Learn the right lesson from Covid lockdown
This time last year, when the World Health Organisation declared Covid a pandemic, it seemed as if much of human progress itself had turned out to be an illusion. When faced with a disease that threatened to overwhelm even well-resourced health services, the only tools advanced societies felt they had at their disposal were almost medieval: field hospitals, quarantines and shutting people up in their homes.
Some nations mastered more technologicallyadvanced approaches, notably east Asian countries that had had experience with Sars. Yet in the liberal democracies of the West, test and trace and mobile apps proved unable to keep societies functioning while suppressing a virus that, in many carriers, has no symptoms. The economic carnage and social damage of this miserable year is the price we have had to pay.
The only reason there is hope is the arrival of the vaccines. Big pharmaceutical companies launched an all-out war on Covid. Billions of pounds of speculative investment, allied with practical scientific expertise (rather than the pseudo-science of “modelling”), have delivered millions of jabs, in record time. There have been impressive innovations in Covid treatments, again by Big Pharma, a sector that has long been a bogeyman of the capitalism-hating Left. The UK Vaccine Taskforce showed what can be done when the state abandons its institutional loathing of the private sector and embraces an entrepreneurial ethos.
Disappointingly, ministers do not appear willing to use the triumph of the vaccine rollout to accelerate the release of lockdown. However, they can still learn the correct lessons of the past year. Human progress is not an illusion. It is founded on real-world innovation, enterprise, and risk, rather than growing the size of state. We should be doing more to encourage the young to study science, rather than arts subjects of dubious usefulness. We should make every effort to grow our pharma and biotech sectors so they lead the world. Above all, we need to create the conditions so that, not only is lockdown never repeated for Covid, but we never have to resort to such pre-modern techniques for controlling any disease ever again.