Lockdown or Liberty?

A new book attempts to justify the draconian actions of government during the pandemic, writes IPA Senior Fellow and Chief Economist Adam Creighton.

One of the most vivid recollections of my time in the United States as The Australian’s US correspondent was having lunch on Ocean Drive, South Beach, Miami in September 2021. Tourists and locals alike were out and about enjoying a sunny autumn day, and the restaurants, bars and hotels were bustling.

As other patrons sipped on their cocktails, I was glued to my phone in horror as videos of Victoria Police firing tear gas and rubber bullets at anti-lockdown protesters ricocheted around the world.

Apart from a few masks here and there, there was little sign in Miami of the mass hysteria around Covid that had gripped my country.

Australia’s second biggest state and America’s fourth had chosen very different responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. I felt extraordinarily fortunate to have spent most of the pandemic in the US.

Five years later, it should be obvious which path was superior.

But it is not among Australia’s so-called expert class, which largely remains impervious to the mountain of empirical evidence that strongly suggests the draconian public health response championed by Australia, New Zealand and other jurisdictions was shockingly costly and provided very little benefit.

A new retrospective collection of essays on Australia’s pandemic experience, Because COVID … Pandemic Responses, Rationales and Ruses, is a good example of this insularity.

Published by Australian National University Press in April this year, the book includes thirteen essays by mainly Australian academics and one journalist, which by and large endorse the gamut of crushing mandates imposed by state and federal governments, even if they concede some waste and unintended consequences.

“From any US vantage point, the Australian pandemic response seems an unblemished paragon,” writes Barry Bozeman, a professor at the University of Arizona, giving a flavour of the self-congratulation that permeates much of the book. “Australia has no Covid-19 calamities to explain, only successes to emulate,” he adds.

The book’s editors, Shirley Leitch and Sally Wheeler write: “If the pandemic has taught us anything, we hope it is that paying attention to macro-level trends and indicators is important, but it is not enough.”

Lockdowns were a shocking over-reaction.

Macro level trends? How about human rights, the previous pandemic plans that all advised against doing what we did, and the importance of cost benefit analyses for guiding public policy?

“It would clearly be desirable if the only actions performed were those in which what was gained was worth more than what was lost,” Nobel prize winning economist Ronald Coase once aptly wrote.

For me, the most significant thing about the 256-page book is the absence of the phrase ‘cost benefit analysis’, or anything even close to it.

This is no surprise: there’s no empirical evidence around the world that harsh measures saved significant numbers of lives at all, and certainly none that illustrate how the saving of those lives exceeded the costs.

Even The Lancet acknowledged as far back as April 2023 that Florida’s (and other US states that took a similarly laissez-faire approach to the disease) Covid death rate was much lower than California’s, which imposed the harshest restrictions, once the southern state’s much older population is taken into account.

It’s also well-known now that within Europe, Sweden ended up with the lowest or near lowest cumulative excess deaths (from all causes) through the pandemic, despite being viciously attacked for its similarly light-handed approach. These stark facts should raise serious questions about the wisdom of our own response.

If a jurisdiction intends, for months on end, to suspend freedom of movement, close hospitals and schools, ban practically all in person commerce, separate families arbitrarily, introduce censorship, and massively increase inequality, public debt and inflation, the offsetting benefits would need to be truly astronomical.

They weren’t. In June 2023, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) published a 220-page assessment, Did Lockdowns Work? The Verdict on Covid Restrictions, which found the benefits were risibly small, based on the best 22 empirical studies that had been conducted globally.

“The average lockdown in Europe and the United States in the spring of 2020 only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 3.2 per cent, which translates into approximately 6,000 avoided deaths in Europe and 4,000 in the United States,” the authors, including eminent Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke, concluded.

By comparison flu deaths in Europe and the US averaged around 70,000 and 38,000 a year, respectively, suggesting lockdowns were a shocking over-reaction.

The authors of the IEA study cautioned “against attributing the low mortality rates in New Zealand and Australia to strict lockdowns when more obvious explanations – such as being island countries – may explain the differences.”

Indeed, Iceland and Japan never imposed lockdowns at all and ended up with similar levels of Covid-19 deaths as Australia. Other factors beyond the control of governments were more relevant, including the degree to which populations were burdened by chronic disease, which explains why the US experienced such a high number of Covid deaths.

At least Bozeman in his essay included “be an island” in his list of 10 reasons why Australia supposedly performed so brilliantly compared to the US.

Others included “make use of the police and the military”, “following the rules” and “people trust the health system”. Whatever the truth of that last explanation, fewer people do today, according to numerous surveys throughout the developed world that indicate huge declines in trust in authorities.

Frank Bongiorno in his chapter expresses shock that some journalists during the pandemic, such as the Australian Financial Review’s John Kehoe, had argued that the “economic and social cost of locking down populations was so great that the right of the elderly to the protection of their lives should be demoted in any rational order of priorities”.

It’s a tragedy for families when loved ones die, but this is an inevitable fact of life. The average age of Covid deaths was well above 80 in Australia. And the disease was very far from the death sentence the media portrayed anyway: during the first and deadliest wave, the US Centers for Disease Control published survival probabilities by age for those who contracted Covid. For those over 70, it was 94.6 per cent.

Imperial College’s epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, who became known as ‘professor lockdown’ despite flagrantly ignoring his own recommendations, told a British parliamentary committee in early 2020 “as much as half or two thirds of the [Covid] deaths we see” would be “people at the end of their lives or [who] have underlying health conditions”.

Governments make decisions about the value of human lives all the time, through safety regulations and implicitly by expenditure decisions related to hospitals, emergency services and pharmaceuticals. Resources aren’t infinite.

The Andrews government’s curfews were not based on health advice at all.

As ANU economist Matthew Lilley recently noted on social media: “We could cut car deaths to around 0 by limiting all cars to 30 kph, a reduction in liberty which pales compared to Covid policy; yet we do not, infer accordingly.”

Around sixty million people die in the world every year, at an average age considerably lower than those who died from Covid. Yet little is done to prevent these deaths, certainly nothing like what occurred in Australia from 2020 onwards.

It’s also now clear far fewer people died from Covid as opposed to with it. In practically all developed nations any person who died after a positive test for Covid, even when the cause was clearly something else, was marked down as a Covid death.

A study published in April that looked at Greek ‘Covid deaths’ in 2022 found that 45 per cent were in practice not related to Covid at all. Information released by the Israeli health authorities in 2023 indicated they were not aware of a single death ‘from’ or ‘with’ Covid in anyone under 50.

Rather than looking at what various cost benefit studies from around the world have concluded, readers are treated to a chapter by Kim Cunio that asks them to “imagine a socially inclusive model of artistic participation as a possible response to the pandemic”.

“Let us imagine a country where sacred song, language and ritual are unencumbered by forced settlement, warfare and cultural destruction. How might the losses of COVID-19 have been responded to in such a country?” she writes.

I would have preferred a chapter comparing the burning of ‘witches’ in Massachusetts in the 17th century, at that time among the most educated parts of the world, to the Covid response. Sociology and psychology offer better explanations of what occurred than the rational principles that are meant to govern policy making.

The best chapter of the book, by academic Chay Brown, lays out the disaster of lockdowns for the Northern Territory’s Indigenous population, where women in particular endured huge increases in domestic violence.

Brown reminds readers how thousands of Indigenous Australians were locked at home without internet access or even phone coverage. “Overcrowding and homelessness are commonplace (I have received reports of up to 45 people in a three-bedroom house),” she writes.

“Whereas in urban areas of Australia, people can shop online and have groceries delivered to their homes, these services are extremely limited, especially in regional areas, and non-existent in remote areas,” she adds, pointing out even in relatively urbanised Alice Springs deliveries could take two weeks or more.

Another worthwhile chapter, by Rohan Pitchford and Rabee Tourky, highlights the extraordinary waste of the JobKeeper wage subsidy, which ‘saved’ jobs (from government lockdowns) at a cost of well over $100,000 per job. At least $38 billion of the $130 billion program was paid to businesses which weren’t even eligible for it.

Perhaps the silliest chapter of the book was one dedicated to the allegedly insidious role of News Corp in Australia and Fox News in the US, some of whose writers and broadcasters, including me, were vehement critics of the so-called public health measures.

This chapter by Tony Ward refers in dismay to studies that found Fox viewers were “65% more likely to prioritise economic activity over public health measures”. In other words, they were trying to live their lives rather than obsessively focus on Covid cases to the detriment of all else.

The phrase “learning loss” doesn’t appear once.

Ward appears to blame News Corp for contributing to supposedly outrageous incidents such as “a man and a woman not wearing facemasks while with their children at Lysterfield Lake Park in Melbourne’s south-east”. “Police also imposed a fine on a woman walking in Hobsons Bay during the 8 pm to 5 am curfew. She had visited a friend’s house and did not think the virus was that serious,” he adds in apparent shock that anyone could not think the virus was serious.

He must not have enjoyed reading the ABC’s recent revelation that the Andrews government’s curfews were not based on health advice at all.

Indeed, a chapter on government misinformation would have been appropriate. “The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government”, pointed out Marty Makary, recently appointed commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, in testimony before congress in 2023. He could have added disinformation, the use of propaganda, and lies.

Remember the despicable Australian government TV advertisement that pictured a young healthy woman in hospital allegedly dying from Covid? British writer Laura Dodsworth wrote an entire book, A State of Fear, on how the UK and other governments deliberately sought to scare populations throughout the pandemic.

Numerous statements by public officials around the world have suggested mask mandates were more about stoking and maintaining fear rather than preventing the spread of Covid-19, which they manifestly failed to do.

Indeed, many officials overseas have conceded in hindsight harsh restrictions were a mistake. Former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield in 2024 said governments had “made a big mistake and paid a big price” by locking down their societies.

“We absolutely never should have mandated vaccines, it was a terrible decision … the rationale for mandating vaccines for healthy firefighters and policemen, those in the military, hospital workers, teachers, was emotional, it shouldn’t have happened,” he said.

Former head of the US National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins in late 2023 conceded public health decisions “attached zero value to whether [restrictions] actually totally disrupt[ed] people’s lives, ruined the economy”.

“Many kids were kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from”, he added. Australian children were kept out of school for longer than American students but the phrase “learning loss” doesn’t appear once in this monograph. Instead, there’s a dense chapter on whether “bioethics” should “embrace a political turn after Covid”.

Other surprising absences include how Anthony Fauci, the intellectual source of much of the Covid response around the world, retired in disgrace having promoted the self-serving narrative that the virus emerged naturally in a wet market near Wuhan, a city that’s home to the only SARS virus research institute in China. The Biden administration tellingly gave him a presidential pardon for any crimes going back to 2014.

Instead, Donald Trump is maligned in the book as “incompetent and malevolent”. As president the first time around in 2020 he did say odd things throughout the pandemic, but on the most important fact of all, the infection fatality rate of the virus, he was absolutely right.

His infamous “hunch” from early 2020, that the infection fatality rate was a small fraction of 1 per cent, far lower than the 3.4 per cent that hysterical media were initially promoting, ended up entirely correct.

The long-term damage to Australia’s prosperity and reputation from our draconian Covid response is difficult to measure but should have been addressed.

Why would a large multinational invest in Australia if there were even a small percentage chance that its staff would be locked down for potentially hundreds of days? Has the quality of immigrants coming to Australia declined—or are more bright Australians permanently leaving to avoid a repeat of the precedent that has been set?

Indeed, as Kate Ogg points out in her chapter on Australia’s extraordinary external and internal border closures, even Australian citizens weren’t allowed to return home.

“The imposition of incoming passenger travel caps and hotel quarantine meant that tens of thousands of Australian nationals were essentially locked out of the country”, she writes, noting that Australia was “certainly in breach of international human rights law”.

Within Australia in the second half of 2021—when I was sitting in a café in totally normal Miami—thousands of Queensland residents were unable to return home because they could not afford hotel quarantine and airline tickets, Ogg points out.

Florida’s different approach to the pandemic, which I had the good fortune to experience, wasn’t mentioned once in the monograph.

Yet the comparison is instructive. Five years on from Covid, Victoria is mired in huge public debt, and Melbourne has fallen markedly down the global indices that measure where people want to live, while Florida’s population booms from internal migration.

Florida’s debt is around one quarter that of Victoria, despite having about four times the population.

I’m not optimistic Australia will act differently the next time a bad case of flu emerges. Florida banned compulsory Covid-19 vaccination, but in 2025 parts of the Victorian public sector, including the Fire Emergency Service, still bizarrely require it.

“In social situations, Australians commonly now remark that they do not wish to even think about the pandemic anymore”, notes former journalist Mark Kenny in his chapter on the political aftermath of the Covid years. It is certainly understandable why ordinary Australians don’t want to think about what they were put through. But it should be incumbent on authors of books like this to tell them another, far superior path was available.

This article from the Winter 2025 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA Senior Fellow and Chief Economist Adam Creighton.