockdown sceptics (I’m not a lockdown sceptic, I’m a lockdown opponent) always saddled themselves with finding alternate explanations for the same examples. That was a game they were obviously bound to lose. A better tactic would have been to accept that different things happen in different places by chance, ie for reasons unknown to us (we cannot really determine) and also pick whatever chance presented. Eg, Germany was in permanent, harsh lockdown (much harsher than it was ever in the UK) from fall 2020 until after spring 2021 and dutifully had a Corona-wave nevertheless the moment lifting of restrictions started to be discussed. This obvious example of lockdown not working was then used to argue that it must be continued.
But then, conspiracy theorists believe that making up explanations leads to insight… Read more »
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/27/drinking-problems/
“Well, the results of this lockdown folly are in: the biggest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in history; millions of poor schoolkids now miles behind their better-off peers; millions thickening hospital waiting lists, many of them tragically too late; a mental health crisis; public finances in tatters, and the unedifying realization that one-third of one’s fellow citizens would relish the social-credit-system drudgery of Beijing.
Remarkable is the thought that anyone—let alone the entire Western political class—took as a measure of sophistication the Chinese method of amputating at the shoulder what tingles at the thumb.”
Lost the argument? You had the entire government and the entire media against you.
In essence, you were ignored.
“The greatest power of the mass media is the power to ignore. The worst thing about this power is that you may not even know you’re using it.” Stan Smith
Yes, if they pretend it didn’t happen, it didn’t happen, as far as they’re concerned.
Imagine had we not tried and Toby not taken the risk to set up this website. Thank you for trying and for bringing people together on here to support each other
Bringing us all together here is what worries me!
Such information is useful to the security services who no doubt come here just as we do, to read this.
True, but “they” can’t resist commenting here….so sure are they that they are right and we are a minority….I am not so sure that is true
1984
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X1A5gxJn_I
No, Toby, you lost the argument because in line with your free speech agenda you keep publishing plenty of ridiculous gibberish through your site, not having the money/resources/inclination to hire staff who would actually check that. And that is why nobody in charge really takes you seriously.
Far from “appealing to reason”, when you browse through the comments, most of them are rooted in pseudoreligious beliefs and emotions, and the selection of articles published here clearly panders to that audience.
Could the Daily Sceptic be more effective with a bigger budget? Yes.
Could the Daily Sceptic, with better funding, defeat every powerful institution in the world? No.
The main problem is that attempting to debunk fallacies present in mainstream media draws in crazy people who are committed to even bigger fallacies of their own. This process automatically discredits the moderate well-reasoned critic (which Toby himself claims to be). As the saying goes, “with friends like that, who needs enemies”?
And of course the mainstream is very eager to single out the most extreme and craziest people to whack all the critics by mere association. The same technique is also used to terminate new non-mainstream political parties.
Sad as it seems, tightly controlled and censored media have a huge advantage because they can appear more reasonable and authoritative to an external observer – which is what helps them win even the wrong arguments.
We didn’t lose because of a few “cranks” or whatever. We lost because the enemy had a bigger army than we did.
Yes, we lost the war but our arguments were for the most part correct.
It’s a bit like the old saying in the investment world – “the market can remain irrational for much longer than you can remain solvent”.
More a case of the enemy having a massive propaganda machine!
And yet, you’re always here.
I take my hat off to Toby his energy in this cause has been remarkable but for once his intuition for what his side of the political spectrum wanted from him has let him down. He has created a great deal of animosity and this is Toby saying sorry to his old mates. Notice that the article is published in the house magazine of his previous supporters, its like making up to your Mrs after an argument ‘Look we were both wrong, if only I had explained it better we wouldn’t have fallen out in the first place’. Toby has been convinced by his contacts that it is all over and its time to kiss and make up if he wants those lucrative commissions and the contacts which lead to a seat on those red benches. I hope he is right about it all being over, at least for now!
Lockdowns do work because they were never about suppressing a virus, but about demoralising, dehumanising and dispossessing the population. And the work goes on through the jab. Weigh up the risk of possible death by lethal injection versus all but exclusion from society. These people are tyrants and we are at war. Why are people still pussyfooting about on this and pretending it’s got anything to do with health? Since all cause mortality is up by about 13% (source was here yesterday. Heneghan I believe) it’s got fuck all to do with health. And yet Toby – for all his virtues in starting this site and the FSU – still thinks that’s what’s driving it.
first reason you failed: if people do not mingle the virus cannot spread.
second reason, your site was swamped by anti-vaxxers, hence your site became a basket of deplorables.
Use slogans and clichés like anti-vaxxers when you don’t have an argument. I think it’s common sense to weigh up the options: possible death by injection against catching a virus that 99.5% (underestimate) recover from. At the moment looking at the statistics you are more likely to die or have serious adverse reactions from the jab than the rona so it’s a no brainer. (Apposite phrase since it seems most people who advocate the jab have misplaced their brain.) It’s not a vaccine but I wouldn’t take it for the same reason I wouldn’t take a flu jab. They’ve been going 20 + years and I’ve never had the flu.
You left your tin foil hat behind the sofa
I remember being labelled by people like you (in fact you may well have been one of them) as a “racist” and “little Englander” and “xenophobe” and “bigot” with no attempt to engage in any argument about the actual issues of EU membership. This was all an attempt to avoid a debate which these people feared they may lose, and to demonise those holding a different opinion.
Well in the end it didn’t work with Brexit and it won’t work with lockdown scepticism. All it does is harden people’s attitudes and make them more determined to win.
Hey ewloe (if you’re an actual person – I’m kind of on the fence on that one?)
what’s an anti-vaxxer? I’m dying to know because I keep reading people refer to them. What is one can you tell me? I’m not having the covid vaccine, I think anyone who’s taken it has made a terrible mistake, I won’t let my children anywhere near it and my wife and all our friends aren’t having it ever, either. Are we all anti-vaxxers? Am I a deplorable? To make it more complicated for you, prior to the spring of 2020 I had no particular opinions about vaccines whatsoever.
I see – so perhaps you can explain why worldwide there is no correlation between the level of restrictions and the actual case rates?