Good argument. But at most Canadian universities you’d be cancelled and probably ‘reassigned’ somewhere far from a classroom of any sort for making it publicly. (Wanna be dean?) You’re lucky you don’t have to face angry, and always woefully ignorant undergrads.
J Bryant
2 years ago
Sadly, the pandemic is now too politicized for there to be an open, thorough review of what went wrong and how we could do better. Too many powerful people have too much to lose and don’t want to risk being blamed. Same is true for the other pandemic story running in Unherd this week: the origin of the coronavirus.
Also, the left has seized on the pandemic as a catalyst for change, and they’re milking it for all it’s worth. They will never abandon the Orange Man Bad narrative.
Andrea X
2 years ago
Interesting article.
However, I would have thought that Scotland has a (local) government that so populist that it deserves a DOC badge. Why is Scotland not included in this list? What makes, according to the author, a leader into a “populist”?
Last edited 2 years ago by Andrea X
Alka Hughes-Hallett
2 years ago
Mr Ferguson, the media& the journalists have let us down. Not really the politicians . The scientists do not spurt out science, they are just a self-serving, opinionated bunch and a hindrance to true science. These are the first stories that should have come out. Alarm bells should have been ringing and the journalists should have ensured that every angle was investigated to the very end. No stones should have been unturned. But the lazy, virtue signalling, sycophantic left media filled no purpose except to further distress the public. Nothing useful and helpful was ever reported. Common sense was NEVER applied. Both should be taken to task for their respective roles. It’s long time coming.
I think that nails it. If the media anywhere did the job they’re supposed to do (tell truth to power etc) we would not be in this mess, or indeed the last half dozen. Trump may not be great, but he was infinitely better than the idiots who did everything in their power to bring him down, and the same is true of Johnson, to a lesser degree.
And something Ferguson did not do nearly enough to explore was how many of the people (including for example the CCP) who attacked Trump and the other “populists” were in fact desperately trying to distract attention from their own monstrous f—k ups.
Last edited 2 years ago by David Simpson
Mangle Tangle
2 years ago
A good, reasonable and reasoned ‘cool heads’ summary.
Katharine Eyre
2 years ago
Interesting article and good points made. However, it is all based on the premise that there is such a thing as populism and that it has a fixed definition. Nowhere in the article is a definition proffered – the author simply assumes that we will all understand the same thing when we talk about “populism”. That is a very brittle assumption – and that wounds the rest of the argument.
So what is populism, exactly (assuming that there is a new political phenomenon to be described and that using the word isn’t just a way of discrediting people you don’t like)? I’ve heard many different definitions over the past few years, the best being “populism is always preceded by bad politics”. Populism is defined by what went before, it is the result of a failure.
Expanding on that, one could say that populism is the exploitation of (and rebellion against) popular discontent about the status quo which the establishment has ignored/failed to address for far too long. The author touches on this with regard to the reasons why Boris was elected – but I think a more explicit definition of the foundation premise would have made the article a lot more persuasive.
Interesting question. I do not think your idea will fly as a definition – that would make both the communist of 1917 and the Nazis of 1933 into ‘populists’, which does not sound particularly helpful. But then, I do not have anything better to propose. Whatever definition you use, I’d be curious ot see how it classified the Itaian Five-star movement. They are often called populist, but they do not have that much in common with Trump, Bolsanaro or Salvini.
I have the same response to articles that discuss ‘democratic decay’ because it’s generally nothing more than code for some policy the author doesn’t like. Similarly, I brace myself for impact whenever journalists opine about ‘the rule of law’. They can never define the rule of law but are always finding violations….‘Populism’, in my opinion, has come to denote leaders who offend the delicate sensibilities of the experts who believe themselves to be our anointed, natural leaders.
A Spetzari
2 years ago
Good article.
I don’t think you go far enough in criticising this though:
the top five slots in [the] mortality rankings all belong to countries run by populists when the pandemic began — the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, India, and Britain
This is just outright nonsense. A complete lie. Not even a “poor interpretation” of the data. Top 5 if you exclude about 70 other countries…
Philip LeBoit
2 years ago
“The most parsimonious interpretation is that the public health systems in Taiwan and South Korean learned from the experience of SARS and MERS, while ours did not.” I think it’s safe to say that given continuation in power, neither the Trump, Bolsanaro, Modi, or Obrador administrations would be interested in having a public health system interested or capable of learning from COVID. The idea of individual choice is a more appealing solution for many on the libertarian wing. Mr. Ferguson is likely right that Trump’s decisions may have been a co-morbidity, but he was also terrifyingly determined to learn nothing from his mistakes.
Rasmus Fogh
2 years ago
Quite convincing. It is too easy to put all the blame on Trump, Johnson, or even Bolsanaro. And the health bureaucracies were definitely on the wrong track across lots of countries, which makes it dodgy to ‘follow the science’. However, government can make a difference. In some places like Sweden the bureaucrats were left to it, in some places politicians made it worse, and in some places like Denmark the government actually insisted on earlier action against bureaucracy advice
Notice what he is saying, though:
Trump, Johnson et al definitely made the pandemic worse, maybe a few tens of thousands instead of hundreds of thousands?
The danger was underestimated right from the start. COVID was not just ‘like a bad flu season’, and choosing to believe it was led to disaster.
Herd immunity was absolutely the wrong strategy.
The countries that got it right were those that went for severe mesures right away, and so avoided the need for even more severe measures many deaths later.
How many of those arguments saw you pushing in the wrong direction?
“The countries that got it right were those that went for severe me[a]sures right away, and so avoided the need for even more severe measures many deaths later.”
Yes, I agree. However, I’ll also say here: the ones who got it right with the pandemic mostly got it wrong with regard to liberal democracy, and vice-versa. I live in Austria, which, at the start of the pandemic at least, came out relatively unscathed. because it had taken severe measures very, very quickly. It was the right decision in terms of getting the disease under control. However, it took until summer to really have a discussion about whether the measures were proportionate or not. That discussion should have happened in the very first week of lockdown as a matter of course in a liberal democracy. My confidence in it was therefore damaged.
I think every country is going to have a lot to chew over in the aftermath of this.
“Herd immunity was absolutely the wrong strategy” – Still a topic for debate. The Great Barrinton – protect the vulnerable allow the rest to get ill as slowly as possible (Sweden) would have gotten the pandemic ended more quickly. The models need to be updated with real data to assess what the best strategy needed to be. The economic damage will remain an issue for a very long time. Perhaps a modest stand-by medical capability is worth a look to cope with the next pandemic as insurance.
It will not be quite clear-cut until the pandemic is over and we can start doing it in hindsight, true. Personally I think the Barrington people have a very bad case – and it is not obvious to me that Sweden has ended the pandemic yet – let alone at low cost. But my main point is that “Herd immunity is the wrong strategy” etc, is an important part of what Niall Ferguson is saying. I did not want people to enjoy his exoneration of Trump, Bolsanaro etc. without considering the rest of the message as well.
Severe measures in an absence of knowledge about what is going on out there could have been a worse outcome. As it so happens till today those with severe measures have suffered less deaths but then this whole scenario is not yet played out in its entirety. Collateral damage of all kinds needs to be taken into account . Wait for those countries to open up if they do at all. Perhaps it will be clearer next year.
And perhaps it’s too harsh a concept but why is herd immunity such a bad idea? If this monster has been released and the media doesn’t want to investigate, in the absence lack of ethics among the scientists, the death toll is still mostly of the elderly and those will other illness. So in one manner we should thank our lucky stars that the pandemic was not taking away our young. If no one wants to do their job, the public can only make sense of such a scenario with common sense approach which is herd immunity. It’s a bit cruel but it’s nature & much more scientific than the lies that we have been told .
I agree that is wat Ferguson seems to imply in this text. Still, in a conversation on January 26th this year (https://www.hoover.org/research/no-hugging-no-kissing) he challenges Jay Bhattacharya, one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, in view of the huge increase in cases in October 2020 in Europe and the North East of the US. Although Ferguson at first does not seem to have an outspoken opinion (stating that he is just “playing the devil’s advocate”), I think he seems to have his doubts about this alternative approach to the pandemic (of which he admits that he endorsed it previously). From about 37:40 in this conversation, he seems to disclose his position in the debate somewhat more: public health agencies and governments in the West underestimated the risk of SARS-CoV-2 completely in January, February and into March 2020, they failed to learn from the rather succesful handling of this and previous epidemics in Taiwan and South Korea, only to panic when they realised the virus was already wide spread at home and rushed into drastic, exaggerated measures.
I think it is fair to assume that Ferguson thinks the epidemic should have been taken much more seriously by experts and health authorities from the very beginning, but at the same that at least some (or maybe even many) of the “severe measures” were guided by panic and not by science.
So I disagree with your fourth point: just taking “severe measures” was not the right thing to do according to Ferguson. The measures had to be efficient. And throughout this interview (and elsewhere) I think he doubts the efficiency of quite a lot of the measures taken.
(Only by means of a footnote: I think that “herd immunity” is a goal, not a means (if that is what you mean by ‘strategy’), and therefore not synonymous with “let it rip” (which is indeed a strategy, and as the wording is aimed to suggest, not a good one, implying complete abstination, which many critics of lockdowns do not intend). After all, if you are in a position that you can no longer eradicate a virus, trying to achieve some kind of immunity is the only option left. But even from his text above, I cannot infer what Ferguson thinks on this question, so it’s actually irrelevant for my comment here.)
Al M
2 years ago
‘One might argue that the governments of Bulgaria, Czechia, Poland and Slovenia were led by populists, along with the U.S. and England; but Chile, Belgium, Spain and Scotland?‘
Scotland is most definitely run by populists, albeit more in the vein of the late Hugo Chavez than Viktor Orban.
Roger le Clercq
2 years ago
Comprehensive and balanced as we expect from the author.
Geoffrey Wilson
2 years ago
Good article, and interesting arguments presented with evidence and balance. One common thread between the UK and the US is today’s bitter animosity between officialdom (including for some reason most of the media) and the then elected government, which cannot have helped! It probably made little difference to death rates (I suspect obesity and societal openness will prove to have been large factors), but sadly I expect a lot more heat than light from the various enquiries likely to be published in the next few years.
Michael Miles
2 years ago
To take the “pilot” analogy further: The public health authorities did not fly their flight plan after a distracting warning light was tripped by a faulty sensor and they panicked, recklessly pushing buttons and flipping switches.
Good argument. But at most Canadian universities you’d be cancelled and probably ‘reassigned’ somewhere far from a classroom of any sort for making it publicly. (Wanna be dean?) You’re lucky you don’t have to face angry, and always woefully ignorant undergrads.
Sadly, the pandemic is now too politicized for there to be an open, thorough review of what went wrong and how we could do better. Too many powerful people have too much to lose and don’t want to risk being blamed. Same is true for the other pandemic story running in Unherd this week: the origin of the coronavirus.
Also, the left has seized on the pandemic as a catalyst for change, and they’re milking it for all it’s worth. They will never abandon the Orange Man Bad narrative.
Interesting article.
However, I would have thought that Scotland has a (local) government that so populist that it deserves a DOC badge. Why is Scotland not included in this list? What makes, according to the author, a leader into a “populist”?
Mr Ferguson, the media& the journalists have let us down. Not really the politicians . The scientists do not spurt out science, they are just a self-serving, opinionated bunch and a hindrance to true science. These are the first stories that should have come out. Alarm bells should have been ringing and the journalists should have ensured that every angle was investigated to the very end. No stones should have been unturned. But the lazy, virtue signalling, sycophantic left media filled no purpose except to further distress the public. Nothing useful and helpful was ever reported. Common sense was NEVER applied. Both should be taken to task for their respective roles. It’s long time coming.
I think that nails it. If the media anywhere did the job they’re supposed to do (tell truth to power etc) we would not be in this mess, or indeed the last half dozen. Trump may not be great, but he was infinitely better than the idiots who did everything in their power to bring him down, and the same is true of Johnson, to a lesser degree.
And something Ferguson did not do nearly enough to explore was how many of the people (including for example the CCP) who attacked Trump and the other “populists” were in fact desperately trying to distract attention from their own monstrous f—k ups.
A good, reasonable and reasoned ‘cool heads’ summary.
Interesting article and good points made. However, it is all based on the premise that there is such a thing as populism and that it has a fixed definition. Nowhere in the article is a definition proffered – the author simply assumes that we will all understand the same thing when we talk about “populism”. That is a very brittle assumption – and that wounds the rest of the argument.
So what is populism, exactly (assuming that there is a new political phenomenon to be described and that using the word isn’t just a way of discrediting people you don’t like)? I’ve heard many different definitions over the past few years, the best being “populism is always preceded by bad politics”. Populism is defined by what went before, it is the result of a failure.
Expanding on that, one could say that populism is the exploitation of (and rebellion against) popular discontent about the status quo which the establishment has ignored/failed to address for far too long. The author touches on this with regard to the reasons why Boris was elected – but I think a more explicit definition of the foundation premise would have made the article a lot more persuasive.
Interesting question. I do not think your idea will fly as a definition – that would make both the communist of 1917 and the Nazis of 1933 into ‘populists’, which does not sound particularly helpful. But then, I do not have anything better to propose. Whatever definition you use, I’d be curious ot see how it classified the Itaian Five-star movement. They are often called populist, but they do not have that much in common with Trump, Bolsanaro or Salvini.
I have the same response to articles that discuss ‘democratic decay’ because it’s generally nothing more than code for some policy the author doesn’t like. Similarly, I brace myself for impact whenever journalists opine about ‘the rule of law’. They can never define the rule of law but are always finding violations….‘Populism’, in my opinion, has come to denote leaders who offend the delicate sensibilities of the experts who believe themselves to be our anointed, natural leaders.
Good article.
I don’t think you go far enough in criticising this though:
This is just outright nonsense. A complete lie. Not even a “poor interpretation” of the data. Top 5 if you exclude about 70 other countries…
“The most parsimonious interpretation is that the public health systems in Taiwan and South Korean learned from the experience of SARS and MERS, while ours did not.”
I think it’s safe to say that given continuation in power, neither the Trump, Bolsanaro, Modi, or Obrador administrations would be interested in having a public health system interested or capable of learning from COVID. The idea of individual choice is a more appealing solution for many on the libertarian wing. Mr. Ferguson is likely right that Trump’s decisions may have been a co-morbidity, but he was also terrifyingly determined to learn nothing from his mistakes.
Quite convincing. It is too easy to put all the blame on Trump, Johnson, or even Bolsanaro. And the health bureaucracies were definitely on the wrong track across lots of countries, which makes it dodgy to ‘follow the science’. However, government can make a difference. In some places like Sweden the bureaucrats were left to it, in some places politicians made it worse, and in some places like Denmark the government actually insisted on earlier action against bureaucracy advice
Notice what he is saying, though:
How many of those arguments saw you pushing in the wrong direction?
“The countries that got it right were those that went for severe me[a]sures right away, and so avoided the need for even more severe measures many deaths later.”
Yes, I agree. However, I’ll also say here: the ones who got it right with the pandemic mostly got it wrong with regard to liberal democracy, and vice-versa. I live in Austria, which, at the start of the pandemic at least, came out relatively unscathed. because it had taken severe measures very, very quickly. It was the right decision in terms of getting the disease under control. However, it took until summer to really have a discussion about whether the measures were proportionate or not. That discussion should have happened in the very first week of lockdown as a matter of course in a liberal democracy. My confidence in it was therefore damaged.
I think every country is going to have a lot to chew over in the aftermath of this.
“Herd immunity was absolutely the wrong strategy” – Still a topic for debate. The Great Barrinton – protect the vulnerable allow the rest to get ill as slowly as possible (Sweden) would have gotten the pandemic ended more quickly. The models need to be updated with real data to assess what the best strategy needed to be. The economic damage will remain an issue for a very long time. Perhaps a modest stand-by medical capability is worth a look to cope with the next pandemic as insurance.
It will not be quite clear-cut until the pandemic is over and we can start doing it in hindsight, true. Personally I think the Barrington people have a very bad case – and it is not obvious to me that Sweden has ended the pandemic yet – let alone at low cost. But my main point is that “Herd immunity is the wrong strategy” etc, is an important part of what Niall Ferguson is saying. I did not want people to enjoy his exoneration of Trump, Bolsanaro etc. without considering the rest of the message as well.
Severe measures in an absence of knowledge about what is going on out there could have been a worse outcome. As it so happens till today those with severe measures have suffered less deaths but then this whole scenario is not yet played out in its entirety. Collateral damage of all kinds needs to be taken into account . Wait for those countries to open up if they do at all. Perhaps it will be clearer next year.
And perhaps it’s too harsh a concept but why is herd immunity such a bad idea? If this monster has been released and the media doesn’t want to investigate, in the absence lack of ethics among the scientists, the death toll is still mostly of the elderly and those will other illness. So in one manner we should thank our lucky stars that the pandemic was not taking away our young. If no one wants to do their job, the public can only make sense of such a scenario with common sense approach which is herd immunity. It’s a bit cruel but it’s nature & much more scientific than the lies that we have been told .
I agree that is wat Ferguson seems to imply in this text. Still, in a conversation on January 26th this year (https://www.hoover.org/research/no-hugging-no-kissing) he challenges Jay Bhattacharya, one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, in view of the huge increase in cases in October 2020 in Europe and the North East of the US. Although Ferguson at first does not seem to have an outspoken opinion (stating that he is just “playing the devil’s advocate”), I think he seems to have his doubts about this alternative approach to the pandemic (of which he admits that he endorsed it previously). From about 37:40 in this conversation, he seems to disclose his position in the debate somewhat more: public health agencies and governments in the West underestimated the risk of SARS-CoV-2 completely in January, February and into March 2020, they failed to learn from the rather succesful handling of this and previous epidemics in Taiwan and South Korea, only to panic when they realised the virus was already wide spread at home and rushed into drastic, exaggerated measures.
I think it is fair to assume that Ferguson thinks the epidemic should have been taken much more seriously by experts and health authorities from the very beginning, but at the same that at least some (or maybe even many) of the “severe measures” were guided by panic and not by science.
So I disagree with your fourth point: just taking “severe measures” was not the right thing to do according to Ferguson. The measures had to be efficient. And throughout this interview (and elsewhere) I think he doubts the efficiency of quite a lot of the measures taken.
(Only by means of a footnote: I think that “herd immunity” is a goal, not a means (if that is what you mean by ‘strategy’), and therefore not synonymous with “let it rip” (which is indeed a strategy, and as the wording is aimed to suggest, not a good one, implying complete abstination, which many critics of lockdowns do not intend). After all, if you are in a position that you can no longer eradicate a virus, trying to achieve some kind of immunity is the only option left. But even from his text above, I cannot infer what Ferguson thinks on this question, so it’s actually irrelevant for my comment here.)
‘One might argue that the governments of Bulgaria, Czechia, Poland and Slovenia were led by populists, along with the U.S. and England; but Chile, Belgium, Spain and Scotland?‘
Scotland is most definitely run by populists, albeit more in the vein of the late Hugo Chavez than Viktor Orban.
Comprehensive and balanced as we expect from the author.
Good article, and interesting arguments presented with evidence and balance. One common thread between the UK and the US is today’s bitter animosity between officialdom (including for some reason most of the media) and the then elected government, which cannot have helped! It probably made little difference to death rates (I suspect obesity and societal openness will prove to have been large factors), but sadly I expect a lot more heat than light from the various enquiries likely to be published in the next few years.
To take the “pilot” analogy further: The public health authorities did not fly their flight plan after a distracting warning light was tripped by a faulty sensor and they panicked, recklessly pushing buttons and flipping switches.