Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Why didn’t more people resist lockdown?

[Getty Images]

Last week’s Spectator interview with Rishi Sunak conveyed the anti-science ‘science’, the paucity of even fag-packet cost-benefit analysis and the ideological lockdown of Boris Johnson’s cabinet that brought forth calamitously extensive lockdowns of everyone else. Ever since, numerous politicians and institutions implicated in this rash experiment have had a vested interest in maintaining the myth that putting whole societies into standby mode, as if countries are mere flatscreens that can be benignly switched on and off by governmental remote, saved many millions of lives.

As it will take years for culpable parties to retire, I once feared that a full generation would need to elapse before we recognised lockdowns for what they were: the biggest public health debacle in history. Yet everywhere I turn lately, still another journalist is decrying the avoidable social, medical and economic costs of this hysterical over-reaction to a virus, while deriding lockdown zealots for having vilified sceptics of a policy that may well end up killing more people than it protected. The Covid revisionism is welcome – though it’s a good deal easier to publish these opinion pieces now than it was two years ago, and I speak from experience.

I’m all for holding officialdom accountable for mistakes from on high that continue to generate dire consequences, not least today’s soaring inflation. Yet it’s worth pressing more uncomfortably: should the public not also be held accountable? After all, the professional naysayer Neil Ferguson notoriously assumed that democracies would never ‘get away with’ lockdowns in Europe – ‘and then Italy did it. And we realised that we could.’ What facilitated sending entire populations to their room like naughty children? Not merely draconian laws, but widespread public eagerness to obey them. Johnson’s heavy hand was forced in part by British opinion polls.

With nary a whimper, the public abdicated every civil right they’d imagined to be inalienable

What was wrong with people – individual people, and in many instances this means you, reader – yes, you – who’d never even heard of a ‘lockdown’ outside a prison or an American school-shooting drill, yet who overnight embraced as inevitable a method of suppressing communicable disease never before tried at scale, never recommended in public health literature and first used to ‘successfully’ quell Covid by lying, authoritarian China? Why didn’t more independent thinkers say: ‘Hold on a minute.

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