The protestors have brought down the lockdown

I wasn’t surprised to see that a woman whose father died at a care home in Bicester in April has decided to take legal action against the government. If I had an elderly relative in a nursing home whom I hadn’t been able to visit in the last months of his life because of the lockdown, I too would be angry. And I can imagine that anger turning into incandescent rage as I watched pictures of the Black Lives Matter protests on the nightly news. Why are police officers, who were so zealous about enforcing the social distancing rules until last week, now getting down on one knee to genuflect before the protestors? Why is Sadiq Khan, who has been urging Londoners to remain in their homes to suppress the spread of the virus, now expressing his solidarity with the progressive activists thronging Whitehall and Hyde Park in their tens of thousands?

As a lockdown sceptic, I’m actually grateful to the protestors. For months, I’ve been blogging away at lockdownsceptics.org, pointing out that the public health argument for suspending our liberties on a scale never seen before, even in wartime, doesn’t hold water. But the case against lockdowns is often quite technical and so doesn’t have much cut-through with the general public.

I’ve written thousands of words on why I think the infection fatality rate of Sars-CoV-2 has been over-estimated and the virus is likely to kill fewer people worldwide than seasonal flu did in 2017-18. I’ve published an article by an ex-Google software engineer criticising the code used in the apocalyptic Imperial College computer model that spooked Boris Johnson into imposing a full lockdown. I’ve even published two lengthy papers by Mikko Paunio, an adjunct professor in general epidemiology at the University of Helsinki, pouring scorn on the World Health Organisation’s dire warnings about the disease and claiming that the populations of many large cities, including London, are close to herd immunity.