Still, a decade and a half later, governments all over the world tried lockdowns anyway. And sure enough, since April 2020, scholars have observed that these lockdown policies haven’t worked. The politicians preached, the cops enforced, citizens shamed each other, and businesses and schools did their best to comply with all the strictures. But the virus kept going with seeming disregard for all these antics.
Neither oceans of sanitizer, nor towers of plexiglass, nor covered mouths and noses, nor crowd avoidance, nor the seeming magic of six feet of distance, nor even mandated injections caused the virus to go away or otherwise be suppressed.
The two years of the hell into which hundreds of governments simultaneously plunged the globe achieved nothing but economic, social, and cultural destruction. Very obviously, this realization is shocking and suggests a crying need for a reassessment of the power and influence of the people who did this.
This reassessment is happening now, all over the world.
A major frustration for those of us who have denounced lockdowns (which go by many names and take many forms) is that these studies haven’t exactly rocked the headlines. Indeed, they have been buried for the better part of two years.
“We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of coordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures. The data cannot fully exclude the possibility of some benefits. However, even if they exist, these benefits may not match the numerous harms of these aggressive measures. More targeted public health interventions that more effectively reduce transmissions may be important for future epidemic control without the harms of highly restrictive measures.”
Among the comments were those of Oxford’s Seth Flaxman, a major figure in this realm, who isn’t trained in biological science or medicine but computer science with a specialization in machine learning. And yet it has been his work that has most often been cited in defense of the idea that lockdowns achieved some good.
In opposition to the JHU study, Flaxman writes:
“Smoking causes cancer, the earth is round, and ordering people to stay at home (the correct definition of lockdown) decreases disease transmission. None of this is controversial among scientists. A study purporting to prove the opposite is almost certain to be fundamentally flawed.”
See how this rhetoric works? If you question his claim, you are not a scientist; you are denying the science!
These sentences are surely penned out of frustration. The first time in modern history or perhaps all of history when nearly all governments undertook “ordering people to stay home” (which amounts to a universal quarantine) to “decrease disease transmission” was in 2020.
To say that this isn’t controversial is ridiculous, since such policies had never before been attempted on this scale. Such a policy isn’t at all like an established causal claim (smoking increases cancer risk) nor a mere empirical observation (the earth is round). It’s subject to verification.
There are plenty of reasons one might expect disease transmission to be higher in enclosed spaces with sustained close contact, such as homes, versus shops or even well-ventilated concert settings. As Henderson himself said, it could result in putting healthy non-infected people in close settings with infected people, worsening disease spread.
“‘They’re not working; they’re not traveling,’ Cuomo said of these recently hospitalized coronavirus patients. ‘We were thinking that maybe we were going to find a higher percent of essential employees who were getting sick because they were going to work — that these may be nurses, doctors, transit workers. That’s not the case. They were predominantly at home.’”
That Flaxman would still claim otherwise after all experience shows that he isn’t observing reality but inventing dogma from his own intuition. Flaxman might say that he is sure that transmission might have been higher had people not been ordered to stay home, and there might be settings in which that is true, but he is in no position to elevate this claim to the status of “the earth is round.”
Finally, it isn’t possible to order everyone to stay home, not even for a day or two. The groceries have to get to the store or be delivered to homes and apartments. People have to staff the hospitals. The electrical plants still need staff. Cops still have to be on the beat. There is literally no option available to “shut down” society in real life versus in computer models.
Stay-at-home orders in real life become a class-protection scheme to keep high-end laptop professionals shielded from the virus while imposing the burden of exposure on people who have no option but to be out and about. In other words, the working classes are effectively forced to bear the burden of herd immunity, while the rich and financially secure stay safe and wait for the pandemic to pass.
For example, early in the pandemic, the messaging of The New York Times was to instruct its readers to stay home and get their groceries delivered. The paper knows its reader base well: It didn’t suggest any of them actually deliver groceries! As Sunetra Gupta says, “Lockdowns are a luxury of the affluent.”
The dogma that ordering people to stay home—for how long?—always reduces the spread comes not from evidence but from Flaxman-style modeling plus a remarkable capacity to ignore reality.
Lockdown policies are easily marketed to political players who might get a power rush from the exercise. But, in the end, Henderson’s prediction was correct: These interventions turned a manageable pandemic into a catastrophe.
It’s a sure bet, however, that lockdown proponents will be in denial at least for another decade.
