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 of the Swedish Government, which advised its citizens to take various precautions
but didn't force them to, should have been the approach of the British Government. Indeed, that was Boris Johnson's strategy until he performed a U-turn and decided to plunge the country into lockdown.
The idea that the alternative to lockdown is to do nothing - that sceptics' just want to "let it rip" - is a familiar straw man in this debate, and not just when Piers Morgan gets on a tear. In one of the most influential papers produced by the modelling team at Imperial College - known colloquially as
Flaxman et al and published on June 11th - the researchers argued that the lockdowns in 11 European countries, including the UK, saved 3.1 million lives. But that claim was based on the assumption that 95% of the populations of those countries would have been infected with COVID-19 in the absence of any NPIs. Setting aside the fact that pre-existing immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is almost certainly higher than 5%, it's absurd to claim that people would have just carried on as normal in the face of a global pandemic if they hadn't been ordered to change their behaviour by their governments. Indeed, this conception of democratic citizens - as mouth-breathing troglodytes who will march towards their own destruction without a benign state forcing them to act in their own best interests - is one Chris has objected to many times before.
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