by Toby Young Blower's cartoon in the Telegraph on October 12th, 2020 Christopher Snowdon has now done what he failed to do in his original attack on lockdown sceptics in Quillette: he has engaged with the main plank of the sceptics’ case. Our central argument, as I explained in my reply to his article, is that lockdowns cause more harm than they prevent. I cited the wealth of evidence that lockdowns are largely ineffective, as well as the equally voluminous evidence that they cause social and economic damage. And I did my best to show that while some of this harm might be a ‘pandemic effect’ rather than a ‘lockdown effect’, the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that governments have made across the world have exacerbated this damage. In his response, Chris starts by making a pretty big concession: he acknowledges that the reduction in human interaction brought about by draconian stay-at-home orders could be achieved by people just deciding voluntarily to change their behaviour. He seems to think that lockdown sceptics are in denial about this – that we believe infections will rise and fall within a given region, irrespective of how much human interaction there is. Virus gonna virus. But I know few sceptics who believe that. On the contrary, we have been arguing from the start that the approach ...