Were Harms of Pandemic Policies Due to Innocent Mistakes or Criminal Negligence?
One of the questions citizens should ask themselves, when confronted with the devastating consequences of mandatory vaccination policies, rolling lockdowns, school closures, suppression of inexpensive and safe Covid treatments, and inaccurate information sponsored by government agencies, is whether this cascade of government-inflicted harms is due to malicious or corrupt behaviour or innocent mistakes made in good faith.
Not just an academic question
This is not just an academic question: it is a question whose answer defines the fundamental relationship between government and citizens. If the harms inflicted by misguided government policy were driven by an innocent misreading of a complex situation, then we may hope that goverments will learn from their mistakes and limit the harms of bad policies, in future epidemics or strains on hospitals.
If, on the other hand, it turns out that governments have been acting in bad faith, betraying the public trust by engaging in reckless and/or self-serving behaviour, then they were not acting as good faith stewards of the public interest, who can be counted upon to correct their past mistakes, or do their best to adjust their policies to the latest scientific evidence.
Under these circumstances, citizens may be justified in treating the advice of public officials, and the interventions that flow from such advice, at least in anything that touches upon public health matters, with a great deal of circumspection. The traditional relationship of trust between citizens and public health authorities would no longer be justified, at least until authorities show us they can be trusted again.
Governments have acted in bad faith
Since we cannot peer into the hearts of government officials and observe their intentions directly, all we have to go by is their external speech and behaviour.
It is likely that some of the errors made in the management of the pandemic were indeed due to innocent mistakes or incomplete information. For example, the initial overreaction may be attributed, at least in part, to an incomplete understanding of the true extent of natural immunity, and an overly hasty faith in measures like lockdowns that were, after all, being recommended by quite a few eminent scientists, including Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London.
But nearly two years into the pandemic, we now have a damning litany of evidence that government actors have indeed acted in bad faith, putting their own personal careers, reputations, and political success above the health and well-being of citizens.
Damning evidence of bad faith
Eight aspects of the public response of Western nations to the pandemic constitute damning evidence of bad faith:
1. No Lockdown Impact Assessment in 24 Months
First, and most obviously, no Western government, to my knowledge, has published any rigorous impact assessment of lockdown policies, over two years into the pandemic, in spite of having imposed lockdowns of various sorts repeatedly throughout the course of the pandemic.
Any social scientist with a grain of common sense, and certainly any deserving of the title “expert” could tell you that a drastic, large-scale, coercive intervention in the social fabric on the scale of a protracted lockdown would inflict many unintended harms, difficult to anticipate or correct.
The accumulated evidence of the harms associated with lockdowns, in terms of declining mental health and physical health, debilitating hospital backlogs, excess cancer deaths, job losses, the collapse of small and medium businesses, and so on, has only confirmed the highly risky nature of these interventions. Any government that liberally uses such a dangerous policy tool again and again without undertaking a rigorous cost-benefit assessment of its impact on society is clearly guilty of criminal negligence, and is certainly not acting in the public interest.
2. Widespread Use of Scientifically Unsupported and Untested Methods of Disease Control
The apparent inattention of governments and government advisors to established scientific principles of disease control suggests that they are more interested in defending a political position or mounting a public show of force, than actually reducing Covid-19 infections or promoting public health.
Basic principles of conventional wisdom on the control of infectious diseases were turned on their head in the space of a few months, with no major new evidence to justify the changes. Clear examples include the sudden reliance in early 2020 on community masking to stem the spread of respiratory disease, in the absence of any solid evidence of its efficacy; the use of border screening and border closures, which was considered ineffective and inappropriate by official WHO pandemic guidelines drafted in 2019; and the reliance on involuntary home confinement of healthy populations, which was not contemplated in national or international pandemic plans for pandemics before 2020.
3. Knowing Misrepresentation of Epidemiological Data
Many Western governments and their advisors knowingly misrepresented official data relevant to the pandemic in public reports. To begin with, they frequently reported all hospitalisations and deaths correlated with a positive Covid test as Covid hospitalisations and deaths without making any attempt to separate hospitalisations and deaths due to Covid-19 from hospitalisations and deaths accompanied by a positive Covid test.
This conflation of deaths and hospitalisations from Covid-19 with deaths and hospitalisations with Covid-19 might seem unimportant, but it is not: during a pandemic, there is a good chance that many people admitted to hospital for a range of conditions unrelated to Covid-19 might happen to also test positive for SARS-CoV-2. For example, someone who tests positive for SARS-CoV-2 and dies a week later in a motorcyle accident should not be recorded as a Covid death. Similarly, someone in the final years of their life may die from a complication in an accumulation of chronic conditions, even if they test positive for Covid-19.
Furthermore, it is now scientifically incontestable that PCR testing detects many positives that are not in fact active cases of Covid-19 disease - in some cases, inactive viral particles from past disease are detected; in other cases, virus is detected in innocuous, non-infectious quantities; and in other cases, especially where high cycle counts are used, a significant number of false positives are generated. Never in the history of pandemics, to the best of my knowledge, have positive laboratory tests with no associated disease symptoms been recorded routinely as “cases” of a disease. This method of counting “cases” of a disease is medical fraud on a grand scale.
The generation of large quantities of false or irrelevant (e.g. non-symptomatic and often non-infectious) positives may serve to ramp up public fear and anxiety, but has done little to stop the spread of this disease, especially once Covid-19 was already circulating widely in the community. The continual use of large-scale PCR testing in low-risk environments like schools, and the decontextualised reporting by governments of PCR data that needs to be interpreted in conjunction with “pre-test probability of disease,” including disease symptoms (as discussed in this article in The Lancet), shows that governments have not been providing the public in good faith with reliable epidemiological data.
4. Pervasive Use of Fear-Mongering and “Nudge” Tactics Instead of Rational, Evidence-Based Arguments
Instead of calming the public and equipping them with accurate information to make responsible choices, government agencies and public representatives have effectively bombarded citizens with daily reports on Covid case, mortality and hospitalisation data, and notoriously unreliable and empirically unsupported projections, often completely out of context, and with little or no reference to historical patterns of hospitalisation and death (such as peak excess deaths during previous flu seasons).
Governments did all they possibly could to keep citizens in a state of fear and anxiety by presenting them with Covid mortality figures and gloomy projections on a regular basis, rarely if ever taking the trouble to remind their listeners that large cohorts of citizens, in particular young and healthy individuals, were at very low risk of suffering serious or debilitating disease from Covid-19.1 The UK government even had a task force devoted to “nudging” public behaviour in the “right” direction by artificially ramping up the level of public fear and anxiety, as some of its own members later admitted candidly to the media.
5. Failure to Reform Broken Healthcare Systems
It became evident very early on in the pandemic that the crisis of Covid-19 was a crisis of Western health services, which in many cases were not well designed to adapt to significant peaks in demand. The endemic weaknesses and accumulated deficiencies in Western health systems had already been recognised long before this pandemic. For example, in the case of Ireland, the public health system had been grossly mismanaged and understaffed for many years, with dysfunctional delays in surgeries and appointments, and recurrent shortfalls in capacity.
Instead of tackling these chronic problems in a serious way, governments squandered scarce economic resources in suspending economic and social activity and enforcing draconian and intrusive rules restricting citizen travel and the hospitality services, with no clear evidence that such interventions would yield net benefits for people’s health and well-being.
The fact that almost two years into the pandemic, the level of healthcare reform has still been so tokenistic is a resounding proof that governments are not sincerely committed to promoting public health. They are prepared to mount an expensive spectacle of public restrictions and reinforce their emergency powers, while standing by and doing very little about the worsening crisis in the public health system - a crisis that was exacerbated but certainly not produced by Covid-19.
6. Active Suppression of Promising, Cheap, and Low-Risk Treatments for Covid-19
In the absence of an international consensus on a safe and effective treatment regime for Covid-19, associations of medical experts such as the Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance and British Ivermectin Recommendation Development Group conducted research and development treatment protocols using re-purposed drugs such as Ivermectin to treat Covid-19.
Given the excellent safety profile of Ivermectin, which is on the WHO’s list of “essential medicines” and has been safely used for decades by billions of people across the world, and given its promising results in clinical trials reviewed in peer-reviewed journals (here is one meta-analysis), the risk-benefit ratio clearly favoured permitting doctors to prescribe Ivermectin to Covid patients.
The logic of Emergency Use Authorisation that was applied for vaccines that had not passed all of the usual testing protocols should have been applied to Ivermectin, given its extremely low risk to life and health, and the high risk Covid-19 posed to the life and health of vulnerable populations. Instead, governments and regulators went out of their way to turn the public against Ivermectin and discourage its use in the treatment of Covid-19.
The US’s Food and Drug Administration even went as far as to tweet out an image of a horse in conjunction with an article arguing against the use of Ivermectin, to plant the false idea in the public mind that Ivermectin was exclusively a veterinary medicine.
7. Use of scientifically Unsupported and Ethically Dubious Forms of Surveillance and Discrimination
The widespread introduction of vaccine passports for access to public venues like bars, restaurants, and concerts across many Western nations had no compelling scientific basis as a method of disease control, given that (a) it was known from the very beginning that the Covid vaccines do not confer sterilising immunity, and it has since emerged that whatever added protection against infection they did confer dwindled rapidly within 4 to 6 months (according to one Swedish study, described here, the relative protection against symptomatic infection dropped to 48% within 4 to 6 months) ; and (b) many of those excluded from access to public venues had been naturally exposed to Covid-19 and therefore enjoyed more robust and lasting immunity than vaccinated citizens who had not been naturally exposed to the disease (as demonstrated by recent studies such as this one).
The scientific case for the vaccine passport is now in tatters. The only reason to continue implementing it is either to (a) save face and avoid an embarrassing U-turn or (b) achieve vaccine compliance for its own sake, irrespective of its disease-reducing benefits.
8. Failure to Come Clean on Risks and Benefits of Vaccines for Different Populations
Two facts about governments’ handling of the vaccination campaigns show there was not a good faith effort to inform the public in a transparent way about vaccine risks and benefits:
First, it is truly astounding that governments sold the Covid vaccines as essential for every age group and demographic, in spite of the staggering difference in Covid risk between children and the elderly, and the fact that the vaccines were never shown to confer long-term sterilising immunity for any age group. The net benefits of vaccines for reducing disease risk for children, for example, were always extremely small, and difficult to justify in light of the risks of a relatively new vaccine, as the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation acknowledged in a report dated 3rd September 2021, yet few governments acknowledged this publicly. The UK government went against the recommendations of its own scientific advisors by pushing out Covid vaccines for children less than three weeks after the JCVI recommended against universal vaccination of under 12-15-year-olds. This reflects what we have seen in many other jurisdictions: a constant pressure to expand the pool of persons eligible for vaccination so as to include the youngest possible cohorts, without any corresponding proof of medical benefits for young and healthy persons.
Second, governments insisted quite emphatically that the vaccines were completely safe, when they and their advisers knew perfectly well that the data on adverse effects had not yet been adequately researched and analyzed (as became evident with the gradual emergence of evidence for elevated risks of myocarditis among young men who had taken the Covid vaccine), and the data on long-term adverse effects simply did not yet exist. Governments did not come clean with the public about the limits of the assurances they were giving about vaccine safety.
To sum up, the evidence for the bad faith of actors responsible for the West’s pandemic policies (with a few notable exceptions, such as the governments of Sweden and Florida) can be found in eight red flags in the behaviour of governments and public officials:
(1) the absence of any public impact assessment for lockdowns;
(2) the widespread use of scientifically unsupported methods of disease control;
(3) the knowing misrepresentation of epidemiological data;
(4) the pervasive use of fear-mongering and “nudge” tactics instead of rational, evidence-based arguments;
(5) the inexcusable failure to reform broken healthcare systems;
(6) active suppression by regulatory agencies of promising, cheap and low-risk treatments for Covid-19; and
(7) the use of scientifically unsupported and unwarranted forms of surveillance and discrimination, such as vaccine passports.
(8) the failure to come clean on the net benefits and risks of the vaccines for different age groups, and the giving of artificially inflated assurances of vaccine safety in the absence of long-term vaccine safety data.
These eight “red flags” in the behaviour of governments and public official, taken together, add up to a compelling case that the disastrous consequences of the West’s pandemic policies were not merely due to innocent errors of judgment, but demagogic fear-mongering, wilful misrepresentation of epidemiological data, and criminal negligence.
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For example, this study finds that people under 65 without serious underlying conditions account for only 0.7–3.6% of all COVID-19 deaths in France, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Georgia, and New York City.