The false lesson of lock-down scepticism

by Thomas Fazi and Toby Green from Unherd

Increasing corporate power will end in disaster

Now that the US and WHO have both declared an end to the Covid health emergency, one might be tempted to think the pandemic nightmare is finally over. Indeed, for most people, it had already been overtaken by more pressing issues, ranging from inflation to war. But for those of us who maintained that the real nightmare was not the virus itself, but rather the governments’ dystopian response to it in the name of “public health”, there is little to celebrate.

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.

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...

read more here