Few seem to believe those claims. But the more significant phenomenon is not the particular tendencies of this or that politician: it is the struggle of this government, and of all modern governments, to maintain control of information in an age when the internet has begun to pose a dangerous threat to that control. Today, information can be distributed far more easily, widely and quickly than in history’s most searing periods of revolution. It is a reality that traditional mechanisms of government find hard to accept — a discord that can have devastating consequences.

Seen through this lens, the recent flare-ups of the free speech debate — the arrest of Graham Linehan, the reprimanding of Starmer by Donald Trump over free speech in the UK, the introduction of the Online Safety Act — can all be understood as responses to the challenges to government posed by the new technology. Societies across the globe are still digesting an extraordinary change, and the crises spreading across the world are in part a reaction to it.

Yet if governments now seek to control information via new means, their desire to do so is nothing new. And, as Elias Canetti, a Nobel laureate for literature, wrote in Crowds and Power, secrecy is a fundamental component of power. Governments have always sought to monopolize information and to shape it. They have often kept large swathes of it secret, whether it is records of government meetings or the tabs they are keeping on criminal gangs and geopolitical adversaries. At the same time, they have generally sought to censor materials which are contrary to their vision.

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Any politician who is truly ignorant of this basic fact of history probably shouldn’t be anywhere near government. For if, in theory, we object to secrecy: in practice, citizens of Western liberal democracies have been quite happy to accept this reality. This is why, for instance, UK government files are kept secret for 20 years before being released to the public. No politician has ever contested this rule. That is because, until now, all politicians shared the unspoken opinion that secrecy was an important part of government; until, that is, they started leaking excerpts of cabinet meetings to friendly journalists, a symptom of the transformations now underway.

Though secrecy of information has always been a key plank of political authority, there are of course different tiers of secrecy enforced by governments. As Canetti noted, autocracy of information has often been a symptom of dictatorships. The Stasi’s network of “secret informers”, members of the public who informed on each other, remain in the living memory of the former East Germany. I saw a similar phenomenon myself in The Gambia. There, in the years preceding the end, in 2017, of Yahya Jammeh’s regime, I was doing research on Gambia’s precolonial history. Such was the fear of government informers that, at any mention of Jammeh’s increasing turn to authoritarianism, people’s eyes would cloud over and they went quiet.

It is a reaction that would have been visible at many other places and points in history. Take the Papal Inquisition, set up by the medieval papacy to police heretics like the Cathars. Where Starmer’s digital ID proposes authority over our biometric information, in late medieval and early modern Europe the Inquisition sought authority over what it too deemed to be the most important information about citizens: the purity or otherwise of their religious faith.

Having almost died in the 15th century, the Inquisition was revived as a state-backed institution in absolutist Spain, and then in Portugal, from the late 1470s onwards. The Inquisition soon became a bulwark of what were then the most powerful states in Europe, useful for attacking dissenters and confiscating their property. A cornerstone of the inquisitorial judicial process was secrecy: not only did witnesses have to swear that they would keep all aspects of the trial secret, but the accused were never told who had accused them, or even what they had been accused of.

We can understand what this meant for the human experience of power only through individual cases, which — fortunately for historians — the Inquisition archived meticulously. In 1665, for instance, the Inquisition arrested Crispina Peres, who was the most powerful trader in the port town of Cacheu (today’s Guinea-Bissau, West Africa). Peres was charged with “witchcraft” after several years of interrogations led by an ambitious cleric. Her downfall came in spite of an uprising of almost 1,000 troops marshaled by the local king, who was her ally. She was eventually deported via the Cape Verde islands to Lisbon, a journey of more than 2,500 miles. Peres languished for three years in the inquisitorial jail, at one point spending over 12 months in her cell without being summoned for an interview. By the time she returned to Cacheu, after confessing her guilt in an ritualized form of penance known as an Auto da Fé, her health was shot through and the power she had held as a trader in Cacheu was gone.

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For historians like me, the Inquisition’s insistence on secrecy is a gift. Because of their desire to rule out anyone whose evidence was partial, Peres and her husband Jorge spent long depositions mentioning all of their enemies, offering in the process a unique window into the daily lives of people who lived so long ago in West Africa. As her husband Jorge said, her actions were nothing out of the ordinary in Cacheu. Indeed, some of her main accusers freely admitted to partaking in the same African religious ceremonies as she did. In essence, she was arrested because her power threatened the secrecy which was the cornerstone of the political authority which Portuguese institutions of empire were developing in West Africa.

How does all this relate to the debates over digital ID and freedom of speech — and the recent comments by the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and many politicians, over what the Government can and can’t do to police speech and information on the internet? The answer is that breaches of secrecy have always been seen by political leaders as constituting a major threat to power. This is an insight that helps us understand several key global events of the past 15 years.

The Wikileaks affair, which led to the multi-year solitary confinement of Julian Assange in HMP Belmarsh, is about more than the specific information that Assange leaked. Instead, the harsh punishment stands as a warning to any others who might seek to challenge the secrecy of our political elites. For them, Assange’s real threat lay not so much in the details of what was revealed as in the structural challenge posed by Wikileaks to their view of politics, which required their unquestioned right to secrecy in the exercise of government. Nor has this relationship between secrecy and power been just a Western phenomenon, as the widespread “secret societies” in Sierra Leone and other parts of West Africa make clear.

In the 21st century, political elites impose censorship not only by punishing individuals, but through the actions of increasingly nebulous organizations. In June 2019 — two months after Assange was removed from the Ecuadorean embassy in London — an alliance of the world’s biggest broadcasters founded an organization whose putative goal was to combat misinformation. The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) is an alliance of the world’s biggest publishers: hosted by the BBC, it includes major news agencies, major newspapers from the UK, the US and abroad, and big tech companies such as Google and its subsidiary YouTube.

Within a year, the TNI played a key role during the Covid pandemic in censorship of “fake news” — including, in the first 18 months of the pandemic, the mere suggestion that Covid-19 could have leaked from a lab in Wuhan. Those from Left (such as me) and Right who questioned whether strict lockdowns were necessary, and whether a cost-benefit analysis including real-world harms to young and old in the West and the Global South should not be considered, had their views ruthlessly suppressed by the TNI in the press and in social media — with a price that the whole world is now paying.

The TNI was seen by conspiracists as a key plank in the “plandemic”. But skeptics of a different sort would see the TNI as a weapon created and deployed by political elites to defend their monopoly of information. In this sense, it doesn’t really matter whether the information is true or false. What matters is the importance of secrecy to political authority, and the vicious efforts which those in power will make to maintain their grip on this secrecy.

Thus it is no surprise that new research is revealing the lengths that the West’s political leaders are taking to impose their preferred information paradigm. During Covid, Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, tried personally to communicate in private with the then CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey — to precisely what end, we still do not know — while French state-affiliated NGOs sought special access to Twitter’s internal data and content moderation process. Similarly, the UK, like the EU, has sought backdoor access to digital communications services such as WhatsApp. Woe betide those who do not comply: Pavel Durov, the defiant founder of the Telegram app, was arrested last year.

All this shows the depth of the political reaction now in place to shore up Western authorities’ control of information, in which digital ID is a further move. Yet the accompanying debates often show a general lack of structural understanding of the historical relationship between political power, secrecy, and information. In its pugilistic response to the Linehan affair and the Online Safety Act, the Right shows its naïveté: these instincts to control information are a fact of political life.

But the Left is guilty of comparable naïveté in its railing against conspiracy theories and the Right’s alleged predisposition to swallowing them. While egregious conspiracy theories should of course be called out, the Right — contrary to the dismissive claims by the Left — is correct to see conspiracy as part of power. The Left, at times, has shown similar attentiveness. Indeed, prior to their 1917 coup, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks had a strongly conspiratorial critique of the levers of capital. And, in terms of more prosaic politics, Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair did not stumble into the leadership of their political parties. Instead, they reached the top thanks to conniving backroom deals, secret manipulation of information known only to a few, and conspiratorial deployment of relationships with various players which might often be kept hidden.

What this shows is that in this debate over information control and secrecy, both Left and Right are currently tilting at strawmen: the Left at the spread of conspiracy, the Right at supposedly unprecedented government secrecy and authority over perceived safety. Biometric information, which is the key resource for the “BritCard”, is simply the latest tug-of-war.

This is all quite normal in politics, and distracts from the broader issues at stake. What is true is that, as Canetti observed, the impulse to assert control through a strong-arm policing of information tends to be typical of more authoritarian governments. This is what historians can observe in the absolutist dictatorships of Spain and Portugal in the era of the Inquisition, and with the trial of Crispina Peres. It is what we can now observe with the trend towards policing the internet and using it to monitor citizens. The question is not, therefore, whether governments should control information, since all governments of all time always have tried to do this: but what levels of control and secrecy are compatible with democratic life. With neither politicians nor technocrats to be entirely trusted with the levers of power, a different playing field if society is to manage the circulation of information. Perhaps the mechanism might be a combination of judicial separation of powers and sortition (election from the general public via a lottery).

At the same time, the firestorms around this topic are also a distraction from the enormity of the crisis which current governments have plunged into. Fear for the future is mounting as quickly as fury at politicians. The distraction, then, is highly useful to political elites in an age when over-reaction to threats to their control of information has caused such massive harm.

Nigerians have responded with a wave of “hardship protests”. Since February, demonstrations have rocked many large cities including Lagos, Ibadan and Kano. In Lagos, police responded with sympathy, handing out biscuits and water to the protesters to prevent them fainting from hunger. After ration sizes in Nigerian prisons were cut, protests broke out in the prison of the central city of Jos at the end of February.

Many have blamed the crisis on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who was elected in controversial circumstances last year. The powerful emir of Kano, Aminu Ado Bayero, said in February that Nigerians faced “economic hardships, hunger and starvation” and called on President Tinubu to take action. Later that month, Tinubu agreed to release 102,000 tonnes of a strategic grain reserve at subsidised prices, but such is the hardship faced by most Nigerians that when this happened there was a stampede at the depot.

On the face of it, President Tinubu’s economic policies are to blame. In May 2023, he removed fuel subsidies, which the World Bank estimated could save the Nigerian government $5 billion a year. It was part of a wider strategy to increase foreign investment. Yet, in spite of the pain this catastrophic strategy has already caused, global investors warned last week that the Central Bank had to “tighten” monetary policy further to attract investment — even after a 4% increase in Nigeria’s interest rate, to 22.75%.

This tightening of the screws will only worsen the crisis. The call from investors runs counter to what financial leaders said last year: that scrapping fuel subsidies was already giving markets “everything they hoped for”. Even the Financial Times reported last week that, in retrospect, “many are questioning the wisdom of abruptly removing the subsidies without a shock-absorbing plan”.

But Tinubu can’t be blamed for everything. When he was elected, Nigeria was already facing an economic crisis. By late 2021, analysts were pointing to a looming debt crisis, with public debt having soared under the previous president Muhammadu Buhari. This followed a decade during which, as Bloomberg reported, long-term loans had more than doubled. In 2022, the last year of Buhari’s government, annual debt repayments stood at $7.5 billion, which exceeded the government’s total revenue by almost $1 billion.

However, it’s worth noting that in 2019, the picture was the reverse. That year, the African Development Bank issued its annual report, which said that “the state of the continent is good. Africa’s general economic performance continues to improve”. This followed a decade of sustained economic growth across Africa, with some claiming at the time that the eradication of poverty by 2030 was possible. As two Dutch economists concluded in 2018, there were “broadened opportunities for sustained economic growth in the longer term”.

What changed between 2019 and 2022? The obvious answer is the Covid pandemic response, which not only interrupted economic growth across Africa, but in the Nigerian case, saw a collapse in the oil price that resulted in a sharp drop in revenues. It also saw a huge increase in the debt burden. In April 2020, the IMF approved a $3.4 billion loan to Nigeria to fund its Covid response — almost half of the government’s annual revenues. The Central Bank of Nigeria drew on this to offer credit facilities to businesses in distress. Now, however, those loans are being called in, and some accuse the government of “conning” Nigerians.

Worse still, at the end of February, the Nigerian Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability network filed a lawsuit against President Tinubu for the government’s failure to account for the disbursements from this huge loan. In a tale that will be grimly familiar to readers in the UK and the US, the effective printing of money that accompanied the Covid response is alleged to have led to diversion or theft of the funds that have never been accounted for.

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This suggests that the real cause of Nigeria’s crisis is what scholars Ruben Andersson and David Keen aptly label “wreckonomics” in their provocative new book of the same name: a label that describes how the setting of a war economic model is used for profiteering by existing institutional interests. For these interest groups, the purpose of the war is not necessarily in winning it, but in extracting profit from the crisis situation — often by extending it for as long as possible.

Such analysis offers a different twist to the concept of the neoliberal “permacrisis”. While these rolling crises are usually spoken of in political terms, wreckonomics shows that it is part of an economic framework. In each crisis framed as a war — whether real wars such as in Ukraine, or the “war on Covid” — existing economic interests have the institutional frameworks to leap in and profit from them. This corporate money printing comes at the cost of state budgets, leading to future indebtedness, which is paid for by those who had no hand in the profits — and who must put up with crumbling state services.

The Nigerian crisis perfectly fits the wreckonomics mode. A “war on Covid” was declared worldwide. This created a massive external shock and led to the printing of money financed with credit from the IMF. Existing interests took advantage of this to profiteer from the debt in Nigeria, as also happened in Senegal, the UK and the US. And none of this had anything to do with the threat posed to the Nigerian population by Covid itself, since, with a median age below 20, this was always low risk compared to a disease like malaria that kills 600,000 people annually across Africa. Indeed, at present, the registered Covid deaths in Nigeria total 3,155.

The consequence was a vast increase in Nigerian government debt which, twinned with collapsing revenues in 2020-1 because of the oil price, reversed the rosy picture described by macroeconomists in 2019. Not only has all this led to the new era of austerity, but it was predicted right from the start by groups such as Oxfam. The charity reported in 2021 that, as of 15 March that year, 85% of IMF Covid loans were tied to future austerity in the countries concerned. These “externalised losses” have now been realised, by people in Nigeria — and indeed across Africa.

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As the devastation wrought by these policies becomes clear, Africa has started fighting back. Last week, a coalition of senior African academics accused the WHO of being “colonialist” in its plans for a new pandemic treaty that could allow it to plunge Africa back into lockdown. “This is a perpetuation of classical Western imperialism coming through the backdoor,” said one academic. The coalition is seeking to challenge whether African governments should automatically accept the new pandemic treaty, as well as IHR regulation changes being promoted for discussion and voting at the World Health Assembly in May.

The group’s health advisory director, Wellington Oyibo from the University of Lagos, challenged the grounds for the new treaty. “Lockdowns affected Africans badly because these are people who earn their living from subsistent income, and yet you lock them in for several months?” he was quoted as saying. “The people are still not over the socio-economic and educational consequences of lockdowns.”

Yet with the crisis growing, the official policy menu for Nigeria’s government is very restricted. President Tinubu is negotiating further World Bank budget support of up to $1.5 billion — but this will just further the wreckonomics model that has proved itself so useless over the past five years. Meanwhile, with the postponement of elections in Senegal, and the imprisonment there of the leading opposition candidate Ousmane Sonko, political crises are growing across the continent. In such cases, governments usually look for someone to blame. The WHO might be a good start.

The Gambia announced its first Covid lockdown, in March 2020, at a fragile moment. Following years of President Yahya Jammeh’s dictatorship, the democratic government installed under President Adama Barrow in 2017 had ushered in hope. There was, for instance, a noticeable drop in Gambian youth’s attempts to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean to reach Europe. Yet the country’s pandemic response has erased those gains, and also dealt a severe blow to Gambians’ confidence in its young democracy.

The timing of The Gambia’s lockdown could not have been worse. In March 2020, as many African countries shut down in accordance with WHO advice, The Gambia’s main market at Serekunda closed for six weeks. Late March is when Gambians buy seeds to prepare for planting, in readiness for the rains. The unilateral closure of markets meant that seeds were widely unavailable. A transport shutdown meant that even where they did have seeds, people could not take them to their villages for planting. Even when public transport restarted, several weeks later, social distancing requirements meant that buses were only allowed to operate at half capacity. As this was uneconomic, many buses did not run at all.

Anyone who did manage to sow crops then had difficulties in harvesting, since social distancing protocols meant that no more than two people could work a plot at one time. When food was finally taken to market, the forced impoverishment of the population meant that few could afford to buy it and much went to waste: the UN estimated on-farm losses of 50% in Africa in 2020.

The aggregated effect of The Gambia’s Covid response was a massive reduction in farming revenue and in available food. In effect, these were policies guaranteed to cause hunger and malnutrition — and to stoke food price inflation through the destruction of stores and harvests. Food inflation quickly grew in 2021 and remains in double digits, much higher than pre-pandemic levels.

At the same time, and as in the rest of the world, the Gambian government threw money at Covid-19. Donor advice on hygiene saw all public institutions forced to buy large plastic vats and gallons of hand wash and disinfectant. This, and the costs of implementing Western biomedical surveillance regimes, was paid for by taking on new debts: the Gambian government implemented a 500 million dalasi (US$10 million) emergency response fund — a vast sum for a country with a per-capita GDP of US$772. This was financed by a World Bank loan of the same value, and by an IMF loan of US$21.3 million.

Meanwhile, Gambian tax revenues fell by half in 2020, owing to the economic cataclysm, meaning that debt repayments stacked up even higher. This is money that The Gambia does not have. It was frequently said that “we could have fed the country for 10 years for the amount of money that we spent on Covid-19”. The Gambia is beset by poverty and malnutrition. Structurally indebted to Western creditors, with a median age below 18, and where a teacher’s monthly salary is under £50, the spending of these sums to implement Western protocols for a disease quickly known to affect mostly the elderly and obese is scandalous.

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Gambians themselves protested vociferously. Some tried to break into Serekunda market to continue working, and others — when a mask was demanded — asked who would pay for it. But the question remains: why did Gambian politicians implement these policies? In fact, creditor pressure from the EU and other Western embassies, from the World Bank and the WHO, made it almost impossible to do anything else.

Still today, billboards line the country with EU funding logos, indicating the “correct” way to wear masks. This offers a flashback to the bombardment which Gambian officials received from Western agencies on handling Covid-19. Weekly flurries of information arrived with instructions on “appropriate” behaviour. Weekly “situation reports” were demanded from the Gambian Ministry of Health by these partners: these reports had to indicate the effectiveness of the Covid protocols, and case numbers. This information was a prerequisite for further access to the finance so essential in the economic meltdown.

The Covid vaccine rollout made this dynamic even clearer. When by late 2021, vaccination numbers remained low, the UK High Commission warned Gambian counterparts that tourists would not return until all those in the tourist industry were vaccinated. Indeed, the UK only removed The Gambia from the red-list of countries once the vaccine rollout had “decreased risk to British nationals”. In the end, public officials were virtually forced into vaccination. Most of these vaccines were not gifted to the country, but paid for through World Bank loans which increased structural indebtedness.

The consequences have been vast. The impact on Gambian young women has been especially severe. The closure of schools in the pandemic made schoolgirls vulnerable to being sent away for marriage by parents desperate to earn some dowry money to assuage the pain of the pandemic restrictions. One expert in the field described how early marriage had become common in The Gambia during the pandemic.

Secondly, there has been a huge increase in Gambian youths seeking to migrate to Europe illegally. The restrictions shattered the Gambian economy. Hotels, which employ more than 50,000 Gambians, were closed. The youths lost their jobs and many of them were forced into the dangerous ‘backway’ journey to Europe. Indeed, the fledgling democratic government’s noticeable achievements in youth job creation were all but wiped out by the pandemic, and the 2022-23 season tourism was still only at 30% of pre-pandemic levels.

Another harm came in the primary health sector. The pandemic and the endless Western agency briefings as to the requirements on vaccination, social distancing and masking meant that frail health facilities were completely rewired to focus on Covid-19 patients. This meant that as malaria, fevers and digestive diseases took their usual toll on the population, no one did much. The medical personnel, drugs, ambulances and facilities were all dedicated to fighting the pandemic in accordance with the demands of Western embassies and NGOs. This made maternity, child health and outpatient services suffer disruptions which were, in many cases, fatal. There was also a severe disruption in the Meningitis A, Tetanus, and Hepatitis children immunisation schedules, which still have not completely recovered.

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Given the devastating impacts of the pandemic response on the general population, Covid vaccine hesitancy is strong. A recent survey suggested that close to 70% of Gambian adults surveyed trusted “prayers” more than the vaccines. Many accuse healthcare officials of diagnosing simple cases of malaria as Covid-19. Popular distrust extended to the Government’s efforts to alleviate the food scarcity caused by the restrictions. A series of corruption scandals have broken pointing to the embezzlement of Covid-19 relief funds, while key suppliers contracted by the World Food Programme over two years failed to deliver the required 8,550 tons of rice intended as relief for needy families.

All of this could take decades to fix. Austerity has been forced on the country by external creditors and their incessant demands for information and compliance to protocols that, to most Gambians, were useless — and where Covid-19 was far from the greatest health threat they faced. As elsewhere around the world, vast levels of corruption were involved with the effective printing of money that went with the Covid response. Meanwhile, international solidarity collapsed, as Western activists appeared far more concerned by the political landscape in their own countries than by the effect of these policies on African lives — about which many remain reticent to this day.

What policymakers do not appear to have grasped are the consequences that all this will have. For all multi-billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates’s plans, and the current US government’s ideas about future pandemic preparedness and mass vaccine manufacturing in Africa, it is clear that no citizen of that continent will be prepared to trust future lockdowns, social distancing measures or mandatory vaccinations. While policymakers opine and “official narratives” are constructed, the experience in The Gambia, and across Africa as a whole, will ensure its response to the next pandemic will be nothing of the kind.

* Co-contributor Hassoum Ceesay is writing in a personal capacity

For starters, we are still a minority. Over the past year, official reports have confirmed many of our claims that were initially dismissed as disinformation — on the likely artificial origin of SARS-CoV-2, on the futility of universal masking (especially in children), on school closures, on the negative impact of lockdowns, on the possible side effects of the mRNA vaccines, and much more. But most people are not aware of these developments. Instead, they still largely subscribe to the Covid consensus: that the pandemic measures were a necessary, albeit painful, response to a novel virus which we knew very little about. As a recent UnHerd Britain poll revealed, most Britons are still convinced that lockdowns were the right choice.

Will this shift? It seems unlikely, given the vast resources that will likely be poured into consolidating the “accepted story” of the past three years — what we might call the post-Covid consensus. This can already be seen in the media’s hagiographic reports about two of the chief architects of America’s pandemic response, Anthony Fauci and former CDC director Rochelle Walensky, following their recent departures from government. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization and national governments are pushing to increase the power of centralised public health authorities during health emergencies, through the revision of the WHO’s International Health Regulations and a new pandemic treaty. Elsewhere, despite the launching of official Covid inquiries in several countries, including the UK, it seems doubtful that they will lead to anything more than a merry-go-round of buck-passing. The failures committed at the highest level during the “war on Covid” are simply too big to expect states to put themselves on trial.

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Indeed, if the past three years have taught us anything, it is that most of the constitutional safeguards, legal formalities and “checks and balances” that we took for granted can easily be swept aside in the name of “emergency”. That most of the Covid measures are now being curtailed doesn’t change the fact that the potential for a return to boundless executive power is always there. Indeed, perhaps this is the most pernicious legacy of the pandemic: that most people appear to have accepted the fact that democratic norms and practices may be suspended in the name of “public threats”. In other words, the politics of emergency have been normalised.

While the Covid pandemic may be over, then, the Covid paradigm remains very much alive. In fact, we are already witnessing its deployment in the context of new crises, most recently in the emergence of a totalising narrative surrounding the Ukraine war. This points to another uncomfortable truth: that the underlying conditions that made the Covid response possible have not gone away. If anything, they have been exacerbated since the virus struck: the capture of state institutions by corporate interests, the hyper-concentrated nature of our mainstream media, the power of Big Tech and its symbiotic relationship with the repressive apparatuses of the state, and the transfer of power from the national level, where citizens are able to exercise some degree of influence over policy, to an unaccountable supranational level.

In this context, it is worrying to see many of those in the so-called lockdown-sceptic camp drawing misplaced conclusions from the events of the past three years. It has become almost an article of faith among lockdown sceptics to place the blame for the pandemic response on excessive state power — and to conclude that the solution to all our problems is to dramatically curtail the role of the state.

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We profoundly disagree with this conclusion. Of course, Western state institutions have failed in the Covid era — proving to be inefficient, terribly oppressive or both. Yet it seems pretty clear that they failed not because they are state institutions per se, but rather because they have been captured by private corporations and their interests. If the main lesson drawn from the pandemic is that there should be further erosion of the productive and organisational capacities of the state, disaster will surely follow. The worst possible outcome would be the further privatisation of public services, allowing private interests to further distort public institutions through “revolving door” policies and close government ties to biotech companies. Such an approach ignores the fact that private corporate power can be just as tyrannical as state power. In fact, many of our problems can be traced back precisely to the deregulation of big business of the past decades, which has led private corporations to exercise significant control over our lives.

To see how this corrupts the public sphere, consider the rise in conspiracy theories around the mRNA vaccines. Many of these, suffice it to say, are deeply disturbing. However, as we observed in The Covid Consensus, a main driver of these conspiracies has been the enormous secrecy with which Western governments have shrouded the entire Covid vaccine process — ranging from the original trial records to the contracts signed with vaccine manufacturers to the question of vaccine injuries. Secrecy is by definition an element of conspiracy, and with governments refusing voluntarily to divulge any of this information except when legally challenged, it’s clear that this has influenced the rise of the conspiracies, and general distrust in public health.

What’s particularly disturbing is the reason generally cited by Western governments to support this secrecy: corporate confidentiality. When Vikki Spit — whose partner had been recognised by UK agencies as having died of a blood clot to the brain after taking the AstraZeneca vaccine — requested information about why the company had requested indemnity from litigation, the UK government responded: “The requested information contains commercially sensitive information with regards to the contracts… [disclosure] would prejudice the commercial interests of the companies involved.” This suggests that the main problem is the way the role of the state has changed in recent decades, becoming little more than an enforcer of corporate priorities.

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Another important example of this process is the marketisation of healthcare. In the years before the pandemic, bed occupancy rates in health systems rose across Europe, as the number of hospital beds were slashed in the name of austerity and “efficiency”. The pandemic has exposed the short-sightedness of such a policy: in order to have enough capacity to continue the treatment of routine conditions during a health emergency, health systems require built-in “inefficiencies” of empty beds, probably of around 20%. The problem is that, in the UK in particular, the healthcare system is failing on this front. Compared to France (5.73 per 1,000 population) and Germany (7.82), the UK has a shocking low number of hospital beds (2.43). Of the top 10 countries for hospital beds per capita, only two (Germany and Austria) are not in Asia or Eastern Europe.

This might just be one measurement, but it strongly indicates that Western market dogmas around efficiency shouldn’t be taken at face value. Rather than doing away with the state, the past three years have shown that we actually need more of it. But we also need to increase democratic control and oversight over its institutions, while at the same time placing clear limits to what can be done in the name of public health. This is the only way to restore the public faith’s in public health — and, hopefully, avoid a repeat of the Covid disaster if and when the next pandemic strikes.

As two of the key preliminary hearings in the UK Covid Inquiry take place this week — two years after Boris Johnson said “we owe it to the country to produce answers in a reasonable timescale” — bereaved families and policy sceptics could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing is an excuse to kick controversies and failings into the long grass. Will this inquiry follow the pattern of previous ones and avoid the difficult questions?

There are already concerns. With the World Health Organization refusing to provide a statement of evidence, not all the relevant stakeholders are engaging with the process, while bereaved families already feel marginalised. But the Inquiry’s broad Terms Of Reference (TOR) are encouraging: decision-making, the availability and use of data, “legislative and regulatory control and enforcement”, “the use of lockdowns and other ‘non-pharmaceutical’ interventions (NPIs)”, the impact on mental health of the whole population, the specific impacts on young people and education, and the safeguarding of public funds are all included. As are questions of the treatment of Covid-19 in hospitals, care homes, and “the development, delivery and impact of therapeutics and vaccines”, alongside the consequences of the pandemic on provision of non-Covid treatments.

But how will the Inquiry address these issues? Will it simply reinforce the mainstream public and Government messaging — or will it provide a meaningful examination of this peacetime catastrophe? Given the current narrative regarding the most controversial of pandemic measures, “the use of lockdowns and other [NPIs]”, one might perhaps be allowed a little scepticism. That the UK failed to lock down soon enough is pretty much orthodoxy in policy circles. This was the conclusion in October 2021 of the Health and Social Affairs Select Committee, soon repeated by luminaries such as Jeremy Hunt — and trumpeted by Keir Starmer as early as April 2020.

A serious inquiry shouldn’t simply repeat the mantra — it should consider the novelty of the lockdown model (the WHO’s November 2019 pandemic preparedness report into NPIs did not mention the word “lockdown” once), as well as its long-term effectiveness. The TOR encourage the “reasonable regard of relevant international comparisons”, and it’s to be hoped that this is taken seriously. Italy’s national lockdown was the first in world history —  and yet it has one of Western Europe’s highest Covid death rates. South Africa’s was the strictest lockdown in Africa, and yet it has far and away the highest Covid death rate on the continent. Peru had one of the world’s strictest lockdowns in 2020, and now has the world’s highest Covid fatality rate.

So this inquiry should seek to understand how and why the world’s political and scientific establishment cohered around a completely untried and untested model for dealing with the Covid outbreak. It should attempt to connect this to some of the other themes in the TOR, especially the question of political decision-making, such as how and why did the UK’s scientific establishment depart from the previous consensus that, as the Government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said on March 13, 2020, “If you completely locked down absolutely everything, probably for a period of four months or more then you would suppress this virus… but when you do that and then you release it, it all comes back again.”

And it should seek to interrogate how and why the lockdown approach became unchallengeable, leading to a situation in which 40% of the deaths from Covid-19 in the Western world took place in the most vulnerable of all settings — care homes. Why did the Imperial College modellers’ predictions that the lockdown measures would see fewer than 6,000 people dying from Covid in the UK overestimate the effectiveness of these measures by something like 3,000%? And why was the UK’s pre-2020 pandemic planning — which emphasised balancing the costs and benefits of all interventions according to the principles of proportionality and flexibility, minimising the disruptions to everyday social and economic life, and protecting the vulnerable — thrown out of the window?

This core question should be connected to the broader impact on healthcare. Instead of protecting the NHS, did lockdowns produce the crisis we now see flooding the health service? Should more care have been focused on the vulnerable, while allowing the rest of society to continue as normal? Would this have then mitigated the damaging effects of lockdown on young people and societal mental health, as well as avoiding the immensely regressive consequences of school closures?

Although the effects of lockdown should lie at the heart of the Inquiry, there are other aspects of the pandemic which deserve scrutiny.

Why, for example, did the Government ignore the potential benefits of natural immunity, when evidence suggested early on that prior infection confers durable protective immunity in the case of SARS-CoV2, as confirmed by a study just published in The Lancet? The idea of letting the virus spread through those who were at low risk from it (the overwhelming majority of the population), allowing them to generate antibodies, while protecting high-risk groups, was a well-established epidemiological concept, and yet it was dismissed as outlandish, despite being initially advocated by Patrick Vallance.

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Why, too, was compulsory universal masking adopted, despite the fact that no existing data supported the use of face-masking in the general population as a protective measure against respiratory viruses? Even the WHO had originally stated that “the wide use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not supported by current evidence and carries uncertainties and critical risks” — including lulling elderly and at-risk people into a false sense of security by making them mistakenly believe they will be safe while wearing them. This has now been confirmed by meta-analysis published in January by Cochrane, widely considered the gold standard of healthcare data review. And what was the point in the use of mass testing for the general population, including in very low-risk children, at a massive cost, without evidence of individual or community-wide benefit from doing so?

The question of treatment is often ignored in the heated exchanges around Covid, but it also deserves serious examination. Why was so little research conducted into early at-home treatments for Covid? Based on existing drugs, these had apparently early benefits in reducing hospitalisations and deaths — which were subsequently confirmed in peer-reviewed studies (see here and here) — as early as March 2020. They were ignored, though, even after the publication of a first early treatment protocol based on efficacy and safety in the prestigious American Journal of Medicine in July 2020.

The potential of a number of early treatments was relatively unexplored, even though they might have worked well to prevent infection and illness. Instead, how many people ended up in hospital because all they were told, at the onset of the first symptoms, was to stay at home, rest, and in the case of a high fever to take paracetamol? And then, once they were in hospital, how many of those who developed serious respiratory issues perished because they were placed on mechanical ventilators? During the first wave, this became the mainstay of treatment for severe and critical cases of Covid-19; however, it soon become clear that a shockingly high number of patients put on ventilators ended up dying. It would later emerge that the use of pressurised oxygen was literally destroying patients’ lung sacs that were inflamed and damaged by the virus, and therefore unable to withstand the high pressure of mechanical ventilators. Why was the ventilation protocol maintained for months despite such appalling results?

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Finally, why were fast-tracked, experimental, and, ultimately, little-known “next-generation” mRNA technology-based vaccines offered to everyone, including those at little risk from Covid, even though it was known that the vaccines didn’t prevent transmission, and were associated with serious side effects? Wouldn’t a focused, risk-based approach to vaccination have been more advisable?

There are serious questions to be asked about the management of this catastrophe. The scope of the inquiry is necessarily huge. But the politicisation of the debate around Covid is fraught. There are strong headwinds, built up during the initial years when the lockdown consensus was so powerful. But as the failings of the Covid policy response become ever clearer, let’s hope the the British public isn’t lumbered with yet another meaningless inquiry.

Some researchers sounded the alarm, but were largely ignored by governments, public health authorities and the mainstream media. It was a curious response from those who in the previous two and a half years had justified the complete upending of human societies on the basis of “preserving life”. Throughout the second half of 2022, however, excess deaths have continued to rise at faster rates, and have continued to do so in the first weeks of 2023, to the point that the problem has become impossible to ignore.

The BBC recently reported that more than 650,000 deaths were registered in the UK in 2022 — 9% more than 2019. That’s around 50,000 excess deaths, most of which have been concentrated in the second half of the year (since July, there have been an average of 1,300 additional deaths per week). Excluding the pandemic, this represents the highest excess deaths level in 70 years — and only a fraction of these deaths are attributable to Covid. Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that excess deaths were almost 3,000 higher than normal in the second week of January alone — more than 20% above the average. Covid-19 accounted for just 5% of the total. The week before, overall deaths were 30% higher than expected.

If we break the numbers down by age groups, the results are even more surprising. While excess deaths in most age groups, even if above average, tend to be lower than they were in 2020 and 2021, as you would expect, there is one outlier: people between the age of 0 and 24 registered lower-than-average death rates in 2020 and 2021. Throughout 2022, on the other hand, they have been dying at higher rates than expected. In other words, more young people are dying today in Britain than before, or even during, the pandemic — and we don’t know why.

And yet, despite this stark discrepancy, there has been a notable lack of public acknowledgement of the non-Covid mortality crisis — let alone any meaningful explanation as for what’s driving it. Earlier this month, Health Secretary Steve Barclay told Sky News that “it’s extremely complicated as to what the drive of those excess deaths are”. Meanwhile, health experts say the causes could include anything from ambulance delays, long waits in A&E and major backlogs for routine NHS care to high flu rates and long Covid. Indeed, the consensus seems to hold that the general breakdown of the NHS is largely to blame for the increase in excess deaths.

But there is a hole in this argument: excess deaths are a problem in a number of other high-income countries, where the “NHS is broken” argument doesn’t hold. According to EuroMOMO, a European mortality monitoring activity supported by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), many European countries are showing elevated levels of excess mortality in all age groups — around 35% above average — and did so throughout 2022. In fact, despite relatively low Covid death rates, overall excess deaths in all age groups in Europe in 2022 were as high as in 2020 and higher than 2021 — even in the oldest cohorts. Beyond Europe, the situation is much the same: Australia and New Zealand recorded, respectively, 16% and 9% more excess deaths than the historical average in 2022, while in the United States, CDC data shows that the rate of non-Covid excess deaths in the first half of 2022 was even higher than in 2020 or 2021.

In short, a significant number of Western countries are experiencing a surge in excess deaths across all age groups. And there is no single explanation for this. Rather, each country seems to have its own theory — none of which have anything to do with the NHS. In Portugal, December saw excess deaths which beat all records of the previous 13 years, including during Covid-19, which the press attributes to an ageing population, and the resurgence of other respiratory viruses alongside the summer heat waves. In France and Spain, the summer heat waves are also seen as a clear cause of the excess deaths, while in Chile one additional cause of the surge in mortality was seen as “deaths avoided during the pandemic owing to the lower risk of certain events, like traffic accidents or injuries at work”.

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Where countries share one phenomenon — in this case, excess deaths — and attribute it to different causes, it is reasonable to ask some questions; the problem today seems to be that our public-health experts are not asking the right ones. At the end of last month, for instance, the UK’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Chris Whitty suggested that a lack of access to statins during the pandemic may have caused an upsurge in coronary heart disease, which has been the main driver of excess deaths. People did not attend medical services as much as usual, and the shortfall was having devastating consequences. However, as Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson pointed out shortly afterwards, it takes roughly five years for statins to have a notable impact on mortality reduction — so reduced medication since 2020 cannot have led to these outcomes.

So, what explains the rise in heart disease? The collapse in routine healthcare appointments (due to the single-minded focus on Covid at the expense of all other pathologies) is fairly obviously one part of the story, but is there anything else at play? One potential explanation is the impact of lockdowns on people’s physical health. After all, Whitty himself noted in March last year that lockdowns had increased young people’s obesity, which could lead to lowering life expectancy. Moreover, the political and social intrusion of the state into peoples’ emotional well-being, and the consequent breakdown of the pre-existing social contract, is also known to affect a citizen’s health. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, there was a significant increase in mortality in Russia, much of which was triggered by vascular disease. There is a clear precedent in living memory, then, for immense social and economic shocks leading to surges in heart disease.

Also relevant to the elderly is the increase in isolation produced by lockdown policies. According to the WHO factsheet on dementia, “risk factors include depression, social isolation [and] cognitive inactivity”, all of which were widely increased by the lockdown response; one 2015 study even found that social isolation increased the risk of mortality by between 26-32%. The lockdowns therefore are almost certainly a contributing factor to what we are currently seeing, particularly as the UK government itself has noted that those who die from dementia often have proximate additional causes of death in strokes or heart disease.

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Finally, there is one possible explanation that has to be considered, at least as a contributing factor for the rise in non-Covid excess deaths: the role of the vaccines, in particular those from Pfizer and Moderna that use the new mRNA technology. This is a hyper-polarising issue, so let’s start with what we know: the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are associated with a higher risk of developing myocarditis (heart inflammation), especially in younger males (possibly due to the spike protein generated by the vaccine circulating in the blood), and other serious adverse events such as blood clots. This is confirmed by a number of studies (see, for example, here, here, here, here, and here) and even by the CDC’s own data. There is quite a lot of variability between the studies, but they appear to suggest that, with young people, the risk from the vaccine may well outweigh the risk from Covid or from post-Covid myocarditis.

That said, proving a connection between vaccine-related harms and the disproportionately high number of young people dying at the moment is not straightforward. However, a number of studies — such as a recent analysis by Martin Neil, professor of computer science and statistics at Queen Mary University in London, and Norman Fenton, a mathematician and leading expert on risk assessment and statistics — do show a statistically significant correlation between vaccination rates and excess mortality.

To what extent this correlation actually implies causation does, of course, remain unclear. But just as lockdowns are clearly a factor, it seems unwise to rule out the vaccines as a contributing factor without proper investigation — the point is that we simply don’t know, as we don’t have enough data to establish or disprove a link. Ultimately, the causes of the excess deaths are probably varied, and involve a combination of factors. This shouldn’t be surprising, since lockdowns and vaccines were always connected in the pandemic response. But we shall never know for sure if we don’t start asking these uncomfortable questions — especially when our politicians and public-health experts seem reluctant to do so themselves.

Many factors connected to the pandemic response are at the heart of Africa’s current crisis, even if many economists choose to ignore them. Some point to the fact that Africa’s long-term loans more than doubled in the 2010s, both across the continent and in specific regions such as Eastern and Southern Africa. In Nigeria, for instance, the country’s external loan value reached $28.57 billion by December 2020, meaning an extra $21.27 billion of debt had been accumulated in the five years before the pandemic.

Yet the reason for the increasing loans prior to Covid was not that the continent was already in economic difficulty. On the contrary, it was the booming nature of Africa’s macroeconomic position before Covid hit that saw it accumulate this debt. In the 2010s, as countries such as Ethiopia saw an increase in GDP of almost 30% per year at some points, economies grew and so did the capacity of African countries to take out new loans to build infrastructure.

This all amounted to fairly standard economics — until the pandemic hit, when these plans were upended almost overnight, and mainstream economists tried instead to blame the impending austerity on overextended finance. First, there was the worldwide collapse in GDP in 2020, which led to an average fall of 4-5% across the continent; while, according to the African Development Bank, one of the very few African countries to ignore WHO policy advice, Tanzania, saw its economy grow by 4.5% that year. On top of this, there was the fall in remittances from the diaspora, triggered by the collapse in service sector jobs in wealthier countries such as the UK: remittances to Africa had surpassed foreign aid in 2019, but fell by 14% in 2021.

The combined impact of these colossal declines in economic activity was catastrophic: in South Africa, 47.2% of small businesses were forced to close in 2020. Meanwhile, global lockdown policies also triggered widespread inflation which long predated the Russian war in Ukraine — even if this has also exacerbated it. All this means that while GDP has started to recover in Africa, its gains are largely wiped out by the soaring price of goods, which makes it harder to keep pace with debt repayments.

This toxic mess created a debt crisis which was predicted from the start. Emmanuel Macron initiated calls to address the debt crisis as early as April 2020, but the plans which were put together failed to address its underlying issues or the continent’s pandemic policy responses. Elsewhere, a number of African countries were wary of taking up the offers to suspend debt repayments for fear it might impact their credit ratings. And with many of the additional loans being offered by the World Bank linked to purchasing stocks of Covid vaccines, rather than anything to deal with the real debt crisis, none of this relieved any of the fundamental issues at stake.

Compounding this is the fact that while income has fallen across the board, the cost of servicing the continent’s debt burden has soared along with the value of the dollar. As it stands, the US has emerged as the one major macroeconomic winner of the global pandemic policy response — and with debts held in dollars, this is catastrophic for low-income countries whose economies have not fully recovered from the carnage of 2020-1.

For most of Africa, the signs are bleak, with some commentators already labelling the policy framework “Structural Adjustment 2.0” — a revamp of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund following the debt crisis in the Eighties. Triggered by the oil crisis of the previous decade, and the spiralling interest rates that followed, this policy came at the worst possible time for newly independent African countries, which had taken out extensive dollar loans to build new infrastructure. The original SAP bailout loans were predicated on the sell-off of African state assets to private (usually Western) corporations, and the erosion of public services on the continent such as healthcare and education. The arrival on the scene of the new NGO industry to pick up the pieces swiftly followed.

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The current situation certainly seems reminiscent of the early Eighties. Then, as now, a decade of booming economies was abruptly reversed by a severe external economic shock. Back then, external lenders “helped” to stabilise debts with SAP 1.0, in return for a fire sale of state assets to predatory external corporations; today, the connection of “bailout loans” to future austerity and asset-stripping (privatisation) was clear right from the outset of the pandemic policy response. Oxfam warned in 2021 and 2022 that the vast majority of the IMF Covid loans to low-income countries were predicated on future austerity. The impact of this was apparent three months ago, following reports that half of the world’s low-income countries had cut health spending during the pandemic. The stark reality is that the global Covid policy response has crippled the continent’s economies, and will result in lowered spending on healthcare for years to come — and all to fight a disease which, given the continent’s median age of 19.7, did not pose a great threat to the vast majority of Africans.

Alongside a looming decade of austerity, a decade of uncertainty is starting to take shape. Last month, Ghana defaulted on most of its international debt, following a crisis that had been brewing for months. Meanwhile, in nearby Nigeria (which faces elections next month), the country’s debt crisis is deemed “insurmountable”. And with debt interest payments for low-income countries projected to rise by 35% in 2023, things are not about to get any easier, increasing the potential for civil unrest.

What this might look like became clear in Senegal’s New Year’s Eve protests, led by young people furious at the release of a report which showed widespread government corruption in the funds released to “deal with the pandemic”. As in the UK and the US, the printing of vast sums of money to chuck at the new suite of pandemic policies was inevitably accompanied by widespread fraud — while, in the African context, producing mountains of debt which now seem almost impossible to repay.

With Senegal’s informal economy yet to show even minimum signs of recovery, this anger can only get worse. As one Senegalese resident told me recently: “If this government seeks re-election, there will be a genuine revolution.” People, he explained, are angry at the corruption of government Covid contracts, at the fact that Covid saw the largest Senegalese government spending in history where there are many other priorities, at the roll-out of policies which have destroyed people’s livelihoods, and at the promise of years of austerity to pay for it all.

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It is true that some silver linings may yet emerge from this catastrophe. In March last year, Ghana introduced a new electronic levy to tax internal money transfers at 1.5%, partly in an attempt to deal with its looming debt crisis. Though the source of much anger at the time, a more stable tax base is surely a prerequisite for building governments which do not require expensive foreign loans to subsist, and could seem like a wise move in 10 years’ time.

For the time being, though, many people are worried as to what the more immediate future may bring. A senior figure in international development recently described the Covid response to me as “the most regressive policy in three decades, and yet no one’s talking about it”. This may change in the year ahead, as the debt crisis becomes impossible to ignore. On the basis of recent events, there is going to be a desperate effort by policymakers to avoid looking at the true causes of this human disaster, and at their role in creating it — but as the recent Senegalese protests suggest, Africans may have other ideas.

As the past year came to an end, the same stubborn arguments which have been spinning around the world’s hamster wheel for the last three years were aired again — this time about China’s decision to abandon Zero Covid, and what this might mean for the rest of the world in terms of variants, Covid spread and the health of the general population. We don’t want to rehearse these arguments again, but they are vital: they cut to the heart of what lessons global societies will take from the Covid-19 pandemic and associated policy response, and how institutions will balance health and disease in the future. It’s too easy to say that we should just move on, because the future health of human societies depends on what decisions now are taken.

It’s pretty clear that China abandoned Zero Covid because it didn’t work, was causing huge socioeconomic and psychological harm, and threatened to undermine the political control of Xi Jinping. The writing was on the wall when footage emerged in August of shoppers in a Shanghai Ikea stampeding for the exit after authorities sought to seal off the store and send everyone in it to quarantine following the discovery of one shopper who had been exposed to an asymptomatic six-year-old child. Once mass protests began to spread in November, the decision was taken to move on before they became a threat to the regime.

To us, a number of conclusions can be drawn, which we discuss in The Covid Consensus. Clearly, lockdowns could only work in a very limited way, to reduce spread for a short period of time; they were therefore impractical for any length of time without causing enormous harm, which is why Zero Covid was impossible. Moreover, in spite of China’s severe attempts to prevent travel, the spread of a highly infectious respiratory virus cannot be shut down completely in the era of global supply chains, even with hermetically sealed borders, as proved to be the case in Australia and New Zealand.

Nevertheless, many seem to be trying to draw different and nonsensical lessons, showing that nothing has been learned from the past three years. Once again, the Western media is stoking unnecessary fears with panic-stricken reports of “China’s new Covid nightmare”. The rapid infection of potentially more than a billion Chinese people, we are told, is likely to result in countless deaths among the population, and spark the emergence of dangerous new variants that could lead to “a global catastrophe”, as millions of potentially disease-carrying citizens prepare to celebrate the reopening of the country’s borders by travelling to all corners of the world.

So, instead of celebrating the end of the Zero Covid prison in which so many Chinese have been incarcerated, during the past week, several countries — including the US, Japan, Italy, Spain, France and, most recently, the UK — have reacted by reintroducing restrictions for passengers from China, requiring them to show a negative PCR or antigen test before boarding.

But are such fears justified? First, let us explore whether China is really heading for a public health disaster of apocalyptic proportions, as the news would have us believe. According to the Chinese government, the country is registering around 5,000 new cases, and only a handful of Covid deaths, per day. Official deaths since the start of the pandemic are just over 5,000. These numbers are universally considered to be hogwash; China has routinely been accused of downplaying infections and deaths for political reasons. The World Health Organization, for example, reports around 150,000 new cases, and 400 deaths, per week, and a total of just over 30,000 deaths.

As far as the latest wave is concerned, there is at least an official explanation for the discrepancy: China recently announced that it will include only deaths from pneumonia or respiratory failure in its official Covid-19 death toll; deaths that occur in patients with pre-existing illnesses, on the other hand, will not be counted as Covid-19 deaths. If true, this contrasts starkly with the very “liberal” approach to Covid-19 deaths (and hospitalisations) adopted by most Western countries throughout the pandemic, and still widely used, whereby any deceased person who has recently (or even not so recently) tested for Covid is classified as a “Covid death”, even if the death was manifestly unrelated to Covid. Figures related to new cases are even more unreliable, since they obviously depend on the number (and method) of tests that are carried out.

One thing, however, is certain: in the coming weeks and months, a huge portion of the Chinese population is going to catch the virus. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), for example, estimates that around 1 million Chinese people are already getting infected every day. Some reports claim that 250 million people across the country have been infected just in December. How many deaths this leads to depends on a number of factors, including the ability of the Chinese authorities to put measures in place to protect those who are actually at risk of developing a serious illness from Covid-19, namely the elderly and those with serious medical conditions. The IHME expects close to 300,000 Covid deaths by April 2023 — roughly 100,000 deaths per month (3,000 per day).

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These numbers may seem shocking, but they need to be contextualised. Assuming that a large percentage of the 1.4 billion-strong Chinese population eventually catches Covid, as seems likely, this would amount to a minuscule infection fatality rate (IFR) — less than 0.001%. Most of the deceased are also likely to be very elderly people who would have died within a short time — as was the case for the overwhelming majority of Covid-related deaths in Western countries. In fact, since more than 10 million people died in China in 2021 (the most recent year for which there are statistics), this figure — even if it continued at that rate throughout the year — would lead to around a 12% mortality increase, broadly in line with global averages elsewhere in 2020.

We also need to keep in mind that the dominant strain in China at the moment appears to be a subvariant of the Omicron variant BA.5 (BA.5.2.1.7), also called BF.7, which we know to be more transmissible but much less lethal than previous variants — exactly the kind of evolution you would expect to see in a virus like SARS-CoV-2. Indeed, Chinese authorities have confirmed that the virus causes relatively mild symptoms in the vast majority of those infected. There’s little reason to doubt this, as much as one may be sceptical of the information coming out of China.

And yet, Western politicians are now telling us that the reason we need new restrictions is that, as the Chair of the Defence Select Committee Tobias Ellwood said, “we simply cannot trust Chinese data”. Such claims would hold more water if that same Western establishment hadn’t spent the best part of the past three years taking the Chinese Covid-19 statistics at face value, and using them as evidence for the effectiveness of lockdowns. Up to March 2020, 39 of 42 reproduction number estimates were based on Chinese data, as was the Imperial College report that predicted 510,000 deaths in the UK, which would fall to somewhere between 5,700 and 39,000 with Chinese-style “suppression” measures. Needless to say, those predictions turned out to be wildly inaccurate.

In other words, the Chinese data was deemed perfectly reliable insofar as it was useful to justify restrictions in the West. Today, on the other hand, it is accused of being unreliable… in order to justify restrictions in the West. The doublethink is jarring — and the results are likely to be similarly flawed. Just as lockdowns failed to contain the spread of the virus within countries, previous attempts to prevent Delta and Omicron variants from spreading beyond India and southern Africa, respectively, also failed miserably. Even the WHO considers travel bans to be “usually not effective”, while Andrew Pollard, chairman of the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, also admitted that “trying to ban a virus by adjusting what we do with travel has already been shown not to work very well”. Neither is there any evidence that pre-departure testing will “help slow the spread” of the virus, as claimed by the CDC’s director Rochelle Walensky. In July, for example, French researchers found the Omicron variant in wastewater from two commercial airplanes that flew from Ethiopia to France in December 2021 even though passengers had been required to take Covid tests before boarding, concluding that mandatory testing before boarding “did not prevent massive importation of Omicron variant into Europe”.

More importantly, why would we want to do that? Data from last month suggests a majority of people in Western countries have had coronavirus infections, and that prior infection, even in the unvaccinated, offers strong protection against BA.5 Omicron hospitalisation. Moreover, the Omicron subvariant that has been spreading in China has been detected in the US, Europe and rest of the world for many months, which means we also have good levels of natural immunity to that subvariant (as well as high vaccination rates, which were told were the golden bullet to end the pandemic). So, there’s no reason to fear coming into contact with a Chinese tourist any more than there is to come into contact with any other human being.

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Furthermore, not only is there “currently no evidence” to suggest that a new and dangerous strain of the virus has emerged in the Chinese population, but there’s no reason to believe this is likely to happen either — or at least it’s not more likely to happen in China than anywhere else. “The likelihood of variants emerging [in China] is the same as it is in other places where there are Covid waves,” said Pollard. Besides, as noted already, even if it were to emerge, it would spread across the world regardless of the measures put in place, just like all previous variants.

Why, then, are policymakers once again going down this route? Part of the explanation is that politicians, by peddling a pro-lockdown narrative for the past three years, have now created an artificial demand for restrictive measures among their fear-stricken constituents, some of whom are now even making the case for wearing masks forever or for the permanent institutionalisation of what Giorgio Agamben might call “bare life”. Even more worryingly, it appears to indicate that Western governments have little intention of giving up the powers they’ve claimed under the guise of “fighting the virus”. While these current travel restrictions won’t affect the daily lives of Western citizens, they nonetheless show how easily “lockdown laws”, many of which remain in place in the UK and other countries, can be reinstated. If restrictions can be arbitrarily brought back at any moment in the name of public health, what’s to stop governments from abusing these powers once again in the future? For instance, the British government’s “Living with Covid-19” guidance, published in February 2022, states that it “will retain contingency capabilities and will respond as necessary to further resurgences or worse variants of the virus”.

The threat of such “capabilities” relates to a more fundamental issue, which is how human societies relate to illness and disease. The pandemic threw this into the foreground, and offered two contrasting approaches. The first is the biomedical approach, which has been championed by Bill Gates in his book on the pandemic and subsequently by Joe Biden in his new pandemic policy, which relies on the rapid production of vaccines, while citizens will need to wait in lockdown until these new products are available.

The alternative requires us to move beyond the guidance — or tyranny, depending on your point of view — of “the science”, and to recognise the role that philosophy and humanistic knowledge has in human life. Whether or not humans choose to embrace this way of living is ultimately a question of values. We can either confront the truth that death is — and always will be — a fundamental part of life, embrace the case for living well and healthily while we are alive, and recognise the place that human contact, exchange, and the sharing of bodily and social space has in well-being and therefore in health. Or, we can assign more value to the technical shield which we have been constructing around ourselves for the past decades. Looking at what’s now playing out in China, we know which we prefer.

As we make clear in our forthcoming book, we see lockdowns as a social, human and economic catastrophe of enormous proportions, which did very little (if anything) to reduce virus spread and death from Covid-19. We’re grateful to those who have fought hard to define this position, and continue to do so — even though we don’t agree with them on everything.

Perhaps the strangest idea still finding traction today is the notion among many influential lockdown sceptics that draconian Covid restrictions were some kind of socialist plot led by “Marxist” institutions, such as the World Economic Forum and China-sympathisers on the “woke” left. In a recent article, for instance, the San Francisco attorney Michael P. Senger draws links between the Wuhan lockdown and the way in which this was actively promoted in Italy in February 2020 by the Health Minister Roberto Speranza, who thought that the lockdowns “could be used to implement far-Left political reforms across Italy”. Meanwhile, American Institute of Economic Research director Jeffrey Tucker has described how the best way to deal with the overreach of lockdown bureaucrats is to simply abolish the failing institutes and replace them with private corporations.

We agree that Western state institutions have failed in the Covid era — proving to be utterly inefficient, terribly oppressive, or both. Yet it seems clear they failed not because they are state institutions per se, but rather because they have been captured by private corporations and their interests. In fact, the lockdown catastrophe and subsequent mass-vaccination-by-all-means programmes, and associated pharma and tech profiteering, are the clear outcome of decades of deregulation and marketisation advocated by pro-market conservatives. Yes, centre-Left governments, from Blair to Clinton, played an important role in implementing these policies, but no one in their right mind would call Blair or Clinton socialists — if anything, they symbolise the Left’s abandonment of its socialist roots. The same can be said of Italy’s Health Minister Roberto Speranza, who hails from the anti-socialist, pro-establishment Partito Democratico.

A good example of such policies is the famous practice of the “revolving door”, where there is a cosy relationship between government and business, in which executives from companies enter senior levels of government — and then where senior civil servants move into top corporate jobs on leaving government. This policy has been actively championed by conservative policymakers, who stress how much government has to learn from business models, and believe that bringing executives into senior policy roles can help to trim waste and make government more efficient.

The Covid-19 crisis gave the lie to this claim, showing the dramatic consequences of revolving door politics. For instance, the man called to lead Operation Warp Speed — the US programme created to accelerate the development and manufacturing of Covid vaccines, which provided more than $10 billion of public funding to a handful of pharmaceutical companies such as Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) — was none other than  Moncef Slaoui, former GlaxoSmithKline executive (running its vaccines programme) and board member of Moderna.

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Following his nomination, Slaoui was required to resign from a number of biotech boards funded by Operation Warp Speed, and to sell his Moderna stock, but was allowed to keep his stock in GSK, reported to be worth about $10 million. Meanwhile, in Europe, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, whose husband is medical director of a US biotech company, negotiated its biggest deal yet with Pfizer — for up to 1.8 billion doses — via a series of text messages with the company’s chief.

Or one could mention how the WHO went from being an entirely publicly funded institution to one increasingly dependent on private “philanthropic” institutions — first and foremost, today, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has been accused of “function[ing] as a trojan horse for Western corporations”, and which is increasingly recognised even by mainstream media groups such as Politico as key in market profiteering associated with the pandemic response. Many lockdown critics decry the role of Bill Gates in buying influence in the media, in pharmaceutical investments, and in government, yet few would consider Gates to be a socialist; in fact he’s considered the embodiment of philanthrocapitalism. It’s also rather obvious that Gates’s ability to exert this influence has not come from socialist policies of redistribution, but rather from the upward transfer of wealth which has been promoted by the neoliberal economic agenda of the past decades.

Then there’s the fact that both the FDA and EMA rely heavily on fees and charges levied on the very pharmaceutical companies they are called upon to regulate (respectively for around half and three quarters of their budgets) — a fact which, according to several observers, raises serious issues of conflict of interest. Moreover, both agencies have long been criticised for their revolving door problem. For example, the current executive director of the EMA, Emer Cooke, previously worked for Europe’s largest pharmaceutical lobbying organisation, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations.

Should we be surprised, then, that Western governments almost entirely funded the development of the vaccines, fast-tracked the approval process, granted manufacturers close-to-full immunity from liability over a whole host of issues, and then allowed the pharma companies to fully own the patents and even set the price of the vaccines? It seems pretty obvious who benefited from this — the corporations themselves — just as it is clear that this is the result of a pro-market agenda, not a socialist one.

Perhaps the clearest evidence for this can be found in the Global South, where the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic response have had a catastrophic impact in low-income countries (LICs). As noted in the first edition of The Covid Consensus, some have said that these were decisions made by sovereign leaders — and that global pressure has had very little to do with this. Yet the truth is that 40 years of structural adjustment and austerity policies — driven by global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF — eroded the ability of state budgets to provide for healthcare and education, leaving LICs and their health agendas to be shaped by philanthropic donors and their non-profit partners.

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As the trauma of 2020 and 2021 fades into the reality of the painful consequences of 2022, a broader political reckoning is required. Those of us on the Left who recognise the appalling abdication of social and ethical responsibility which many — but not all — Left-wing politicians and intellectuals showed in the face of Covid must take stock of the reasons why this happened. This is something that many people are still coming to terms with: for us, the appropriation of the Left-wing movement by metropolitan liberals far distant from production chains and everyday realities of the global working class — whether in London, New York, Abidjan or Dhaka — must be a starting point for understanding how this has happened.

On the other hand, a similar reckoning is needed from those on the libertarian Right who have fought these restrictions. These did not emerge from some socialist plot, but rather from decades of policies of deregulation, revolving doors, and the capture of state institutions by corporations. If Left-leaning critics like us need to come to terms with the reasons for this catastrophic response, so must Right-leaning critics of lockdown policies recognise how they have followed directly from policies which many of them have supported for years.

What’s interesting is that the lockdown-cheering leftists and anti-lockdown libertarians actually have more in common than they would like to admit. Both outlooks are ultimately rooted in a fundamentally flawed view of the relationship between state and market. Both groups hold the belief that state-market relations are dichotomic, where the influence of one can only increase at the expense of the other. This is why many on the Left interpreted government activism throughout the pandemic as a welcome “return of the state”, one potentially capable, in their view, of eventually reversing the pro-market project of the past decades; while those on the libertarian Right, which see state interventionism as inherently socialist and anti-market, saw those same government interventions as expressions of creeping “socialism”.

But state-market relations are in fact symbiotic. Simply put, markets — let alone so-called “free markets” — can’t exist without the state. As Karl Polanyi argued, the emergence of so-called laissez-faire under mid-19th-century industrial capitalism entailed a highly active state to “embed” markets in society; to enforce changes in social structure and human thinking that allowed for a competitive capitalist economy. As he put it: “Laissez-faire was planned… [and] enforced by the state.”

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This has remained true throughout the various phases of capitalism. If the state’s role under “Keynesianism” was that of mediating between the interests of capital and labour, over the past decades the role of the state has become that of securing the interests of Big Capital at the expense of everyone else. As witnessed during the pandemic, this makes the modern state intrinsically authoritarian. It also makes it inefficient, as it entails the creation of an environment favourable to the privatisation of public assets and services through institutionalised mismanagement. Various terms have been put forward to describe this system — corporatocracy, neo-feudalism, hyper-capitalism — but one thing is clear: it ain’t socialism.

Even more ludicrous is the claim that the World Economic Forum is a “Marxist” organisation. Now, people have been quibbling for the past 150 years about what Marxism is, but what it clearly isn’t is an ideology that aims to hand power over to the world’s most powerful corporations. In fact, the WEF’s Young Global Leaders initiative, responsible for putting several members of the ruling elite into positions of power in business and politics, can be traced back to the US’s Cold War efforts to counter communist influence while ensuring that future global leaders would be amenable to American interests.

So, while libertarians understand (better than leftists) that capitalism today is heavily reliant on “political intervention”, what they don’t seem to understand is that the “free market” they dream of would require an equally interventionist state. Interventionism is quite simply an inescapable fact of advanced modern economies.

The point is whose interests the state should serve. “Less state” won’t make us freer, let alone deliver some mythical “free market” — it will just make the majority of us even more powerless in the face of financial and corporate power, the concentration of which has led to the lockdown catastrophes. What we need is a state that does the exact opposite of its modern incarnation: one that represses Big Capital, while expanding the liberties and rights of individual citizens and workers. If there’s one lesson to be gleaned from the past two and a half years, it’s that we need to reclaim the state, not give up on it.

It’s certainly true that these measures have been “tried and tested”. Universal masking was tried from January 2020 in Hong Kong, seeing almost complete compliance outside the home; the world’s highest Covid fatality rate was recorded there in March of this year. South Korea was long hailed for its “successful test-and-trace system” that “beat the pandemic”; the strategy was abandoned in February because of record Omicron infections. Of course, both masking and test-and-trace have been tried in various combinations across high-income countries, including the UK — and yet in spite of this, the Office of National Statistics estimated in April that over 70% of Britons had been infected by Covid.

None of this is surprising: there never really was a scientific case for universal masking. This was obvious based on the pre-pandemic literature, which is why the WHO (alongside the CDC and high-profile public health experts such as Anthony Fauci) initially advised against mass masking; subsequent studies have confirmed that “existing data do not support universal, often improper, face mask use in the general population as a protective measure against Covid-19”. Even the New York Times has at least partially accepted this, running a piece on 31 May entitled “Why Masks Work, but Mandates Haven’t”. As for contact tracing, the pre-2020 consensus was even more trenchant, with the WHO’s 2019 report on “Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza” claiming that “under no circumstances” should it be adopted, due to its limited effectiveness. (There is also no evidence that lockdowns had any enduring influence on the spread of Covid-19. In fact, they may have worsened it.)

At this point, it really isn’t clear what advocates of these “tried and failed” restrictions hope they will achieve, given that — even in conjunction with several doses of the Covid vaccines — they haven’t been able to prevent the vast majority of people contracting Covid. As Edinburgh University’s Professor of Epidemiology Mark Woolhouse wrote in The Year the World Went Mad, lockdowns and associated non-pharmaceutical interventions cannot eliminate a virus, or even prevent infections — they can only delay them, and even then just for a short while.

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And yet, earlier this week, junior UK health minister Lord Kamall said restrictions could return if the NHS struggles to cope in the wake of increasing Covid cases. In Italy, meanwhile, the junior health minister Andrea Costa also failed to rule out the reintroduction of Covid restrictions in the face of rising cases, just saying that they would not return “for the moment”. We are seeing a resurgence of Covid fearmongering — which has done so much to inhibit a rational debate about the best ways to deal with the pandemic. The object of fear du jour is the latest Omicron subvariant, BA.5, which appears to be more contagious than any previous variant. If that’s the case, it simply means that non-pharmaceutical interventions would prove even more futile in containing its spread, meaning that reintroducing restrictions would be utterly illogical.

There’s also no evidence to claim, as a recent Daily Beast article asserted, that this new variant “is the most dangerous yet”. The most recent study (pre-print) concludes that “[d]isease severity was similar amongst diagnosed Covid-19 cases in the BA.4/BA.5 and BA.1 periods in the context of growing immunity against SARS-CoV-2 due to prior infection and vaccination, both of which were strongly protective”, while another one (under review) found that “[n]ewly emerged Omicron lineages BA.4/BA.5 continue to show reduced clinical severity compared to previous variants, as observed for Omicron BA.1”. Dr David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Business Insider: “Just as the virus is adapting, so too are our bodies.” He continued: “It’s not like with every variant things are getting worse. If anything, our bodies are getting smarter and we’re seeing fewer and fewer serious infections.”

Still, many argue that previous infection confers practically no immunity against BA.5 — and that, therefore, we should all be ready for another round of vaccination. In fact, the data shows no such thing; population-level data shows us unequivocally that prior infection confers immunity. The most recent study on the subject, published in the world-leading New England Journal of Medicine, shows that prior Covid infection conferred better protection against symptomatic Omicron (BA.1 and BA.2 subvariants) more than a year after infection than three doses of vaccine more than one month after the final dose.

However, the Covid fearmongers have another string to their bow. While the number of Covid deaths remains flat, there is increasing attention being given to “long Covid” (LC) as a debilitating condition that requires new restrictions, and yet another round of mass vaccination, in order to prevent more people from being afflicted by it. Should our leaders be listening?

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The first question that has to be answered is: how serious a condition is LC? As with pretty much anything Covid-related, opinion is polarised — and, as so often, the truth is likely somewhere in the middle. While some studies have suggested that it occurs in as many as 30% of people infected with the virus, others have found the number to be 7% overall. One of the most in-depth studies yet, published in May 2022 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was unable to find any biological explanation for LC symptoms. This, of course, doesn’t mean that LC is all in people’s head, as the researchers who conducted the study were keen to stress. (Indeed, we know people close to us who are suffering from it, so we can testify to the fact that it’s a serious issue.) The study does however suggest that LC might be a much more complex phenomenon than we imagine.

Indeed, the existence of LC in children and adolescents has been the subject of much debate due to the difficulty in ascertaining whether the most common symptoms usually associated with LC — sadness, tension, anger, depression, anxiety, fatigue, sleep disorders — are due to Covid itself or to other (co-)factors. One of the earliest cohort studies on LC, published in August 2021, concluded that:

“It is possible the symptoms associated with Long Covid are in fact a mixture of factors relating to the pandemic and lockdown as a whole rather than the viral infection itself. For example, factors such as social isolation, anxiety, depression or educational concerns may be the root cause of these symptoms in children and young people both with and without SARS-CoV-2 infection”.

Given the devastating and well-documented effects of lockdowns and school closures on the mental health of children, this doesn’t seem unreasonable.

A more recent study conducted by the Italian Society of Pediatrics found that “physical symptoms due to SARS-CoV-2, even if persisting after 4 weeks from infection, tend to regress spontaneously or under treatment in few months, whereas mental problems can persist for a longer time”. Given that “[s]everal factors indicate that mental health problems depend on the stress conditions children underwent during pandemic”, the researchers concluded that, “what has been reported for pediatric long Covid, further suggesting that most of the clinical manifestations characterising long Covid depend on the pandemic and not directly on the infection”.

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One thing is clear: we still know too little about LC, which means we need to step up research into the condition — as sufferers have been demanding for a long time. But it would be unacceptable to weaponise the very real distress of those sufferers in order to justify new non-pharmaceutical interventions that have failed on all possible accounts, or a new round of coercive mass vaccination.

The received wisdom from the political-scientific establishment over the past year or so has been that universal vaccination will lead to herd immunity, and therefore to the end of infection (and, hence, of LC). However, given that the European Union has, to date, ordered 4.2 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines, most of them from Pfizer — that’s almost 10 doses for every man, woman and child of all ages in the EU — it’s clear that even this establishment never thought that universal vaccination would lead to herd immunity (or at least not quickly). Now, though, even the political authorities (and other figures such as Bill Gates) acknowledge that the vaccines will not get rid of infections and don’t provide protection for long. A huge May 2022 study of more than 13 million people published in Nature Medicine has also found that “long Covid risk falls only slightly after vaccination”. Cases are rising, and there is pressure to “do something”. But if neither vaccines nor non-pharmaceutical interventions can’t prevent Covid infection, and if even some people who are not hospitalised develop LC symptoms, what is the solution?

Here, it’s worth returning to the first months of the pandemic, when there was no certainty that a Covid vaccine would ever be found. In those early months, treatments were considered by many to be every bit as hopeful a prospect as vaccines. You may remember the furore around Hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial which was quickly touted as “Trump’s cure” — but which Didier Raoult, one of France’s most cited scientists (and one of the 400 most-cited scientists in the world), also claimed to have used to great effect in the treatment of Covid symptoms early in the pandemic. You may also remember the controversies around Ivermectin.

These treatments were controversial, yes, but some scientists believed initially (and still believe) that effective treatments exist for early-stage Covid; surely, this is an avenue worth exploring? While enormous amounts of money have been spent on the Covid vaccines, much less has been invested in developing early-stage treatments — when treatments have been approved by regulators, such as Remdesivir, they tend to be late-stage courses.

Of course, vaccines are key in preventing serious illness and death in those at great risk from Covid — but this was always, in truth, a comparatively small section of the population, as study after study has shown. Now that it is clear that vaccines do not prevent infection, it’s time to shift the focus to the kind of early-stage treatments that are vital in preventing potential LC from developing. Insisting on the same restrictions and vaccine-centric strategy of the past few years and expecting a different result is, as Einstein might have said, simply insane.

Ever since March 2020, the memes have spread. Was Gates a mass murderer with a global depopulation agenda? Was he a “biofascist” seeking control over the world’s population through vaccine passports and microchips?

It didn’t stop there. Was the Covid-19 pandemic actually “plandemic”? Did the Microsoft founder and his acolytes create it through funding “gain of function” research in a biosecurity lab in Wuhan? Was it all war-gamed at Event 201 in October 2019?

Bill Gates has not much enjoyed being the focus of these stories for the past 18 months. He just wants to help out. He wants to solve problems so badly, he tells us early on in How To Prevent the Next Pandemic, that in February 2020, he flew from Seattle to South Africa to participate in a charity tennis match, no doubt on one of his four personal jets.

It was in South Africa that he first began to join the Covid-19 dots. The tech entrepreneur delivers the story with characteristic flair: “A couple of days after returning from South Africa, I sent an email about scheduling something for the coming Friday night: ‘We could try and do a dinner with the people involved with coronavirus work to touch base.’” Gates is happy, “everyone was nice enough to say yes — despite the timing and their busy schedules”. His work on the pandemic begins.

Now Gates is tired of all the conspiracies. He asks his critics to judge him by his actions. And the best way to do so is by reading the book: does Gates have anything sensible to say about the best way to combat future pathogenic outbreaks?

His model for the future is built on what he feels has worked over the past two years: isolate contacts, close borders, lockdown as quickly as possible, then remove restrictions slowly and cautiously. He cites Dr Anthony Fauci, who Gates says he spoke to once a month during the pandemic: “Not only should you appear to overreact at first, as Tony Fauci said, but you also have to be careful about relaxing all NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions] too soon.” Meanwhile, you should invest enormous sums in boosting global public health systems, vaccine production in poor and rich countries, and fund a Global Pandemic Emergency Response Unit to monitor potential outbreaks. The aim, says Gates, is to vaccinate the entire world — twice if necessary — within six months while lockdown measures restrict the spread of the new pathogen.

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It all sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it? Or it might do to those who haven’t seen the footage of Shanghai’s lockdown circulating on social media, to those who can work online in relative comfort, or indeed to billionaires with comfortable gardens and libraries in which to while away those six months. With the Gates model, a little translation is in order.

The massive investment required to make this vision happen is a good starting point. Where will it come from? Gates is a well-known philanthropist, and makes much of the more than US$2 billion which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have ploughed into fighting Covid-19. Yet this is a small amount compared to the US$6 billion that the US government has invested in the Moderna vaccine alone. As Gates points out, “Most of the world’s greatest talent for translating research into commercial products is in the private sector… It’s the government’s role to invest in the basic research that leads to major innovations, adopt policies that let new ideas flourish.”

Translation: taxpayers invest in developing products through government agencies, and private companies and their shareholders reap the profits. How does this work in practice? Gates does not give what we might call full disclosure. He offers the example of the antiviral Molnupiravir which “Merck and its partners developed”. It was authorised to great fanfare as a Covid treatment in November 2021.

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Yet Merck did not develop this drug. It was initially developed as a veterinary drug for horses at Emory University, with a US$19 million grant from Fauci’s NIAID and funding from other sectors of the US government. Molnupiravir costs US$17.74 per dose to manufacture, according to an estimate from researchers at Harvard and King’s College London, but is being retailed to the US government for US$712 per course — a profit of 4,000%.

Another example of Gates’s eye for detail is his discussion of Remdesivir, which was approved as “Standard of Care” for Covid in the US by the Federal Drug Agency. Again, like Molnupiravir, much of the funding and institutional support for the drug originally came from the US government. Remdesivir was the baby of the drug company Gilead.

Gates describes how one study showed that “it may have a major impact in patients who aren’t yet sick enough to be in the hospital”. But other details are ignored. He doesn’t tell us that in an earlier, peer-reviewed study from China, published in the Lancet in May 2020, “Remdesivir was not associated with statistically significant clinical benefits”, and that the trial was “stopped early because of adverse events in 18 (12%) patients versus four (5%) patients who stopped placebo early”. All the same, the profits were good: while the drug cost Gilead just US$10 per dose to manufacture, it was being retailed to US taxpayers at US$3,120.

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Maybe Gates knows nothing about the Lancet study. Perhaps he doesn’t know that in both of these cases, public investment has funded enormous private profits — and that in the case of one of the drugs, there’s little evidence that this was to any benefit. He’s just a software engineer after all. 

For Gates, technology really does provide all the answers, as it certainly has in his own life. He believes humanity belongs online: “once people learn the digital approach, they generally stick to it”. Post-Covid, he envisages a world of flexible working, in which regular guys like him with large mansions and decent living space can languidly choose between going into the office on Wednesdays or Thursdays. The problem with Gates’s digital utopia — full of virtual  spaces where 3D avatars attend business meetings — is that I suspect many of us will not want to live in it.

Gates tries to show in this book that he gets it, while at the same time demonstrating on every page that he just doesn’t. As he draws up his elaborate plans for global governance, Gates writes that he does so knowing that he hasn’t been elected. He tells us he wouldn’t want to be anyway (after all, we can surmise, if he were elected, he might be accountable).

Gracefully, Gates understands that people are angry at the huge increases in wealth disparities during the pandemic, and pledges to return his profits to “make the world a fairer place”. He recognises that poor people across the world have suffered, and are far less able to deal with lockdowns, and even acknowledges that harsh measures might not be a good idea in some of them… And yet he recently went on record as saying that “if every country does what Australia did, then you wouldn’t be calling it a pandemic”. We can, in fact, judge him by his actions, and his words: he says one thing, and funds and promotes others.

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Looking forward, the outlook is bleak. Preventing pandemics in Gates-World means shutting down immediately at the “next major outbreak” — a favourite, and alarming turn of phrase. Future semi-permanent global lockdowns are baked-in as the new normal, something I warned of in the conclusion to my book The Covid Consensus. As Gates notes, the WHO have identified 1,500 new pathogens in the past 50 years, and thus the “next major outbreak” surely cannot be far off. In the past 20 years, pre-Covid, there were already three of note (SARS — 2003; Avian Flu — 2005; Swine Flu — 2009). In each case enormous fatalities were falsely predicted, and would surely have led to six month shutdowns in the Gates model.

Gates-World is one where citizens make sacrifices for his model to work. And it’s also one where class is totally ignored. Does Gates know what it was like for Angolan children to be forced to stay at home for seven months in 2020? He admits that internet connections need to be improved to make digital schooling possible — but does he understand that no IT in the world can help children of sex workers in Mumbai slums with their homework? Can he comprehend what it is like to be incarcerated in a flat with small children for months on end in New York, Shanghai or London?

Gates wants to be respected, and understood. His world is one of innovative scientists having dinner with one another. They solve the world’s problems by the pool, or near the barbecue. It’s what he likes doing best, because “I’ve had some of the best conversations of my working life with a fork in my hand and a napkin in my lap” (p4). He wants to fund more and more work leading to experiences like this, and meanwhile turn the rest of human society into a digital avatar of itself. 

No doubt he means well. But you don’t need to indulge the conspiracy theories to realise that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

On the one hand, hundreds of thousands of small and medium businesses were forced to shut down, triggering one of the worst jobs crises since the Great Depression. In 2020 alone, workers around the world cumulatively lost $3.7 trillion in earnings — an 8.3% decline.

On the other, a handful of mega-corporations, particularly in the Big Tech and Big Pharma sectors, have made a killing, raking in hundreds of billions more in “pandemic super-profits” than over the previous four-year average. Topping the list are behemoths such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Facebook, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Merck.

The success of the Tech giants — Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Facebook — is easily explained. As people found themselves confined to their homes, they turned to the internet for pretty much everything: shopping, dining, working, schooling, entertainment, socialising, even sex. In other words, what represented a curse for countless small and medium traditional businesses, represented a blessing for a handful of corporate behemoths.

The golden egg for the pharmaceutical companies, however, came later with the vaccines: the companies behind two of the most successful Covid-19 vaccines — Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna — made combined profits of $34 billion in 2021. And if the “new normal” ends up including permanent booster shots, such super-profits will become the norm. Crucially, these profits are then distributed to shareholders who predominantly belong to the richest 1% of society. It’s hardly surprising then that billionaires around the world saw their wealth increase by $3.9 trillion just in 2020. As Oxfam starkly put it in a recent report: “The wealth of the 10 richest men has doubled, while the incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off”.

To see what this means in practice, one need only turn to Latin America, whose billionaires increased their wealth by 52% during the pandemic. In Mexico, meanwhile, multimillionaires saw their wealth increase by 31.4% in 2021 alone. On the other hand, over the last two years, 78 million people in the region were plunged into extreme poverty, while 13% of children abandoned education altogether.

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In Africa, where low-income countries predominate, the picture is equally stark. A report this month noted that not only had GDP fallen by as much as 7.8% in some cases, but that remittances from abroad had fallen by 25%. In a context where remittances from rich countries accounted for over half of private capital flows to Africa shortly prior to the pandemic, this has had a devastating effect on the daily economy, with over 40 million additional people in extreme poverty.

Couple this with a debt crisis, and it is not surprising that the impact on daily lives has been devastating: in Angola, a recent report described how youth unemployment doubled to nearly 60% in the past two years. Meanwhile, the continent’s billionaires have seen an uptick in their fortunes, as elsewhere; a January report from Nigeria found that Africa’s 18 billionaires had seen their wealth increase by 15% in 2021 alone.

Yet in many ways this is a global phenomenon; on every continent, there has been a hyper-concentration of wealth, and poorer communities have suffered. Wealth has been further racialised, with minority communities suffering the most in rich countries, and poorer continents the worst affected.

Why, then, have Left-leaning commentators supported the policies that have led to these terrible outcomes?

The usual explanation is that these impacts were an inevitable impact of the pandemic. And yet the evidence for this is weak, not least because most of those affected by the virus have been elderly people often beyond an age of active employment. In Africa, a 1% increase in mortality from Covid in a country like Nigeria cannot explain the 20% collapse in formal employment. In fact, Tanzania — one of the very few countries that did not impose Covid restrictions in 2020 — was also almost the only country in Africa to see its GDP increase, by as much as 5% according to some reports. Meanwhile in Sweden, where restrictions were much milder than in the rest of Europe, the country returned to pre-pandemic levels of production by the middle of 2021, in contrast to many other European countries (while registering lower per capita mortality rates than many other countries).

And so it seems that the staggering increase in inequality, and in the concentration of capital, must be the consequence of the Covid response measures, not of Covid-19. What, then, are some of the likely consequences of this massive accumulation of capital by a tiny number of people, expropriated from SME owners and the global working class?

A dystopian future seems to be emerging from the ashes of the pandemic — one in which not only is wealth more concentrated than ever in the hands of a small elite, but in which practically every sector of the economy is dominated by a handful of all-powerful mega-corporations. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that those who have most profited from the pandemic response, such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, also supported that response and removed information from their portals which criticised it.

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However, there’s a further element that makes this scenario even more disturbing, if possible, and that is the growing consolidation not only within, but also between, sectors. This becomes evident when we look at the investment funds that actually “own” these corporations. BlackRock and Vanguard are the two largest asset management firms in the world, respectively managing $10 and $8 trillion. That’s 3.7 and 3 times more than the UK’s annual GDP. These two funds are the top “owners” of all the major Big Pharma (Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck), Big Tech (Facebook, Twitter) and Big Media (New York Times, Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, News Corp) corporations. Even more worrying is the fact that despite having shareholdings of “only” 5-7% in these companies, there is growing evidence that institutional investors such as BlackRock and Vanguard try to influence company management and boards on strategy.

It would appear that these funds also coordinate among themselves. When analysing the voting behaviour in board meetings of the two funds, researchers found that they coordinate it through centralised corporate governance departments. This is hardly surprising if we consider that BlackRock and Vanguard are also each other’s main institutional investors: in other words, they partially “own” each other through cross-shareholding. So, we are effectively in the presence of a single super-entity that “owns” and controls a huge chunk of the Western economy. While this was already the case before the pandemic, the latter has accelerated this trend. More importantly, it has brought to the surface the way in which these funds, through their cross-sector corporate control, can “harmonise” these companies’ behaviour to further their interests.

We can see this in the case of debate around pandemic strategies on social media, and the censorship exercised today by social media platforms against any critical voice, no matter how qualified. A good example might be the removal from YouTube of a video of a senior editor of the British Medical Journal, Peter Doshi, discussing the Pfizer Covid vaccine trial in a US Senate hearing — in which among other things Doshi had questioned the accuracy of the reporting of the Pfizer vaccine effectiveness.

This is worrying in itself. But it becomes even more worrying when we consider that the companies selling the vaccine, the media outlets shaping the mainstream vaccine narrative and the social media platforms enforcing that narrative are, to a large degree, “owned” and controlled by the same two funds: BlackRock and Vanguard, which, incidentally, are raking in billions from the vaccines. This harmonisation among sectors (and between the latter and governments) points to the rise of a new ultra-powerful complex — the techno-media-pharma (TMP) complex. This is evident in increased “synergies” between these sectors: take Google’s growing investments in the health, pharmaceutical and pandemic-prevention sectors, for example, or Amazon’s investment in Covid-19 research.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the active support of governments, which create an enabling environment that rewards participants in the TMP complex. This is evident, for example, in the secrecy, overpricing, cronyism, and inefficiency that has characterised Covid procurement deals: Covid tests, PPE, vaccines, and now vaccine passport technologies have all been parcelled out to transnational corporations without proper tendering processes or legislative oversight. In other words, this is not a scenario in which governments disappear, but rather one that relies on increasingly powerful and authoritarian state apparatuses furthering the interests of big capital.

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This is hardly surprising when we consider the extent to which these corporate giants have meshed with our political systems. The US is a good case in point. Obama was very close to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, who later became a close collaborator of the Pentagon in developing military applications of AI. Today, Biden’s economic policies are heavily influenced by the director of the National Economic Council, Brian Deese, a former BlackRock executive. This ultra-elite is now in a position to shape every aspect of our lives — and it’s frankly terrifying.

If the Left is to recover from the catastrophic policies that it has supported during the pandemic, it must begin by recognising that it is lazy and misplaced to denounce those who point out these inconvenient truths: that wealth is hyper-concentrated as never before, that this is as a result of the policy choices during the pandemic, that these choices were unprecedented, and have been supported by those who enriched themselves enormously along the way, and censored any alternative point of view.

If we don’t want a world dominated by a very few ultra-wealthy people, and their vision for retaining that wealth, an unprecedented collective effort will be needed to fight for a different future. The huge TMP conglomerates will have to be broken up and their profits used for the benefit of all humanity, and not just their shareholders. This will be the struggle against the post-pandemic capitalist nightmare — and we are already losing.

As writers from the Left, we are disturbed by this turn of events. We don’t think there is anything progressive about the current move towards compelled — and in places mandatory — Covid vaccinations. These are discriminatory against minority communities, many of whom for historical reasons are suspicious of medicine and the state, and have had lower vaccine take-up rates. They are enormously costly, not only in economic terms, creating huge profits for the pharmaceutical companies rolling them out, with BioNTech, Moderna and Pfizer making between them over US$1,000 per second, but also in human resources terms — with thousands of health workers being pulled out of (already understaffed, in many cases) hospitals to run mass vaccination centres.

As a result, the current requirement for two or more annual vaccines to provide protection is likely to result in much-needed human resources being permanently removed from healthcare systems that have already faced a disproportionate harm from the Covid restriction measures. Moreover, given the deficit hysteria that still dominates the mainstream political discourse, despite everything that the pandemic has taught us about the true mechanics of government spending, it is also likely to result in financial resources being diverted away from other sectors.

The mandates are also clearly leading to vaccine hoarding in rich countries, where doses are being forced on younger people, who are little at risk from Covid, while elderly and vulnerable people in poorer countries have been deprived access to them. The pressure from multinational donors for African countries to reach a 60% vaccination target, meanwhile, has led to disturbing recent reports of forced vaccination in Rwanda, where vaccinees have been handcuffed and beaten to comply. Finally, and equally disturbingly, the compulsion element has led to a huge rise in distrust of the medical establishment, which will have serious future consequences for medical care.

So why have governments pushed towards compulsion, and why have so many supposedly progressive politicians — Jacinda Ardern, Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau to name but three — been among the most vocal supporters of this move? In our view, much of this relates to the perception of the “collective good” that we analysed in relation to lockdowns in our last article for UnHerd. The argument that vaccination is required to protect others is a persuasive one. And yet, one of the ironies of the mainstream Left’s response to Covid is that, as the pandemic has evolved, this definition of the “collective good” and perceptions of risk has been revealed to be entirely ethno- and Western-centric.

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Vaccines are a very good example of this. The Left’s approach to personal risk reveals a framing which owes a lot to neoliberal constructs of the individual and society. “Staying safe” involved minimising individual risk, which was never broadly comparable across age, class, gender — or geography.

In a brilliant essay at the outset of the pandemic, the Mozambican sociologist Elísio Macamo analysed risk in African and European societies, and noted how levels and perceptions and approaches were entirely different because of the different levels of socio-economic comfort. Indeed, it is now clear that with its much younger population and greater resilience through exposure to a range of viruses that boost immunity, the risk of Covid to people in Africa is much lower than the risk to older and vulnerable people in richer countries. This means, effectively, that the shared risk from Covid is now being outsourced to Africa through the push for universal vaccination: poor African countries are required to get into debt to procure vaccines, and vaccinate large numbers of people, in order to protect older and wealthier people in rich countries.

In fact, a real sharing of risk and collective approach would acknowledge that it is unacceptable — and certainly unprogressive — to force poor countries to immiserate themselves further with World Bank loans to vaccinate unwilling populations who are already suspicious of medical colonialism, in order to protect richer people with much longer life expectancies. The Western liberal’s comforting canard, that “No one’s safe until everyone’s safe”, is shown really to mean that “Until I feel safe, I will continue to destroy the livelihoods and health outcomes of poor countries”. This is indeed clear, with concerns aired that poor countries will be “variant factories”, revealing that this — and not concern for the health of poor Africans — is one of the real drivers of the global vaccine push.

Once the inequities and medical colonialism implicit in the global drive is recognised, the progressive rhetoric around universal vaccination is revealed as a house of cards. This applies to the West as well. Much of the institutional framing has revolved around people’s “duty” to get vaccinated. People of all ages were told to get the jab — and now their children — to avoiding infecting others, to help reach herd immunity and “eradicate Covid”, and to stop taking up hospital beds. However, none of these arguments holds up to scrutiny.

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It is now patently obvious that high levels of vaccination don’t correlate with fewer cases. Indeed, the most vaccinated region in the world, Europe, is also the one experiencing the greatest surge in new cases. While Israel, the first country in the world to administer a fourth dose of the vaccine, at the time of writing also has the highest number of daily new Covid cases per capita.

This simply confirms what countless studies had already demonstrated: that while the Covid vaccines are excellent for the elderly and vulnerable populations in reducing the risk of serious illness, they offer a very limited protection from the possibility of getting infected and infecting others. It also means that the main rationale for vaccine passports — that of creating “Covid-free spaces” and reducing the spread of the virus — is completely unfounded, which is why several countries are now considering scrapping them.

The fact that even the vaccinated can catch and transmit the virus is also the reason why it is simply false to claim that by getting jabbed you are contributing to “eradicating Covid”. As is now being admitted by a growing number of scientists around the world, with the current vaccines we are unlikely to reach herd immunity any time soon. None of this should be surprising, since the idea that herd immunity can only be achieved through vaccination is itself a new one, which appears to have been developed by the WHO in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Princeton University historian of medicine David J. Robertson notes that while mass vaccination has certainly been associated with herd immunity in recent decades, it has never previously been seen as the sole means of achieving this immunity.

As for the notion that people should get vaccinated to avoid taking up hospital beds, it’s an argument that makes little sense, for obvious reasons, if aimed at those who faced little or no risk of ending up in the hospital in the first place. Respected epidemiologists have noted that the chances of an 18-year-old dying of Covid are 1 in 10,000 of those of a 75 year-old. Even for people under 50, the risk is low. While a small number of people in this category might indeed end up in hospital as a result of their choice not to get vaccinated, it’s unclear why they should be held any more responsible than someone who ends up in hospital as a result of, say, unhealthy lifestyle choices.

Moreover, the rhetoric around universal vaccination is leading to negative impacts in poorer countries, where health funding and resources have many competing and more deserving priorities: as the Ghanaian historian of medicine Samuel Adu-Gyamfi wrote in December: “It should be up to African countries to determine their own public health goals, and Covid-19 is far from being the most serious public health concern in Africa today.”

It’s hard to see the collective benefit of vaccinating everyone against a virus that targets only a minority of the population – especially if this achieved through highly discriminatory and segregational policies.

Even from an individual perspective, for younger people who risk little or nothing from Covid, it’s unclear whether there is even an individual benefit from receiving the vaccine. It rather feels like, in the rush to vaccinate every living thing, the elderly have once again been sacrificed. A focused protection approach might have geared all efforts towards reaching the highest possible vaccination coverage in people aged 60+ as quickly as possible — including, as a last resort, age-specific mandates (unnecessary in practice because people in this age group, in general, are more than happy to get vaccinated).

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Ultimately, it would appear that the prevailing mass vaccination strategy of most countries has benefited neither the less vulnerable nor the most vulnerable.

Fortunately, the narrative does appear to be shifting. Even the WHO is now claiming that, precisely because the current vaccines have a negligible impact on prevention of infection and transmission, “a vaccination strategy based on repeated booster doses of the original vaccine composition is unlikely to be appropriate or sustainable”. The same concern was voiced by the vaccine strategy chief of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), Marco Cavaleri, who added that administering repeated booster doses could potentially lead to “problems with immune response” — that is, lower the overall protection of societies. “While use of additional boosters can be part of contingency plans, repeated vaccinations within short intervals would not represent a sustainable long-term strategy,” Cavaleri said. He also said boosters “can be done once, or maybe twice, but it’s not something that we can think should be repeated constantly”.

Meanwhile, in the United States, president Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal workers is now being pushed back in the courts. Earlier this month, Alaska and other states prevailed in the US Supreme Court in their efforts to prevent the federal government from implementing a vaccine mandate on private businesses. And now a federal judge in Texas has ordered a halt to the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate, in yet another setback to the federal government’s actions.

It may be that the push to universal vaccination will now subside. But there are many pieces of public healthcare that must now be put back together. Trust in the public health profession has weakened, with grave potential future health outcomes. The hold of what Shoshana Zuboff has called “surveillance capitalism” has advanced. The medical systems of poor countries have been appropriated, leaving huge scars in their coverage of existing endemic diseases. Physical segregation — much of it racialised — has been institutionalised in many Western countries.

None of this was ever progressive; a true progressive healthcare system in the future must be based on the WHO’s definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. Most important of all though, it must be driven by what communities need and want, and not what globalised technocrats determine is good for them.

This is certainly a new departure. As we have previously noted on UnHerd, the Left has strongly supported restrictive measures in the fight against the pandemic.

It argued that these restrictions, which clearly infringe on individual freedoms and rights, were nonetheless justified in the name of “the collective good” and “the collective right to life”. This allowed them to pre-empt any criticism of the new Covid consensus: if you’re against any of these measures, you’re against the collective interest. And so thinkers like us, who have always criticised neoliberal individualism and argued in favour of progressive state intervention, suddenly found ourselves accused of being libertarians or outright “Right-wingers”, just for taking a critical stance of governments’ response to the pandemic.

Indeed, it would appear that for many on the Left today, anything can be justified in the name of the “collective good”. It’s easy to see why Right-wing critics view this uncritical invoking of collective benefits as proof of the Left’s inclination towards authoritarian or “Stalinist” control. While such caricatural definitions are easy to laugh off, as leftists we can’t deny that there is something disturbing about the lack of critical commentary from the Left on how to reconcile the need for collective action with the importance of individual rights and freedoms in the response to Covid.

After all, the Left has historically championed civil rights and freedoms in society which are associated with individual liberties: the right to protest, the right to work, the right to sexual independence and freedom. Expanding the freedoms of men and women — while emphasising that this can only be achieved through collective action — has always been a central tenet of leftist, even socialist-democratic, ideology. So clearly something more complex than “default authoritarianism” is at work in the juxtaposition of the current Covid crisis and the Left’s broad response towards civil and individual liberties.

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Part of it has to do, we believe, with the Left’s criticism of the rise of desocialised individualism. The growing emphasis in economic and political thought on personal autonomy and the individual’s responsibility for their own fate, which has accompanied the rolling back of welfarism, has radicalised the ideological construction of the individual. We can see this in the renewed popularity of a figure such as Ayn Rand, with her message of enlightened egoism as the basis of civilised life. However, criticising modern individualism is one thing; laughing off the very idea that individual rights and freedoms matter is another, as is arguing that anything goes in the pursuit of “saving lives” and the “collective good”.

All of which has meant that, until the Observer’s interview with Mark Woolhouse, there has been painfully little critical analysis from the mainstream Left as to whether the raft of restrictive Covid measures we have seen over the past two years have indeed served the collective good — or saved lives for that matter. By definition, for something to be considered in the collective interest of a society, it has to be in the interest of at least a significant majority of its members. However, it’s hard to see how lockdowns (and other subsequent measures) meet this criterion.

Their psychological, social and economic impact might have been justified from a collective-interest and life-saving standpoint if Covid represented an equal threat to all citizens. Yet soon into the pandemic, it became clear that Covid-19 was almost exclusively a threat to the elderly (60+): in the last quarter of 2020, the mean age of those dying both with and of Covid-19 in the UK was 82.4, while by early 2020 the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) — the risk of actually dying if you catch Covid — in people under 60 was already known to be exceptionally low: 0.5 per cent or less. A paper written late in 2020 for the WHO by professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University, one of the world’s foremost epidemiologists, then estimated that the IFR for those under 70 was even lower: 0.05%. As Woolhouse points out in his interview “people over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15”.

Moreover, given the impacts on other aspects of medical care, the preservation (or prolonging) of life of the elderly was certainly being achieved at the expense of the life expectancies of younger sectors of the population — to say nothing of the catastrophic impacts in the Global South. This has indeed been confirmed by evidence which shows that excess deaths in younger age groups rose sharply in 2021, with very little of this attributable to Covid mortality.

If anything, Covid restrictions should have been framed in terms of solidarity: as measures which implied the overwhelming majority of the collective, which risked little or nothing from Covid, paying a price, and a heavy one at that, in order to protect, in theory at least, a minority (in Western countries people aged 60 or older represent on average around 25% of the population). Acknowledging this from the start would have avoided much loss of trust in public institutions down the road, and would have allowed for a rational discussion around important questions of intergenerational equity, proportionality and the balancing of rights and interests.

A possible counter-argument is that avoiding healthcare systems being overrun with Covid patients, regardless of their age, was in the interests of everyone. This might be true from a purely theoretical standpoint. However, both arguments hinge on the assumption that lockdowns were actually useful in reducing hospitalisations and deaths. But there’s hardly any evidence that this has been the case.

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In early 2021, John Ioannidis published a paper claiming that there was no practical difference in epidemiological terms between countries that had locked down and those that hadn’t. Several other studies have appeared since then that confirm Ioannidis’s initial findings: see, for example, here, here and here. Indeed, some of the countries that locked down the hardest are also those with the highest mortality figures and excess death rate. Peru is an obvious example, while Sweden’s excess mortality is below the European average for 2020.

Meanwhile in the US, the end of 2021 confirmed the reality that lockdown strategies had little or no impact on Covid mortality. The two neighbouring states of Michigan and Wisconsin followed very different Covid policies, with Michigan favouring severe restrictions while Wisconsin lifted them much earlier; yet at the start of this month, Michigan’s Covid mortality rate was far higher than Wisconsin’s, at 2,906 deaths per million compared to 1,919 per million in Wisconsin. Another stark example comes from comparing two other neighbouring states: North and South Dakota. South Dakota infamously imposed no Covid restrictions, while there were mask mandates in North Dakota during the second wave in Winter 2020/2021: yet as of January 1st 2022, the two states’ death rates are very similar, at 2,810 per million (South Dakota) and 2,640 (North Dakota).

Another case that is less talked about is that of Italy. Over the course of the past two years, Italy has implemented some of the strictest and longest lockdowns in the world (indeed, it is the country that “invented” the concept of national lockdown), topping every other Western country in terms of average stringency of anti-Covid measures. Yet Italy is also one of the countries with the highest mortality rate per capita — well above the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden and several other countries that adopted much less restrictive measures. And there’s evidence that this isn’t despite the lockdowns but, most likely, because of them.

As Piero Stanig and Gianmarco Daniele, two professors at Bocconi University, explain in their book Fallimento lockdown (“Lockdown Failure”), the worst possible thing you can do when dealing with a highly infectious disease that spreads almost exclusively indoors and targets the elderly is to lock old people up inside their homes with other family members, and ban citizens from spending time in arguably the safest place of all: outdoors. In other words, even from the narrow perspective of saving lives, not only were lockdowns not in the collective interest of society, they weren’t even in the interest of those whose lives were actually at risk.

Such an outcome was easily predictable. Indeed, the WHO’s 2019 report on pandemic preparedness states that the quarantine of exposed individuals — let alone of the entire population — “is not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure”.

The grotesquery of the global responses becomes even more apparent when we take into account the fact that while governments went out of their way to keep healthy people locked in, chasing runners down solitary beaches or checking shopping trolleys to make sure people were only buying essentials, they all but abandoned those most vulnerable: nursing home residents. According to a recent Collateral Global study, Covid deaths in nursing homes amount on average to a staggering 40% of all Covid deaths in Western countries, despite representing less than 1% of the population. In some countries (Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US), more than 5% of all care home residents were killed.

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In view of this, it seems obvious that the focused protection approach championed by the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) — based on “allow[ing] those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk” — was the right course of action. It would have avoided inflicting needless pain on workers, women and children through repeated lockdowns, while arguably saving countless lives, by focusing first and foremost on the elderly and especially on nursing homes.

Naturally, the way in which this worked would have been very different in different settings. While in richer countries the resources and infrastructure were certainly available to direct policy in this way, in poorer countries with high Covid mortality and weak healthcare systems — such as Latin America, India and South Africa — the capacity of governments to offer focused protection was limited. Nevertheless, funds could have been used for this purpose, rather than to fund schemes such as contact tracing, which the WHO had specifically disbarred in all circumstances as a pandemic response in its aforementioned 2019 report.

Instead, countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Peru and South Africa have faced the catastrophe of both severe Covid restrictions and high Covid mortality. What has followed is the destruction of the livelihoods and access to food of tens of millions of citizens; a recent report showed that after almost two years, Covid restrictions have completely shattered the world’s informal economies, with 40% of domestic workers, street vendors and waste pickers still earning less than 75% of their pre-Covid earnings.

And yet as we enter 2022, our openness to reassessing the paths not taken remains constrained. Not only has there been no acknowledgment of the missed opportunity of focused protection at the institutional level — and no apology to the authors of the statement, victims of a vicious smearing campaign — but even now the GBD is dismissed by academics and epidemiologists such as Woolhouse, even though the focused protection policy he advocates is drawn from it.

Meanwhile, throughout the past year, governments have actually upped the ante, coming up with even more invasive, oppressive and discriminatory measures — all in the name of public health and the collective interest. Yet surely the past two years have revealed the dangers of assuming that a “collective response” to the pandemic requires lockdown measures. Many other “collective responses” — such as focused protection and the GBD’s suggestions of free deliveries of groceries to the elderly and vulnerable, and frequent rapid testing of care home staff and visitors — would likely have been more effective.

It is time for the Left to look reality in the face and take stock of the fact that the prevailing Covid response of most Western governments has been an abysmal failure on all fronts —not least that of “saving lives”. An alternative approach is desperately needed. Fortunately, and tragically, it’s been hiding in plain sight all this time.

As writers who have always positioned ourselves on the Left, we are disturbed at this turn of events. Is there really no progressive criticism to be made about the quarantining of healthy individuals, when the latest research suggests there is a vanishingly small difference in terms of transmission between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated? The Left’s response to Covid now appears as part of a broader crisis in Left-wing politics and thought — one which has been going on for three decades at least. So it’s important to identify the process through which this has taken shape.

In the first phase of the pandemic — the lockdowns phase — it was those leaning towards the cultural and economic right who were more likely to emphasise the social, economic and psychological damage resulting from lockdowns. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s initial lockdown scepticism made this position untenable for most of those leaning towards the cultural and economic Left. Social media algorithms then further fuelled this polarisation. Very quickly, therefore, Western leftists embraced lockdown, seen as a “pro-life” and “pro-collective” choice — a policy that, in theory, championed public health or the collective right to health. Meanwhile any criticism of the lockdowns was excoriated as a “right-wing”, “pro-economy” and “pro-individual” approach, accused of prioritising “profit” and “business as usual” over people’s lives.

In sum, decades of political polarisation instantly politicised a public health issue, without allowing any discussion as to what a coherent Left response would be. At the same time, the Left’s position distanced it from any kind of working-class base, since low-income workers were the most severely affected by the socio-economic impacts of continued lockdown policies, and were also those most likely to be out working while the laptop class benefitted from Zoom. These same political fault lines emerged during the vaccine roll-out, and now during the Covid passports phase. Resistance associates with the Right, while those on the mainstream Left are generally supportive of both measures. Opposition is demonised as a confused mixture of anti-science irrationalism and individualistic libertarianism.

But why has the mainstream Left ended up supporting practically all Covid measures? How did such a simplistic view of the relationship between health and the economy emerge, one which makes a mockery of decades of (Left-leaning) social science research showing just how closely wealth and health outcomes are connected? Why did the Left ignore the massive increase in inequalities, the attack on the poor, on poor countries, on women and children, the cruel treatment of the elderly, and the huge increase in wealth for the richest individuals and corporations resulting from these policies? How, in relation to the development and roll-out of vaccines, did the Left end up ridiculing the very notion that, given the money at stake, and when BioNTech, Moderna and Pfizer currently make between them over US$1,000 per second from the Covid vaccines, there might be motivations from the vaccine manufacturers other than “the public good” at play? And how is it possible that the Left, often on the receiving end of state repression, today seems oblivious to the worrying ethical and political implications of Covid passports?

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While the Cold War coincided with the era of decolonisation and the rise of a global anti-racist politics, the end of the Cold War – alongside the symbolic triumph of decolonisation politics with the end of apartheid – ushered in an existential crisis for Left-wing politics. The rise of neoliberal economic hegemony, globalisation, and corporate trans-nationalism, have all undermined the Left’s historic view of the state as an engine of redistribution. Combined with this is the realisation that, as the Brazilian theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger has argued, the Left has always prospered most at times of great crisis — the Russian Revolution benefited from the World War One, and welfare capitalism from the aftermath of the World War Two. This history may partly explain the Left’s positioning today: amplifying the crisis and prolonging it through never-ending restrictions may be seen by some as a way to rebuild Left politics after decades of existential crisis.

The Left’s flawed understanding of the nature of neoliberalism may also have affected its response to the crisis. Most people on the Left believe that neoliberalism has involved a “retreat” or “hollowing out” of the state in favour of the market. Thus, they interpreted government activism throughout the pandemic as a welcome “return of the state”, one potentially capable, in their view, of eventually reversing neoliberalism’s allegedly anti-statist project. The problem with this argument, even accepting its dubious logic, is that neoliberalism hasn’t entailed a withering away of the state. On the contrary, the size of the state as a percentage of GDP has continued to rise throughout the neoliberal era.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Neoliberalism relies on extensive state intervention just as much as “Keynesianism” did, except that the state now intervenes almost exclusively to further the interests of big capital – to police the working classes, bail out large banks and firms that would otherwise go bankrupt, etc. Indeed, in many ways, capital today is more dependent on the state than ever. As Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan note: “[A]s capitalism develops, governments and large corporations become increasingly intertwined. … The capitalist mode of power and the dominant-capital coalitions that rule it do not require small governments. In fact, in many respects, they need larger ones”. Neoliberalism today is more akin to a form of state-monopoly capitalism – or corporatocracy – than the kind of small-state free-market capitalism that it often claims to be. This helps explain why it has produced increasingly powerful, interventionist, and even authoritarian state apparatuses.

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This in itself makes the Left’s cheering at a non-existent “return of the state” embarrassingly naïve. And the worst part is that it has made this mistake before. Even in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, many on the Left hailed large government deficits as “the return of Keynes” – when, in fact, those measures had very little to do with Keynes, who counselled the use of government spending to reach full employment, and instead were aimed at bolstering the culprits of the crisis, the big banks. They were also followed by an unprecedented attack on welfare systems and workers’ rights across Europe.

Something similar is happening today, as state contracts for Covid tests, PPE, vaccines, and now vaccine passport technologies are parcelled out to transnational corporations (often through shady deals that reek of cronyism). Meanwhile, citizens are having their lives and livelihoods upended by “the new normal”. That the Left seems completely oblivious to this is particularly puzzling. After all, the idea that governments tend to exploit crises to further entrench the neoliberal agenda has been a staple of much recent Left-wing literature. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, for example, have argued that under neoliberalism, crisis has become a “method of government”. More famously, in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein explored the idea of “disaster capitalism”. Her central thesis is that in moments of public fear and disorientation it is easier to re-engineer societies: dramatic changes to the existing economic order, which would normally be politically impossible, are imposed in rapid-fire succession before the public has had time to understand what is happening.

There’s a similar dynamic at play today. Take, for example, the high-tech surveillance measures, digital IDs, crackdown on public demonstrations and fast-tracking of laws introduced by governments to combat the coronavirus outbreak. If recent history is anything to go by, governments will surely find a way to make many of the emergency rules permanent – just as they did with much post-9/11 anti-terrorist legislation. As Edward Snowden noted: “When we see emergency measures passed, particularly today, they tend to be sticky. The emergency tends to be expanded”. This confirms, too, the ideas on the “state of exception” posited by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has nonetheless been vilified by the mainstream Left for his anti-lockdown position.

Ultimately, any form of government action should be judged for what it actually stands for. We support government intervention if it serves to further the rights of workers and minorities, to create full employment, to provide crucial public services, to rein in corporate power, to correct the dysfunctionalities of markets, to take control of crucial industries in the public interest. But in the past 18 months we have witnessed the exact opposite: an unparalleled strengthening of transnational corporate behemoths and their oligarchs at the expense of workers and local businesses. A report last month based on Forbes data showed that America’s billionaires alone have seen their wealth increase by US$2 trillion during the pandemic.

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How Covid despots humiliated America

By Jacob Howland

Another Left-wing fantasy that has been shuttered by reality is the notion that the pandemic would usher in a new sense of collective spirit, capable of overcoming decades of neoliberal individualism. On the contrary, the pandemic has fractured societies even more – between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, between those who can reap the benefits of smart working and those who can’t. Moreover, a demos made up of traumatised individuals, torn apart from their loved ones, made to fear one another as a potential vectors of disease, terrified of physical contact – is hardly a good breeding ground for collective solidarity.

But perhaps the Left’s response can be better understood in individual rather than collective terms. Classic psychoanalytic theory has posited a clear connection between pleasure and authority: the experience of great pleasure (satiating the pleasure principle) can often be followed by a desire for renewed authority and control manifested by the ego or “reality principle”. This can indeed produce a subverted form of pleasure. The last two decades of globalisation have seen a huge expansion of the “pleasure of experience”, as shared by the increasingly transnational global liberal class – many of whom, somewhat curiously in historical terms, identified themselves as on the Left (and indeed increasingly usurped this position from the traditional working-class constituencies of the Left). This mass increase in pleasure and experience among the liberal class went with a growing secularism and lack of any recognised moral constraint or authority. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, the support from this class for “Covid measures” is quite readily explained in these terms: as the desired appearance of a coterie of restrictive and authoritarian measures which can be imposed to curtail pleasure, within the strictures of a moral code which steps in where one had previously been lacking.

Another factor explaining the Left’s embrace of “Covid measures” is its blind faith in “science”. This has its roots in the Left’s traditional faith in rationalism. However, one thing is believing in the undeniable virtues of the scientific method – another is being completely oblivious to the way those in power exploit “science” to further their agenda. Being able to appeal to “hard scientific data” to justify one’s policy choices is an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of governments – it is, in fact, the essence of technocracy. However, this means carefully selecting the “science” that is supportive of your agenda – and aggressively marginalising any alternative views, regardless of their scientific value.

This has been happening for years in the realm of economics. Is it really that hard to believe that such a corporate capture is happening today with regard to medical science? Not according to John P. Ioannidis, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University. Ioannidis made headlines in early 2021 when he published, with some colleagues of his, a paper claiming that there was no practical difference in epidemiological terms between countries that had locked down and those that hadn’t. The backlash against the paper – and against Ioannidis in particular – was fierce, especially among his fellow scientists.

This explains his recent scathing denunciation of his own profession. In an article entitled “How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science”, Ioannidis notes that most people – especially on the Left — seem to think that science operates based on “the Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism”. But, alas, that is not how the scientific community actually operates, Ioannidis explains. With the pandemic, conflicts of corporate interest exploded – and yet talking about them became anathema. He continues: “Consultants who made millions of dollars from corporate and government consultation were given prestigious positions, power, and public praise, while unconflicted scientists who worked pro bono but dared to question dominant narratives were smeared as being conflicted. Organized skepticism was seen as a threat to public health. There was a clash between two schools of thought, authoritarian public health versus science – and science lost”.

Ultimately, the Left’s blatant disregard and mockery of people’s legitimate concerns (over lockdowns, vaccines or Covid passports) is shameful. Not only are these concerns rooted in actual hardship but they also stem from an understandable distrust of governments and institutions that have been undeniably captured by corporate interests. Anyone who favours a truly progressive-interventionist state, as we do, needs to address these concerns – not dismiss them.

But where the Left’s response has been found most wanting is on the world stage, in terms of the relationship of Covid restrictions to deepening poverty in the Global South. Has it really nothing to say about the enormous increase in child marriage, the collapse in schooling, and the destruction of formal employment in Nigeria, where the State Statistics agency suggests 20% of people lost their jobs during the lockdowns? What about the reality that the country with the highest Covid mortality figures and excess death rate for 2020 was Peru – which had one of the world’s strictest lockdowns? On all this, it has been virtually silent. This position must be considered in relation to the pre-eminence of nationalist politics on the world stage: the electoral failure of Left internationalists such as Jeremy Corbyn meant that broader global issues had little traction when considering a broader Western Left response to Covid-19.

It is worth mentioning that there have been outliers on the Left – radical-left and socialist movements that have come out against the prevailing management of the pandemic. These include Black Lives Matter in New York, Left Lockdown Sceptics in the UK, the Chilean urban left, Wu Ming in Italy and not least the Social Democrat-Green alliance which currently governs Sweden. But the full spectrum of Left opinion was ignored, partly due to the small number of Left-wing media outlets, but also due to the marginalisation of dissenting opinions first and foremost by the mainstream Left.

Mainly, though, this has been a historic failure from the Left, which will have disastrous consequences. Any form of popular dissent is likely to be hegemonized once again by the (extreme) Right, poleaxing any chance the Left has of winning round the voters it needs to overturn Right-wing hegemony. Meanwhile, the Left holds on to a technocracy of experts severely undermined by what is proving to be a catastrophic handling of the pandemic in terms of social progressivism. As any kind of viable electable Left fades into the past, the discussion and dissent at the heart of any true democratic process is likely to fade with it.