In fact, he wasn’t the only one and, lacking Dan’s modesty, I’m happy to name myself as one of the first journalists to oppose the lockdown policy, along with Peter Hitchens, Allison Pearson, Ross Clark, Julia Hartley-Brewer and a handful of others. But Dan is right to emphasise how one-sided the debate was, with almost everyone falling in behind the government. He singles out human-rights lawyers as missing in action, given that this was ‘the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history’ (Jonathan Sumption), and we can add the ‘neo-republican’ political theorists who champion the Roman conception of liberty as self-rule, such as Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit. Both those intellectual giants defended the policy.
I thought I could count on the Tufton Street mafia to weigh in on my side – after all, aren’t they wedded to the principle that ‘government is best that governs least’? Surely, paying people not to work, forcing businesses to close and increasing public expenditure by £400 billion was anathema to them? But most of the right-wing policy wonks became enthusiastic supporters of the Covid restrictions, a group I dubbed ‘libertarians for lockdown’. Boris Johnson passed the initial test with flying colours, urging the public to ‘take it on the chin’, but soon fell into lockstep with the more cautious people surrounding him, including my political lodestars Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings. As someone who’d shared foxholes with them during the Brexit wars, that was heartbreaking.
I am not a hard-core, purist libertarian and I was in favour of the first lockdown because it seemed at the time that we didn’t know the severity of the situation.
As we got more information, such as the Infection Fatality Rate and the average age of deaths from Covid, (if we really know how many died ‘from’ rather than ‘with’) and we saw what happened with the passengers on the Diamond Express (name from memory, unchecked this lunchtime) cruise ship I changed my mind.
The Great Barrington Declaration put forward an entirely reasonable alternative strategy, but only one of my acquaintances had even heard of it at the time.
It was, in practice, impossible to discuss the benefits or dangers of the lockdown policy.
We were manipulated, fed restricted information, misinformation and disinformation. i.e. we were lied to.
Since approximately June 2020 I have argued against lockdown and warned of the dangers, financial and cultural dangers. Some of my acquaintances are now starting to accept that a huge amount of damage, short and long term was done.
But it’s too late now.
Some believe that the government could never lock us down again because the people would not accept it. They are more optimistic than me.
Anyone can a mistake – and I have certainly made many mistakes.
What is awful is how so many people have clung to the establishment position – long after it has been refuted.
They still deny the virus came from the Wuhan lab.
They still deny that there were any effective Early Treatments.
They still defend the censorship and the persecution of doctors and medical scientists who refused to follow the establishment line.
They still pretend that the lockdowns were the correct response.
And they still pretend that the injections were “safe and effective” – and point at computer models that say so, because that is what those computer models are programmed to say.
After five years all this is just not acceptable.
James,
Is for me the crux of it all. Someone was counted as a “Covid death” even if Wile E. Coyote had dropped an anvil on their head.
Paul,
I’m not sure the Wuhan lab connection is established fully. The true disgrace is that it never can be proven and was deliberately quashed right from the start. For “reasons”. That even looking into it was deeply frowned upon (to put it mildly) is astonishing. We get a novel virus starting-up just outside a bio-weapons lab but, “Nothing to see, kindly move along…” is staggering. As is the extent to which anyone who challenged that orthodoxy was portrayed as a “Flat Earther, Moon-landings faked, JFK taken out by Wee Jimmy Krankie” type total mentalist is one of the most appalling hits I’ve seen on scientific and forensic inquiry in my life. And, yes, I have debated with Young Earth Creationists. And, no, I haven’t inserted a hockey-stick into a part of Alogoreical’s anatomy where Sun will never shine.
I am publicly on the record justifying the lockdowns to a limited extent as a potentially legitimate exercise of the police power as of March 23 2020. For precisely the reason we didn’t know much but the situation looked bad and there was a chance that medical resources might be overwhelmed. However, I am also on the record as of April 17 2020 as questioning the continued justification once it appeared the medical resources were sufficient. The liberal common law tradition does give the state power to act in extraordinary situations, the issue is that this depends on sound judgement not to be abused. For those interested, by videos on the subject are linked. I am interested in people’s thoughts 5 years later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YFBtyJ5rgo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmGSaisBTls
The problem is that most governments will leap on ‘extraordinary situations’ to claim power for themselves. This is why we must stick to small government in all situations up to and including an invasion by space aliens, damn the consequences.
The ‘was it manmade or not’ discussion is a rabbit hole. The true story was the reaction by governments and people to the virus. The virus itself was largely a nothingburger. In fact, focussing on the origin of the virus is damaging, as for that discussion to be worthwhile you have to take the view that Covid was unusually dangerous and “killed millions of people” (not in itself a big deal given a global population of seven billion). Unfortunately some people like Rand Paul have wasted a lot of energy on this. Fauci is guilty of a whole load of stuff but ‘killing millions with an artificially created virus’ is not one of them.
I am a 100% hardcore purist libertarian, and I was also in favour of the lockdowns – with some caveats.
You’ve got to remember that we don’t live in a non-state world, so we only have the tools that exist in that world. We can’t expect our governments to react in this one particular instance, to pretend that they’re not a government.
Coupla bits to be aware of:
The “died of, or died with”: more people died “of” Covid than is being reported. The figures are underreported. On a very basic level, if someone would have lived, but died because Covid pushed them over the edge, that’s not being reported
(yes, yes, very much yawn, we all know about the one (1) guy who died in a motorcycle accident and had Covid, and was reported as a Covid death. There’s far more people who died from Covid-accelearated deaths than that one person. The “died with vs died of” is hugely skewed, far more people died “of” than is being reported. Basically, you are being lied to.)
Great Barrington Declaration – I mean, sure? A bit rough on people who are disabled/vulnerable. it was basically: if you’re vulnerable, you need to stay indoors, but I want to go and get avocado toast for brunch with my girlies, so you stay indoors and have a shit life whilst I do me.
I mean, fine, but not something I’m massively lauding. The proponents of it were pretty selfish.
There was a lot of misinformation around at the time – either good faith or not – which can be questioned.
I think one of the things that was bad faith was the early “You shouldn’t wear a mask, it’s not helpful”
Makes me sick now. I remember it led to the whole “oh, it’s like trying to stop a mosquito with a chicken-wire fence” thing, when it was just very clearly something that everyone should do – but the reasons given were false – it was actually because we didn’t have enough masks.
On the other hand, the whole “early treatment” thing – that’s just bollocks, but it’s led people who don’t understand stuff to think that *that* was a problem, when in fact it would have killed people – or likewise, there’s still people who think that the vaccines were a danger, when the facts are that it massively reduced the risks if one was to get Covid (it doesn’t stop one from getting covid, which we know now, but they hugely reduce the risk of enormous illness from it)
It’s all very bizzare, and a lot of people have…very wrong opinions that are dangerous.
Neonsnake shows us what 90% of humans in the west believed during the height of the hysteria and propaganda. Almost all of those people have since realized that most of those points were incorrect, even though they believed most of it during the height of COVID. The rare people like neonsnake who still cling to such lies now in 2025 are dangerous to society and should never be in positions of authority because they lack not only judgment and wisdom, but also open mindedness and spine. Such loathsome scum are beneath my contempt and if it were up to me their voting rights would be stripped.
The crimes against humanity committed during covid are unforgivable and if we want to prevent such horrific crimes again in future then then people like neonsnake who still all these years later cannot tell truth from falsehood should be shunned and shamed and ostracized from society.
Neon, at least here in the US, Dr Fauci’s lying about masking was major deal. Who could trust a word he said after that. Telling a noble lie can be commendable as long as you remember the necessary next step, to fall on your sword when the lie must be revealed. He didn’t fall on his sword, he kept his job.
I agree: the lab leak theolooks robust but there’s clearly no great demand from other governments to demand a thorough investigation.
That’s why conspiracy theories proliferate.
There may well be valid reasons to do gain-of-function research, but the risk-reward of gaining knowledge vs the risk of a catastrophic pandemic is so bad that I can’t see how any remotely democratic country could support it. And so we get stories of western countries funding the Wuhan lab. From where I’m sitting, this is a scandal of Biblical proportions. And what do we generally get?
The sound of crickets. Nothing much from MPs here in the uk or their peers in continental Europe, or Asia, North America, etc.
Why isn’t RFK creating a stink on this topic? It surely would redeem Trump’s decision to appoint him if he did.
On this lab leak issue, Trump hasn’t so far been very vocal. I’m a bit surprised.
It’s funny, I remember hearing the claim that the number of excess deaths during covid were about twice the number of deaths attributed to covid. Upon hearing this some people assumed actual covid deaths were about twice the reported number, I assumed the number of deaths caused by the reaction to covid was about as many as was caused by covid itself.
Strange, not haha.
OK, now I’m pissed off.
We had a plan to deal with a respiratory infection pandemic. It was a global plan, based on the fact that you can’t stop one of these, unless infectivity is extraordinarily low, when the number of infected is more than about 20,000.
I cannot emphasise that enough,
We.Had.A.Plan.
It was based on good modelling, a strong understanding of how these things play out. We didn’t know how severe the infection was (actually the Diamond Princess data was available before lockdown, so bugger that), but that didn’t matter!
What mattered was what you could do about it.
And what we did was
1) continue accepting air passengers from China;
2) more generally, not close our borders or initiate quarantine at the borders;
3) wibble;
4) get the notorious modellers at Imperial* (check up on what they did modelling the last Foot and Mouth outbreak) to create a panic;
5) involve the “nudge unit” to create a panic;
6) conclude that there was no effective early treatment without any evidence;
7) create many Nightingale hospitals which were then unused;
8) lock down;
9) start slagging off and libelling anyone who disagreed’;
10) it turned out that the original plan was the right one.
see the above comments. In particular, those of us who rapidly studied the outcomes from the Diamond Princess, where air conditioning undoubtedly spread the virus as quickly as possible between cabins and passengers knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was unjustifiable hysteria coupled with blatant power grabs and, I strongly suspect, a big push from China to ensure that the west suffered at least as much economically as China did.
The passengers grabbed the controls of the airplane and said “let’s shut it down”.
*some of them are distant colleagues and I have some respect for their mathematical skills but none for their epidemic modelling
Lockdown? When it was 15 days, I approved. When I’m not sure what’s happening, or what to do about it, I try to find a quiet place that gives me a chance to clear my head, gather data, and think. Two weeks seemed reasonable.
When the time-out metastasized, I changed my mind. But there wasn’t much I could do about it – there was a steamroller at my front door, just waiting for me to come out. So I stayed in. When the government starts going batshit on the citizens, it’s safer – disease or no disease – not to attract its attention.
Oh really? As a self-described hardcore libertarian, have you really thought that though?
A really funny thing about the Covid lockdowns is that the news media’s progressive groupthink probably cost the Swedish Social Democrats the re-election.
In 2022 they should have headed to the polls utterly vindicated about their Covid policy, proudly bragging how they kept their nerve while every other country in Europe panicked. Saving children from education gaps, social isolation, people not dying from missed tests or treatments, etc.
Instead they couldn’t run on what many right-wingers admitted was their biggest success, because the Swedish media kept on badmouthing it, since they were no longer the stars at the cool kids table because of it. Even as the massive social costs in other countries became clear the media turned it into a source of embarrassement like the Guardian criticizing Labour for not being woke enough.
The result was Swedens first gouvernment with a de-facto coalition with a “Far-Right” party.
Jon, it matters if a virus was engineered because it would help those trying to deal with it. I don’t think it’s a distraction. Lots of people, for reasons I regard as suspicious, would rather the whole line of enquiry is shut off. That’s a mistake, on various levels.
For what it’s worth, I was for the vaccines on a risk-reward trade off, but against vaccine mandates.this is particularly the case because there’s no clear evidence of vaccines reducing transmission.
As for early treatments that Paul Marks often refers to, I’d want to see clinical trial evidence. That said, in the early days of this pandemic, all ideas should have been on the table. The fact that early treatments were dismissed as they were only reinforced my suspicions about agendas.
The first social distancing measures in Sweden seemed to have a coherent purpose and over the course of the whole thing, Sweden has come out with less damage overall.
The first lockdown could just about be defended, but too many in public life seemed to enjoy this too much for my liking.
The well of public trust has been poisoned for a generation.
I was working in Spain at the time. One weekend the government there were making it mandatory for ministers to go in mass feminist demonstrations in major Spanish cities despite early concerns about COVID transmission from mass events. Several key ministers quickly got COVID after those marches. By the following weekend the most hard-line lockdown in Europe was being implemented. The speed with which all that happened convinced me that the lockdown wasn’t any rational or scientifically grounded plan but a government ridiculously over compensating because it had been made to look incompetent.
Yes.
I really have, actually, as a self-described hardcore libertarian. Probably more so than most.
Full-on muppetry. Not surprising, Shlomo is a muppet of the highest order.
@neonsnake
I am a 100% hardcore purist libertarian, and I was also in favour of the lockdowns – with some caveats.
Yeah, and I’m a teetotaler as long as I can start my day with a belt of whisky.
I mean really, you say you are a hard core libertarian and then go on to list the ways you approve of some of the most oppressive government actions in the history of the United States? If you want to stay home, stay home. If you want to wear a mask, wear a mask. If you want to get the vax, get the vax. That is what libertarians, hardcore and softcore, say.
Doesn’t feel like you read or understood the rest of my post, Fraser.
This reads like a tragic satire. With “hardcore libertarians” like this… lord save us all from these spineless worms. They know not what they say.
Dude, am I misrembering, or aren’t you a fucking Moldbug disciple? Like, you’re a self-admitted full-on fascist?
You don’t know what a fascist is any more than you know what a hardcore libertarian is. Crawl back to your hole, retard.
lmao – yeah, I thought you were a fascist. I’m not being proven wrong.
You don’t know what a “hardcore” libertarian is – it’s an anarchist. I’m not against softcore libertarianism, but you ain’t it, sunshine.
(also, don’t give it the large one with me, boy, you’re not tall enough for this ride)
Shlomo,
Fucking Hell! Why not just have everyone else who disagrees with you shot? That’s the libertarian way isn’t it? And God help, us all but just calling someone a “retard” indicates to me you’ve totally lost the argument.
JP, Jon,
No, it isn’t a rabbit hole for the reason JP gives. But also… Consider this if someone is to blame they should be held accountable. Also, Jon, are you happy that the cause of all of this isn’t resolved?
Someone who claims to be a “hardcore libertarian” and still is in favor of the covid lockdowns in 2025 is a retard beneath my contempt and should have his voting rights stripped. Absolutely.
There should also be mass imprisonments and mass prosecutions for the people in positions of authority who committed crimes against humanity during COVID.
People like neonsnake are dangerous to society because they have no moral compass whatsoever. They are spineless worms and deserve scorn and mockery and worse.
oh noes! Not my voting rights! Anything but my voting rights! lmao
Just about the only thing the buggers cannot fake is the number of actual corpses. At least, here in the UK the corpses are reported and counted with pretty near 100% accuracy. (I hope.) And so as the stories in the news started to get wonky and wonderful, I started to download the statistics. You can google it. “UK weekly death statitics” will get you the numbers.
And if you plot them – and I did – you will see a great wodge of “excess deaths”. 2 humps beyond the usual annual shape – one in Spring 2020 and one just after the turn of the year 2021. The first hump was about 50,000 souls and the second was about 20-30,000. Bear in mind that with a light seasonal skew towards the winter approx 10,000 people die every week in the UK. We had two weeks of approx 25,000 (reported) deaths. The humps are there and those are real extra dead people unless the UK authoritie have corruptly reported thousands of phantom deaths.
I don’t think that we know anything else about what happened with any confidence. Yes, lots of us had respitaory illnesses around then and a lot of folk tested positive with a testing thingy but I am not convinced that we know really what it was all about. I wouldn’t put it past the UN/Davos/WHO/WEF bastards to have rigged the entire thing to test their mucles, to scupper Trump’s re-election, derail Brexit, and to try to strangle at birth “populist” wrongthink.
Not long ago there were tests citizens had to pass in order to vote. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test
Neonsnake still cannot figure out that 1 + 1 = 2 even 4 years after the fact was established. To achieve this feat, it takes not only a lack of reading comprehension, a lack of judgement, a lack of wisdom, and a lack of introspection but it also takes a complete and total lack of any morality whatsoever. And he has the gall to call himself a “hardcore libertarian” and an “anarchist”. This retard is beneath my contempt and should not be able to vote.
I will not be returning to this thread or engaging with this moral miscreant any further.
Every now and then I happen across a scifi artificial plague drama, and there’s always the line “I demand you give us the antidote!” Hell, I’m sure it was the plot of Star Trek Voyager a couple of weeks ago.
Why the **** would you artifically create a plague AND ALSO HAVE THE RESOURCES, AGREEMENT OF THE UNIVERSE, AND WILL TO CREATE AN ANTIDOTE?!?!?!!!????!! The ONLY logical line to follow “I demand you give us the antidote!” is “Antidote? What antidote? We were engineering a plague, not a cure, we have no idea how to kill it.”
This might be the only time I’ve ever agreed with Shlomo 😀
Maybe a stupid question:
When I’m shooting, I check downrange to make sure I don’t kill anyone who is where they shouldn’t be. I limit my actions based on the possibly stupid actions of others.
I consider that to be entirely consonant with the NAP.
For that short period of time when we DID NOT KNOW the infectivity of Covid, isn’t it also in keeping with the NAP that we allow our epidemiologists to be all panicky and spittle-flecked and follow their very cautious, maybe even panicky instructions so that we’re not perhaps shooting a virus at others? Until we know?
Is that much different from not shooting when in doubt?
I’m not speaking of the time when it became clear that the disease wasn’t as bad as feared, just that period when we truly didn’t know.
NickM – I stand by what I have written.
What is unknown (and I certainly do NOT claim to know) was whether the release of the virus from the Wuhan lab (research funded, in part, by United States government agencies and organisations such as the “Eco Health Alliance” – so not just the Chinese) was accidental – or DELIBERATE. Some people claim it was deliberate – hence the epidemic was the “plandemic”, but this is unproven.
We also do not know if the establishment really did not know there were effective Early Treatments for Covid (which there were) – or whether they did know, and smeared those Early Treatments KNOWING they were effective – if so that would be close to mass-murder by the establishment. But we do not know.
We also do not know if the establishment knew, in advance, that the lockdowns were a useless policy – and pushed the lockdowns for political objectives (for example in America to “get Trump out”) and for the broader (Agenda 2030 style) objective of destroying small business enterprises and making the population dependent on the government and “partner corporations”.
What happened in, for example, California was particularly vicious – and looks very much like a political (and cultural – societal) agenda, rather than a health agenda.
Certainly later on when the establishment were supporting BLM riots (looting, burning and murdering) in response to Mr Floyd killing himself with drugs (for which people were sent to prison by a corrupt jury and a corrupt judge) in defiance of Covid lockdown rules, because “racism is a public health emergency” (there was no “racism” involved in the death of Mr Floyd) it was clear that the establishment did not believe their own lockdown propaganda – the question is, did they EVER believe it, or was in deceit from the start?
The same can, of course, be pointed out about the cloth masks – which never protected people from the virus, and were pushed as a way of spreading fear and dehumanizing people.
Lastly the Covid injections – did the establishment ever really believe they were “safe and effective” or did they always know the injections were not effective (did not protect people) and were the opposite of “safe”?
Did they always know?
If you (dear reader) were going to release a virus in order to push a political and cultural agenda (via death and via mass panic – panic you would work to whip up) you would make sure that there were effective Early Treatments for that virus – in case you got it yourself.
But you would also make sure that these Early Treatments were NOT generally used – as if they were generally used that would defeat the purpose of releasing the virus.
Just a theoretical case – we do NOT know that this is what happened.
As for Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove – their behaviour during Covid was at least as bad as those people (both officials and politicians – such as establishmentarian Vice President Pence) who forced President Trump to, partly, go along with international policy (although they never got him to force all State Governors to lockdown for the duration – which is what they really wanted, State Governors were allowed to make to dissent from international policy – and some did dissent).
Neither Mr Cummings or Mr Gove have changed their position over the last five years – there has been no “I blundered – I am sorry”, and that (the last five years) should rule them out of serious political discussion on other matters – as they will just continue to be puppets of the international establishment (the “rules based world order” the “international community” or whatever name is used for the establishment elite) and their agenda of making everyone dependent on government and “partner corporations”.
Sadly they are still active – and Mr Gove has been made editor of the Spectator magazine.
It looks like the entire British press is going to carry on being puppets of the international establishment elite – with claims that this or that newspaper or television station being “right wing” largely being widow dressing – or “right wing till it matters – and then suddenly NOT rightwing”.
I was 100% against lockdowns from the word go. The “we didn’t know about the severity” argument is tosh now and was tosh then. Lockdown didn’t stop the virus spreading so it didn’t matter a damn how dangerous the virus was. The NHS – not exactly the world’s best health service – was never overwhelmed and the overflow hospitals were never used.
BTW, a lab leak was always the most obvious cause of the pandemic. No convincing alternative has ever been proposed.
Clearly a broad church, this libertarian lark.
@bobby b
That sounds very reasonable…but. We know how this works on a global scale and that’s not a good idea. You have to have pre-planned responses for something on this scale. It’s what, for a very brief period, the WHO coordinated, before it became a captive of the CCP.
We all (I mean those charged with planning for this sort of thing around the developed world) had the plan and then we tore it up before starting to implement it. Not after it was discovered to be no good (which it wasn’t), but immediately.
First we froze, then we panicked. That’s never a good idea.
The plan is what the Great Barrington Declaration was based on.
Yeah, I remember. It’s one of the “bad faith” pieces of misinformation that sticks in my mind – another was the WHO saying it wasn’t airborne, when they knew by the end of April 2020 that it very much was – meanwhile, dear old Doris is still disinfecting her shopping and singing Happy Birthday twice whilst washing her hands because that’s what she was told to do. There others than those two, but those spring immediately to mind as they’re related to each other.
I’m not saying I don’t understand the impulse to then distrust everything, but it led to very poor decision making, and when masks were mandated, I can see why people cribbed about it (I was wearing a mask way before the mandates, and for a long time after they dropped. I upgraded from a neck gaiter through eventually to N95s once I myself learned more)
Yeah, it’s entirely consistent with libertarian principles to not risk infecting others with a potentially dangerous disease.
In a more libertarian world (and I mean one already in existence by the time 2020 rolled around), the mitigiations would have been entirely different. Quarantines would still have been needed, but they could have been much more targeted, since a decentralised society could have responded quicker. Unfortunately, we did not live (and do not live) in that world, so we had to make do with what we had. Lockdowns were *very much* a lesser evil, necessitated because the state is a huge, slow and stupid centralised institution, but the alternatives were significantly worse.
It’s very much a “the state breaks your legs and then offers you a pair of shoddy crutches” – you’d be pretty daft not to accept the crutches, but you’d clearly much rather the state hadn’t broken your legs in the first place. Lockdowns (and other mandates) are the crutches. Shoddy, of varying levels of efficiency, and definitely not preferred – but given the alternatives on offer, you’d take them.
Covid was obviously a deep state/ Democrat op from the start- we know a lot more about how these things work now. The kickbacks must have been phenomenal. Pfizer sold some $70 billion worth of vaccines in 2 years, and multiple vaccines were ready to go in a matter of weeks. That’s not how vaccine development works, especially for novel pathogens.
As for all the lockdown bullshit- “ don’t tell me what to do. You get no say in what I do” worked just fine.
Yeah, it is. Largely it’s split into extremes between people who are correct about things (me), and people who aren’t (the people dogpiling me)
😉
Joking aside, libertarianism requires more analysis than just “the government is doing this, therefore it is wrong and should be opposed!” – it needs to be looked at in the context of whatever other wrongdoings the state has previously committed, and judged on whether it will make things better or worse in that context
Well said Neonsake.
Someone else needs to say it, but Shlomo’s idea that people who hold views he dislikes being banned from voting is ridiculous. Maybe I should call for people want “vast” tariffs to be hounded and shunned.
Instead of calling people rude words, perhaps it makes more sense for those of us who profess to love individual freedom and autonomy to ask how to ensure that the politics of fear can be better countered. How can panics be resisted better? Why are the critical reasoning faculties of the population so weak, at least on the evidence of wide support for certain government policies?
I think the answer can be found in the culture, family breakdown, model of education, etc. This where to seek lessons from the pandemic, at least from a libertarian point of view .
I recommend Economics in One Virus, by Ryan Bourne.
https://amzn.eu/d/d1KeIRK
Thank you Johnathan, I appreciate that (and I forgot, but you’ve reminded me – thank you NickM as well for support upthread)
(In fairness, I did call Shlomo a muppet several times, so I perhaps earned a few harsh words in return)
It’s a fair question. I think the reason is that the vast majority of the populace are conditioned (and I don’t blame them, honestly) to view the government as the “one source of truth”, and it’s in the government’s interest to uphold this, and simultaneously crush (or co-opt) other sources. I recall the mutual aid groups I was involved in during mid-2020, and how hard I had to fight to keep local gvmt reps from getting involved.
(I’ve not read Economics in One Virus, but I’d offer “Seeing Like A State” by James C. Scott if people want to really understand what I mean by noting how inefficient the state really is)
NickM, ‘all of this’ is the abuse of our liberties by government and cowards. I already know what caused it. The virus was not particularly interesting.
100% with Shlomo on this one.
One of the things that was a “silver lining” during the pandemic was, indeed, the resurgence of mutual aid groups. For far too long, the “family” has been thought of as an atomised unit of “Mum, Dad, 2.4 children” etc, and we’ve forgotten that we used to go to our grandparents after school (if both parents worked), or to a friend’s house and so on.
It reminded us that we are at our best, a community and a co-operative, not competitive, species and I was heartened to see those sort of informal groups spring up again – it’s one of those things that we are naturally inclined towards as a species (see: every piece of anthropology ever) when not living under a repressive state.
It’s been a shame to watch those ideals flounder post-2022 or so, to be honest.
I am proud to point out that I called for neonsnake’s voting rights to be stripped prior to him calling me a muppet.
To address Johnathan’s point, I do not say that neonsnake’s voting rights should be removed because he supports a policy I dislike. I dislike the policy of continued war in Ukraine, but I would never suggest removing the voting rights of people who support continued financing of Ukraine’s war against Russia.
There are policy differences. And then there are differences in morality.
I can understand why people would hold Neonsnake’s immoral opinions during the height of COVID – most of my friends and family did as well. But to continue to cling to such horrific immoral positions in 2025 proves that he is literally a bad person, an immoral person, someone of very poor character who should be shunned, shamed, and ostracized. He proved with his first comment, which I reproduce below, that he is a spiritually demented imbecile, a morally crippled swine, and a genuine danger to civilized society. And he should not have the right to vote.
The crimes against humanity committed during COVID will happen again in the next one hundred years – because of people like Neonsnake and the people who refuse to condemn him for the piece of shit he is.
lol
A) I’m right on all those points.
B) Imagine threatening an anarchist with removing their “right to vote” and thinking that’s a gotcha.
C) I thought you weren’t going to reply any more on this thread? It’s Saturday, haven’t you got homework to do or something? Or like, cartoons to watch if you’ve already done it?
It’s…amusing…to be accused of “horrific immoral positions” and everything else.
Somewhere upthread, someone noted that the excess deaths due to covid were something like 80,00 people in the UK. This is very low, the actual number was 167,356 from March 2020 to December 2022. From that point, the excess death count started to be measured from 2020 (awkward, to say the least).
Give or take, that’s something like a 12% increase.
I mean, if I’m immoral for thinking that’s a problem, or indeed I’m “a spiritually demented imbecile, a morally crippled swine, and a genuine danger to civilized society”, then that’s not something I have a problem with, in all frankness. I’ll fly my (black) flag of “genuine danger to civilised society” with pride on that one.
😉
I’ve always considered that the whole ‘Did covid originate in a Chinese lab’ question was memory holed because the US was up to its neck in what was going on at Wuhan, and didn’t want too many questions asked. If there hadn’t been a direct line of causation from US financial support to Wuhan’s activities then I suspect the US would have been considerably more active in pointing the finger at China. As it was they knew what skeletons were in their cupboard so kept schtum.
neonsnake,
Thanks but to be honest it was as much about this site descending from sophisticated salon witticisms to saloon-bar brawling.
See what I mean?
Anyway, I quite like The Muppets.
Shlomo,
I thought you’d quit this thread but you just had to come back… Sorry, but you’ve lost the argument when you get into such absurd and vile name-calling. And then keep on doing it. Don’t you have an elderly spinster with a cat to burn or something? Or is your ducking-stool in need of a service?
Agreed – I was rather thrilled to find an episode with Blondie some months back, that I’d totally forgotten about in my old age. And of course, I have The Muppet’s Christmas Carol on my yearly “to-watch” every late December, along with Scrooged et al.
Do you mean Blondie or just Debbie Harry? Never seen that but I’d love to!
The Muppet’s Christmas Carol is utterly brillint. By far the best adaption and, possibly, Michael Cain’s greatest performance. Definitely my fave Christmas movie though Die Hard comes close.
Jim, I Susie t that’s a major reason.
But it’s odd that RFK isn’t talking about at all, unless he’s agreed not to discuss it a price for his cabinet seat.
Trump surely must know about the Fauci-Wuhan connection. On lockdown, DT isn’t the fiery iconoclast that he likes to be seen as on most other topics.
Ah, no, you’re right – it was Debbie Harry solo, not the full band (I watched it recently during the last Christmas period, it was on Disney+ if you have access to it)
I saw a social media post a few years ago which basically said that Caine treated it like it was the most serious performance of his career (despite his co-stars being, y’know, Kermit the Frog, Rizzo the Rat and so on), which is what “made it”. Difficult to argue with that, honestly (and I’m a big fan of most of Caine overall)
I disagree with most of the points made by neonsnake but the one that particularly gets me is the idea that the proposals in the Great Barrington Declaration were selfish. The GBD was saying that normal people should be allowed to get on with their normal lives and that the state’s efforts to protect people should be targeted at the elderly and otherwise vulnerable. The thinking was that lockdowns were seriously damaging society in a number of ways and that it would be far better for the future of society for most people to return to normal. I agreed with that completely then and I still do. It’s obvious that protecting the vulnerable involves the imposition of some restrictions; it simply doesn’t follow that those allowed live their lives normally were being selfish or that the recommendation that they be allowed to do so was itself selfish.
Taking the opposite view is like saying that as people with a particular disability can’t do certain things that those without that disability can, the latter are selfish to do those things.
Like Marius, I was opposed to the idea of lockdowns from the very beginning. In the run-up to March 2020, I couldn’t help but think of Lyme disease and how the state of New York. has tried to whip up a panic over that. As I understand it, Lyme is unpleasant so you certainly want to avoid getting it. But even if deer ticks didn’t carry Lyme disease, you still wouldn’t want to get bitten by a tick because it’s irritating. Ditto mosquitos even when they don’t carry malaria/Zika/West Nile/etc; bees and wasps even if you don’t have a bee sting allergy; spiders; and so on. However, NYS acts as though if you don’t wear light-colored, long-sleeve clothing, tuck your pant legs into your socks, and stuff like that, you will get Lyme disease.
Likewise covid. Early on, it sounded like it was worse than the flu, and I think the death numbers for the elderly bear that out. But you don’t want to get regular seasonal flu either, so keep doing the hygiene things you’d do to try to avoid seasonal flu. I remember just before lockdowns hit in the US saying elsewhere that covid sounds unpleasant, but you don’t want to panic. The response I got was, “Italy didn’t panic, and look what happened to them.”
What really fueled my anger, however, was in April 2020 when our POS then-governor Andrew Cuomo said of the people complaining about being put out of work by lockdowns that maybe they should get essential jobs. No, you ****, they had essential jobs before you and your goons put metaphorical guns to their employers’ heads. Right at the end of April, my job (I had a cube in a place attached to a mailroom which remained open) went to three days a week to get people some of the covid bennies. That only lasted half a week, literally (someone came in mid-shift on Wednesday, one of her days off). The following Monday we learned of the first of several rounds of layoffs. When workload finally started coming back around January 2021, we were so short-staffed we were working close to 60 hours a week for six months, until we lost one of our contracts, leading to another big round of layoffs. I survived all those layoffs, but all the way back at the beginning of May 2020 when we went to three days a week, I reached the conclusion that if I lost my job due to the lockdowns, I’d tell people that the pro-lockdown crowd deliberately wanted to destroy me economically just as much as they claimed anyone who opposed lockdown wanted to kill Granny (another Cuomo argument; he invoked trying to keep his mother who was pushing 90 safe). Hyperbolic? No more so than the people who claimed I wanted to kill them.
Does anyone have more information about what the ‘Tufton street mafia’ said about COVID and lockdowns back in 2020? I’m already no fan of the IEA/ASI etc but would be curious what their positions on lockdown were.
neonsnake, you are quite right. My post above referred to the humps in Spring 2020 and Winter 2021. Clearly people were also dying in the other weeks of the year.
Annual deaths in England and Wales:
2015 530,388
2016 523,269
2017 532,095
2018 537,951
2019 527,234
2020 604,045
2021 585,800
2022 575,708
Before the pandemic, you could say that the recent average deaths in England and Wales were about 520,000-530,000. Shall we say 525,000 per year for simplicity?
Excess deaths in England and Wales
2020 79,000
2021 61,000
2022 51,000
I stopped calculating the figures in early 2023. Perhaps I shouldn’t have.
(Source: ONS – my own analysis, uncorrected – just reported deaths)
Ah, gotcha – my mistake, I read the post too quickly.
Yes, that seems reasonable to me; I think we’re saying the same thing – there were a lot of bodies in those 3 years. Post 2023, fwiw, they started included 2020 in the numbers, which brings the excess down a lot, and is to my mind incredibly flawed (but allows us to say that it’s now under control, of course)
“Excess” deaths. How many died from seasonal flu during same period? Or did seasonal flu magically disappear for the first time ever?
According to the ONS (and I don’t particularly trust them), the mortality numbers are now below 2019 levels if you adjust for a slightly different age profile and allow for the increased population.
The Continuous Mortality Investigation (run by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries) currently projects better (than 2019) life expectancy (in the UK) for the over-45s and worse for the under-45s.
Of course, it’s the over-45s that have been somewhat weeded out by Covid.
David Norman:
I mean, sure – if it “particularly gets” you that I’d rather not have placed the entire burden of covid on the elderly and otherwise vulnerable, that’s a you thing.
I get that what you charmingly term “normal people” didn’t really feel that they should have to modify their lives in order to protect those most at risk (there was a massive sense of burden and blame placed on the vulnerable almost from day one, what with the whole “did they have an underlying condition????” question everytime someone young died – like, so what if they did?), and that’s cool, but don’t expect me to (as I said in my initial post) to laud people who felt like that.
The GBD was extremely vague on what measures could be enacted to protect the vulnerable, but what it would have ended up being (based on the only example they gave, which was around care homes) was that people who were considered vulnerable would have had to lock down far harder than was currently necessary, AND anyone in contact with them would have had to have also lockdown far harder, given that the circulation of covid would have sky-rocketed (by design – herd immunity) and those carers cannot have risked bringing in ever-mutating strains into contact with the vulnerable.
It’s nigh-on impossible to believe that those people would have been looked after financially (a lot of their carers would have had to leave their jobs, if they involved being in contact with the now-infected general public), given the attitudes towards disabled people, so it amounts to a managed culling of the disabled population.
We’re not just talking the elderly here (but be clear, if someone died at 70 who would have otherwise lived to 80*, that’s still a problem), we’re talking about young people who would have lived their entire lives – yes, disabled, yes, not able to go on fucking ski-ing holidays, yes, with a lower quality of life than what you called “normal people”- but who would have otherwise had long and purposeful lives.
If my stance that I’d rather we protected those people – even at the cost of my own mild inconvenience – “gets you”, then so be it.
As I said, sure, you do you, but I’m not about to laud that attitude.
*the average loss of years lived due to covid deaths is 10.6
Is the COVID lockdown being a “mild inconvenience” a hill you really want to die on?
Pffft.
I typed out “do you massively want to do this, with me, Perry?” and then deleted it, because it’s possibly a little bit unfair on you, and I’m trying not to be unfair.
I’ve stated my position very clearly, but I’ll repeat it:
Our society is not a libertarian society, and one cannot just say “in this instance, we’re gonna do a libertarianism” without taking into account the downstream effects.
To repeat something I said upthread: were we living in a more libertarian society, the required response would have been very different.
But we we weren’t, and we’re still not.
But honestly: if you’re saying “would I accept a mild inconvenience for me, to try to save the lives of disabled people”, I mean Jesus fuck dude, I’d do that without thinking!!! What is wrong with you?
To put it another way:
Is “I’m prepared for people who are old, disabled, or who have otherwise underlying conditions to die so that I am not inconvenienced”
Is *that* a hill you’re prepared to die on?
neonsnake,
Define “mild”. Difficult isn’t it? As is foreseeing everything. Do you think, in the mid/long-term*, shafting the economy, fucking education et. al. is helping the old, disabled or sick? And is a “mild” inconvenience for billions worth it for the saving of… how many?
We can only answer that by using some sort of utilitarian “ethical calculus”. And we know where that leads…
*Again, I leave it as an exercise to put specific timescales on that…
Imagine a deadlier-than-bubonic plague virus spreading rapidly across your country.
Would you allow for some shutdown?
If you would, then this is really just an argument about price.
How the lockdowns affect me as an individual isn’t really relevant for public policy.If you had asked me “Would you want to keep kids out of public schools for a year so a bunch of people who are at deaths door anyway?” I would reply “you had me at keep kids out of public schools”.
But as others have pointed out, one must consider the larger picture.
neonsnake – it does take much work to find out that the lockdowns did NOT save lives, all (all) the nations that did not lockdown had a lower (lower – not higher) Covid death rate, than the United Kingdom.
The idea that the lockdowns were about “saving lives” is false.
As for destroying basic civil liberties in order to make people dependent on government and vast partner corporations (the very corporations you say you oppose neonsnake) being an “inconvenience” for ordinary people (being reduced to serfdom – in all but name) – I think, on reflection, you will choose to withdraw that statement neonsnake.
“I’d rather we protected those people – even at the cost of my own mild inconvenience”
How does making everyone else stay at home as well as the elderly staying at home help the elderly? I can’t see how a 25 year old being allowed to go to the pub with his 25 year old mates means that his grandad dies of covid, if his grandad is self isolating anyway and getting his shopping delivered to the end of his driveway, as happened in lockdown.
Lockdowns meant the elderly were isolated from the rest of society (which was very bad for many of them don’t forget) but they also meant the not-elderly were isolated from the not-elderly too, when they didn’t need to be, and to the long term detriment of society as a whole. The GBD just meant the elderly would act as they would have anyway in a full societal lockdown. They aren’t ‘bearing all the weight of fighting covid alone’ or anything such like, they are in no worse position than if everyone else is locked down around them.
And before you say ‘But some elderly people live with their younger generations and would be more vulnerable to covid being brought back into the household if the young are free to do as they please’, that was always going to happen, because lockdowns were in effect only for the middle classes, who either did jobs that could be furloughed, or could be done from home. The working classes still had to go out to work – filling the shop shelves, wiping the elderly’s backsides in care homes, operating the warehouses, driving the vans delivering all those internet goodies etc etc etc. Its far more likely that intergenerational households will exist at the lower end of the economic scale, and those are precisely the people who had to still go out to work during covid lockdowns. So those elderly would still be exposed to covid being brought back in to the household, full lockdown or not. Full lockdowns did not prevent Granny from being exposed to covid if her son worked in a food warehouse, and/or her granddaughter worked in a hospital, and she shared a house with both.
You seem to think lockdowns meant everyone stayed at home 24/7. If it did that would indeed have protected the elderly, but everyone, young and old would have starved to death anyway. As society still needed the basics to function the lockdowns meant perhaps 50% didn’t go out. The other 50% had to, and were exposed to the virus, and brought it home with them.
So the lockdowns were in effect theatre to produce the illusion that ‘something is being done’ when in reality they did very little to slow the spread of covid. They certainly would not mean that anyone could avoid being exposed to covid for ever. At some point everyone was going to be exposed to the virus, and have to deal with the consequences, young and old. Those promulgating the idea that covid could be eliminated were either idiots or lying for political effect. Covid is still around now, and the elderly are having to deal with it, or not as the case may be. Lockdowns did absolutely nothing to change what health risks covid poses to individuals today, but they did do massive long term damage to society as a whole. They should never have been enacted.
When the plague did stalk the land, the infected would be kept separated from everyone else – sometimes by force and sometimes through peronal sacrifice. The village of Eyam quarantined themselves during the Great Plague and a vast proportion of them died.
It was just about acceptable to panic and throw out the profesionally arrived at plan for an outbreak of something nasty – especially if we suspected that it came from a bio-lab. Although we do elect people to positions of power who one would hope would not panic. And they do have access to the best advisors in the universe.
So I’d be disappointed but let them off for the first lockdown. Everything after that was a shit show of, I hope, cowardice and stupidity. As for the “vaccines”. Better statisticians than me will do the tally in a decade or two. I fear that it will be horrifying.
@bobby b
Yes, but in the economics sense. The price of Lockdowns was and will be a substantial number of deaths.
If you want to know why, Constable Dorfl in Terry Pratchet’s Going Postal gives an excellent explanation in relation to the victims of fraud.
The benefit against which this was traded was essentially nothing.
By the basic epidemiological law of connections, really. The elderly are going to encounter the non-elderly sometimes. By reducing the spread amongst everyone, the chance that the elderly will encounter a carrier are lower.
(I am NOT saying that I accept lockdown past the initial period of not knowing what Covid would do. Just saying what the epidemiologists think.)
All true. But I know that sometimes I write too tersely. I was talking about the old joke:
So she is a prostitute, just haggling over price.
If you are willing to accept lockdown when a virus is deadly and infectious but claim a moral opposition merely when things aren’t so bad, it’s not really a moral (libertarian?) question, it’s just a fight over price.
NYT, quoting the Captain of the Titanic: “Mistakes were made . . . ”
😉
(Strangely, this was supposed to show up AFTER Fraser Orr’s comment.)
A little off topic, but I read this article which made my jaw hit the floor. This article is from the New York Times — which, for those of you who live outside the USA is considered the very bastion, the mother or left liberal thought in the USA. It explains how we were deeply mislead about the lab leak theory and goes into a considerable amount of detail on the utter mendacity of the public health officials, and the unrelenting pressure from the government to force scientists to hide the truth.
For example:
FWIW, Kristian Andersen, who is quoted here saying that he authored a paper in a major scientific journal that was knowingly false, still works as a professor at Scripps Research. Any honest scientist on publication of his utter scientific dishonesty would either resign or be fired. But apparently not.
I’m keeping a copy to pull out anyone who gives the line about “all scientists say….” or “are you a virologist….”. On a lighter note I also found this cartoon which says, rather more simply, the foolishness of people who rely on the unqualified certainty of public scientific prognostications. As the cartoon says, people who say “It’s science, bitches” don’t know what the hell they are talking about.
(BTW, the NYT article is from an archive so that you can read it. The original article link is at the top, and I checked it, that is was the same, but behind a paywall.)
The lockdowns did not “save lives” (yet again – every nation that did NOT lockdown had a LOWER, not higher – LOWER, Covid death rate than we did) – on the contrary they will end up costing many lives, partly by the economic harm (poverty kills) they have caused, but also in other ways.
And they were a massive assault on basic civil liberties – just as the international forces behind them, intended them to be.
Once one understands that the lockdowns, and then the injections, were not about saving lives from a virus (a virus for which generally effective Early Treatments existed – but which were viciously smeared) other things fall into place.
As normal, most people involved in these policies were innocent – they were just doing what they were told to do – and they themselves were mislead, but a few people were not innocent.
The great problem now is that people do not like to admit they were duped.
Even now some people were still defend the lockdowns (and the injections – and all the rest of it), because they will not say “I was fooled” – the truth is too humiliating for them.
It takes a very (very) strong person to say “I was wrong, I was fooled”.
@bobby b
Imagine a deadlier-than-bubonic plague virus spreading rapidly across your country. Would you allow for some shutdown?
Allow? Yes. Demand? No. If you want to stay home, stay home. If you want to wear a mask, wear a mask. If you want to get the vax, get the vax. If your health or circumstances put you at greater risk, take extra precautions. I don’t see what is complicated about this.
FWIW, at the very beginning of the pandemic what I suggested (probably on this blog, among other places) is that people could entirely solve the problem by wearing PPE. We can easily imagine more durable PPE that the plastic kind used in hospitals. Perhaps with battery powered pumps to filter the air. I can easily imagine this becoming a fashion trend. Kids with Spiderman PPE, or princess PPE. The NFL producing branded PPE. Fancy dress stores producing elegant evening gown PPE, or really nice business suit PPE. It could have been solved just simply by allowing the free market to do its thing. But instead the government decided to take over.
And when it turned out to be utterly useless, we can move on to the next thing. Of course some people would over do it. Heck I just saw a guy driving his car with a mask on even though he was the only one in there. No skin off my nose though.
If we were truly looking at a deadly virus with huge infectivity, I’d be outside my home with one of my AR’s, shooting anyone who refused to turn away.
So, no, I’d not demand that YOU stay home. But I would demand that you stay away. Maybe that’s the difference.
@bobby b
So, no, I’d not demand that YOU stay home. But I would demand that you stay away. Maybe that’s the difference.
Well that seems pretty reasonable, though I think my proposal of wearing PPE might be a bit more straightforward than your AR-15 backed “Get off my lawn” approach. You know all those dead bodies are still a cesspool of virus, for a while anyway.
El Gato Malo:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/believe-in-something-even-if-it-wrecks?utm_source=publication-search
Companion read
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-greatest-lie-told-during-covid
Neonsnake. As an elderly person myself I am touched that you were prepared to be mildly inconvenienced in order to reduce my chances of getting Covid. The main difference between us is that you believe lockdowns saved lives whereas I definitely do not. I believe they had bad results for everyone, both young and old. I believe the approach recommended in the Great Barrington Declaration was the right one, and a moral one.
@bobby b
Yes, true. But you forgot to add “and there is evidence that lockdowns would help”. I think most of us are at cross-purposes here.
My fury is directed at the politicians and experts who threw away so much for what was, on a global scale, a (for want of a better phrase) non-emergency.
I was also frustrated by your argument that the NAP (still not sure what you mean by that – Non-Aggression Principle?) suggests that we should allow the spittle-flecked epidemiologists to instruct us to lock down. I think not. Experts are there to advise, not instruct, and any rational person looking at their suggestions in detail (and in the light of The Diamond Princess outcomes) would have said (as I did, to a member of SAGE) “no, they’re barking mad”.
Here’s a link to a summary of what Kevin Roche had to say on 17 February 2020 (before any lockdowns in the UK). That’s the same date as the initial report into the Diamond Princess experience.
Precisely this.
It’s all well and good saying that the elderly can continue to get their shopping dropped off at the end of the driveway, but what happens when their boiler breaks down, or a bulb needs changing, or a fuse blows or etc (to take 3 examples that meant I had to go inside my very stereotypical little 90 year old lady neighbour’s house during lockdown)? If I think I’ve got a 10% chance of having Covid, that’s one thing; if I think I have 50% chance of having Covid (because the plan was “herd immunity” so it was inherent that people had to get infected), that’s very much a different calculation. Sorry, Ivy, you’re just going to have to pop another cardigan on and sit in the dark without your evening cuppa, love.
And remember as well – whilst everyone has apparently read “vulnerable” and immediately thought “elderly in care homes” (understandably, given the scandal in the UK care homes, at least), that’s not the exhaustive list of vulnerable. The whole “underlying conditions” thing included people of all ages. Many of these people live otherwise relatively normal lives, albeit with some restrictions. And many of them live with people who don’t have conditions themselves – be they parents, partners, children, whatever.
The effect of the GBD would mean that those people as well would have had to be locked away. Their carers and other housemates – parents, partners, children, whatever – also have to be locked away. The risks get too high – again, it boils down to: if everyone is taken some kind of care not to get infected, then maybe going and sitting outside in a pub garden has a 1% chance of danger. You might risk that for a birthday meal, maybe. If everyone is actively being encouraged to acquire herd immunity, and that risk sky-rockets, then suddenly those options disappear. As I said upthread as well, if someone has an able-bodied parent/partner whatever who is responsible for bringing in the income, but cannot risk going to work any longer, that’s also a huge issue; and let’s not pretend that those people will be looked after financially, we know that’s simply not true.
These aren’t hypotheticals, either – I was involved throughout the pandemic with a group of disabled 20-something to 40 somethings, and this was the brutal reality of it.
Now, I know what’s going to happen next – someone is going to sigh heavily and say “You can’t expect to shut society down for the sake of a very small percentage of people”
And no, I don’t expect that. But for one thing, the estimated level of people who were “vulnerable” was between 4% and 10% – this is outside of the elderly, btw, this was those people “of working age”, and doesn’t include the people living with them who also would have had to lock down hard.
And for another, there were plenty of other options, none of which were taken, and none of which were proposed in any significant manner to look after these people other than “I oppose lockdowns, but in order to do so, I think we should lockdown the disableds”
“Libertarians for lockdowns” is an oxymoron – if someone supports the lockdowns (this savage attack on basic liberties) they are against liberty, they are not a libertarian.
As for “saved lives” – it is possible that people believed that about the lockdowns in 2020, but to still come out with the “saved lives” tap dance, about the lockdowns, in 2025 is pathetic.
What next – “libertarians” for forcing people to take the experimental Covid injections (which were certainly NOT vaccines by the traditional definition of that word) with threats that they would lose their job, and face other persecution, if they did not?
Forgiving people who were mislead and indoctrinated in 2020-2021 is one thing – but if they are still coming out with this pro international establishment agitprop in 2025, then it is time to stop being forgiving and to start to condemn their stance.
Probably also worth re-iterating what I initially said:
“I am a 100% hardcore purist libertarian, and I was also in favour of the lockdowns – with some caveats.”
I’d have expected people to have read the “with some caveats” and thought “ah, that means he has some caveats”, but evidently not 🙂
You keep saying that they didn’t save lives, and you’ve provided no evidence of this statement whatsoever.
The swiftest of internet searches notes that lockdowns (and other mitigations) reduced covid deaths by 10.7% (according to the IEA) compared with “light” mitigations such as those employed by Sweden (who, note, did NOT do nothing, they just didn’t do a full-on “stay at home” order, and had a higher “trust-based society” than the UK).
So, yes, they saved lives, unless you can provide numbers to contradict the IEA.
neonsnake – a libertarian (even a lukewarm one) should not have been a supporter of the lockdowns, which were the worst attack on basic liberties in modern history, even during World War II people in the United Kingdom were less unfree than we were during the lockdowns. No one, during World War II, told the people they could only leave the house once a day, and most shops and other establishments were NOT closed.
And the idea that this was to “save lives” is absurd – after all we were all supposed to go to the supermarket (crowd in there – the absurd, and ineffective, “distancing” and “shields” for payment staff came later).
But that is 2020 – 2021 – are you STILL in support of the lockdown policy (this policy of the international government and corporate establishment) NOW – in 2025?
Do you have the moral courage to say “I was fooled – they deceived me, I proved to be, in this case, gullible” or are you not a strong enough person to admit this?
I will go first – a couple of years ago I was conned, very badly conned, about some garden work, I showed myself to be very gullible, I was conned out of a lot of money – and I am ashamed, deeply ashamed, of my stupidity and weakness.
Now you neonsnake – say (and accept to yourself) the following….. “I was wrong to support the lockdowns”.
I feel like I’m repeating myself over and over.
Did I support lockdowns in 2020? Yes. Do I believe I was right to do so? Also yes.
Why? This seems to be the bit that people are missing: we did not then, and do not now, live in a society where “libertarian ideals” are widely held; we lived and live in a state society. Lockdowns were an ugly and blunt measure, that would not be needed in a more libertarian society, but were one of few tools available at the time, given the actual “on the ground circumstances”, and the state society as it stood at the time (and it hasn’t got better, I’ll note)
I can wish and pray as much as I want that they weren’t needed, but I’m not going to revise history and pretend that that isn’t the case. It is the case.
Did we then squander the opportunity by (for example) not enacting a decent track and test system? Yup. Should we have gone full-throttle into producing PPE and creating clean air systems? Oh yeah. Should we have been more honest that it was airborne and not “droplet borne”? Oh, very much hell yeah.
Did we do any of these things? No. But none of those things – that I had basically zero control over – were considerations in March 2020. So, no, I’m not going to walk back how I felt in March 2020 on the basis of things that came after in some kind of “ackshually I was never in favour of it” fashion.
That would be enormously dishonest of me.
Such a bizarre thing to say. Nobody here asked him to lie and say “ackshually I was never in favour of it”.
I was strongly in favor of the lockdowns for the first two months or so of the plandemic. My perspective gradually changed starting in late April 2020 and by late May or June 2020 I was totally against basically every state policy being implemented under the guise of the plandemic, especially the lockdowns which constituted the most egregious crime against humanity committed by the United States government against its own people since slavery. Nothing else comes close.
Why did my opinion change? Because I followed the evidence and the data. From the Diamond Princess. From Italy. From Spain. That’s why by June 2020 I realized I was totally and completely wrong to have supported the lockdowns back in March and April 2020. Some people really are incapable of admitting they were colossally wrong based on the data, especially five years later. It’s just humiliating to admit having fallen for such hysteria and propaganda.
I don’t understand this.
Before we knew that Covid wasn’t a mass killer – before we had the data to rule this out – limiting contacts was a good and valid choice.
Once we got the data that showed it was NOT the killer we feared, lockdowns lost their justification.
But we were not WRONG to support them before we had the data. We were cautious. I was not WRONG to think that being cautious at that point was warranted.
(As Clovis Sangrail points out above, lots of this is cross-argument, missing each others’ points. Here in the USA, we had a rather limited lockdown compared to the lockdown that Europe – the UK – had. Aside from the folly of closing schools, even here in liberal Minnesota, we all did basically what we wanted, except for not being able to go into certain types of businesses.
I still struggle to wrap my head around the UK – not being able to leave your house. That’s why I think that discussion of this topic between Americans and Europeans misses the mark.)
Neonsnake. Would that be the same IEA that produced a book saying that lockdowns were a costly failure? Even if one believes that they saved some lives, if you reason from that alone, as you seem to be, that they were the correct policy you are ignoring the staggering collateral damage they caused. Looking back at your contributions, you don’t seem to have much interest in that.
It’s funny because I personally know people whose lives were ruined by the lockdowns and people like neonsnake pretend to believe that *THEY* are the compassionate ones for being in favor of these crimes against humanity despite virtually all evidence proving that these crimes were not only immoral but ineffective too lmao
As I said, they are spineless worms who in an ideal world would not be allowed to vote
Limiting contacts is something anyone can choose to do. Lockdowns is coercion and I was objectively wrong to have supported that for about 2 months at the beginning of COVID. I was wrong. It was completely immoral and ineffective and the wrong thing to have supported. Lack of data is no excuse for supporting crimes against humanity without valid reason to do so.
neonsnake “I feel I am repeating myself over and over” and then you say you supported the lockdowns and that you were right (correct) to do so.
In short you have learned nothing in five years and are still pretending that the lockdowns were about “saving lives” – which they were not.
As you refuse to learn it is pointless to talk to you.
I suspect that it is not just the lockdowns you refuse to learn from, I suspect that you refuse to learn about generally effective Early Treatments, or the dangers of the injections (which were not vaccines – as that word is traditionally defined). I hope I am mistaken about you refusal to learn – and you can correct me.
Indeed it appears (appears) to be the case that you refuse to learn anything about anything.
If (if) true, this would mean that it is pointless to try and communicate with you Sir – not just about this subject, but about any other subject.
This was very obvious from his very first comment in this thread. Only a literal retard could write something like the following in the year 2025. Unfortunately, such people are not being shamed, shunned or ostracized by sufficient numbers of sane people in the west. Pathetic
Precisely.
bobby b
By the way many eminent epidemiologists and virologists and doctors have publicly explained many times that the scientific research and evidence shows that even if COVID was 50X more lethal and 50X more transmissible than it was in reality, STILL lockdowns would not have been justified because that is not how you properly or scientifically respond to a pandemic even one that is actually dangerous. Dr Peter McCullough is a great example of this. Read what he has written, lockdowns go against all science even if the virus is very lethal and transmissible and dangerous. The whole response was an orchestrated scam, to achieve certain goals. And they succeeded quite magnificently
One other point, which may only be relevant on this side of the pond. The pro-lockdown people who said “oh but of course we will make an exception for BLM rallies” utterly destroyed any shred of credibility they may have had. Not just about covid, about anything.
Wow. Just . . . wow.
Wow, this thread seems to have gotten WAY out of hand. I think some people need to remember their manners. Whenever words like “retard” start appearing I wonder if we have returned to grade school recess. If you have to resort to name calling you have not only lost the argument but you have entirely lost the plot.
I have a small disagreement with BobbyB on this subject, but FFS he is obviously one of the smartest most insightful commenters here.
Imagine worrying about being polite towards evil scumbags who continue to defend Nazi tier atrocities and crimes against humanity years after they were proven to be ineffective, immoral, and completely unwarranted and without any basis in any science whatsoever.
Fuck them all, I truly hope they burn in hell
Anyone who fails to shun, shame and ostracize is taking the easy way out instead of what is proper and correct to help prevent such atrocities from taking place again. Pathetic. Don’t whine and complain when the terrorists come back for another bite
Thanks, FO (blushing) but it’s mostly “dazzle ’em with lawyerly BS.”
You used to be more measured. That was better to read. This is not a comment about content – just tone.
Yeah, full agreement. Don’t be going after BobbyB on this one – you wanna go after someone, keep it aimed at me, please, given that it’s my commentary that’s setting people off.
Not only insightful, but humble too! You do yourself a disservice 😉
Paul (and others), I am not pretending that the lockdowns were about “saving lives”, I’m stating clearly that I believe that they were. I had no reason then, and have no reason now, to believe that were anything but.
If I am wrong on anything, it is only in not making clear enough what I believe and why – that may well be a fair accusation that can be levelled at me.
It appears that when I made my initial statement – “I am a 100% hardcore purist libertarian, and I was also in favour of the lockdowns – with some caveats.” – that I should have put much heavier stress on the “with some caveats” part, as this appears to have totally ignored (and, in fairness, I probably haven’t done the best job in making clear what those caveats are or were).
I have also allowed myself to get annoyed by some of the, uh, harsher commentary towards me, and have replied in like manner. I appreciate the support of people who have defended me, against that, but I will admit that I have knowingly, for my own amusement, escalated some of it.
I have also, unfortunately, ignored a lot of the commentary and questions regarding the secondary effects of lockdown. Variously, people have spoken about job losses, mental health issues, schools, and so on. This wasn’t deliberately evasive on my part, but I have a day job, and other responsibilities (in case it isn’t clear from some of my upthread comments, I’m a carer – non-paid – for several people with disabilities), and wasn’t able to spare the time yesterday to answer them – please bear in mind also that there are several people all focusing questions on me in particular, because I’ve said something controversial, so whilst I’d love to get to all of you, that’s probably not going to happen.
So, I will attempt to back up and clarify:
In March 2020, I believe it was legitimate to enact a lockdown.
The factors that feed into that are many and varied, but include (and are not limited to) the fact that we did not have the tools necessary to react to a new virus, we did not have infrastructure in place to contain it, or treat it, and we did not have anything like the necessary amount of PPE, and we simply did not know how dangerous it was. There’s more, I’m sure, but that’s enough for now.
Crucially, we didn’t have widely available tests, AND we knew that people could be contagious before they showed symptoms, for 4-5 days. This is really important, as it renders the “if you feel ill, stay at home” argument null and void. This was an enormous problem.
The above points are purely factual – as in: I do not believe that they can be argued against on a factual basis; some people may argue that it’s not okay to tell people not to mix on the basis that they “might” be infected, and that’s okay. I have sympathy with that viewpoint, even whilst I don’t wholeheartedly agree with it (I’d rather be more careful than less).
I thought I had been clear, but apparently not: had society been structured differently at the time, the strict lockdown could have been avoided (it could have been much more targeted), but instead we had to use this incredibly blunt instrument, because of how society was (and still is) structured. I also thought I had made it clear by talking about good and bad faith misinformation how badly I believed we squandered the opportunity afforded to us by lockdowns, but again, apparently not judging by some of the comments I’ve had aimed at me.
For clarities sake: we (in the UK at least) then fucked it up royally, leading to an enormous death count, and an erosion in trust. The rules constantly changed, they were inconsistently applied, some were just plain stupid (I always forget that there was a time when you were only allowed to leave your house for an hour per day – mainly because my street flat-out ignored that one). Like, if you asked me type you out a timeline of the rules, I couldn’t do it without recourse to a search engine. The easy one to go to in the UK: we sent elderly people into care homes with Covid, and killed them. Very roughly, 20% of the UK covid deaths came from that decision. I’ll be slightly wrong on this, numerically, either up or down a little, but not materially enough to change the essential point that makes – that single fuck-up caused a lot of unnecessary deaths.
And that was just one of the many fuck-ups we made. I’ve mentioned a few (the airborne vs droplet-borne one for starters, the “masks shouldn’t be worn” vs “actually, it’s because we don’t have enough uwu sorry” for another) already, and I’ll add in now, since it’s beginning to come up – vaccines. The “vaccine” was sold as a “once you have this, you can’t catch it again”, which turned out to be utter nonsense.
But it’s the same nonsense as herd immunity. Covid is constantly mutating, and catching it once does NOT confer immunity. And neither did the vaccine, so it turns out. I’m sympathetic to the people who went “oh, ffs, in that case, I’m not getting it, I was lied to”. But: what the vaccine DOES do (and more sensible commenters on here have already noted this, with respect to the massive reduction in Covid infected elderly people continuing to drop dead, once vaccinated), is reduce the “viral load”. It makes it less likely that you yourself will have significant health issues, and it makes it less likely that you will be contagious. What it doesn’t do – unfortunately, and by god I wish it did, but it doesn’t – is reduce either of those factors to zero. Can it have adverse side effects? Sure it can. All vaccines can have adverse side-effects on a percentage of the population
Slightly under 3/4 of the global population have taken at least one shot, so it’s not surprising that we’ve seen newsworthy instances of people having adverse side-effects. But there’s no evidence at all to say that the Covid vaccines (I’m going to continue to call them vaccines, for ease) are any more dangerous than any other vaccine, and they are more beneficial than harmful, according to all the evidence available, vs getting a heavy dose (high viral load) of Covid. I’m not an anti-vaxxer, but I’m also aware that there is credible evidence that some illnesses (specifically, in the cases that are important to me, CFS and ME) can, arguably, be caused by adverse reactions to vaccines, so this is something I spent some time researching before getting my COVID shots, and it’s not something that I just glossed over with a “lol you anti-vaxxers are nuts” attitude. Being anti “Big Pharma” is a standard pillar of libertarianism/anarchism, after all, so I have sympathy towards it.
—————-
Just to return to a couple of points:
I probably have snapped at people, who didn’t earn it. Shlomo, Fraser, and Paul’s reactions had put me on the defensive, and I when I’m put on the defensive, my reaction is to go on the offensive.
My main concern is (hopefully understandably) around how Covid affected the most vulnerable amongst us. Some people have implied that by doing so, I lose my, uh, libertarian credentials. Okay. I’m not about to feel bad for wanting to protect the most vulnerable, and I don’t…massively ( 😉 )…feel that by doing so that I’m lacking in compassion, or indeed have committed “Nazi tier atrocities”, as has been badly stated.
There are very sensible conversations to be had around the second-order effects of lockdowns (job losses etc and many more) that I have not had a chance to address. I’m not against addressing them (I think they were fucking terrible), but I’m not massively interested if that means being dogpiled
(I’m also not interested in conspiracy theories around why lockdowns were enacted)
You do this every time, Paul.
You state (state) a bunch of speculative (speculative) rubbish, and then repeat it more than once (not less than once, more than once), and repeat it more stridently (not less stridently, more stridently), and then when someone (me, 1977-2025) presents you with actual evidence to the contrary (actual evidence, not made-up evidence), you retreat into “I’m not gonna talk about this anymore”.
(I missed a couple of “sirs”, my bad)
If you have evidence that lockdowns increased (not decreased, increased) covid related deaths, then present that evidence. Which you haven’t (not have, haven’t), because it took me less than 3 minutes (not more than, less than) to come out with the most conservative estimate possible, which was that they reduced (not increased, decreased) deaths by over 10%
Mucking about aside, that’s going to be very low, and it was much likely higher than that.
I would have a lot more sympathy with neonsnake if he had not gratuitously threatened me a couple of weeks ago.
“My main concern is (hopefully understandably) around how Covid affected the most vulnerable amongst us.”
Your pro-lockdown attitude is akin to saying ‘Because some people are vulnerable to anaphylactic shock from contact with peanuts we must remove peanuts entirely from society. No one can grow them, process them, sell them or eat them, because to do so puts the vulnerable at risk. Everyone must be forced to not have the benefit of peanuts so as to protect the small % who might be negatively affected. The loss of the benefit of peanuts to the vast majority is worth it for the gain in benefit to the small minority’.
I disagree fundamentally. If you are relatively vulnerable to something that is widespread throughout society, and that the rest of society is not vulnerable to, then the cost of avoiding it is on you, not the rest of society. You are the one who seeks to gains benefit, ergo you are the one who should pay the costs, whether that is financial or restrictions on what you can and can’t do. It is not acceptable to demand others are restricted purely for your benefit. You can ask, and some may voluntarily change their behaviour, but to demand others are forced to do your bidding backed up by the power the State is authoritarianism of the highest order, and a very slippery slope to all manner of evils that the 20th century has demonstrated in spades.
My brother in Christ, I have repeatedly noted that had the tools been in place in March 2020 that would have allowed vulnerable people to have a chance to avoid Covid, I would not have supported lockdown, and I did so because those tools were not in place (due, largely and probably entirely, to our existing political systems)
To give you an idea of what tools are in place to allow people with peanut allergies to avoid peanuts, we take it so seriously that the bag of KP Dry Roasted Peanuts that I’m currently enjoying as an afternoon snack has “peanuts” bolded and capitalised in the ingredients’ list as one of the allergens. Y’know, just in case I thought it might not contain peanuts. Laughable? Surely. But it’s an instructive example of just little we leave to chance.
Had that level of information been available in March 2020 that would have allowed relevant people to avoid Covid, I would have very different views. But they weren’t.
(Far worse, they still weren’t in place several months later)
“Had that level of information been available in March 2020 that would have allowed relevant people to avoid Covid, I would have very different views. But they weren’t.”
The outbreak of covid on board the Diamond Princess cruise liner provided us with exactly the data that was required in February 2020 as to who was vulnerable to covid, and that data was studiously ignored. We knew then that those who were vulnerable were the elderly with comorbidities and the young were pretty much untouched by it.
Ergo it was entirely possible to have designed a version of the GBD that told the elderly ‘you are at the greatest risk, so protect yourselves’, and told the young ‘Go about your lives as normal’. And provided funding to allow those two groups to keep apart from each other as much as possible. However much that would have cost it would have been a fraction of what was spent on paying completely able bodied people to stay at home so they didn’t catch a cold.
The only reason it wasn’t was because the entire Western world (apart from in Sweden) had a psychological meltdown at the idea they might die.