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.

De Blasio’s diktat, dropped in the middle of the holiday season, will take effect December 27th, offering businesses extraordinarily little time to prepare themselves or their workers for its implementation. The bare-boned order was delivered with a minimum of detail, raising more questions than answers. Would employees who refused vaccination be placed on leave without pay, as is the case with municipal workers, or fired outright? What penalties will businesses face if they allow unvaccinated employees to keep working? Does every employee fall under the mandate, or just the ones who are in the office full-time?  

The mayor’s response to the concerns of the private sector was characteristically blithe. “Our Department of Health is going to work with the business sector and come out with specific protocols by December 15th,” the mayor explained, “so people have time.”  

It should be noted that the Biden Administration announced its nationwide workplace vaccination mandate — which would apply to businesses with more than 100 employees — 60 days before its effective date of January 4, 2022. The mayor’s compressed itinerary, offering only a few days before Christmas for review and comprehension of a complex, controversial policy with potentially limitless negative ramifications, reads as reckless, unserious, and an act of grandstanding by a lame-duck politician for whom empty spectacle is a kind of love language.  

Indeed, de Blasio’s ukase seems cynical even by his own low bar for respectable governance. The emergent reason for its promulgation is the Omicron variant, though even Anthony Fauci — our soi-disant embodiment of Science — has indicated that the new mutation appears to be mild and not a cause for panic. There’s no particular indication that New York City is facing a devastating crush of infection. Cases are up, but the ‘percent positive’ number is well below the 5% threshold that the World Health Organisation considers too high. Covid hospitalisation and death indicators in the city are stable or declining. There have been a few Omicron cases across New York State, but there’s no evidence that they are causing grave illness. 

If the experience of the federal mandate — which has met nationwide injunctions at every turn — is any model, then it is hard to imagine that New York City’s even less qualified version will be waved through the courts. Numerous attorneys have already sworn to sue the city on behalf of both business owners and their employees. De Blasio and his corporation counsel have expressed total confidence in the sturdiness of the mandate to withstand legal challenges, but de Blasio has a long history of insisting that bizarre legal manoeuvres will have no problems succeeding in court. In 2018, for instance, the city filed suit against the Big Five oil companies for having caused climate change; the case, despite de Blasio’s casual confidence, was immediately dismissed. 

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The mandate will also face massive resistance from the private sector, which is struggling to recover from the lockdown. New York City is still hundreds of thousands of jobs shy of its pre-Covid levels, and more than half of Manhattan’s one million office workers are working from home all week. Aside from de Blasio, who commonly denigrates Manhattan as “not the center of our universe,” everyone acknowledges that full economic recovery depends on Midtown returning to life. But it’s not clear that a vaccination mandate will encourage workers to rush back to their desks. 

But the mayor has riled the business community, with which he has always had a frosty relationship. Kathryn Wylde, head of the business coalition Partnership for NYC, protested, “there’s no forewarning, no discussion, no idea about whether it’s legal or who he expects to enforce it. There’s been no consultation. We were blindsided.” Small businesses, which in a tight labor market are struggling to retain employees or are already operating short-handed, are also facing anxiety if they are forced to lay off existing staff.  

On the other hand, the mayor has frequently outsourced the heavy lifting of social change onto the private sector, as when he signed legislation mandating that all employers give workers five days of paid sick leave annually. As every large employer in the city already offered this benefit, the effect of the new law was simply to create a massive bookkeeping and financial burden for small businesses. No one wants sick people to have to work, but the sight of de Blasio exulting in having created a headache for a beleaguered class of petty capitalists captured the way Progressive policies are really effected in America’s deep blue cities. 

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The scheduled date for the mandate to go into effect is four days before Eric Adams is sworn in as the city’s new mayor. Why is Bill de Blasio throwing New York into a tizzy in his last weeks in office by imposing a highly disruptive new regulation, which he won’t even be around to manage? It smacks of something a vengeful office leaver would do to a political enemy, but de Blasio and Adams are ostensibly allies. In fact, the vaccine mandate isn’t the only major change that Bill de Blasio is trying to implement in a last-minute bid for relevancy and to cement his rather weak legacy as a Progressive stalwart. 

In October, the mayor, citing concerns about racial equity, announced that he would eliminate the public schools’ “gifted and talented” programs. This announcement came after years of fighting over school screening and tests for admission and placement, which have strongly disfavoured black and Latino kids over white and Asian children. Eric Adams immediately indicated that he would not accept this change and had his own plans for fixing the schools.  

Then, in late November, de Blasio suddenly announced the opening of new sites where drug addicts can ‘safely’ inject themselves under medical supervision. “Overdose prevention,” according to advocates, is a humane and scientifically-indicated way to ensure that drug users can be revived if they inject too much heroin or fentanyl. De Blasio cited the experience of Toronto and Vancouver in saving lives through these centres, though he failed to note that those cities have seen a stark rise in overdose deaths in the last year. Nor did he address neighbourhood concerns that safe injection sites will become a magnet for drug dealers, and lead to a proliferation of blight and disorder. 

De Blasio is rumoured to be considering a run for governor next year and appears to be using his last months in office to position himself as a bold visionary. Certainly, he has been making the rounds of black churches every weekend to deliver what sound suspiciously like campaign speeches, though it is hard to imagine that, with at least two prominent African American candidates already running, he could plausibly win a statewide race leaning on the support of urban black voters. But after 20 years in elected office, few marketable skills, and virtually no private-sector experience, Bill de Blasio may be feeling himself a bit adrift as he contemplates life outside government. Hence, like petty dictators throughout history, he is desperately seeking relevance, even if it means causing massive inconvenience for everyone else.

His vaccination mandate, like similar measures across the world, is a way for aspiring tyrants to mask their desire for control and power in the gauze of the sanitary state apparatus. De Blasio is doubling down on the partial efforts of the Biden Administration to impose hindrances on a free people, and he will not be the last to do so. Even when Covid is gasping its last breaths, there is little question that vaccine, mask, and distance mandates will continue to govern our society, now forever in the grip of a permanent public health emergency.