March 12, 2025 - 1:00pm
For 29 years after the end of the Second World War, a Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda fought on against the Allies in a remote Philippine island, refusing to believe that his country had surrendered despite being presented with overwhelming evidence.
It is worth remembering Onodaâs campaign when trying to understand those who, to this day, continue to defend the mainstream response to the Covid pandemic centred around lockdowns, compulsory masks and vaccine mandates.
The lockdown defenders may be a dwindling band, but they include more than a few influential scientists and journalists. Human nature being what it is, perhaps we should not be surprised that even seemingly intelligent people find it hard to interpret evidence fairly when doing so would mean acknowledging how disastrously wrong they were at the time.
A case in point is a Guardian opinion piece published on Sunday, in which science journalist Laura Spinney argues that âearly and hardâ lockdown was correct, that âmasks workedâ, and that the âmRNA vaccines prevented millions of deathsâ.
The Covid response involved policies of unprecedented consequence, and it is right that they should be thoroughly debated and critiqued. Indeed, we should never tire of putting the record straight on articles like this, however repetitive we might sound.
For a start, lockdowns, school closures and other compulsory measures were not a prerequisite for turning around infection waves and hence preventing health services being overwhelmed. There is also no evidence that an earlier lockdown would have saved significant numbers of lives. Additionally, while lockdowns may have caused a small reduction in short-term Covid deaths (though even that isnât certain), they may well have increased overall excess mortality, and certainly caused unprecedented economic, psychological and social harms which dwarf any possible benefit they might have had.
The evidence on mask effectiveness, meanwhile, is at best weak and uncertain. For example, the gold-standard Cochrane evidence review of their impacts on respiratory diseases found wearing a mask makes âlittle to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/COVID-like illness; and probably makes little or no difference in how many people have flu/COVIDâ.
Even if mRNA vaccines saved lives, suggestions that they prevented millions of deaths are certainly wide of the mark. Further, we now have strong evidence that, although the care home vaccine mandate was ineffective in saving lives, it was very effective in driving workers out of the sector and destroying trust in vaccines.
Most crucially, though, lockdowns and other authoritarian responses to Covid were unethical in and of themselves, and should never be repeated.
The story of Hiroo Onoda may tempt us to be tolerant of Spinneyâs quixotic defence of mainstream Covid policies. What is less forgivable, however, is her assertion that voices opposing those responses âmust be mutedâ on the grounds that they risk an effective response to future pandemics and thus place future lives at risk.
We should have no tolerance of such tyrannical calls to shut down debate. Over the past few years, we have learnt more about the worrying attempts to restrict critics of official Covid policies. In the UK, the Counter-Disinformation Unit monitored activities of lockdown and vaccine mandate critics and worked with social media companies to limit their reach. Similarly in the US, journalist and vaccine critic Alex Berenson has revealed how the Biden administration pressured Twitter to remove his account, something that is now the subject of a major lawsuit.
Whatever your views on pandemic policy, it should be a point of common agreement that coordinated campaigns to mute dissenting voices in academia, the media, politics and online were not only wrong, but also counterproductive in the way they destroyed long term trust in official public health messaging. Even Rishi Sunak has acknowledged that the lack of open debate contributed significantly to poor decisions being made in government.
Those pushing for crackdowns on dissenting voices argue that doing so protects vulnerable people from incorrect information. The obvious problem with this argument is that governments and so-called âexpertsâ have been as guilty as anyone else of promoting misinformation. History suggests the way to tackle bad information is to promote more speech and debate, not less. It is a shame that the Guardian appears not to have learnt that lesson.
David Paton is a Professor of Industrial Economics at Nottingham University Business School.
cricketwyvern
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeIf your end point is to minimise the number of deaths (short term or long term), then scientific evidence should take the upper hand. If you are willing to trade deaths for the economy (numbers, anyone?), it is political. Consider that the next pandemic will probably be unlike Covid; greater or less mortality, who knows? But don’t make the mistake of repeating your Covid position (especially if it’s a political one). Not all plagues require the same solution. Some will need Lockdown.
You’re missing the point. Lock-downs can’t prevent deaths. At best they spread them out over time. They may well increase total deaths by delaying herd immunity. The country with the least restrictions (Sweden) had the best outcomes and the least deaths.
Before COVID, lock down was not to be found anywhere in pandemic planning. The experts never envisioned it. It was a knee-jerk response by panicked politicians, and should never be repeated.
Covid was a pandemic with low mortality. Would you still oppose lockdown if there was a plague with 80% mortality?
What would it achieve? The virus isn’t going to pack up and go home, and at some point you’re going to need to engage in productive activity. It’d just mean the same number of people died, but in increased isolation and misery.
Since COVID allegedly jumped somehow from a bat to a pangolin to a human, you’d have to lock down all the animals too.
btw I lived in Japan during COVID. No lockdowns here and after the first few weeks schools reopened. Worse outcomes than countries with lockdowns? Nope.
Yes. It’s pointless. People would self-isolate anyway, but it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.
The only way viruses lose their virulence is by mutating, and they only mutate as they spread.
They closed the town gates, and bricked up the dying in their homes during the Black Plague. Poland shut its borders. Didn’t stop the plague.
“Would you still oppose lockdown if there was a plague with 80% mortality?”
Quite possibly, yes. It depends on the nature of the pathogen and how it is transmitted: if it’s a respiratory virus then the right thing to do is leave everyone free unless they are seriously ill at which point they have to be isolated. The reason is that this strategy represents the most effective and quickest way for the pathogen to evolve towards lower severity. This is why herd immunity actually works.
Politically it might be difficult but we’re hardly concerned with the careers of politicians in this scenario anyway. The alternative, a general lockdown, might be defensible if it actually prevented the spread of the disease but it certainly made no difference to Covid and will make no difference to any future respiratory virus either. What lockdowns DO achieve, in the context of a respiratory virus, is to move the survival advantage from the mild variants to the more severe variants, which delays the onset of herd immunity and consequently kills more people.
You’ve spectacularly missed the point Kathleen.
“If you are willing to trade deaths for the economy (numbers, anyone?)”.
Well, we do, all the time. When I looked into this a little some years ago, I discovered that they’d spend a ÂŁ1m to save a life on the railway but only ÂŁ100,000 on the motorway.
Kathleen has an important point. The decisions early in the pandemic (e.g., lockdowns) were probably right given the threat and uncertainty. But later on the evidence doesn’t seem to have been used to update decisions. As I understand it the plea is to avoid hindsight bias, we might have been ‘lucky’ this time, but as an analogy people in California shouldn’t stop preparing for the Big One because it hasn’t happened yet. Lockdowns can prevent deaths in some situations.
I wonder how many people think “Well lockdown worked for Eyam’s neighbours so makes sense it would work now.” Rubbish. The world has changed enormously, the costs of lockdown are huge and if done thoroughly (rather than just sending the, useless, laptop class back home) would result in huge deaths and societal collapse though it might reduce deaths. But nowadays the pre Covid pandemic plan had it right with, basically, keep calm and carry on.
Not really. What a lockdown does is simply move transmission from the workplace to the home. The net result is that so-called muitigation efforts in COVID where completely ineffective. Further, they were introduced on a false premise. The false premise was that mitigation efforts would reduce deaths. But in fact, mitigation efforts on a respiratory virus can NEVER reduce number of deaths. The area under the curve is always the same. The only thing mitigation efforts can do is broaden the infection peak: i.e. last longer and the number of deaths per day during a wave may be reduced but the total number of deaths during that wave is always the same. That’s epidemiology of respiratory viruses 101.
If it has less mortality than Covid, it’s probably not much of a pandemic, to be fair.
Even the measures in China in early 2020 seemed an overreaction. Its probly why I was allowed to roam the streets of Suzhou and Hangzhou unmolested.
There is no such thing as a trade-off between economic and human concerns here: the dichotomy you imply is both a straw man and in any case non-existent.
Any action that suppresses economic activity leads to people dying earlier than they otherwise would.
Itâs very simple human nature Iâm afraid.
If she admits lockdowns were wrong, she admits the âexpertsâ were wrong, she admits censorship was wrong, she admits fact checking was wrong, she admits the journalists and and medical industry lost all credibility, and that she herself has contributed significantly to a great damage that was inflicted on the world by the credentials class.
Ergo, lockdowns were right, vaccines saved millions of lives, it started in a Chinese market, and masks stopped transmission of coronaviruses.
Exactly it’s a sunk cost dilemma.
Very well put. And that’s why the so-called experts including Whitty and Valance in the UK, and Fauci and Collins in the US, should come out and admit they royally screwed up. But instead these very people are being rewarded at the very highest levels for the screwups. e.g. Knighthoods, election to the Royal Society, promotion to the House of Lords and a ministerial position, prizes with large monetary awards, etc…..
Fauci was clearly implicated in the lab leak and that explains his position
I think it probably goes beyond personal pride. Probably there are incentives (monetary) to keep pushing this. By the way, isn’t a new covid vaccine about to be released? Usually this kind of ‘campaign’ happens always before the launch of a new product…
A new covid vaccine about to be released- try Hundreds.
https://jamesroguski.substack.com/p/mrna-products-in-the-development
Spinney is right that she doesn’t mention the word lockdown. Not once.
A case in point is a Guardian opinion piece published on Sunday, in which science journalist Laura Spinney argues that âearly and hardâ lockdown was correct, that âmasks workedâ, and that the âmRNA vaccines prevented millions of deathsâ.
I could tell you what her political view are on every single issue .I could even have a good guess at where she buys her knickers
What do expect from he trustafarian privileged bigots at the Guardian.
science journalist Laura Spinney argues that âearly and hardâ lockdown was correct, that âmasks workedâ, and that the âmRNA vaccines prevented millions of deathsâ.
She ‘argues’ without any facts or evidence, meaning that she’s not arguing, she is emoting and opining, dutifully continuing to repeat the talking points she was told to parrot.
“Science Journalist” – LOL
The irony is that the Guardian actually does science and technology content a fair bit better than, say, the Daily Telegraph, which is the daily newspaper I tend to read.
The glaring exception of course is whenever the science in question has a political dimension in which case it’s written like the editor brought his toddler-aged children to work that day and let them loose with the crayons.
The difference tends to stand out more because it contrasts with the higher-than-average standard of science news articles that don’t get tarnished with the Guardian’s absurd and usually-histrionic politics.
Well, the author criticising her is an âindustrial economistâ – is that a âLOLâ thing too? Or does his business school post give him the right to pontificate on pandemic issues?
Credentialism is only plausible to to the sort of people who think the Guardian is a newspaper, I’m afraid.
Contrast Laura Spinney’s opinion piece with Jordan Peterson’s recent interview with Dr. Simone Gold. I didn’t think I could have a lower opinion of the dark years, but it was clearly hysteria embracing tyranny enabled by lack of courage (me aculpa).
Great piece here, we need more and more vocal, fiery, unapologetic, unyielding resistance to any such support for those times.
She didn’t use the word lockdown. She said ‘containment’.
Well; I am glad I didn’t have to make any of the decisions! A strange virus, no one knew how it behaved, no one knew how to protect people both in the general population or in Health Care settings. No idea how deadly.
And I have no idea whether any of the measures taken were right or wrong! I think the comment by Kathleen Burnett is excellent.
I think most people supported two weeks to stop the spread – because there were a lot of unknowns. But by the summer and fall of 2020, it was clear the disease only killed a small subset of the population – the oldest and most physically compromised.
Andrew, it was pretty clear within weeks, at most 3 months, about the mortality rate. At its worst in the first weeks it looked like 1% max for over-65. But experts motivated by ego and social benefits of fear-mongering, continued to press worst-case scenarios, and pump up on “uncertainty” in hospitalisation and child illness rates. They also argued that even one death was too many, which is a damn strange threshold to suddenly decide in the midst of a pandemic of even the mildest virus.
Not actually true. It was known very early on from the Diamond Princess exactly what was going on and what the age stratification was. That is precisely why the Great Barrington that was so disparaged by Fauci and Collins advocated for focussed protection of those most at risk (i.e. those in nursing homes).
Articles like the one in the Guardian are to be expected when they cater to the views of many if not most of its readers. It’s about target audience marketing and it doesn’t matter if anyone else is or is not persuaded.
Many of the Covid ‘certainties’ are gradually being eroded as later scientific work undermines what now appears to be political disinformation.
It now seems probable that the source of the virus was a lab leak; the much reviled Great Barrington Declaration was essentially the best way to deal with the pandemic; masks were not significantly effective.
Even Boris Johnson was right – for a week, before he was got at.
So articles re-asserting the ‘old truths’ are just flogging a dead horse.
I always thought Boris would have had a far more sensible attitude to COVID had it not almost killed him.
Debate? As far as I’m concerned it was just constant white noise for 2 or 3 years
The guardian view on Covid seems to be stuck in March 2020. The comments are even more demented – pro-mask, pro-lockdown, lab leak is racist ⊠the full 9 yards. Theyâve probably still got black squares in their insta bios.
It’s the five year propaganda booster for any Guardian bingers that may have inadvertently come into contact with the alt truthers dispensing all shades of red and black pills.
Here in NZ, a 5-year anniversary article quoted over-reaction enthusiasts of time now saying we should have been calculating in other costs beyond health, and should have included ‘black hat’ experts in policy. Well, there WERE experts calculating the other costs to show lockdowns, masks and mandates weren’t worth it, and their were black hat experts. All of them were shouted down, refused public space, hounded out of jobs and ostracised. The lesson is not that we needed them, but that we had them and ignored them. The problem was fear, and who gained from stoking it, the politicisation of an issue that didn’t warrant it. Society lost its collective shit over covid, as it has done too many times before when fear grips us. The lesson is not to take that course – but I doubt that we can.
I wonder what would have happened had the thing not occurred in China first. Basically the CCP did what they always do when faced with a challenge, stamp down hard and lock it up. So our panicking politicians copied the natural response of an authoritarian one-party State, and oddly enough ended up behaving, as did the media, as if they were an authoritarian one-party state. Had the virus begun in Sweden perhaps we’d have copied them instead. We sure as hell weren’t following the science, because at that point there wasn’t enough to follow.
Excellent piece. There is no reason to squelch debate. The Barrington Declaration should have been discussed. The fact that many are not even aware of it is a travesty of the mainstream press.
Cost/benefit analysis.
Thatâs all thatâs needed. Nothing else.
The âscience journalistsâ can either do a robust, holistic whole-of-society cost/benefit analysis – or they canât.
Itâs very simple.
At this point, if we canât hold lockdown propagandists to this standard, thatâs on us more than them.
What we really ought to be doing at this stage isn’t merely maintaining the pressure of new evidence against the lockdown fiasco, we also ought to be attacking what is very obviously a blind and unyielding ideologically-inspired commitment to lockdowns in principle.
The present Speaker of the House, Lindsay Hoyle, made a rather revealing faux-pas a couple of years ago when he publicly stated that the lockdown experiment had shown that Britons would be tolerant of the same measures for other reasons such as climate lockdowns. As far as I’m concerned a statement like this ought to be a career-ending scandal but of course no such consequences exist for the people who hold the “right” political opinions (by which of course I mean either left or wrong – they’re usually the same thing anyway).
What ought to be obvious by now is that the Guardian, and the political tribe for whom it is their public voice, support in principle the confiscation of liberty from the individual and the corresponding expansion of state power. If the more extreme of these insane people got their way, we’d be allowed out for 20 minutes a day and we’d have to spend the whole time clapping for the generosity of Big Brother while we did it. It amounts to a form of religious mania against which rational argument is pointless.
As the target of this article, I would like to reply.
First of all, Professor Paton misquotes me. Nowhere in the opinion piece that he is responding to did I mention lockdown. As I wrote in the Guardian in 2022, “Though lockdowns might have been necessary in the beginning, because we had no other shields against the virus, they soon stopped being synonymous with elimination. Cheap mass testing plus isolation of the infected, ventilation, masking, distancing and â importantly â social and financial support for those inconvenienced by these measures, became the preferred tools, used most effectively in combination.”
In fact, the point of effective “containment” – the word I actually used – is precisely to avoid lockdown and the associated suffering.
Vaccine mandates are, as I have also written in the past, unpopular with public health experts and seen very much as a last resort. It is always better to have people make the choice freely, on the basis of reliable information.
Finally, I would like to agree with him on one point: science thrives on open discussion and debate. My point was that we are not having the debate we really need to have, about how to respond to the next pandemic, because it is being drowned out by the loud and often unfounded criticism of the response to Covid-19. I made a plea for those critics to “pipe down”. There’s a subtle difference between that and “muting” them – not my choice of word but that, unfortunately, of the Guardian headline-writer. To be clear, in my opinion, good-faith voices, that are not deliberately spreading misinformation, should never be muted.
It is quite absurd to write either this comment or the article in question as if the Covid19 period was not predominantly characterised by establishment censorship of views deemed politically inconvenient – especially when those views are now increasingly revealed by the evidence as having been more factually accurate than the official consensus reached through supranational collaboration between western governments.
Sorry Ms. Spinney but you have no clue as to what you’re talking about. Let’s start with the covid vaccines. It could be that the Covid vaccines reduced hospitalization and death in people over 80, although I suspect that this is doubtful. However, the vaccines, by their very nature, did NOT prevent infection or transmission and this was alreadyt known by March 2021. Under those circumstances there is no ethical justification whatsoever to mandate administration of the vaccine. Now, you might ask why the Covid vaccines didn’t prevent infection or transmission. This should have been eveident to anybody who wasn’t carried away by the technology. The immunity required is mucosal immunity (IgA) and not humoral immunity. But anything administered by injection can only produce humoral immunity. Now masks. It is possible that in an examination room in a doctor’s surgery or in a hospital for a very short period of time, a N95 mask may serve to reduce transmission. But in the general community masking is just useless. There is too much air that can be breathed in and expelled from the sides, top and bottom of any mask, including N95s. That’s precisely why masking in a household, when one person is sick with Covid is generally not protective. As for lockdowns. It may have made sense to have people who could work at home work at home. But preventing people from going outside and enjoying the fresh air was always nonsense by virtue of simple dilution. To give you an example, if you are sharing a bath I’m sure you wouldn’t be happy if you partner peed in the path; but if he/she peed in the ocean, even if you were holding hands, who cares as the volume of water diluting the pee is so massive, and the mixing is rapid. Finally social distancing. The 6ft/2 m rule was simply pulled out of some people’s backsides. Even Fauci admitted there was no evidence for this. Sure large droplets would fall to the ground within 6 ft, but most of the transmission occurred through aerosols that can travel huge distances.
And unlike Ms Spinney I’m an actual scientist capable of critical thought. Ms. Spinney should realize that Covid, and any other infectious disease and how to deal with it, is not a left or right issue. It’s not a political issue but a medical one. Unfortunately, Covid was made into a political issue and most scientists/MDs, largely because they are left leaning, followed the official narrative, rather than thinking critically about what was happening.
As a scientist, can you CTRL+F and search for the word ‘lockdown’ in Ms Spinney’s article?
Agree with nearly all of your comment, but I would object to your characterization of most MDs as being left-leaning. I suspect most MDs went along with the official narrative because they were under enormous pressure from their professional associations to comply, or lose their position.
Also, I doubt the frequently-made claim that the vaccines lowered the death-rate from Covid. If I’m remembering correctly, the vaccines weren’t introduced until sometime during the third wave of the pandemic. Could it be that the death-rate went down simply because those most likely to die of the disease, already had? This is just basic ecological science, but I’ve never heard this point brought up. I’d be interested in hearing your opinion.
Anecdotal I know – my doctor at the time refused to give me medication that I had speculated might be useful, although she agreed that it *may* be effective… when asked why, she replied “we’ve been told that we can’t”. That cheap treatment won a nobel prize and is “cheap as chips” (no money to be made) and has been administered safely to tens or hundreds of millions of people. Maybe it would not have been affective, maybe it wasn;t to do with pushing expensive ideas, but it contributed to the situation now where trust is lost, good vaccinations are suspected and more…
Though I would not be substantially in agreement with Ms Spinney either here or in the article Professor Paton cites, I absolutely applaud her for coming into potentially hostile territory to defend and/or clarify her points. This is the sort of public engagement we all need.
Agreed. Even now her critics are jumping on her for the ‘L’ word when she didn’t even use it. If you’re lazy (or just don’t like Grauniad articles) do a damn CTRL+F on the page and search for it.
It’s a similar situation on MSN’s Website, their articles have replies blocked as does SKY both of the looney left. What was the point of Lockdowns when the Airports remained open? Not a mention of taking Vitamin D in the amounts needed to have a fully functioning Immune system
Why not look into Biden’s collusion when he delegated USAID to send large amounts of money to Peter Daszak’s Eco Health Alliance to fund Virus gain of function work in China.
The same mob is or was forcing the H5N1 virus into humans until again Trump shut down USAID and that evil WHO, who are mRNA vaccine maniacs.
So now five years on we have a man made virus that mRNA vaccines have no effect on but have major detrimental effects on your body that our Health Authorities have no interest in here in the UK. It will still be with us in ten, fifteen, twenty years time
I’m not an anti vaxxer but the gene vaccines have not been properly tested. and when you see the huge amounts of issues arising from them we should go back to vaccines that stay in your arm and not travel undetected to all organs in your body. Time for this to be aired openly and shut down Stasi Britain.
The Guardian tribe almost exclusively work (and I use that term in its loosest sense) for the State, so little wonder that theyâre cheering on lockdowns.
Were there any furloughs or lay offs in the public sector? To this day the railways havenât recovered, despite massive pay rises to staff. Most healthcare workers did little except gobble up free pizza, when not using their discount at the front of the supermarket queue. Meanwhile most civil servants are safely ensconced âworking from homeâ.
I donât doubt Guardian readers remember Covid fondly.
Why oh why is this rancid debate still raging? It’s all heat and no light, and just makes planning and preparation for the next pandemic all but impossible. The simple fact is that the government, and the country, were faced with an unprecedented, rapidly changing, situation, with limited and ambiguous information, innumerable conflicting, and changing, ‘expert’ opinions, an ill-informed media screaming abuse at whatever the government did or didn’t do, the prospect of an overwhelmed NHS, and increasing numbers of people self-isolating. No amount of ‘open debate’ was going to lead to anything useful. A firm government line was essential, balancing health and economic issues, and which made policies such as furloughs and the positive response they might invoke possible. There was, and is, no right answer. The downsides of what was done can only be partly understood. The downsides of doing something else can only be guessed at, but are unlikely to be any less. So FFS start looking at constructive ideas to anticipate, plan and prepare for, and deal with the next major health threat. That would include getting the media, including UnHerd, to employ health and science journalists with real expertise, experience, and the ability to put across facts not sensationalised opinions. As it is, Ms Spinney is about the only one who begins to meet that criterion.
The evidence is in now, so there is and was a âright and wrongâ answer.
It turns out, Sweden got it right, ironically by following the plan most of us already had, but chose to ignore.
Just because you decide a situation is unprecedented (largely because of the media storm) doesnât mean you ignore evidence when making decisions.
“Ms Spinney is about the only one who begins to meet that criterion” but she isn’t – she’s dug in to a fixed opinion – no doubt she’d be useful in helping to work to avoid future issues, but she needs to either respond to the nine or ten assertions above with concrete rebuttals or no-one is going to trust the future findings.
Yes. It’s very depressing – in the USA NPR is now operating like Fox on the left-right axis – i.e. just parroting official lines
The Guardian is what it has become, a caricature of itself and the Left. The paper should never have left Manchester.