© Dwayne Paisley-Marshall
I enjoyed reading Christopher Snowdon's critique of lockdown sceptics ("
Rise of the Coronavirus Cranks"). Chris is a lively and entertaining writer and he does a great line in withering scorn ("There is no shortage of stupidity on Twitter, but this is something different, something almost transcendent"). He posed some tough questions for people like me — I've been editing a website called
Lockdown Sceptics since April of last year — and he identified some key weaknesses in the anti-lockdown case. Having said that, I won't bother responding to his detailed criticisms of Ivor Cummins and Michael Yeadon because I don't think the case against the lockdown policy stands or falls on whether their analysis is correct.
We can quibble about the reliability of industrial-scale PCR testing, whether the "second wave" in Europe and America has been ameliorated by naturally acquired immunity and whether deaths due to other diseases have being wrongly classified as deaths due to novel coronavirus. But that is largely beside the point. Sceptics could concede all of Snowdon's points — acknowledge that the threat posed by SARS-CoV-2 is every bit as grave as the most hard-line lockdowners say it is — without endangering the central limb of our argument. Our contention is that the whole panoply of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that governments around the world have used to try and control the pandemic — closing schools and gyms, shutting non-essential shops, banning household mixing, restricting travel, telling people they can't leave their homes without a reasonable excuse, etc. — have been largely ineffective.
Sure, there are some peer-reviewed studies published in reputable journals seeming to show that these measures reduce COVID-19 infections, hospital admissions, and deaths. (See
here, for instance.)
But most of these rely on epidemiological models that make unfalsifiable claims about how many people wouldhave died if governments had just sat on their hands — and some of these models have been widely criticised. The evidence that lockdowns don't work, by contrast, is not based on conjecture but on observing the effects of lockdowns in different countries. (You can review 30 of these studies
here.) What these data seem to show is that the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in each country rises and falls — and then rises and falls again, although less steeply as the virus moves towards endemic equilibrium — according to a similar pattern regardless of what NPIs governments impose.
Comment: See also: