Pro-lockdown fanatics don’t deserve an amnesty
TIt’s not just in retrospect that we know the Covid measures were a disaster. We were vilified for pointing it out at the time
Some of them were not just ‘following the science’, but hell-bent on enforcing an authoritarian agenda
here is at least one tiny consolation to the misery we are likely to endure this Christmas, as we prepare for even higher inflation, more crippling taxes and the prospect of Matt Hancock outdoorshowering on primetime TV. At least we aren’t facing the fear of yet another Yuletide spent in the Scroogefest that was lockdown.
It’s easy to forget that it was only last Christmas – not the one before, but Christmas 2021 – that omicron threatened to once again derail our festivities. Boris Johnson was about to cave in to doom-mongering scientists (and Michael Gove) and ban families from mixing, until the government’s Covid doves swooped in to stop such madness happening in postvaccination Britain.
Sensing the cataclysmic impact such a decision would have on the hospitality sector, let alone the wider economy, the then chancellor Rishi Sunak flew back from the United States to argue the case for keeping the UK fully open.
The revolt came after Sir Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, had warned that there would be an “inevitable increase in hospitalisations”, because omicron cases were doubling every two days – even though evidence from South Africa suggested that the variant was actually linked to a substantial reduction in the number of patients ending up in hospital.
Being socialist headbangers, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and her Welsh equivalent Mark Drakeford brought in new restrictions anyway, including cancelling Hogmanay and fining Welsh people who refused to work from home £60 – decisions that now look beyond absurd.
Yet it isn’t with the benefit of hindsight that we know many of the UK’S coronavirus measures were not only wholly unnecessary but also a worse cure than the disease; some of us had been saying that all along, only to be ridiculed and demonised for it.
Not that the fiercest proponents of lockdown would care to admit this, of course. On the contrary, there is now a call for the people who got it so spectacularly wrong on Covid to get an “amnesty” for the mistakes that were made – particularly over school closures.
American economist Emily Oster has authored a piece for The Atlantic in which she asks us to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about Covid.
Arguing that we should “focus on the future, and fix the problems we still need to solve,” she insists that we should be more understanding of “the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge,” adding: “We didn’t know.”
The only problem with this argument is that we did actually know quite a lot. She cites the “totally misguided” rules around social distancing outside, pointing out the absurdity of people giving each other a wide berth on hiking paths. Yet from the very beginning of the pandemic, “close contact” was defined as spending more than 15 minutes indoors without maintaining a distance of two metres, or people you’d had direct contact with at a distance of less than one metre. Still the police decided to fine two women £200 each for having a coffee during a walk along a reservoir.
Oster goes on to suggest that most errors were made “by people who were working in earnest for the good of society”. Except some of them weren’t. Some of them weren’t just “following the science” but seemingly hell-bent on enforcing an authoritarian agenda to achieve their own self-interested political aims. People like Professor Susan Michie, the Communist adviser to the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), who advocated the wearing of face masks forever. She told a podcast many people didn’t want some things to go back to the way they were, prepandemic, because: “It wasn’t good”.
She added: “People remember the last financial crash, and who paid for that. And I think people are thinking, this is another thing that was not of our making. This was the result of actual governmental policies globally. And the little people shouldn’t be made to pay for it again ... There will be big questions being asked, and big questions being asked by young people.”
Yet the only big question now being asked by young people is: why on earth was my school closed when I only ever had an infinitesimal chance of dying of Covid? Again, some of us were posing that very question at the time. But lockdown sceptics were vilified by people such as the Tory MP Neil O’brien, with his Covid-19 FAQ website behaving as if it was the authority on all things pandemic.
This was a website which sought to humiliate scientists such as Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson for daring to challenge the Sage groupthink. In general, journalists who questioned the wisdom of shutting down classrooms were treated like pariahs, accused of putting teachers’ lives at risk. Yet according to the Office for National Statistics, there were just 139 Covid deaths in teaching and educational professionals aged 20 to 64 years from March to December 2020 in England and Wales. Even after schools reopened, coronavirus-related deaths for this group were “statistically significantly lower” than the average.
So an amnesty for those who, despite knowing very early on in the pandemic that the average age of death was around 80, still gambled with our children’s futures? An amnesty for the teaching unions who insisted on online learning to the detriment of pupils?
An amnesty for all those universities who refused to reinstate face-to-face teaching, even after the vaccination rollout?
Not on your nelly. And certainly not before the education establishment apologises for the mistakes that were made.
The truth of the matter is that the damaging consequences of most of these measures were very clear at the time, not just in retrospect.
The impact on children, in particular, has been disastrous, as was obvious when lockdown was first announced. Research by the Centre for Social Justice shows that school closures resulted in 100,000 pupils disappearing from education altogether. The disadvantage attainment gap now stands at 3.84 – the largest in a decade.
And to think the impact on children wasn’t even going to be properly included in the terms of reference of the Government’s Covid inquiry until this newspaper and other campaigners managed to convince it to change course.
What we are talking about here is decision-making that destroyed lives. This is not the same as a lack of understanding about how Covid was spread. While we may have been, in certain periods, in the dark about variants, transmission and the efficacy of tests, anyone who truly had a balanced view of lockdown suspected that the economic, social, educational and indeed physiological aftershocks would prove more injurious for society in the long run.
Those self-righteous zealots who used “saving the NHS” as a taxpayerfunded shield for their own onedimensional thinking need only look at ambulance response times and waiting lists to see the folly of their moral superiority.
That video of a member of staff preventing a son from comforting his widowed mother at their father’s funeral is again doing the rounds. It isn’t just upon reexamination that we realise the amorality of that situation. Most of us knew it was unjustifiably cruel at the time.
An amnesty for those seeking to rewrite history would only serve to see us repeat the mistakes of the past. Those who got it wrong should not just own up, but own it.