The fallacies behind state Covid mandates

No ‘rule of six’, please, we’re British. We can make our own decisions | The Times - Jonathan Sumption:

September 13, 2020 - "The prime minister has declared that he will do 'whatever is necessary' to stop the spread of the coronavirus. One of the things that is necessary, apparently, is to stop us enjoying the company of our friends and family in numbers above six. There are at least three fallacies behind these bossy declarations. One is that the spread of an endemic virus is amenable to government control. The second is that legal coercion is a good way of doing it. The third is that stopping infections is all that matters, so that one does not have to count the human cost.

"If one thing has become clear over the past six months, it is that aggressive measures of social distancing make little difference in the long run. They buy time, but reduce deaths only if they last indefinitely. Even buying time comes at a heavy price in depression, mental illness and misery.... Spain took the most extreme and brutally enforced measures in Europe. Sweden had the mildest measures: no lockdown or school closures and only moderate measures of social distancing. Yet Spain now [i.e., September - gd] has the worst second spike on the Continent and Sweden none at all.

"There are many variables that affect the long-term progress of the disease, including the population’s state of health and age balance. But one thing that does not seem to affect it is government policy. The reason seems tolerably clear. People can spread Covid-19 before their symptoms appear — and even if they have no symptoms. So isolating known cases is always too late. Whatever distancing measures you take, short of shutting everyone indefinitely in a box and feeding them through a tube, the virus will still spread, but more slowly....

"Of all the ways of buying time, legal coercion is the most inefficient. Legal coercion is indiscriminate, whereas this virus discriminates. It attacks the old and clinically vulnerable. Across Europe and the UK, the upsurge of infections is heavily concentrated among healthy people under 50. 

"The increasingly absurd health secretary Matt Hancock gets cross about this being pointed out. But, with a handful of exceptions, the infected young will experience only mild symptoms or none. What matters is not infections but hospital admissions and deaths, which have increased relatively little, both here and in other European countries. This suggests that, while the young and healthy are getting on with their lives, the vulnerable are sheltering themselves. It is happening spontaneously.

"What is more, it is exactly what ought to be happening. People are making their own judgments, guided by their own vulnerabilities and their own tolerance of risk. The result is a far more discriminating approach than the government’s regulatory blunderbuss. Left to themselves, people can manage this virus better than Boris Johnson and Hancock because they can fine-tune their precautions to their own situation and that of the people around them. Taking the decisions out of their hands and imposing one-size-fits-all measures is despotic and ineffective....

"To justify their policies and command submission, ministers have to resort to fear, the classic tool of despotic regimes.... Will the public take it seriously?... Why should they? No one can respect laws made with no achievable objective or coherent plan. There is a limit to what people can be expected to put up with from a government that thinks hyperactivity is a substitute for thought, that seems incapable of matching the measures to the problem and has nothing but crocodile tears for the collateral damage to people’s lives."

Read more: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-rule-of-six-please-were-british-we-can-make-our-own-decisions-9j8zbh5nh

How Britain stumbled into lockdown

These people have no idea what they're doing: Ex-Supreme Court judge LORD JONATHAN SUMPTION gives a devastating verdict on our political leaders' handling of the crisis | The Mail on Sunday - Jonathan Sumption

June 21, 2020 - "Does the Government have a policy for coronavirus? Indeed it does. In fact, it has several ... all mutually inconsistent and none of them properly thought through.... [T]his crisis has exposed .. a dysfunctional Government with a deep-seated incoherence at the heart of its decision-making processes.

"The Government has repeatedly claimed to be ‘guided by the science’. This has in practice been a shameless attempt to evade responsibility by passing the buck to scientists for what are ultimately political, and not scientific, decisions. Scientists can advise what measures are likely to reduce infections and deaths. Only politicians can decide whether those measures make sense in economic and social terms too.

"Sage {Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies], the committee of scientists advising the Government, has been very clear about this, as the minutes of its meetings show.... Ministers press them for the kind of unequivocal answers that will protect them from criticism. Scientists cover themselves by giving equivocal answers, which reflect the uncertainty of the science. The Government responds by avoiding any decision for which it would have to take political responsibility, until the pressure of events becomes irresistible, when it lurches off in a new direction.

"Plan A was published on March 3. It concentrated on ensuring the provision of medical and other essential services. It relied on advice and guidance to the public, not coercion. The Government stood out against the authoritarian and indiscriminate measures which were being applied in Italy, and later in other European countries.

"Plan B was an abrupt U-turn. On March 18, the Government announced the closure of schools. On March 20, pubs, cafes and restaurants were added. Finally, it announced the full lockdown on the evening of March 23. That was a last-minute decision made that afternoon, for which the Government had made no preparations at all. It had not included a lockdown power in the Coronavirus Bill which was then going through Parliament. Instead, it was forced to make legally questionable use of public health legislation designed to control the movements of infected people, not healthy ones. Even then, it took another three days to prepare the regulations, and meanwhile pretended that they were in force when they were not.

"Judging by its minutes, Sage was unenthusiastic about closing down the hospitality industry, forbidding large gatherings or closing schools. From an early stage, it had pointed out that the real threat was to people over 70 and those with serious underlying medical conditions. Since March 5 they had been advising the Government to ‘cocoon’ those people, and others who either had the disease or lived in the same household.... ‘Citizens’, the behavioural scientists advised, ‘should be treated as rational actors, capable of taking decisions for themselves and managing personal risk.’ If this advice had been followed, it would have left almost all the economically active members of the population free to earn their livings and sustain the economy.

"Indiscriminate lockdown was a panic response to the now-notorious statistical model produced on March 16 by Professor Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College. Panic responses leave little room for reflection. No serious consideration appears to have been given to the potentially catastrophic side effects. In fact, the Imperial team did identify the main problem about a lockdown. In an earlier report to Sage, they had pointed out that once a disease had taken hold in a population, ‘measures which are too effective merely push all transmission to the period after they are lifted, giving a delay but no substantial reduction in either peak incidence or overall attack rate’. They repeated this view when they recommended a lockdown on March 16 and said that to be effective, it would need to be maintained until a vaccine was available, ‘potentially 18 months or more’....

"The Government justified its Plan B as a temporary measure designed only to delay the peak until the NHS’s intensive care capacity had caught up. But when it came to Plan C, which was unveiled on May 10, they forgot all about that. By then the NHS had caught up, mainly as a result of the Government’s one undoubted achievement, namely the rapid increase in the country’s critical care capacity.... But instead of lifting the lockdown, it merely nibbled at its edges, announcing that its essential features would remain in place for weeks or months....

"[T]hree weeks later on June 2 ...[w]e were heading for an economic catastrophe: gross domestic product down by more than a fifth and falling; 3.5 million jobs set to be lost in the hospitality industry alone; unemployment already up to two million; several million businesses snuffed out; job openings for a generation of young people extinguished. Why was the PM ... surprised? What did he expect to happen if he closed down the economy for several months and conducted a scorched-earth campaign against the rest of our national life? The only plausible explanation was that he had never properly thought about it...

"So we moved to Plan D, announced on June 10, which involved a general return to work. But in many areas the return was stymied by the Government’s two-metre physical distancing rule. The rule never had any rational basis.... Experiments by the Department of Health (reviewed by Sage) indicate that the risk of airborne transmission is low outside a healthcare setting. It is being maintained because the Government wants scientific cover and Sage cannot rule out some risk that prolonged face-to-face contact at less than two metres might cause some infection. No one in government was grown-up enough to confront the real issue: does a low risk justify a huge economic cost?...

"Finally, there is the ultimate absurdity of the quarantine recently imposed on incoming travellers, which the Government has admitted was not based on any scientific advice, but simply (it seems) on the mistaken belief that the public would applaud it. The Government is now trying to backtrack by negotiating ‘air bridges’ with other countries. But it does not need to negotiate anything. This is a problem of our creation. We can simply lift the restriction at our end. Like so many of the Government’s measures, it is being maintained simply in order to avoid admitting that it was a mistake....

"You have to go back to the early 1930s to find a British Cabinet as devoid of talent as this one. The Prime Minister, who in practice makes most of the decisions, ... is incapable of studying a complex problem in depth. He thinks as he speaks – in slogans. These people have no idea what they are doing, because they are unable to think about more than one thing at a time or to look further ahead than the end of their noses. Yet they wield awesome power. They are destroying our economy, our cultural life and our children’s education in a fit of absent-mindedness."

Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8443747/LORD-JONATHAN-SUMPTION-people-no-idea-theyre-doing.html

The greatest interference with liberty in our history

Former Supreme Court judge LORD SUMPTION gives a withering critique of the Government's lockdown | The Mail on Sunday - Jonathan Sumption:

May 2, 2020 - "COVID-19 is not the greatest crisis in our history. It is not even the greatest public health crisis in our history. But the lockdown is without doubt the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history.... Even in wartime, we never confined the entire population to their homes, 24/7, if they did not have some excuse acceptable to a Minister.

"States have always tried to confine people known to be carrying dangerous infections. But we live in a new world in which, if we are ill, the State will try to cure us. From this, it is said to follow that the State can take control of our lives against our will even if we are healthy, lest we fall ill and need its services too much. Suddenly, it is our duty to save the NHS, not the other way round.

"It is now pointless to object to the imposition of the lockdown in the first place.... The question is how we get out of it. It is a pity that the Government did not ask itself that question when, in the blind panic following the delivery of Imperial College London's Professor Neil Ferguson's statistical projections, it legislated the lockdown on the hoof in a late-night press conference. They now find themselves trapped by their own decisions.

"Ministers have formulated five tests to be satisfied before the lockdown is lifted. What is wrong with these tests is that they are all about health and only about health.... They think that this will allow them to avoid criticism by sheltering behind the scientists. But that is just an evasion of political responsibility.... Ending the lockdown is a political decision, not a scientific one.  It boils down to a single question. Is it worth it? That depends only partly on the science. There are also moral judgments, constitutional values and economic consequences involved.

"First, the medical issue. I am not going to argue about Professor Ferguson's projections. They have caused some discomfort among reputable professionals. They are based on some rather arbitrary assumptions. And they leave out of the account important considerations, such as the adverse health consequences of the lockdown itself or the number of people who would have died anyway from underlying clinical conditions even without Covid-19....

"Second, we need to ask how many deaths we are prepared to accept in order to preserve other things that we value.... To say that life is priceless and nothing else counts is just empty rhetoric. People say it because it is emotionally comfortable and avoids awkward dilemmas. But they don't actually believe it. We went to war in 1939 because lives were worth losing for liberty. We allow cars on the roads because lives are worth losing for convenience. We travel by air although pollution kills. We tut-tut about it, but we willingly do it.

"Third question. What sort of life do we think we are protecting? There is more to life than the avoidance of death. Life is a drink with friends ... a crowded football match or a live concert ... a family celebration with children and grandchildren ...  companionship, an arm around one's back, laughter or tears shared at less than two metres. These things are not just optional extras. They are life itself. They are fundamental to our humanity, to our existence as social beings. Of course death is permanent, whereas joy may be temporarily suspended. But the force of that point depends on how temporary it really is....

"Fourth, there is the money question. People decry attempts to measure the mortality of Covid-19 against the economic cost of reducing it. But this too is rhetoric, and hypocritical rhetoric at that.... You and I and the editor of The Guardian and the driver of the No 9 bus and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the cashier at the supermarket all value and depend on money. Not just in the sense that it pays our wages or pensions.... A thriving economy, of the kind that we are now throwing away, is the source of our security and the foundation of our children's future. We would do well not to sneer at it. Poverty kills too. And when it does not kill, it maims, mentally, physically and socially.

"Last but not least, we have to ask ourselves what are the limits to the things that the State can legitimately do to people against their will in a liberal democracy. To say that there are no limits is the stuff of tyrants.... One of the more impressive observations of the Swedish epidemiologist Professor Johann Giesecke, in the interview in which he justified Sweden's refusal to lock its people down, was ... that there are some things that may work and that a totalitarian state like China can do. But a country like Sweden with its long liberal tradition cannot do them unless it wants to become like China.

"We, too, have to ask ourselves what kind of relationship we want with the State. Do we really want to be the kind of society where basic freedoms are conditional on the decisions of politicians in thrall to scientists and statisticians? Where human beings are just tools of public policy? A society in which the Government can confine most of the population without controversy is not one in which civilised people would want to live, regardless of their answers to these questions....

"Not everyone will agree, which is fair enough. These are difficult value judgments, on which one would not expect general agreement. The fundamental point is that these questions need to be confronted and publicly discussed by politicians without the kind of emotive evasions, propagandist slogans and generalised hype that have characterised their contribution so far."

Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8281007/Former-Supreme-Court-judge-LORD-SUMPTION-gives-withering-critique-Governments-lockdown.html