Kicking Against The Pricks

Let us hope lockdown sceptic Ramesh Thakur’s thorough record of Covid thuggery will make repeating such brutal behaviour less likely, writes law professor James Allan.

What most of the elected politicians around today’s liberal democratic world did to all of us mere citizens during the two-plus years of lockdowns still makes me fume with anger. In near on every democratic jurisdiction bar Sweden, Florida, South Dakota, and a couple of other US states the elected governments opted to throw away all the pre-2020 existing pandemic advice based on a century of data—advice that unequivocally ruled out lockdowns—in order to mimic the brutal, thuggish, illiberal response of the Chinese politburo. Retired UK Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption described what happened during lockdowns as “the biggest inroads on our civil liberties in two hundred years”.

Sumption was correct. And what followed was what some of us from the start predicted: this was the biggest public policy fiasco in at least a century and a half. Public health types, bureaucrats, and politicians decided which businesses could stay open and which could not, thereby leading to eventual bankruptcies amongst myriad small businesses, and if this seems worse coming from supposedly right-of-centre governments such as Australia’s Morrison government I share that feeling. The public sector did just fine during lockdowns. The small business side of the private sector, those deemed ‘inessential’, were the ones crucified with many such businesses having loan guarantees against the family home. People were paid to do nothing, a set of incentives now coming home to roost in terms of woeful productivity numbers, employees unwilling to go to work, and here in Australia the biggest drop in living standards in decades.

The lawyerly caste and judges fell virtually fully in line with the thuggery and heavy-handedness. No jurisdiction with a bill of rights had judges that did a single, solitary thing to roll back these lockdowns in any way. This, readers, shows the actual worth of bills of rights. Buy one and you simply buy the preferences and outlooks of the judicial caste, and they bought into the lockdown fearmongering. Meanwhile the elites who did this to us, who sold out freedom and individual autonomy, did not even have the good grace to take the teeny-weeniest of pay cuts themselves. Not the politicians. Not the modellers who got near on everything wrong. Not the public servants. Not the public health caste. Put bluntly, those doing this to us had no skin in the game.

Those doing this to us had no skin in the game.

Meanwhile, the lockdowns forced governments to rack up massive debt and to print money on an astonishing scale. Heck, it was as though supposedly thrifty treasurers had overnight converted to the idiocies of Modern Monetary Theory. This spending on steroids and printing money with unrestrained abandon led to huge asset inflation. You know who benefits when assets go way up in value? The rich and the old, the ones who own the assets. The policy choices made to undergird these thuggish lockdown laws ended up transferring enormous wealth from the young to the old (an immoral outcome if ever there were one) and from the poor to the rich (ditto). The two-plus lockdown years were the best years in history to be a billionaire.

Oh, and do not forget the school closures. A recent Stanford University study predicts the cost of that fiasco alone to the future US economy at some US$81 trillion over the next few decades. But forget the costs to the economy. Most kids who missed a year and a half of school will never make it up. They are permanently affected and will lead less good, sometimes blighted lives. Sure, a small cohort of middle class and better off kids whose moms could teach them at home were fine. But most were not. And even the most gung-ho of lockdownistas now recognise that school closures were a terrible error.

Meanwhile in near every democracy throughout these woeful two-plus years the average age of Covid deaths was higher than the life expectancy in that country. Think about that. From nearly right at the start we knew this virus was 1,000 to 10,000 times more lethal to the over-70s than it was to the under-25s. (The Diamond Princess ship data was there from the start.)

To say ‘we’re all in this together’ was a flat-out lie. Relatedly, think about how odd it is to focus on just one cause of death, Covid deaths, and treat those as more important than all other causes: deaths due to missed cancer checks; deaths due to alcohol and suicide (because only the well-off have big homes with plentiful yards and so being stuck in a tiny flat is obviously going to cause all sorts of ancillary problems); deaths due to missed operations; the list goes on. And remember that the statistics were wonky on Covid deaths everywhere because it is tough to disentangle deaths with Covid from deaths because of Covid. Moreover, governments put in place big incentives to count the former as the latter. That is why the statistic that is hardest to game is cumulative excess deaths. You look at how many yearly deaths there were in country X for, say, the years 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. Average that total. And then look at total deaths from the start of the pandemic. And here is where the lockdown proponents should hang their heads in shame. From the start of the lockdowns to now, Sweden—the country that followed the existing pandemic plan based on a century of data and did not lock down, and hence did not weaponise the police to be thugs in order to enforce often idiotic, non-sensible, even irrational rules—has Europe’s lowest cumulative excess deaths. Got that? Lockdowns did not even save lives (putting aside all the other myriad considerations such as personal autonomy, not saddling our kids and grandkids with huge debts so their lives will be worse than ours, taking seriously the ‘liberal’ part of living in a liberal democracy).

We could not have fought World War II if the only consideration anyone factored in was ‘saved lives due to cause X’ or even just ‘saved lives overall’. Nor if we all wallowed in fear because that is what government was trying to accomplish. But, again, even on this myopic consideration alone of saved lives— throwing out every other human concern and value going in order simply to focus on trying to save lives—the lockdowns still failed.

Reading this book will drive your blood pressure way up.

I could go on and on and on because from March of 2020 onwards I wrote publicly and near-weekly in the Spectator Australia (the gold medal publication for standing up for principle against lockdowns, by the way), a few times in The Australian, overseas in British and American outlets, and in a couple of peer-reviewed law reviews that lockdowns were a terrible, illiberal, idea. My above claims are not those of the morning-after sports expert. And from those initial days I came across another strong lockdown sceptic, Ramesh Thakur. (Full disclosure: Since then, he and I have become good friends.)

Thakur was prolific in making the anti-lockdown case, taking up near on all the above themes and more. He argued powerfully and relentlessly against what governments were doing to us all. And he has put together some of those columns and think pieces of his (that appeared across the world and that were about the follies and failures of the lockdown policies) in Our Enemy, the Government: How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power. His excellent book documents the medical follies, economic ruination, political despotism, police thuggishness, tearing apart of social cohesion, brutal costs paid by the developing world, predictable plummeting of trust in the credentialled classes, and more.

But let me warn readers. Reading this book will drive your blood pressure way up. For instance, three of the world’s top-10 epidemiologists (Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, and Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff) who authored the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’ which argued for focused care on the vulnerable and trusting everyone else by leaving them to make their own choices (à la Sweden) were censored, cancelled, attacked, pilloried, and more. Kulldorff was eventually fired by Harvard. But Bhattacharya to this day argues that the biggest source of misinformation (inaccurate and wrong claims) and disinformation (deliberate lies) came from governments.

We must never forget what they did to us.

They got wrong the costs of lockdowns, whether masks work (no, says the gold standard Cochrane Review), whether the vaccines stop you from getting and passing on the virus (they never did and hence, the vaccine mandates were not just immoral but totally useless), school closures, the whole made-up social distancing regulations, and a whole lot more. Or consider the morality of effectively forcing young people to take vaccines when the virus in play is of less risk to any young person than being hit by lightning. (True. Look it up.)

If the vaccines pose any sort of risk more dangerous to this group than the virus does—and they do—then putting pressure on them to take it is just immoral. Or at least that was the clear position back when I served seven years on a university ethics committee in New Zealand. But not during the pandemic!

All this Thakur details in his book. He is powerful on the moral wrongness of the vaccine coercion, and on the claims related to their supposed efficacy. And on the woeful job done by the journalistic caste who opted to trade in fear porn rather than bring to the table a healthy scepticism of government claims and of public health types and modellers such as the Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson who pre-Covid had a long track record of making ridiculously over-inflated claims about how many deaths would flow from mad cow disease (BSE) and foot-and-mouth disease. No matter. His predictions on Covid were nevertheless treated as gospel. Today, we know they were wrong by orders of magnitude. Again.

This is a book to read in order to remember. And to keep for the next time you might be inclined to take at face value big government and the bureaucratic class and the public health caste. They panicked, then closed ranks, then deliberately scared us, then we all suffered … well, not really those who imposed these brutalities on us, but a good many of us outside that privileged class. I will say it again: not a single politician, public health expert, top bureaucrat, or anyone else at the forefront of imposing Lord Sumption’s “biggest inroads on our civil liberties in 200 years” took a pay cut of any amount. Or lost their jobs. Or had actual skin in the game. Or lost the family home because their small business was deemed ‘inessential’. Or was unable to visit a family member’s deathbed.

We must never forget what they did to us, albeit with the shameful support of the journalistic caste (Steve Waterson, Adam Creighton, and a few others being notable exceptions). Buy this book and you will not forget. Perhaps that may, just may, make it harder for them to do it to us again.

James Allan is Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland. He practised law in Toronto and London, also taught law in Hong Kong and New Zealand, and has published widely in the areas of legal philosophy and constitutional law.

This article from the Winter 2024 edition of the IPA Review is written by law professor James Allan.