The years of living with increasingly oppressive COVID-19 restrictions and mandates is a tale of many villains complicit in tyranny and a few heroes of resistance. It’s a story of venal, incompetent politicians and brutish police—thugs in uniform—acting at the behest of power-drunk apparatchiks.
- Billions, if you were Big Pharma.
- Unchecked power, if you were Big State.
- Power over the whole population of a state and fame with extended daily TV appearances on all channels, if you were a chief medical officer.
- More money and power over the world’s governments and people, if you were the World Health Organization (WHO).
- A template for action, if you were a climate zealot.
- Dreamtime, if you were a cop looking for free rein to indulge your inner bully.
The existing frameworks, processes, and institutional safeguards under which liberal democracies operated until 2020 had ensured expanding freedoms, growing prosperity, an enviable lifestyle and quality of life, and educational and health outcomes without precedent in human history. Abandoning them in favour of a tightly centralised small group of decision-makers liberated from any external scrutiny, contestability, and accountability, produced both a dysfunctional process and suboptimal outcomes: very modest gains for much long-lasting pain.
Confronted by the coronavirus pandemic as a “black swan” event, most countries chose the hard suppression strategy with variably stringent lockdown measures. There should have been more caution because of the history of failed catastrophist warnings from professor Neil Ferguson, the Pied Piper of pandemic porn; the massive economic costs which also have deadly effects; the draconian infringement on individual freedoms; and the availability of other more targeted strategies rather than the mythical “do nothing” alternative.
The science-denying policy interventions inflicted devastating social, economic, educational, health, and mental health costs, especially on young people in the long term even though they were at negligible risk of serious harm by the virus. It should not, could not possibly have been a surprise to any health specialist that as social creatures, human beings are scarred by social isolation enforced through state diktats promoting the message that humans are disease-ridden biohazards.
For the vast majority of poor people in developing countries, on the one hand COVID was rarely at the top of deadly killer diseases, on the other hand, lockdowns proved to be cruel, heartless, and deadly. Their plight was neglected by the very people and countries that loudly trumpet their kind and caring credentials in being concerned about vulnerable and marginalised communities.
Among the most shocking developments as the pandemic dragged on was the degree of coercion and force used by some of the best known champions of democracy and liberty. The boundary between liberal democracy and draconian dictatorship proved to be virus-thin. Tools of repression such as unleashing heavily armed cops on peacefully protesting citizens, once the identifying traits of fascists, communists, and tin-pot despots, became uncomfortably familiar on the streets of Western democracies.
Lockdowns destroyed the three “Ls” of lives, livelihoods, and liberties. Governments effectively stole nearly three years of our life. Preemptive press self-censorship helped to normalise the rise of the surveillance-cum-biosecurity state in the name of keeping us safe from the virus that is so deadly that hundreds of millions had to be tested to know they’ve had it. Canada’s Freedom Convoy laid bare the stark reality that lockdowns are a class war waged by the laptop class on the working class, by the cultural elites on the great unwashed outside urban centres, and by the virtue signallers on independent free thinkers.
Vaccines were initially recommended and subsequently mandated on the slogan that “No one is safe until everyone is safe,” ignoring the admission implicit in the slogan that they do not protect the vaccinated. Opposition to vaccine mandates hardened with evidence of gaslighting on the benefits, denialism on the collateral harms, refusal either to conduct or else to publish the results of cost-benefit analyses, and banning of alternative treatment options.
The policy conclusion is to lift mandates in public settings and prohibit companies from imposing them in most business settings, leaving it instead for people to make informed decisions in consultation with their doctors, without pressure on the latter from drug regulators. And take back all those who were fired for refusing the jab.
The WHO’s performance proved patchy. Its credibility was badly damaged by tardiness in raising the alarm, the shabby treatment of Taiwan at China’s behest, the initial investigation that whitewashed the origins of the virus, and flip-flops on masks and lockdowns that contradicted its own collective wisdom developed over a century as distilled in a report in 2019. This makes it all the more surprising that there should be a concerted effort underway to expand its authority and boost its resources by means of a new global pandemic treaty and amendments to the binding International Health Regulations.
We have had to relearn two abiding verities: Once governments have acquired more powers, they rarely relinquish them voluntarily, and any new power that can be abused will be abused, if not today by current agents of state then sometime in the future by their successors. Like people with command responsibility when crimes against humanity are committed by foot soldiers, the highest level decision-makers need to be held to account. This is important to ensure misdeeds are punished, victims are helped to achieve emotional closure, and future acts of comparable malfeasance are deterred.
Will COVID illiberalism be rolled back, or has it become a permanent feature of the political landscape in the democratic West? The head says to fear the worst, but an eternally optimistic heart still hopes for the best.
