Ten Lessons from the Covid Pandemic
Ten Lessons from the Covid Pandemic
We paid a very high price for our spectacular mismanagement of the pandemic, a price that will very likely surpass the impact of the virus itself many times over. Economies and supply chains were obviously hit hard by the lockdowns. Our current economic woes, even if they were going to arrive sooner or later, will evidently be worsened by the economic meltdown caused by the lockdowns. Excess mortality is on course to be higher in many places in 2022 than in 2020, even though there is far more immunity in the population and new variants of the virus are less lethal. A generation of students lost access to education for a year or more, something that will have serious repercussions on their futures. And many people have suffered the adverse harms of a vaccine they were pressured and harrassed into taking, even in cases where they did not want to take it, and in which their risk of suffering serious disease from Covid was very low.
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Let’s hope these colossal harms of bad public policy and reckless use of taxpayers’ money will not be completely in vain. Let’s hope we can learn from our mistakes, even if the architects of these disastrous policies will be slow to admit they got so many things so badly wrong. It is not too late to plan a different future, a different philosophy of pandemic management, and indeed, a different approach to governance. With that in mind, I thought I’d share a few lessons I have drawn, as a political philosopher and informed citizen, from what has unfolded since early 2020:
1/ Most mainstream journalists cannot be relied upon to critically uncover and impartially convey the facts surrounding a complex and unfolding crisis. If you watched RTE, BBC during the unfolding pandemic, you were fed naively one-sided stories laced with fear-mongering, misleading use of statistics, etc. PCR results, for example, were reported uncritically as though they corresponded to serious cases of disease, when we knew that many PCR positives did not actually correspond to active infections or connoted very mild cases that would not even require medical attention.
2/ If you wish to inform yourself about a public crisis - be it a pandemic, an energy crisis, a war, or a climate “emergency,” you must be pro-active about diversifying your sources of information, and find a variety of commentators who
are independent from mainstream media and their advertising revenue
have no vested interests such as dependency on Big Pharma money or lucrative government contracts
have good credentials and sensible arguments that consider a wide range of available evidence.
3/ Reliance by governments upon advisory committees with a clearly one-sided take on the pandemic (eg suppression at all cost) has led to catastrophic outcomes. Governments must diversify their scientific sources and encourage robust scientific debate among their advisors.
4/ Hyper-centralised management of public health is ineffective. Decision-making power must be decentralised so that it can adapt quickly to local conditions. Care homes were badly hurt by top-down mandates that were sluggishly responsive to evolving conditions on the ground.
5/ We need to restore a model of governance based on trust rather than distrust. The trust-based model of public health was ditched in 2020. Governments turned zealously to a “command and coerce” approach, unleashing widespread distrust and resentment toward public authorities. More coercive health policies have not been shown to be more effective than less coercive ones.
6/ Locking down healthy populations has had catastrophic repercussions on health and well-being with very small returns if any as a method of disease control. We must never ever repeat this reckless experiment again.
7/ Future public health crises must be handled with efficient, targeted policies guided by detailed risk assessment. We knew from March 2020 which populations were most and least at risk, but most governments foolishly chose to treat every social interaction as a high risk situation, and encouraged citizens to do so as well.
8/ Public fear was fed daily by media and politicians focusing on remote possibilities rather than probable outcomes. Public officials and journalists need to inform the public with facts and evidence, not feed their fears with one-sided, idle speculation about potential disasters.
9/ Utopian approaches to public crises can bring disaster in their wake, and as such, are to be avoided in future. Many Western nations were prepared to jettison basic civil liberties like freedom of movement and patient consent in the pursuit of an unrealistic “zero Covid” utopia.
10/ Steps must be taken to devolve political power and authority to local actors and communities. This pandemic has offered us a poignant illustration of the dangers of highly centralised States. In a highly decentralised State local and municipal authorities could push back against civil rights violations and destructive emergency measures imposed by national governments.
Will these lessons be taken to heart, or will they fall on deaf ears? That will depend not only on the quality of our political leaders, and the quality of public Covid inquiries, but also on the willingness of citizens like you and I to hold our elected representatives accountable for their actions.
To give additional support to my work in defence of a free and open society, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, if you have not done so already.
In case you missed them, here are some of my most recent blog posts:
THUNDER OFF SCRIPT, Ep. 19: The Public Response to Covid-19: What Went Wrong?
Far Too Many People Are Still Dying - Why is this not Frontpage News?
Why National Democracy is Condemned to Wobble Between Technocracy and Populism
Will Elon Musk Manage to "Free the Bird?" I Certainly Hope So
Here's Why I Take Mainstream Coverage of Populism with a Grain of Salt