Two Cheers for the End of Lockdowns, Masks and Health Passes
The good news is, Covid restrictions are effectively being dismantled across many Western jurisdictions. With every passing week, more citizens are finally experiencing something approaching a full return to “normality.” The not so good news is, it remains unclear whether this return to normality will be resilient against winter flu seasons.
The good news…
Many Western governments have already dropped most domestic Covid restrictions, or are in the process of doing so. Indoor masking is no longer mandated by state authorities in many US states and several Canadian provinces, and has been phased out completely - in some cases, with specific exceptions, such as healthcare settings and public transport - in numerous European nations, including Denmark, Netherlands, England, Ireland, and France.
Vaccine mandates and passports have also been removed, or will be removed very soon, in many jurisdictions, including England, Ireland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, and several Canadian provinces. Finally, to the great relief of those who are not prepared to get a booster vaccine every six months, Norway and Ireland have dropped all testing requirements for incoming travelers, while Sweden and Switzerland have removed testing requirements for EU travelers.
Those of us living in “Covid-liberated” societies will no longer have to navigate a “check-point,” “documents please” society. Emigrants will be able to be reunited with their families, without paying an arm and a leg to test their entire families. Citizens who opted out of Covid vaccines, for whatever reason, will no longer have to sit outside in the cold when they visit a restaurant. People will no longer be kicked out of their jobs for refusing an experimental vaccine. Waiters and shop attendants will no longer have to wait for long hours with their mouth and nose covered up.
Of course, this is not the case for all Western States. Sadly, there are some countries, such as Italy, New Zealand, Australia, and some parts of the United States and Canada, that persist in persecuting citizens who have declined a Covid vaccine, whether by banning them from travelling, or requiring them to test incessantly in order to access work places and public venues. Some US states persist in masking school children in spite of the weak evidence for the efficacy of masking and the tiny risk Covid poses to healthy children.
So the restoration of civil rights is far from complete.
Nevertheless, the overall trend away from Covid restrictions in Europe, the United States, and Canada is very clear, and it seems quite likely that the vast majority of citizens in these parts of the world will be freed from these restrictions over the next couple of months. Just as the “domino effect” caused a wave of lockdowns in March and April 2020, in a similar way, the “domino effect” will cause the dismantlement of most of the global Covid regime in March and April of 2022.
Should we be breaking out the champagne?
Yes and no.
On the one hand, these developments will bring huge relief to many citizens who were fearful of losing their jobs due to vaccine mandates, suffered discomfort and anxiety from prolonged mask use, or were prevented by onerous vaccination and social distancing rules from seeing their loved ones.
Every extra day and week of freedom is surely something worth celebrating.
The not so good news…
But even those of us who are now completely liberated from Covid restrictions should not be so naive as to believe that we are now completely out of the woods, and that this astonishing revolution in disease control will leave our future unscathed.
There are two facts worth noting about the manner in which these restrictions were introduced, as well as the manner in which they were removed, that suggest that the Covid regime is still very much waiting in the wings to be activated again, should a suitable pretext present itself:
First, it is worth noting that the science supporting lockdowns, masks, and vaccine passes was always weak and inconclusive, motivated by a political judgment that leaped far beyond established scientific knowledge, including prevailing international guidelines on pandemic management.1
Given that the pandemic response, from the very start, involved measures that were largely untested and unsupported by solid scientific evidence, and given that these dubious measures were all too often pursued enthusiastically by public authorities throughout the pandemic, it would seem rather naive to believe that public authorities will suddenly engage seriously with scientific evidence next time a public health crisis comes our way.
The second fact worth noting, lest we become overly exuberant at the lifting of restrictions, is that the general methodology of lockdowns and health passes has not been widely repudiated, both in terms of its abandonment of personalised medicine, and in terms of its unprecedented reliance on police power and coercion rather than voluntary advice and cooperation.
Most official statements explaining the withdrawal of Covid measures and vaccine passports, instead of citing their injustice, divisiveness and ineffectiveness, refer to improved hospitalisation numbers, or a general improvement in the epidemiological situation. The Irish government even cited the Ukrainean refugee crisis as a reason for dropping testing requirements for incoming travelers!
In most cases, there has been no recognition whatsoever by governments and public health authorities that lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates were ineffective and divisive policies, that were never vindicated by their results. Instead, the abandonment of these measures was presented as a contingent response to an improvement in case numbers or hospitalisations.
For example, Ireland’s minister for Health, in announcing the lifting of border testing requirements, justified the change in reference to the improved epidemiological situation, quietly implying that a new surge in infections could potentially spark the reintroduction of border testing:
The current epidemiological situation in Ireland continues to be broadly positive. With both high levels of vaccine uptake and information on the Omicron variant becoming increasingly available internationally, changes in the management of COVID-19 in Ireland are possible…The government continues to closely monitor the COVID-19 epidemiological situation in Ireland and abroad.
The Dutch government offers a similar argument to justify opening up society. Again, the implication is that if the epidemiological situation deteriorates, society should be shut down again:
Despite the high number of cases, hospital admissions remain stable. We are more resistant to the virus due to vaccinations, booster shots and acquired immunity. So the Netherlands is going to open up.
If you review statements by other governments justifying the end of coercive Covid restrictions, you will be hard pressed to find a single government that admits that they did not work, or were not appropriate ways to manage an epidemic. Similarly, few governments that have lifted restrictions have indicated they would pivot, in future epidemics, to a more voluntaristic, consensual approach to disease control, or embrace a “focused protection” approach of the sort that was recommended in the Great Barrington Declaration.
What does this mean, looking to the future? It means that if we take governments at their own word, we must assume that they remain committed to these discriminatory, coercive, and scientifically unsupported methods of disease control, and have only temporarily suspended them, in response to a decrease in Covid disease.
If and when there is another significant surge of viral infections and hospitalisations, whether due to Covid or some other disease, the prevailing discourse of most Western governments would appear to recommend that some combination of vaccine mandates, vaccine passes, mask mandates, and/or lockdowns, should be applied to stem the spread of disease.
Numerous commentators and scientists have already pointed out that these measures, besides the ethical problems they pose for a free and open society, have little solid empirical evidence to recommend them, in spite of their enthusiastic advocacy by some scientists, who should know better.
But what matters for public policy is not the state of the science, but the conventional wisdom circulating in government circles. That “wisdom,” as far as I can make out, is that a hospital crisis should be tackled by aggressive NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) like lockdowns, mask mandates, vacccine mandates, border testing, and vaccine discrimination in public venues.
A part of me would like to just turn a blind eye to this fact, enjoy our newly restored liberties, and hope for a brighter future. Let bygones be bygones.
But given the fact that governments have obstinately persisted in applying measures like vaccine controls months after we knew definitively that the vaccines had limited and relatively short-lived success at blocking transmission, and given the fact that the EU’s discriminatory border testing regime remains in place today even with testing data from England, Denmark and elsewhere showing higher rates of Covid detected per 100,000 among vaccinated than unvaccinated citizens, I can see no reason to continue trusting that governments are responding, in good faith, to scientific evidence, and no reason to believe that they will implement scientifically informed policies in the context of a future public health crisis.
They say that two certainties in life are death and taxes.
Given the fact that many Western nations have seen little serious and effective hospital reform during the past decade to better cope with peaks in demand, it is practically as certain as death and taxes that hospitals will come under a lot of pressure every time a more or less severe flu season comes around.
Until there is a public repudiation of the illiberal and draconian methods of disease control adopted in 2020-21, we must be prepared every flu season for the possibility that governments will make another power grab and attempt to curtail our liberties in the name of public health.
So two cheers for the end of lockdowns, masks, and health passes.
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Consider how Covid measures were introduced from the beginning:
Instead of applying tried-and-tested methods of disease control, public authorities jumped on the Chinese lockdown bandwagon, effectively turning their backs on existing pandemic guidelines, such as those laid out in the WHO’s document, “Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza.”
Similarly, mask restrictions were introduced abruptly, with no solid scientific studies to support them.
Finally, vaccine mandates were imposed in spite of the fact that the vaccine trials were not designed to demonstrate that vaccines would in fact block transmission over the medium or long run. The promise that they would was an empty one, as we soon discovered from evidence of waning vaccine immunity and test data from the UK and Denmark.