Lockdown Was a Public Health, Social and Economic Disaster
Back in 2020 I was an early contributor to this site. Like others who wrote for Sceptics then we were mainly motivated by a sense of bewildered incredulity at the sight of Britain plunging headlong into policies that guaranteed future destitution and ruin.
They were all predicated on fatuous scaremongering derived from insanely reckless modelling and peddled by panic-stricken politicians and their famously useful idiot scientific advisers.
Even worse we saw the almost overnight crushing of dissent, the deliberate wholesale construction of an oppressive new culture that encouraged denunciations and informants and promoted fear on an unprecedented scale. All this seemed to be founded on a hideous and cynical plan to experiment with just how far the state could control everyone’s waking moment.
In May 2020, I wrote a piece called ‘Britain’s Covid Reich’. I commented:
One of the most remarkable aspects of the creation of Britain’s Covid Reich was that even in the middle of the Government’s witless, confused and ambivalent approach to the crisis it was able to rustle up overnight many of the key ingredients of totalitarianism. The ideology and the slogans, and the continual repetition of the message with the supine assistance of broadcast media all fell into place with frightening speed. The speed with which the Great British Public acquiesced was even more alarming.
One possibility I anticipated was:
In one direction lies the complete end of everything we have ever held dear and a life literally not worth living, a mere spectral existence in a paralysed and terrified surveillance state of agoraphobics queuing up like mendicant friars for government handouts.
I thought I was going over the top when I wrote that. But that’s exactly what’s happened – hasn’t it? Back then I thought there was a more optimistic possible alternative, but I was wrong.
Few politicians, few scientists and even worse few in the so-called free press seemed to be able to understand that the measures the Government was imposing were going to leave a legacy that would, and has, set Britain back by half a century and perhaps change it permanently. Anyone who dared to stray from the state propaganda line was shot down in flames.
So it is almost beyond belief to see that the confused and contradictory Covid Inquiry has continued to ignore the impact of lockdown, according to the Telegraph:
Not only does it fail to take into account the non-Covid deaths caused by disruption to healthcare it also pays no heed to the long-term health effects of severe damage to the economy.
Prof Simon Wood, a statistician from the University of Edinburgh, suggests that tens of millions of life years could be lost as a result of the economic impact of lockdowns which would dwarf the life years lost due to Covid.
A study of the health impacts of the 2008 financial crash found that the poorest 10% of people died 10 years earlier than the wealthiest 10% and so, he says: “If you think what that translates to in terms of avoidable life loss in the UK population it’s enormous, it’s 140 million to 230 million life years depending on exactly how you do the calculation, so that’s a lot of people going early.”
But in June 2020 I wrote a piece called ‘The False Choice’ which explained the folly of trying to claim that there was a choice that had to be made of either keeping the economy going or supposedly protecting people from Covid:
I was partly inspired by Sunetra Gupta, as I reported:
On BBC Radio 4’s World at One on June 9th [2020] Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford, in a piercing putdown dismissed the lockdown as having descended into farce. Her reason for saying that was its reliance on what she called completely arbitrary measures. She didn’t specify any, but she obviously meant the magic figure of two metres and other such fantasy barriers between life and instant death, the sorts of foolish and credulous rituals beloved of ancient or medieval religion. We might as well walk about with the relics of saints hanging round our necks. She called for its immediate lifting before the price being paid for that lockdown… overwhelms us.
Her comments cut right to the heart of the matter. I went on:
Those who use fear as a mechanism of control have enhanced their power and profiles in ways that could hardly have been imagined a few weeks ago. The use of fear was central to promoting the idea that the lockdown superseded any other consideration, including not only the economy but also even using the NHS. The threat from the virus was magnified, not only to make it seem more risky than any other threat we face but that – and this is the most preposterous claim of the crisis – that it outweighed the sum of all other risks. This at least is the only way to explain why the lockdown has been enforced, together with all its cataclysmic consequences.
Back then I thought briefly that Boris Johnson’s government was finally beginning to register the insanity that had overtaken us:
The penny has finally dropped that we are now teetering on the brink of a wider health and economic crisis entirely of our own making. The litany of undiagnosed and untreated health problems scarcely bears thinking about – even if we take into account that a lot of the NHS’s time is, or was, taken up by people who really didn’t need to be there. Only recently the news has emerged that the NHS may end up with as many as 10 million people on its waiting lists by Christmas.
The health consequences of economic destitution will affect people of all ages and ethnicity, whether or not they had any underlying conditions to start with. There will be emotive cries of “you’re prioritising the economy over lives.”
It’s an easy, lazy and foolish headline-grabbing argument which completely fails to acknowledge the inextricable links between health and economic well-being, or rather the dependence of the former on the latter. …
The truth, however unpalatable it may be to people who have come to believe that health and immortality are free and God-given rights, is that the only reason any of us makes our way through life at all is because we live in economic systems that allow us to earn our daily bread, buy our homes, educate our children and fund our healthcare.
The reality is that if we tell ourselves to prevent the so-called second wave at all costs, by extending the destructive effects of the lockdown further and for longer, then the health and economic crisis that will follow and echo down for generations, not just here but across the world, will be one we will be far less able to do anything about. Most people in Britain seem to have forgotten that the NHS only exists because we have, or had, one of the largest economies in the world. Without a thriving economy the future can only be one of unemployment, destitution, deprivation and want. And we all know what catastrophic health consequences of all those would be.
That economy has enabled us not only to spare huge numbers of productive young people to work in that health service, rather than in making or generating wealth, but also to appropriate or entice others from around the world to work here with them. The result is that around 1.5 million people work in the NHS which is around 3% of the working population. To those we can add many more involved in healthcare. They spend much of their time dealing with an economically unproductive part of the population, primarily the elderly and vulnerable. Being able to do so and living in a society which values that is part of being civilised.
The same applies to education. Since 1944 there has been universal state education available in this country. It’s far from perfect but it means the vast majority of children emerge from school literate and able to take part in the social, cultural and economic life of this country. Yet, as a result of the disastrously blinkered scientific advice that has driven this crisis we have apparently been prepared to condemn a whole generation of children to compromised education and all the social, health and economic risks we know that will entail. No wonder then that in the Mirror of June 24th Polly Hudson wrote about the shameful betrayal of a generation.
Like mass education, the NHS is a fabulous luxury, a superb and enviable benefit of living in an economically powerful nation. It’s also a privilege. We are extremely fortunate to have it. But the price is massive and it means there is no point in ‘protecting the NHS’ if the result is that we end up being unable to afford it thanks to the economic Armageddon of lockdown. In the end the only way any disease is controlled is through herd immunity, gained either by letting the disease run its course or by developing a vaccine.
The choice we face is not a simplistic one between ‘health’ on one hand and ‘the economy’ on the other. By believing that it was or still is, the result has been to take this country and many others to the point where the very health crisis the lockdown was supposed to prevent is now facing us on a far larger scale. It’s time to get real and stop playing games.
Without the mechanisms of movement and exchange being restored there is no chance of us funding either health care or education, yet we will need both more than ever before. Without restoring normality we may even face disorder, as Professor Clifford Stott has warned, with unemployment and other problems mounting.
And so it has come to pass. But it’s far worse than I expected. The country is deeper in debt than ever before. Hundreds of thousands more people live on benefits, their numbers packed out by those who cannot or believe they do not have the mental wherewithal to hold down a job. Productivity is in terminal decline. We have a government with apparently no vision or understanding of the necessity of a productive economy. At least it claims to have but its every action seems designed to crush initiative, disincentivise work and encourage those who can to leave the country.
The Covid Inquiry has yet more reports to issue. It seems unlikely they’ll really tackle the hard truths. The Telegraph again:
Future reports will cover the impact of the pandemic on healthcare systems, vaccines, procurement, the care sector, test and trace, children and young people, economic response and the impact on society.
While the last of those two topics might appear to cover the economic impact of lockdowns, economic response will only cover furlough and extra funding given to public services, while the “impact on society” module will focus on subjects such as mental health and wellbeing, but without any specific reference to how shuttering the economy affected health.
Prof Carl Heneghan, director of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, says the inquiry is so wide of the mark that it should be stopped and recalibrated immediately.
“They should now pause their proceedings because they have got it dramatically wrong,” he says. “This was the opportunity to gather their evidence to ask whether lockdown and interventions actually worked, but it seems to be working on the premise that we should have locked down harder and longer.
“It was a preconceived idea, and if you are ideologically fixed in a firm view [pro-lockdown], it’s very hard for you to wrestle out of that unless you get overwhelming evidence otherwise.”
There’s far more in the Telegraph piece and it is definitely worth reading in full, but I find it truly shocking that five years on the penny still hasn’t really dropped. There’s a painful inevitability about that, as the piece explains:
It is an established fact that poverty is directly linked to ill health and shorter life expectancy, meaning that it might be decades before we know the full cost of lockdowns in terms of lives cut short. Yet the Covid Inquiry appears to show no curiosity about this, partly, perhaps, because it would have to accept the possibility that lockdowns might have been the wrong thing to do.
Even the famously incoherent Boris Johnson, who ran a hopelessly incoherent government and response to Covid, has declared the Covid Inquiry to be hopelessly incoherent:
Boris Johnson has dismissed the COVID-19 Inquiry as “hopelessly incoherent” after it found 23,000 lives could have been saved if he had imposed a lockdown one week earlier.
The former Prime Minister said the 1,531-page report should be “filed vertically”, warning its findings could be used by future governments to impose harsher restrictions and more lockdowns.
Mr Johnson accused Baroness Hallett, the inquiry chairman, of using her report to “administer a judicious kicking to the Tory administration”, adding her “logic” to support harder and faster lockdowns was “insane”.
That figure of 23,000 lives supposedly lost because the lockdown didn’t come quicker is based on Professor Neil Ferguson’s modelling. No reader of this site needs to read any more to know why that number is beyond meaningless.
I’m no scientist. I’m no scientific modeller and I’m certainly no politician. And I certainly didn’t get it all right when it came to judgements about Covid and the State’s response, not least because I struggled to believe what I was seeing happening in my lifetime.
However, why was it obvious to me and many others without any such pretensions some of what was likely to happen but not apparently to so many of the people charged with running this country? “Lockdown is the path to a public health, social and economic disaster” was my verdict in June 2020.
If you think I, or anyone else who made similar predictions on this site, take the slightest bit of pleasure in being right (at least partly) think again. While the lockdowns didn’t cause all of Britain’s current problems there is no doubt that they contributed significantly to making just about all those problems dramatically worse and to such an extent that it has become almost impossible now to assess by how much.
Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer who has contributed to this site from its earliest days. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations (Abacus 2025).
source dailysceptic.org
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend the Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.