Unfortunately, as conservatives position themselves for the post-Trump future, there are indications that what is coming is likely to be much worse: more conspiratorial, hostile to institutions, and beholden to a pinched and angry nationalism. If anything, Trump has been a moderating force against these tendencies. After him, the deluge.

Consider that last month, the surgeon general of Florida, Dr. Joseph Lapado, and allied legislators announced a sweeping plan to eliminate all childhood vaccine mandates. Lapado declared that even long-established requirements for diseases like chickenpox, hepatitis B, and the like “drip with disdain and slavery.” Within days, the proposal began to collapse under political pressure, especially after Trump himself criticized the idea. This forced Sunshine State health authorities to backtrack, converting the plan into a more limited rollback of a few optional immunizations, while leaving core school-entry vaccines intact for now.

The idea of Trump as a moderating force within the GOP might seem absurd at first glance. Yet this is only one of many data points suggesting that he is, in fact, holding back some of the worst impulses and brainstorms pushed by figures who have now gained control over American conservatism.  

There are two indicators we may look for in forecasting the future of a movement. The first involves examining areas in which the base and its spokesmen show resistance against the ultimate leader. There is a natural tendency to defer to the leader of a party, but tensions always exist between him, those in the middle ranks, and the base, and where the pressure points are can tell us something.

This method would have accurately predicted the Republican Party’s hard turn against immigration in the aftermath of the Bush and McCain era, during which talk radio helped dash proposals for a grand bargain supported by GOP elites. We’ve seen something similar on the Democratic side over the last year, with the party mainstream abandoning support for the Israeli war effort in response to pressure from the Left flank.

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The other method involves assessing a movement’s information ecosystem. I would argue that this is a more useful guide than general public opinion within a party, since most people aren’t thinking about most issues most of the time, and it is the opinion-forming class of today within each that shapes what normies will care and vote about tomorrow. On the Democratic side, the relevant elites are the prestige press and the liberal activist class; for Republicans, it’s Fox News, major podcasts, and the community of Right-wing influencers on “X” (formerly Twitter).

Both indicators suggest that the post-Trump GOP will be more conspiratorial, more deeply in thrall to pseudoscience, and more likely to hold uncompromising attitudes toward immigrants and political opponents.

Consider how the GOP base itself has often resisted Trump when he has strayed from its instincts. At the height of the pandemic and for years after, he touted the success of Operation Warp Speed, which invented the mRNA vaccines used against Covid. Trump also encouraged his supporters to take the jabs, only to be met with boos at rallies and open defiance from talk radio and online influencers, forcing him into a sheepish retreat.

More recently, conservative media have been buzzing with demands to release the Epstein files, a subject Trump has largely ignored, given his past associations. Yet the online Right remains unrelenting in its obsession with the issue, even generating memes that characterize Trump as a “pedo protector.”

When it comes to high-skilled immigration, meanwhile, Trump has sometimes gestured toward Silicon Valley’s and corporate America’s desire for more engineers and programmers. Yet grassroots activists, talk-radio hosts, and social-media influencers have maintained fierce anti-immigration pressure, ensuring that any liberalizing reform will be met with an immediate backlash.

Such episodes highlight that there is more to Republican politics now than simple deference to Trump himself. There is a populist current that will outlive him, and it rewards conspiracy-minded narratives and punishes any gesture toward compromise on the immigration issue.

Note that the backlash isn’t coming in response to Trump’s glaring corruption, such as engaging in crypto scams and accepting a private jet from the Qataris. Nor does the base seem all that exercised by cuts to Medicaid and other entitlements, contrary to the expectations of disappointed populists like Sohrab Ahmari and Oren Cass. That’s not where the GOP base’s heart lies. Instead, it’s immigration and the threat posed by shadowy, vaccine-pushing elites, which include all Democrats and any elected Republicans who fail to go full-bore MAGA. 

The trajectory of Right-wing media is similarly instructive. According to Spotify, the top-four news podcasts today are The Tucker Carlson Show, The Daily from The New York Times, Candace, and Up First from National Public Radio. This supports the general conclusion that Democrats listen to traditional media elites, while Republicans have influencers.

What distinguishes the Right’s influencers at the most basic level isn’t policy outside the aforementioned exceptions of immigration and vaccines — when was the last time you heard Candace Owens’s position on the size of government? — but a general conspiratorial outlook. Carlson has argued that UFOs are interdimensional demons and has spent the weeks since Charlie Kirk’s death hinting that Israel was behind the assassination. Owens is being sued by Brigitte Macron for promoting the idea that France’s first lady was born a man.

Right-of-center influencers who want to climb the rankings must follow this deranged path. Megyn Kelly is also among the top-10 news influencers, albeit toward the bottom at No. 9. Perhaps to boost her audience, she has begun to warn about demons interfering in earthly affairs and implying that vaccines cause autism, deep truths supposedly covered up by the mainstream media. She also declares that she does not care about reports that border czar Tom Homan was allegedly caught on tape receiving a $50,000 cash bribe, as long as he is tough enough on illegal migrants. A once sensible media voice detects which way the wind is blowing, and has changed her views accordingly. 

To be sure, the GOP will be better off without some of Trump’s worst flaws. The cult-like aspect of his movement meant that large numbers of people could look past any level of personal corruption and even storm the Capitol on his behalf. It is difficult to imagine JD Vance or Ron DeSantis acting this way after losing an election, or inspiring thousands of people to risk their physical safety and freedom in a misinformation-fueled effort to keep either of them in office.

But Trump also has a pragmatic streak and common sense when it comes to issues like vaccines and immigration, and whether conspiracy theories are credible. His base, in contrast, makes hostility to foreigners and distrust of the liberal establishment central to its worldview, and the figures that are most successful among conservative audiences reflect the kind of content that Republican-leaning listeners and viewers find compelling. 

If there are countervailing forces within the Republican Party they remain mostly hidden for now. In fairness, mainstream Republicans have put pressure on RFK over his anti-vaccine positions, and likely have stopped the Department of Health and Human Services from embracing pseudoscience even more than it has. When Trump has tried to prosecute his enemies on flimsy pretexts, he has encountered resistance even among his appointees. In order to get his indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, the president had to push out his own US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and replace him with one of his personal lawyers, over the objections of his top-two officials at the Department of Justice, one of whom had also served as his personal lawyer. 

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As with Jan. 6 and the events leading up to it, it is difficult to imagine a similar story involving any other Republican leader. Trump is an outlier both in terms of how flawed he is as an individual, and also in the kind of personal grip he maintains on the GOP base. Top attorneys in the executive branch aren’t Twitter influencers, and have their own code of ethics and professional norms. They will resist a leader who tries to get them to do things that are too far outside of the bounds of legality and established norms. Still, working under Trump makes the ability to draw red lines much more difficult.

Yet when it comes to conspiratorial thinking and anti-foreigner scapegoating, the demand is organic and likely to persist even after Trump. Partly, this is the result of a more general political realignment of which Trump is both a cause and symptom. While people with less formal education and low levels of trust, two predictors of conspiratorial thinking, used to be somewhat divided between the parties, they have now consolidated on the Right, as the decline of gatekeepers allows them to have more of a voice in our politics. The Trump cult in certain ways puts a lid on such instincts, but even as he maintains control over the GOP, divisions between the leader and the base still occasionally rise to the surface. 

 After Trump, the conservative movement will find itself at a crossroads, but one that is unlikely to point back toward moderation or institutional responsibility. Trump’s departure, whenever it comes, won’t mean a simple reversion to pre-2016 norms, because the forces he has unleashed and the informational environment that sustains them are larger than the man himself.

The two lenses for understanding the party’s trajectory — pushback against the leader and the informational ecosystem — reveal the general direction of travel: namely, conspiratorial populism. Elites who try to resist their base, as we saw with immigration reform under George W. Bush or Trump’s attempt to promote vaccines for the sake of his own ego gratification, are quickly punished, and those who play to fanatical audiences are the most richly rewarded.  

When Trump exits the stage, what remains will be a Republican Party still driven by grievance and suspicion — minus a major check on where those impulses can lead.

Earlier this week, he visited the UnHerd Club for a wide-ranging interview about God, his love for WB Yeats, the heroism of JK Rowling, and how he changed his mind about vaccine hesitancy. Below is an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Richard Dawkins, welcome to UnHerd. You’re launching a podcast, “The Poetry of Reality”. Why?

Richard Dawkins: I’ve always felt that science is poetic, and deserves to be treated as a part of our culture. The magnificent fact that the universe has given rise to us, supremely complicated beings capable of even understanding where we came from, ought to be a topic of great literature. Science is the poetry of reality.

FS: Am I wrong to detect a softening in your later years? The choice of podcast name seems designed to give the impression that you’re a more romantic, less rigidly rational spirit than people realise?

RD: I think I’ve always been a romantic spirit and I think that’s what science inspires, or ought to inspire, as opposed to the cold, hard, dispassionate image that science can be mistaken as projecting.

FS: We’re talking at a time in which once-unassailable scientific ideas have become… complicated. Gender is an obvious one. Do you worry that the scientific institutions you cherish have become overly attuned to faddish politics, and that science risks compromising its reputation?

RD: Certainly, I have noticed that some of the leading scientific journals have capitulated to political pressure to become unscientific, and to betray what is an obvious scientific dichotomy between male and female. This seems to have been betrayed for political reasons by people in editorial positions in leading scientific journals who ought to know better.

FS: Another example might be Nature magazine, which has stated that part of its mission is to work to correct racial injustices — it seems to be a political agenda rather than a scientific one.

RD: There’s an analogue of original sin, that white people are expected to feel guilt for what their ancestors — or maybe just people of the same skin colour — did to other people of a different colour. It’s as though we are supposed to inherit the guilt of people of the past, just because we have the same colour skin as they did. And that is, I think, racism. It is actual racism to confer guilt upon people because of the colour of their skin.

FS: So would you prefer a completely colour-blind world, as far as institutions are concerned? This is controversial in the United States right now, with the Supreme Court reconsidering whether affirmative action has a place in education. For years, admissions criteria for university science departments have considered an applicant’s race. Where do you stand on that?

RD: If I were in favour of any sort of affirmative action, it might be in favour of those who have been disadvantaged in their own past, through poverty. And if they happen to be black, fair enough — but simply because they’re black? No, that’s the wrong sort of affirmative action. That is racism.

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FS: And if that resulted in fewer black people going to elite colleges, you’d be fine with that, on the grounds that places would be going to the most deserving candidates?

RD: Well, they would probably be the people most able to benefit from those places, yes. But there is also something to be said for bending over backwards to help people from a disadvantaged background who have a genuine ability that hasn’t had a chance to flourish — and if they were to get to Harvard, then they might be able to. And so I am in favour not of affirmative action but what I would call ‘intelligent looking’ for talent, which is what we try to do at Oxford. In my time, we did, anyway. We tried to recognise that somebody might be not so well groomed for an entrance exam or for an interview, but who showed signs of genuine talent.

FS: You’ve also been critical of New Zealand schools including indigenous origin stories in science classes. How do you think people of a scientific mindset should treat the irrational, or intuitions for which there is no clear proof? Is it not possible that poetic and symbolic ways of describing such things get us close to a different kind of truth? 

RD: My favourite poet is W.B. Yeats, a notorious mystic. Obviously, I have no sympathy whatsoever with his belief in fairies and things like that, but I resonate with his poetry. I think it’s wonderful. It’s hard for me to explain what I mean, but I suppose that’s the point. I’m not trying to be a scientist when I do that. I’m resonating as a human being. In the early poems — “The Wind Among the Reeds”, for example – I empathise with this lovelorn young man, struggling with his feelings of lost love. And I get that, but not as a scientist.

FS: But those feelings of being a lovelorn young man are true, are they not? They exist in the universe?

RD: They are true for this subject, what’s going on in his own mind, yes.

FS: Hearing you talk about a Yeats poem, you don’t sound that different to religious people. Just as when you talk about the beauty of the natural world and the miracles of science — although you might not use the word “miracle” — it feels as though you’re moved by that. Perhaps the difference between you is more a question of language?

RD: I think there’s something wrong with that idea. According to supernaturalism — which is what I take to mean religiousness — there is something beyond physics, beyond the material world, which I do not believe. I do not believe in anything beyond the material world, no matter how poetic you feel, no matter how much you’re in love, or no matter how deeply you feel emotionally about looking at nature, looking at fields of wheat, looking at the stars. These are all human reactions, which I feel as strongly as anyone. But there is nothing supernatural about that.

As a human being, when contemplating the Milky Way, I get a feeling in the pit of my stomach. There’s nothing supernatural about that, it’s something in my nervous system. That’s not to demean it — it feels real to me. But it’s not truth in the scientific sense, which really is actually physically true about the material world.

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FS: In the realm of theoretical physics, for example, there are whole dimensions of the universe that we simply don’t know how to describe yet. Is there not a chance that some of those feelings might be perceiving physical realities that we don’t yet have a way to analyse?

RD: As it happens, this evening I’m going to a meeting in London with Lawrence Krauss, the American theoretical physicist, who has just written a book called The Known Unknowns, which is about all that we don’t yet know. And physicists are proud to admit that there’s a lot that they don’t know, but they’re working on it. It is entirely possible — probable, even — that there are beings in the universe who already do understand things that are beyond our understanding, and that our brains simply aren’t big enough to understand these profundities about the universe. But to somehow equate those with mystical feelings that you get when you’re in love, or when you contemplate a rose, or religious feelings, that’s a naive confusion.

FS: Your work on evolution and natural selection holds that most things about human nature and the human body, in our evolved cells, are there for a purpose.

RD: Yes — and I might be in a minority of biologists for believing that. For that reason, I’ve been called an ultra-Darwinian. Quite a lot of other biologists feel there’s a lot in life that is not actually Darwinian, in the sense that it’s not actually designed by natural selection, but is there by chance.

FS: In which case, should we not view the religious impulse, or mystical impulses, and those feelings that we were just talking about, with more respect? Should we not view them as more likely to be more intelligent than purely a kind of mistake, possibly being wiser and more purposeful than you have been prepared to admit?

RD: Not wiser and more purposeful, but possibly there for a reason. I readily agree that, because it’s a human universal, pretty much, and therefore logically that means that it is highly probably that it is of Darwinian advantage. That, I get. It doesn’t mean religion is true, though. I mean, you could say, the tendency to be religious, the tendency to believe in something supernatural, the tendency to think there’s something higher than you, the tendency to think that people also can connect… all this could have been built in by natural selection.

I often suggest that this could be because children have been naturally selected to be respectful of what their parents tell them, what their culture tells them, because they need that in order to survive. Religion flourishes because children who are vulnerable, in a dangerous world, need to be instantly obeying their parents advice, not to endanger themselves. You don’t question what your parents say, you just believe what they say, which means the child mind is pre-programmed by Darwinian natural selection to be credulous of what elders tell them. And that is fertile ground for falsehood, as well as truth.

FS: But if it’s there by natural selection, it must be a net positive?

RD: A net positive in a survival sense, yes – but it doesn’t make it true. It’s not true that if you sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, you will cause the crops to succeed. But it’s a net positive in the sense that it’s a by-product of the impulse to obey authority, because the impulse to obey authority, in general, is a net positive.

FS: In that context, the latest mostly secular generation could be seen as a species-wide experiment. It hasn’t happened before in history — and you had a fair bit to do with bringing it about. Judging on the evidence, how do you think the secular experiment is going?

RD: The statistics I’ve seen suggest it is slowly getting better. The statistics I’ve seen suggest that the number of people who profess some kind of religion is going down. It’s now below 50%, which is the first time that a British census has shown that to be the case, which I think is good. Similarly in America, which is lagging behind, in this respect, but it’s still going in the right direction. Those are the only figures I’ve seen and, all I can do is offer you my intuition, which is worthless.

FS: There’s a book by Tom Holland called Dominion, which has been very influential in suggesting that a lot of what we consider to be secular Western ways of thinking on morality is still drenched in Christian thinking. So perhaps, although people aren’t describing themselves as religious in the census, they’ve just moved those religious intuitions into other realms?

RD: Yes, I think that’s very likely true. You can make a good religious case for the trans debate. I make an analogy with the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the wine in the Aristotelian accidentals remains wine but, in its true substance, becomes blood. Similarly, the trans person: he has a penis, but that’s a mere accidental, and in true substance he’s a woman. I mean, that’s a perfect analogy to transubstantiation. It even begins with the same prefix.

FS: So which is better, then? We’ve gone through this whole process, we’ve had a whole generation who’ve now been brought up reading your books, and Christopher Hitchens, who are now ardent and proud atheists, and then they end up believing things like you just described. And that has all sorts of societal repercussions. Should we now look back on the New Atheist movement with regret?

RD: No, I don’t get that at all. It’s just an interesting analogy to point out that there is a strong religious element to a current political fad. So what?

FS: The question is: empirically speaking, between conventional religion and what appears to be its successor ideology, which will be proven by history to be better for the flourishing of the species? Early signs are that this new kind of religion, which thinks it’s secular, has some major problems.

RD: Well, if you care about the flourishing of the species, yes, but I care about truth.

FS: So you don’t care about the flourishing of the species?

RD: Well I do care about it as a human being, but more deeply I care about truth.

FS: And if your sense of truth would lead to the annihilation of the species, would you be content with that?

RD: No I would not be content with that. But I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t happen. I think that truth actually is a genuine value. I believe that a true scientific outlook on the world would actually be best for the flourishing of humankind.

FS: We have to talk about the most recent scientific controversy of our age: Covid. It feels like we are now emerging from the Covid years, when our trust in science was enormously damaged. Millions of people now intuitively distrust what they are told by scientific authorities. Do you think Covid was a moment of scientific glory, or something more problematic?

RD: I think glory, with regards to the unprecedented speed that vaccines were developed. And that is a tribute to molecular biology. It was possible, almost instantly, to sequence the genome of the virus, and to transmit the genome directly to labs all over the world, who set to work developing vaccines with, as I said, unprecedented speed. That is magnificent. Whether humans mistrust or trust science, that’s their business.

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FS: But the vaccines were enormously over-promised in terms of their efficacy. They were originally sold to us as being 95% effective in preventing infection. That was then endlessly revised downwards and, in the end, we were told vaccination didn’t stop transmission, it only improved outcomes for vulnerable patients.

RD: The speed with which things were happening means that it’s very difficult for people entrusted with authority to give advice. And normally, there’s much more time in order to examine all the evidence and give balanced, wise advice. When you’re required to give advice almost instantly, there inevitably are going to be mistakes.

FS: During the pandemic, you condemned people who were sceptical about the pandemic response. You tweeted that: “Some faith heads have a ritual of handling snakes, believing faith will protect them. When they’re bitten, they deserve it, they alone suffer. Vaccine refusal is different. Others are endangered. It’s as though their faith told them to release rattlesnakes in supermarkets.” This was April 6, 2021. Your vilification of people who were hesitant about taking the vaccine, in retrospect, seems too much, doesn’t it? Do you take that back?

RD: Well, I had become aware of the conventional wisdom about vaccination, which is that it’s a matter of altruism, because it’s not simply a matter of saying: “This is my private business, whether I’m vaccinated or not.” And in the case of the measles vaccine, for example, it really is a matter of altruism, because if you don’t get vaccinated, then then you are part of the problem if there’s a measles epidemic. And I thought that that would be the case with Covid. Now, it’s not entirely clear that that was right. And so, to that extent, I would take that back, yes.

FS: Do you also think that Covid showed how vulnerable scientists and institutions such as universities have become in this social media age — to peer pressure, to a fear of being cancelled and of being on the wrong side of mainstream thought?

RD: Yes. There are some heroic scientists who go off on their own and don’t need grants and just get on with their research — people like James Lovelock, who I’ve criticised on other grounds, but…

FS: Recently, universities have not been good at defending their own when they come under assault, on social media and elsewhere, for taking an unpopular position. The trends we saw with American universities during Covid, but there are lots of other examples. Professor Kathleen Stock springs to mind. Surely we can be constructively critical of universities for this?

RD: I think we can, and I think Kathleen Stock is a very good example of somebody who’s been appallingly treated. I think she’s a real hero. I think J.K. Rowling is a real hero. She’s not at a university, but she’s another one. Yes, I’ve been rather shocked at the way universities have not stood up to a rabble, a lynch mob, really, going after people like Kathleen Stock. But you can also sympathise with a university vice-chancellor with a baying mob of students after their blood. It’s difficult, but I think in that case they should hold the line.

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FS: Another concept you’ve defended recently is AI, and whether we might be leaving human nature behind altogether, either through some kind of AI future, or via extraterrestrial life. With your materialist hat on, explain how you think AI could supplant organic life?

RD: Well, the brain is a material object — and what it does is, although we don’t understand it fully yet, it must have a scientific explanation. And it must be the case that whatever the brain can do, in principle, could be done by an AI simulation. So, an artificial intelligence must be capable of doing what the human brain can do — and there’s no obvious reason why it shouldn’t be greatly superior to it.

It is conceivable that an artificial intelligence could greatly surpass what the human brain can do. And in many ways, that’s a very frightening prospect. People, many people, are very frightened of it. I haven’t decided whether I’m frightened of it or not. I think I could imagine it going both ways. But, as a materialist, I can’t deny that it’s possible.

FS: People might also be surprised by how much credence you give to the possibility of extraterrestrial life. How likely do you think it is that life exists on other planets?

RD: Very likely — especially when you think of the sheer number of opportunities in the universe for it to exist. It has arisen here and evolved to the point where it can understand its own existence. That was a ridiculously improbable event, but it happened. So why deny that it has happened anywhere else in the universe?

FS: So, on the balance of probabilities, we’re talking more than 50% likely, in your estimation, that there is life beyond our own planet?

RD: Yes. And I would make a distinction between life existing elsewhere, which is far more probable, than actual intelligent life, because one’s got to come from the other. We might well discover intelligent life through radio communication, but we will never be visited by it. Flying saucers, no — very unlikely. But visitation by radio communication, electromagnetic waves , that’s not totally unlikely. And I think that SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is a worthwhile enterprise that should be pursued and funded.

FS: You don’t think interstellar travel will become possible through some breakthrough in physics?

RD: Well, that’s very, very far off in the future, because of the huge distances involved. So far, we are waiting for interplanetary travel within the solar system. Light years is a very long distance for solid, physical objects to travel.

FS: So if Elon Musk succeeds at getting human beings to Mars in your lifetime, would you volunteer for his next flight?

RD: No, I wouldn’t volunteer… actually perhaps yes. If I knew I was dying, it might be the last thing I’d do.

* “The Poetry of Reality” With Richard Dawkins is available to download now.

Experts disagree on what has been holding science back. A common explanation is that potential discoveries are fewer and harder to find, absolving scientists, and institutions, from responsibility. In reality, similar complaints have been made in nearly every era, for example by late 19th-century physicists on the brink of discovering relativity. And such explanations can be self-fulfilling: it’s harder to get funding for ambitious exploratory work deemed infeasible by your peers.

To understand the slower pace of discovery, it is crucial to understand the process by which scientific breakthroughs happen. It can be illustrated by a surprisingly simple three-phase model. First, in the exploration phase, if a new scientific idea attracts the attention of enough scientists, they learn some of its key properties. Second, in the breakthrough phase, scientists learn how to utilise those key properties fruitfully in their work. Third, in the final phase, as the idea matures, advances are incremental. It still generates useful insights, but the most important ones have been exhausted; much of the work in this phase focuses on the idea’s practical applications.

Scientists are quite willing to work on ideas during the breakthrough phase — after all, everyone wants in on a project with good prospects. They are also willing to work on mature ideas, to reap the social benefits of successful ideas. But working on novel ideas exposes a scientist’s career to considerable risk, because most of them fail. This bias against exploratory science is a critical driver of the field’s stagnation, because the greatest risks often come with the greatest rewards. For example, researchers who sought to first edit genes in mammalian cells in 2011 considered CRISPR technology a risky choice, because the technique was still in many ways undeveloped. Today, by contrast, it is one of the most celebrated advances in biomedicine.

The graph below shows the development of four hypothetical ideas — A, B, C and D — through the three stages of this model. Given sustained scientific effort in the exploration phase, ideas A and B will develop into important advances; idea A’s S-curve is steeper in the breakthrough phase, meaning it is of the most significance to the broader scientific community. By contrast, ideas C and D will never amount to much, no matter how much effort is expended on them. The problem for scientists is that, in the exploration phase, the potential impact of all four ideas could appear nearly identical.

This bias against exploratory science points to a critical driver of scientific stagnation: scientists are frequently reluctant to spend their time exploring new ideas and have increasingly turned their attention to incremental science. This is backed up by quantitative evidence. University of Chicago biologist Andrey Rzhetsky and his colleagues found: “The typical research strategy used to explore chemical relationships in biomedicine… generates conservative research choices focused on building up knowledge around important molecules. These choices [have] become more conservative over time.” Another paper by the same team (led this time by UCLA sociologist Jacob Foster) also reports: “High-risk innovation strategies are rare and reflect a growing focus on established knowledge.” Meanwhile, a recent analysis by University of Arizona sociologist Russell Funk and his colleagues tracks a “marked decline in disruptive science and technology over time”, and attributes this trend to scientists relying on a narrowing set of existing knowledge.

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And yet, the underlying risk of failure in exploratory research has always been a feature of scientific investigation. So why is it dictating scientists’ behaviour more than ever? In short, because of the change in the way their success is measured. The rule for research scientists used to be “publish or perish”. First articulated in the Forties, this notion designates a scientist who publishes many papers as “productive”. But in recent decades, the importance of this metric has faded. Now, the popularity of a given article trumps all, and popularity is measured by the number of times other scientific papers cite it. Like the sports statistics sites that report the batting averages of professional baseball hitters, services such as Google Scholar and Web of Science report the extent of a scientist’s influence, valuing their work based on the number of citations it has garnered. The new mantra is: be influential or be sidelined.

This fixation has decreased the incentive to engage in exploration. When a scientist ventures into an emerging area of investigation, the work is unlikely to garner many citations, because few other scientists will be working on related topics. By contrast, as a successful idea matures, the relative certainty of making discoveries — however incremental — attracts more scientists to the area, and if many people are working in that field, their work will receive more citations.

The figures below illustrate the shift in research priorities following this change in scientist incentives. Before the citation obsession, a healthy proportion of scientists was willing to engage in exploration. Today (right panel), scientists are less willing to play with new ideas, and instead pursue incremental advances. This swing in scientist effort has been costly, as fewer ideas have developed into breakthroughs.

Noubar Afeyan, a co-founder of Moderna, is one of many scientists to note that incremental advances are the norm in academia today. He urges reforms to foster a culture in which scientific leaps receive more encouragement — and are rewarded to some extent even when they fail.

One way to achieve this involves indexing the text of a research publication based on the words and word sequences that appear — a process that reveals a list of the ideas upon which an article builds. A paper that relies on more recent ideas is more likely to reflect exploratory science — and services such as Google Scholar should report novelty measures in addition to citation metrics. While those novelty measures are not perfect, they are no more flawed than citation metrics as a measure of scientific influence, and offer one more way to evaluate work. A sports page that reports only batting average would provide a very incomplete picture of the value of a home-run-hitting slugger who strikes out frequently. Scientific evaluation services should similarly avoid presenting an incomplete picture.

An alternative, and idealistic, response would be to stop measuring scientific impact at all — but in reality, this is infeasible. Scientists, like other high-status professionals, cannot escape today’s relentless performance quantification.

Moreover, when used correctly, metrics can serve a useful purpose in allocating limited research dollars. Here, too, scientific endeavour will require a shift. As well as university administrators, funding agencies should start using new novelty metrics when making hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions. Doing so will greatly increase the incentive for scientists to pursue exploratory work. Science as a discipline would become more hospitable to people who might be staying out of academia for fear that exploration is punished rather than rewarded.

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Fortunately, at least in the United States, this goal enjoys cross-partisan support. The Biden administration’s first budget, for instance, included $6.5 billion for the founding of the ARPA-H funding model of biomedicine — which seeks to support “high-risk exploration that could establish entirely new paradigms”, by taking funding decisions away from influence-obsessed peer-reviewers. Still, this is merely an incremental step in the right direction; it directly affects the incentives of only a small subset of biomedical researchers engaged with the ARPA-H initiative. To truly reignite biomedical science, fundamental change is needed in the career incentives faced by a larger share of the research workforce.

The development of the mRNA Covid vaccines is an excellent example of what scientists can do when provided with the incentives to pursue novel work. It shows, too, that important discoveries are often the result of a sustained effort by a large community. Katalin Karikó, perhaps the most celebrated of the scientists who worked on the mRNA vaccines, credits hundreds of others for contributing to the effort. But these ideas only develop from infancy to breakthrough if many researchers are willing to try them out, develop them, and debate their merits. When many others are willing to take the risk of trying out new ideas, individual scientists are more likely to get involved.

The history of mRNA vaccine technology also provides evidence of the hostility offered to novel ideas within science. Key research papers related to the early development were time and again rejected by the leading scientific journals, which fear losing status if they publish too much exploratory science, because it’s less likely to go anywhere. Yet as we have seen, it is nearly impossible to understand the feasibility and significance of new ideas in their infancy, when they are still raw and poorly understood. And the rejection of innovative work by top journals renders negative judgments self-fulfilling: without the attention of other scientists, many ideas die in obscurity regardless of their potential.

It is time, then, to put science back on the path envisioned by the engineer Vannevar Bush in his 1945 report for President Roosevelt. Motivated by the loss of academic freedom during the Second World War, it emphasised the importance of open-ended exploration for scientific progress. His view that many valuable discoveries remain to be found was reflected in the title of Bush’s report, “Science: the Endless Frontier”. In the decades since, a monomaniacal focus on influence in research evaluation has fettered this exploration. If we valued it more highly, our frontiers might start to expand again.

As we make clear in our forthcoming book, we see lockdowns as a social, human and economic catastrophe of enormous proportions, which did very little (if anything) to reduce virus spread and death from Covid-19. We’re grateful to those who have fought hard to define this position, and continue to do so — even though we don’t agree with them on everything.

Perhaps the strangest idea still finding traction today is the notion among many influential lockdown sceptics that draconian Covid restrictions were some kind of socialist plot led by “Marxist” institutions, such as the World Economic Forum and China-sympathisers on the “woke” left. In a recent article, for instance, the San Francisco attorney Michael P. Senger draws links between the Wuhan lockdown and the way in which this was actively promoted in Italy in February 2020 by the Health Minister Roberto Speranza, who thought that the lockdowns “could be used to implement far-Left political reforms across Italy”. Meanwhile, American Institute of Economic Research director Jeffrey Tucker has described how the best way to deal with the overreach of lockdown bureaucrats is to simply abolish the failing institutes and replace them with private corporations.

We agree that Western state institutions have failed in the Covid era — proving to be utterly inefficient, terribly oppressive, or both. Yet it seems clear they failed not because they are state institutions per se, but rather because they have been captured by private corporations and their interests. In fact, the lockdown catastrophe and subsequent mass-vaccination-by-all-means programmes, and associated pharma and tech profiteering, are the clear outcome of decades of deregulation and marketisation advocated by pro-market conservatives. Yes, centre-Left governments, from Blair to Clinton, played an important role in implementing these policies, but no one in their right mind would call Blair or Clinton socialists — if anything, they symbolise the Left’s abandonment of its socialist roots. The same can be said of Italy’s Health Minister Roberto Speranza, who hails from the anti-socialist, pro-establishment Partito Democratico.

A good example of such policies is the famous practice of the “revolving door”, where there is a cosy relationship between government and business, in which executives from companies enter senior levels of government — and then where senior civil servants move into top corporate jobs on leaving government. This policy has been actively championed by conservative policymakers, who stress how much government has to learn from business models, and believe that bringing executives into senior policy roles can help to trim waste and make government more efficient.

The Covid-19 crisis gave the lie to this claim, showing the dramatic consequences of revolving door politics. For instance, the man called to lead Operation Warp Speed — the US programme created to accelerate the development and manufacturing of Covid vaccines, which provided more than $10 billion of public funding to a handful of pharmaceutical companies such as Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) — was none other than  Moncef Slaoui, former GlaxoSmithKline executive (running its vaccines programme) and board member of Moderna.

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Following his nomination, Slaoui was required to resign from a number of biotech boards funded by Operation Warp Speed, and to sell his Moderna stock, but was allowed to keep his stock in GSK, reported to be worth about $10 million. Meanwhile, in Europe, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, whose husband is medical director of a US biotech company, negotiated its biggest deal yet with Pfizer — for up to 1.8 billion doses — via a series of text messages with the company’s chief.

Or one could mention how the WHO went from being an entirely publicly funded institution to one increasingly dependent on private “philanthropic” institutions — first and foremost, today, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has been accused of “function[ing] as a trojan horse for Western corporations”, and which is increasingly recognised even by mainstream media groups such as Politico as key in market profiteering associated with the pandemic response. Many lockdown critics decry the role of Bill Gates in buying influence in the media, in pharmaceutical investments, and in government, yet few would consider Gates to be a socialist; in fact he’s considered the embodiment of philanthrocapitalism. It’s also rather obvious that Gates’s ability to exert this influence has not come from socialist policies of redistribution, but rather from the upward transfer of wealth which has been promoted by the neoliberal economic agenda of the past decades.

Then there’s the fact that both the FDA and EMA rely heavily on fees and charges levied on the very pharmaceutical companies they are called upon to regulate (respectively for around half and three quarters of their budgets) — a fact which, according to several observers, raises serious issues of conflict of interest. Moreover, both agencies have long been criticised for their revolving door problem. For example, the current executive director of the EMA, Emer Cooke, previously worked for Europe’s largest pharmaceutical lobbying organisation, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations.

Should we be surprised, then, that Western governments almost entirely funded the development of the vaccines, fast-tracked the approval process, granted manufacturers close-to-full immunity from liability over a whole host of issues, and then allowed the pharma companies to fully own the patents and even set the price of the vaccines? It seems pretty obvious who benefited from this — the corporations themselves — just as it is clear that this is the result of a pro-market agenda, not a socialist one.

Perhaps the clearest evidence for this can be found in the Global South, where the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic response have had a catastrophic impact in low-income countries (LICs). As noted in the first edition of The Covid Consensus, some have said that these were decisions made by sovereign leaders — and that global pressure has had very little to do with this. Yet the truth is that 40 years of structural adjustment and austerity policies — driven by global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF — eroded the ability of state budgets to provide for healthcare and education, leaving LICs and their health agendas to be shaped by philanthropic donors and their non-profit partners.

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As the trauma of 2020 and 2021 fades into the reality of the painful consequences of 2022, a broader political reckoning is required. Those of us on the Left who recognise the appalling abdication of social and ethical responsibility which many — but not all — Left-wing politicians and intellectuals showed in the face of Covid must take stock of the reasons why this happened. This is something that many people are still coming to terms with: for us, the appropriation of the Left-wing movement by metropolitan liberals far distant from production chains and everyday realities of the global working class — whether in London, New York, Abidjan or Dhaka — must be a starting point for understanding how this has happened.

On the other hand, a similar reckoning is needed from those on the libertarian Right who have fought these restrictions. These did not emerge from some socialist plot, but rather from decades of policies of deregulation, revolving doors, and the capture of state institutions by corporations. If Left-leaning critics like us need to come to terms with the reasons for this catastrophic response, so must Right-leaning critics of lockdown policies recognise how they have followed directly from policies which many of them have supported for years.

What’s interesting is that the lockdown-cheering leftists and anti-lockdown libertarians actually have more in common than they would like to admit. Both outlooks are ultimately rooted in a fundamentally flawed view of the relationship between state and market. Both groups hold the belief that state-market relations are dichotomic, where the influence of one can only increase at the expense of the other. This is why many on the Left interpreted government activism throughout the pandemic as a welcome “return of the state”, one potentially capable, in their view, of eventually reversing the pro-market project of the past decades; while those on the libertarian Right, which see state interventionism as inherently socialist and anti-market, saw those same government interventions as expressions of creeping “socialism”.

But state-market relations are in fact symbiotic. Simply put, markets — let alone so-called “free markets” — can’t exist without the state. As Karl Polanyi argued, the emergence of so-called laissez-faire under mid-19th-century industrial capitalism entailed a highly active state to “embed” markets in society; to enforce changes in social structure and human thinking that allowed for a competitive capitalist economy. As he put it: “Laissez-faire was planned… [and] enforced by the state.”

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This has remained true throughout the various phases of capitalism. If the state’s role under “Keynesianism” was that of mediating between the interests of capital and labour, over the past decades the role of the state has become that of securing the interests of Big Capital at the expense of everyone else. As witnessed during the pandemic, this makes the modern state intrinsically authoritarian. It also makes it inefficient, as it entails the creation of an environment favourable to the privatisation of public assets and services through institutionalised mismanagement. Various terms have been put forward to describe this system — corporatocracy, neo-feudalism, hyper-capitalism — but one thing is clear: it ain’t socialism.

Even more ludicrous is the claim that the World Economic Forum is a “Marxist” organisation. Now, people have been quibbling for the past 150 years about what Marxism is, but what it clearly isn’t is an ideology that aims to hand power over to the world’s most powerful corporations. In fact, the WEF’s Young Global Leaders initiative, responsible for putting several members of the ruling elite into positions of power in business and politics, can be traced back to the US’s Cold War efforts to counter communist influence while ensuring that future global leaders would be amenable to American interests.

So, while libertarians understand (better than leftists) that capitalism today is heavily reliant on “political intervention”, what they don’t seem to understand is that the “free market” they dream of would require an equally interventionist state. Interventionism is quite simply an inescapable fact of advanced modern economies.

The point is whose interests the state should serve. “Less state” won’t make us freer, let alone deliver some mythical “free market” — it will just make the majority of us even more powerless in the face of financial and corporate power, the concentration of which has led to the lockdown catastrophes. What we need is a state that does the exact opposite of its modern incarnation: one that represses Big Capital, while expanding the liberties and rights of individual citizens and workers. If there’s one lesson to be gleaned from the past two and a half years, it’s that we need to reclaim the state, not give up on it.

Long before SARS-CoV-2 was a twinkle in the eye of a Wuhan cave bat, Hancock worked on the student radio station at the University of Oxford.  A contemporary, Gina Coladangelo, reminisced that Matthew read the sport “because he wasn’t good enough to do the news.” Another remembered Hancock as the “butt of everyone’s humour”. He wanted to go to Westminster and be an MP.

He nearly blows himself up. Guildford, 2001. Young Matt does an election leaflet for the Tory candidate Nick St Aubyn. Instead of saying that St Aubyn wanted to “unite” the community, a 22-year-old Hancock writes: “I want to untie the community”. The leaflet lands in 50,000 letterboxes. St Aubyn loses his seat by 538 votes.

Shortly after becoming a junior minister, Hancock compares himself to Pitt the Younger, Disraeli, and Churchill; their achievements are quite well known, but he will make history on his own terms in 2018 when he becomes the first MP to launch a personal app: The Matt Hancock App.

Its creation leads to the memorable onscreen prompt “Matt Hancock would like to access your photos”  — and he appears to get them even if users deny the ‘The Matt Hancock App’ access to their libraries. A spokesman for the Information Commissioner’s office admits, “We are checking reports about the operation of The Matt Hancock App”.

In a party where the average age of a member is 57, Hancock appears young and bright. He is marked out by the early patronage of Osborne, who says of his protege: “In a political system that is full of Eeyores we could do with a few more Tiggers.”

That nickname fits well. Tigger Matt has the tamped energy of the short man, over-exercised. Enthusiastic; readily and sycophantically agreeable. His colleagues mock him — Matt Wankcock and Matt Handjob will be insider nicknames for him — but they are usually reluctant to fire him, even when it makes sense to do so.

***

As the Conservative Party tortures itself in 2019, Hancock decides he would like to be leader. Or raise his profile. So he attacks Boris Johnson and a hard Brexit: “To the people who say fuck business, I say fuck fuck business.”

He fuck fuck’s himself into sixth place in the first ballot of the party’s MPs. Then he withdraws; he spends a month on television and radio praising the new leader… Boris Johnson. Hancock expects a promotion for his breathy verbal parkour. He keeps his job as Health Secretary instead.

To run the NHS is no Conservative’s idea of a dream. Neville Chamberlain was the last Tory Health Secretary to become Prime Minister. The service itself is a patched-up patchwork, a tax sink, an organisation colossally vast and maddeningly confusing. Hancock’s real brief is to make sure the whole thing doesn’t fall apart when people are looking.

The pandemic is the greatest health crisis to face Britain since mad George III thought that an oak tree in Kew Gardens was Napoleon’s ambassador. Fate, or a lab-leak, means that soon everybody will look at the NHS.

***

A relaxed, Prime Minister-less COBRA meeting is held at the end of January 2020. After chairing it Hancock tells reporters the risk Covid posed to the public was “low”. On the same day a study published by Chinese doctors in The Lancet suggests SARS-CoV-2 is comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed around 50 million people.

The risk to the UK is deemed so low that on 24 February the Government supplies 1,800 pairs of goggles, 43,000 disposable gloves, 194,000 sanitising wipes, 37,500 medical gowns and 2,500 face masks to China. Looking back at meetings that month, one senior Department for Health official remembers thinking “‘Well, it’s a good thing this isn’t the big one.’”

***

A clip of Boris Johnson, patiently explaining possible Covid strategy to fellow scientific luminary Phillip Schofield goes viral. “One of the theories,” Johnson had said on March 5, was that “perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking many draconian measures”.

Loo paper soon begins to disappear nationwide. Hancock is rolled out — he was always being rolled out, like a new carpet to be trodden on — into a breakfast TV studio to deny that the Government wanted to massacre the Grannys. “Our goal is to protect life and our policy is to fight the virus.”

Then Neil Ferguson releases his controversial paper. It claims hundreds of thousands will die if Britain is left to take the virus on the chin. Sage advises the Government to embark on a full lockdown that day.

It arrives on 26 March 2020, as Covid cases double every 72- hours. Between 89% and 94% of the public support lockdown. And the Grannys? Care home deaths accounted for 40% of Covid-19 deaths in England and Wales during the pandemic.

***

Like other ministers, after the passage of the Coronavirus Act, Hancock develops war fever. “Our generation has never been tested like this”, he writes to a nation frantically, pointlessly washing its hands. “Our grandparents were, during the Second World War, when our cities were bombed during the Blitz… they pulled together in one gigantic national effort.” The allegory is both ugly and lazy, but Britain is a country where poppies are made to wear poppies.

***

Prince Charles opens the first Nightingale Hospital at the ExCel centre in London. He says the Nightingale “will be a shining light”. The hospital is constructed in nine days, and holds 500 extra intensive care unit beds. (For every hundred thousand members of the population the UK has 7.3 intensive care beds — less than Spain, Greece, and Estonia. This lack of provision will mean more deaths.)

More Nightingales open across the country. They cost the taxpayer 500 million pounds. Only three of the seven hospitals end up treating patients. They are described by one MP as a “massive white elephant conjured up by Matt Hancock to create a good headline”.

***

It’s not really worth it, going outside. A family of five is sent home by the police in Conwy after being caught having a day at the seaside. They scuttle back to Merseyside. Police in Derbyshire “divide opinion” when they use drones to film people walking in the Peak District. A “major incident” is declared when thousands travel to Bournemouth beach, to swim, eat ice cream, and burn in the sun. (Belatedly, it is revealed that the “major incident” did not lead to a spike in Covid cases.)

Speaking to Andrew Marr, a concerned Hancock threatens to ban outdoor exercise. “Let’s not have a minority spoiling it for everybody.”

***

Nothing works properly. The Test and Trace App doesn’t work. PPE doesn’t work — because it’s all out of date. Protecting care homes doesn’t work. Dido Harding doesn’t work. The Civil Service literally doesn’t work. Big-hitter commentators start saying that the entire British state doesn’t work. It is described as “simultaneously overcentralised and weak at its centre”.

But ‘The Matt Hancock’ app still functions. In May 2020 the Telegraph reports that it is becoming a “virtual home for online pranksters and trolls”. Posts to the ‘Have Your Say’ section include drawings of cocks, general abuse, and a date invitation for the (then) married Health Secretary.

When ‘The Matt Hancock’ app is updated a year later, access to the ‘Have Your Say’ section is hidden. One of the last posts read: “Is there a portal on here where I can be awarded a Government contract for an area I have little experience of scale please?”

***

Hancock always looks caught between a giggle and a sob. A new round of Covid restrictions makes casual sex illegal. Or at least that’s how Sky News’ Kay Burley interprets the guidance when she interviews him about it. “You are saying that no social distancing is needed in established relationships,” she notes. “But what about people who are not in an established relationship?”

The Health Secretary, embracing his role as national sex cop, confirms that Government rules do ban shagging someone who is not your normal partner. Apropos of nothing, he adds that, fortunately “I’m in an established relationship”.

A few weeks later, the Times reveals that Gina Coladangelo was appointed to a £15,000-a-year advisory PR role in the Health Ministry. The appointment was never declared. Coladangelo and Hancock are described as “close friends”. A source tells the paper: “Before Matt does anything big, he’ll speak to Gina. She knows everything.”

***

He appears to cry on television when the first Pfizer jabs are stuck into the arms of two pensioners: Margaret Keenan and William Shakespeare. “It’s been a tough year for so many people,” he sobs, rubbing his waterless, unreddened eyes.

The Government spends £12 billion on vaccines. Total pandemic spending is estimated to reach £372 billion. Research finds that under-30s will be disproportionately forced to bear the brunt of these costs. They are described as the “packhorse generation”. The median age of death from Covid is 83 years old. There is no national discussion, parliamentary inquiry, or interest from the Government in working out how the old can make it up to the young.

William Shakespeare dies naturally within a few months of taking the vaccine.

***

In January 2021, a week after the virus death toll tops 100,000, a focus group asks some ordinary people questions about the Health Secretary. A man called Jason compares Hancock to Ian Beale from Eastenders — “He wants people to feel sorry for him.” Asked what sort of car he would be, mother of two Donna suggests that he would be “something that breaks down.”

***

During a committee hearing Dominic Cummings says that Hancock should “have been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room and publicly”. Cummings then puts a WhatsApp screenshot on his blog that shows the Prime Minister describing Matt as both “hopeless” and “fucking hopeless”.  When he is interviewed about the message, Hancock says: “Boris has apologised for the way that came over.”

***

The story and the footage and the photo are exquisitely simple. After nearly 18 months of tiers, colour-codes, R-numbers, powerpoint slides, and graphs, here is something everyone could understand: a hand on an arse.

Yes, Hancock’s downfall was exquisitely simple. His affair with Gina Coladangelo was unambiguous. It made sense like fairy tales make sense. The Princess in the tower must let her hair down. The wolf is wearing sheep’s clothing. The apple offered by the witch is poisoned. The politician who spent the pandemic agitating for the harshest restrictions, who would describe Professor Neil Ferguson’s lockdown sex fiasco as a “matter for the police”, who ensured that the public could be fined for sitting on park benches, who threatened them with 10-year prison sentences for breaking quarantines, this ogre of the new common sense, would — of course! — be breaking all his rules.

The press is devastating, and relentless. With a deep understanding of public humiliation, the Queen describes Matthew as a “poor man”. He resigns, his only consolation being one of the most Googled news stories of 2021.

***

Hancock keeps coming back, like Covid. His head pops out of the ground. Phillip Schofield asks him: “Was it your dyslexia that meant you misread the social distancing guidelines?” The nation laughs, bitterly. It is reported that, off air, Hancock “almost seemed euphoric… He didn’t seem to mind being the butt of the joke.” He has returned to his student days, but made them the business of the entire country. He buys stonewashed jeans, and new turtlenecks. He does podcast interviews, and goes to the BRIT awards. He says he is writing a book for Harper Collins. Harper Collins says he is not writing a book for Harper Collins, and Hancock never mentions it again. A role with the UN is torpedoed, and a comeback video — unanimously described as “cringe” — is swiftly deleted. It is impossible to tell, as with England’s experience of three lockdowns, whether he is enjoying all this, or if he is the saddest man in the world.

***

Everybody wanted a lesson from the last 24 months. Neat, comprehensible wisdom. An intelligible narrative. They wanted to say that it finally proved that Germany was a better country than England, or they wanted to say that our vaccine programme proved the EU was useless. They thought England’s experience of Covid could tell us about the national character, the flaws in our state, or otherwise be used to justify every kind of pet project, ideological hang-up, or personal vendetta. There was no narrative line. All that the pandemic proved was that what happened a hundred times before in history could happen to us too.

***

The number of children referred for specialist mental health help rises above one million for the first time in 2021. Cases involving those 18 and under increase by 26% during the pandemic. The Royal College of Psychiatrists warns it is “becoming an impossible situation to manage”.

People, including Hancock, like to talk about learning the lessons of the pandemic. So we can prepare better for the next one. They don’t realise that between the million mentally hamstrung teenagers, the NHS waiting list hitting 9.2 million within two years, an endless backlog of cases in criminal courts, and inflation, that the pandemic hasn’t ended yet. It’s barely started.

26 March 2020 — 26 March 2022

As the protests enter another week, Ottawa’s mayor has declared a state of emergency. Jim Watson described the truckers — ostensibly protesting against Canada’s harsh Covid mandates — as “out of control”. Watson sees anarchy; the truckers fulminate against Covid authoritarianism. But this battle is really about working-class discontent.

The naive among us could be forgiven for thinking that this protest signalled something auspicious about “late capitalist” society. For decades, the common folk wisdom for both the Left and the Right was that the West’s working classes had been completely neutralised as a political force, and that class conflict itself was a relic of the past.

This idea took hold in the Sixties, when Herbert Marcuse theorised that Western workers had been subjected to a “socially engineered arrest of consciousness”. Their vested interest in the existing capitalist order made them impossible to radicalise. Ever since, finding new theoretical models to explain the unreliability (and stodgy conservatism) of workers has been a recurring activity on parts of the Left. Marxists had made a horrific discovery: the working class were not their foot soldiers. As Joan Didion once put it: “The have-nots, it turned out, mainly aspired to having.”

Many on the Left came to believe that without their corporatist union structures, and without their shop stewards and political organisers, the working classes were done for. They were little better, to paraphrase Marx, than a “sack of potatoes”.

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Without proper leadership, the workers would be too inert and stupid to do anything about their plight. As such, the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union (and the defeat of the strike waves of the Eighties) saw many Leftists indulge a wistful nostalgia for a time when the workers stuck it to the powers that be. Celebration of the good old days of the Left, and of “working-class power” in general, was thus central to the aesthetics of the now completely defunct wave of Left populism in the 2010s.

With that backdrop in mind, the explosion of worker militancy over vaccine mandates — and, on a related note, high fuel taxes in Europe — ought to have been greeted by enthusiasm by the Leftist activist and organiser set. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The truckers in Canada have instead triggered a primordial sense of dread in the hearts of the urban classes, in the people who Canadian trucker Gord Magill has dubbed “the email job caste”.

This sense of fear and dread at the machinations of the proles is hardly something unique to Canada. Indeed, even the United States saw a large increase of worker militancy and wildcat strikes over oppressive vaccine mandates. Like their compatriots in Canada, America’s various professional friends of the working class responded with horror and scorn. The well-known Marxist economist, Richard Wolff, was mobbed on Twitter for suggesting that workers striking over mandates were actually part of something called “class struggle”, rather than merely an expression of “fascism”.

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Ottawa’s truckers are a symptom of the massive class divide that is opening up across the West. Marxists are sticking their heads in the sand about this generational moment, or papering it over with absurd topsy-turvy leaps. In one recent display of moon logic, the Canadian activist, writer and self-described socialist Nora Loreto complained that “labour” was invisible in the resistance to the “fascist” truckers that had occupied Ottawa. An exasperated comrade chimed in with a story of being a shop steward for a teamster (truck driver) union, and — horror of horrors — the painful truth was that many teamsters were more likely to be in the protest themselves than protesting against it.

The exchange is modern Western Leftism in a nutshell. Is there a single better illustration of the contradictions of the moment? An “activist” and organiser” recoiling in horror at a bunch of truckers — people who work in the real, material economy, ferrying the foodstuffs and goods we all depend on to survive — staging a political protest, only to then ask “but where is the organised working class in all of this?”. Isn’t it obvious to the point of parody that the workers are the people inside the trucks?

It’s easy to laugh at this sort of absurdity, but the lesson here is anything but a joke. The divorce between “the Left” and “the workers” is now complete and irrevocable. Nora Loreto may not be a person with calloused hands, and she may very well belong to Gord Magill’s “email jobs caste”. But for the longest time, the political rhetoric and worldview of the Left depended on the idea that the trucker and the activist were merely two sides of the same coin.

Without the activist and the “organiser”, the trucker would never be able to know how to organise himself and his fellows politically; without the trucker, the activist and the organiser would not have a cause for which to organise. Now it seems that the trucker — and by extension, the pilot, the garbage collector, and the bus driver — does not need or want this caste of self-appointed leaders.

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This divorce has happened all over the world in recent years. After the massive rejection by Red Wall voters of Jeremy Corbyn and his activist base in the smart, urban, and highly credentialed parts of Britain, one started to see a rhetoric of open loathing for the dumb, uneducated gammons and proles. In Germany, the Left party Die Linke has endured several rounds of severe internal fighting and strife. As in the UK, the younger, more urban, more credentialed parts of the Left have fought a running battle — and thrown pies — against pro-worker “racists” such as Sahra Wagenknecht.

In Canada, that loathing has now turned into fear — and into outright hatred. The problem of the truckers is not really the honking (which the Guardian sniffily calls “crude behaviour“), because sooner or later, that honking will stop. The state of emergency will end. But the protests, significantly, have shown how confused and weak the opponents of the working classes are today.

During the pandemic lockdowns, the email jobs caste loved to talk about essential workers, and luxuriated in public displays of gratitude for them. But this caste of genteel urbanites never realised that this choice of nomenclature was in fact much more meaningful — and ominous – than they understood. Some people, it seems, simply are critical to the functioning of the economy, pandemic or no pandemic. Once those people — and truck drivers are perhaps the most critical of them all — start to demand to be listened to, they have ways to make those demands felt.

For the Left, the problem of the truckers is their newfound political independence. Nostalgia really is a thing of the past now; the dinosaurs that were thought long extinct are back now, and they are hungry. Gone are the halcyon days of dreaming about halcyon days – where serious working class militancy was just a distant myth.

The real danger of any trucker’s strike, or any pilot’s walkout, or any fuel tax protest in Europe, is that every new confrontation sets a precedent: a precedent that says that the Gord Magills are done taking orders from the Nora Letos of the world.

But in many of America’s deep-blue cities and suburbs, stringent Covid measures are still the norm, especially for schoolchildren. In New York City public schools, for instance, all students must wear masks at all times, including outdoors, except while eating or during designated “mask breaks”. Palo Alto, the hometown of Stanford University, makes kids wear mask outdoors at recess. And LA public schools, responding to new evidence about the uselessness of cloth masks, recently required children to wear surgical masks or N95/KN95s.

These measures are premised on the idea that America’s children must be shielded from exposure to Covid-19. What kids really need, however, is a return to normal. And when it comes to infectious disease, normality means a world where they are routinely exposed to, and overcome, viral illness. For children, getting sick and recovering is part of a natural and healthy life.

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By Vinay Prasad

It has become common to criticise restrictions for children on the grounds that they harm mental health and social development. These concerns are valid, but it is important to emphasise that a more laissez-faire approach to kids and Covid makes public health sense, too. Dropping masks, quarantines, distancing, and all other mitigations will allow children to develop the kind of broad immunity gained by living a normal life.

Shielding kids from exposure only increases their future risk. This is partly why the UK does not vaccinate against chickenpox. Serious complications from the disease are rare among children, and the circulating virus allows adults to be naturally boosted against reactivation-driven shingles. By rebuilding population immunity among the least at-risk, moreover, we help buffer risk for those most vulnerable.

With Covid, the nadir of risk is between 5–11 years old — an age where children develop more robust and durable immunity from infection than adults, even with asymptomatic silent infections.

Some parents may think this sounds like a call to put their children at risk of serious illness or death. But it is important to remember that exposure to Covid-19 is inevitable. Vaccines protect against severe disease and side-effects such as MIS-C, but they cannot stop breakthrough infections, and the rapidity of Omicron’s spread suggests that no matter what we do, we cannot avoid the virus. In January, Anthony Fauci admitted as much, saying that Omicron will eventually “find just about everybody”.

The epidemiologist and researcher Francois Balloux puts it this way:

https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1486449517503389707?s=20

This idea is not as frightening as it may sound. We know that even unvaccinated children generally do well after Covid-19 infection. A study from Germany found that among healthy, unvaccinated children aged 5–11 who became infected with the disease, just 2 in 100,000 ended up in the ICU and none died (16 in 100,000 received ICU care later for MISC-C). Even children for whom vaccination is not yet an option are at lower risk now than they were last summer: the Omicron variant resulted in 66% fewer hospitalisations than Delta in a study of children younger than 5 years.

In some countries, this data informs policy. In Norway, for instance, parents of 5–11 year-olds can get vaccines for their children if they want them, but vaccines are only recommended for children with serious underlying conditions. This is not because vaccines are ineffective but because, according to the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, “the risk of a severe disease course at this age is small, and the need for vaccines for children and adolescents is limited”.

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What lockdown took from my parents

By Kate Clanchy

For children who are vaccinated, however, exposure at the lowest-risk age — roughly between kindergarten and middle school — could also be the safest way for young people to develop superior “hybrid” immunity. Last week, the CDC released a large study demonstrating that natural immunity is superior to vaccinated immunity and that hybrid immunity is superior to both. Vaccination provided a 19.8-times reduction in hospitalisation risk, but prior infection provided a 55.3-times reduction and a combination of the two conferred a 57.5-times reduction. Other studies suggest that hybrid immunity confers better cross-variant protection than vaccines alone.

And so schoolchildren, already at the lowest possible risk for severe Covid-19, have now exited what should be their last winter of restrictions. Many have already recovered from infection or been vaccinated, meaning that their risk has dropped from low to miniscule.

“Normal” has been an option for adults — it’s time to allow children to resume normal life, not simply because their exclusion is unfair or hurts them socially and psychologically, but because it is immunologically in their best interest. Parents must consider that exposures are how we best protect our children against the variants of the future. In fact, it is reckless to let children age into a more serious encounter with a disease best dealt with while younger.

This view is shared by the authors of a May 2021 paper in The British Journal of Medicine, who wrote: “Once most adults are vaccinated, circulation of SARS-CoV-2 may in fact be desirable, as it is likely to lead to primary infection early in life when disease is mild, followed by booster re-exposures throughout adulthood… This would keep reinfections mild and immunity up to date.” In fact, Norwegian authorities believe that natural infection will better protect children than vaccines that rely on out-of-date variants of the virus.

Suggested Reading

Scientific tyranny has captured America

By Jacob Howland

For parents worried that dropping restrictions will put their children at risk, the way forward is to realise that many of the protective measures we’ve been relying on, including masks — and especially the cloth masks that many American schoolchildren have been wearing for over a year — were never as protective as we’d thought, and are no match for omicron.

Some parents understandably fear the consequences of long Covid in kids, but the largest study to date is profoundly reassuring. Children who tested positive for Covid-19 were only 0.8% more likely to report long Covid symptoms, such as fatigue and muscle weakness, than those who had never tested positive. As the authors of the study concluded: “Long Covid in children is rare and mainly of short duration”.

Anxious parents should also put the risks in perspective. Children in many parts of Europe have been subject to less draconian restrictions than their US counterparts — without disastrous results. And while the death of any child is a tragedy, Covid-19 is less deadly to children than many other risks we accept as a matter of course, including drowning, vehicle accidents, and even cardiovascular disease.

Yes, diseases will continue to circulate, as they always have done. Schools are not sterile, nor should they be. Immunity is built through illness. If we can’t return our children to normalcy now, knowing what we know about the small risks facing children and the serious harms inflicted on them by pandemic-era restrictions, there is a real risk, at least in the more progressive parts of America, that the current arrangement will become the new normal. And that is a risk none of us should be willing to take.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article misstated the findings of a study from Germany on hospitalisation risk among unvaccinated children age 5-11. The correct figure for ICU admissions is 2 in 100,000, not 8 in 100,000. We have also added the figure for MISC-C risk and linked to the paper, which can be found here. We apologise for the error.

Take perhaps the most extreme example: Weimar Germany. In the first half of the Twenties, the young republic was seeing its economy collapse due to hyperinflation caused by the punitive repayments imposed by the victors in the First World War. By lending in American capital markets and buttressing the currency, the hyperinflation cooled. But in 1929, as Wall Street went into meltdown, American capital markets seized up and Germany started to slide into a deflationary depression.

But German policymakers remained fixated by the prospect of hyperinflation. So when they saw turbulence ahead, their default position was to assume that trouble was inflationary, not deflationary. As a result, they slammed the brakes on government spending and led their country into a punishing depression. And we all know what happened next.

Sunak’s budget suffers the opposite problem. Since 2008, we have been experiencing a world of economic stagnation and low interests. Keynesian policy proposals — spending more money — have been in circulation in policy circles all throughout this period. I should know, I was one of the people circulating them. They are perfectly suited to an economy with relatively high unemployment and low inflation.

Suggested reading

The Tories will never change

By Tim Bale

But today we face exactly the opposite economic problem. Labour markets are so tight that employers are finding themselves being slowly strangled. And inflation is starting to tick up. Bank of England interest rate setters are putting on a brave face in public, telling us that inflation is transient — but seasoned watchers know that they are far more sceptical when they gather around the water cooler.

The problems are relatively straightforward. The lockdowns and the emerging vaccine mandates are unprecedented economic interventions. They cause chaos for businesses who are trying to provide goods and services to consumers. They also cause chaos in labour markets — just look how many workers simply left the UK in the first and second half of 2020. Crucially, these conditions imply a high probability that inflation is here to stay.

And this is where Rishi’s budget comes undone. Dumping spending and increasing taxes in an economy already under inflationary strain is akin to tossing a lit match into a barn full of dry hay. The spending increases will drive further demand for goods and services that businesses are already struggling to supply due to the onerous lockdown and vaccine-related regulations. Meanwhile, the tax rises will be passed on immediately as price rises by companies, as they attempt to defend their already thin margins.

Why is Sunak doing this? Because he is fighting the last war; focussing on what has happened rather than what will happen. His budget assumes that the main resistance on the field is overwhelming tank power — and as his soldiers march forward he will look on aghast as they are bombed mercilessly from overhead. Sunak is being fooled by a non-existent problem while a very real one festers.

Suggested reading

Is Boris taking us back to the Seventies?

By Dominic Sandbrook

It will work like this. The spending and tax rises will enter into the economic bloodstream, placing further pressure on prices. Inflation will accelerate. The Bank of England will take one look at their charter and realise that if they do not raise interest rates, they are going to take the heat for the inflation. So, they will raise those interest rates, the yield curve will invert — meaning short-term interest rates become higher than long-term rates — and the economy will slip into recession. That is how an expansionary budget produces contractionary results.

The worst part of all this is that, if the inflation is being driven by the lockdowns and vaccine policies, the recession will not stamp out the inflation. Instead, the British public will get a taste of both: stagflation — low growth, inflation and unemployment. Just like in the Seventies.

The entire economic debate today is topsy-turvy. Economists have been, for the most part, too cowardly to challenge the overarching public health measures. They recline in their seats, either becoming armchair epidemiologists or simply falling asleep. Poor Sunak looks on his desk and finds a plan written for a world that ceased to exist in March 2020. And the rest of us live with the consequences. La Comédie humaine.

This “plan B”, outlined yesterday by Sajid Javid, is grist to the mill of the moralists who rage that everyone must be jabbed. Demands for near-compulsory vaccination have become ever more strident. You might get seriously ill, the argument goes. The hospitals might fill up. You might infect NHS staff. You might deprive someone of a bed. And in any event, the unvaccinated might breed mutations. It’s not about you.

This is all perfectly true. Those bad things might happen. And we do frequently expect each other to limit risk to strangers, even at some cost to ourselves. Indeed, a general principle to that effect was established almost a century ago. The “general duty of care”, set out by Lord Atkin in 1932, states: “You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour.” But the concept of reasonableness — which appears twice in that formula — leaves judges with a heavy burden of interpretation.

Take the 1951 case of Bolton v Stone. Miss Bessie Stone, on the street outside her home, was hit in the head by a cricket ball. It had been tonked over the boundary for six by “an exceptional straight drive”, as the Law Lords put it. The resulting wound became infected, causing serious pain and disability. And so the courts had to decide: had the cricket club taken “reasonable care” to avoid the accident?

“The existence of some risk,” Lord Porter observed, in the final appeal, “is an ordinary incident in life”. The suggestion that it would have been a “wise precaution” to move the wicket to the middle of the ground, further from the houses, found no favour with him: “I do not think that it would have occurred to anyone that such an alteration would have made for greater safety.”

Lord Normand noted that, “it is not the law that precautions must be taken against every peril that can be foreseen by the timorous”. Lord Reid pointed out that not every peril can be foreseen: “Even the most careful person cannot avoid creating some risks and accepting others”. And Lord Oaksey, who five years earlier had led the tribunal at Nuremberg, found that many foreseeable risks “cannot be guarded against except by extreme isolation” — something we’ve all had enough of in the past 18 months.

All four of those men had seen active service in the Great War. The fifth judge, Lord Radcliffe, while agreeing that the injured lady’s claim must fail, did so “with regret”: the hypothetical reasonable man, “if his play turn to another’s hurt”, ought, he felt, to offer something more than the mere reflection that “a social being is not immune from social risks”. As chance had it, on the very same day that Miss Stone was hit — 9th August 1947 — Radcliffe had submitted his final plans for the design of an altogether more problematic boundary: that between India and Pakistan. We can only speculate whether the hundreds of thousands of deaths that followed gave him a more sombre perspective on foreseeable, though unintended, consequences.

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Are we heading for another winter lockdown?

By Tom Chivers

Cricket balls no longer pose a threat outside Miss Stone’s old house — the ground now consists of a Care Home and a Modesty Clothing business — but legal claims of this kind have become more common, and the courts’ attitude to fault-free risk less accepting. As Jonathan Sumption noted in his provocatively titled 2017 lecture “Abolishing Personal Injuries Law – A Project”, the number of personal injury claims grew to about 250,000 a year by the early 1970s. And by 2014 the figure stood at 1.2 million.

Part of the reason for the increase is a feedback loop with the insurance industry. When a defendant is insured — which the vast majority are, mainly because insurance is compulsory for drivers and employers — it doesn’t quite feel like justice to leave a seriously injured claimant empty-handed in a borderline case. And when the courts expand the potential for liability, appetite for insurance grows.

But the crucial insight for understanding the mechanics of Safetyism, and how we have come to threaten students with a no-jab-no-education policy, was a brief, candid aside from Lord Oaksey in the cricket ball case: “It may very well be,” he speculated, “that after this accident the ordinarily prudent committee man of a similar cricket ground would take some further precaution, but that is not to say that he would have taken a similar precaution before the accident.” Daniel Kahneman was barely out of short trousers, and Cass Sunstein not yet born, but the observation neatly prefigures the cognitive bias they later described: the availability heuristic.

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The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

This is our tendency to judge the frequency and importance of an outcome by the ease with which we can call examples to mind. We over-estimate our share of housework, for instance, because we have no trouble remembering when we took the bins out ourselves — but barely notice when someone else does. For the sake of our argument, if the “reasonable man” has recently been told that something he’s planning to do led, on some previous occasion, to a bad outcome, he will be less likely to do the risky thing, because that bad outcome is fresh in his mind. Which, according to Lord Oaksey’s analysis, actually alters how we determine what amounts to negligence.

If this seems like mere common sense, well, in a way it is. But common sense isn’t always right. The ease with which we recall examples of a result is not an ever-reliable guide to its frequency and importance. If, for instance, a determined and creative cabal of your enemies were to follow you around all day FYI-ing you about all the terrible consequences of your acts and omissions — not taking a vaccine, for example — the availability heuristic would likely lead you astray.

Yet this is exactly what millions subject themselves to on Twitter every day — policymakers in particular. Negligence is defined in law as taking a risk that the reasonable man would not. The reasonable man today is someone who has heard all the hostile moralists’ warnings. And so, the reasonableness window has shifted, and the ratchet of risk-aversion takes another click.

And this is why there’s no smoking gun in the law reports — no moment when the courts’ approach to health and safety went mad: a slow and steady reappraisal of what the reasonable man would do will naturally seem, well, reasonable. But something surely changed between Bolton v Stone and, say, the case of Tomlinson v Congleton, half a century later, where the Court of Appeal found in favour of a man who injured himself diving into a public lake surrounded by “Dangerous Water — No Swimming” signs. Warning notices were not enough, they said: the popular beach beside the water should effectively be destroyed. The House of Lords put that one right in the end, but the fact that Lord Justice Sedley felt able to say that if his ruling required the removal of all similar facilities across the country then “so be it”, tells us something about the direction of travel.

More from this author

The dangers of compulsory vaccination

By Adam King

And more recently, in the Age of Lockdown, social media has given the operation of the availability heuristic nuclear capabilities. The “reasonable man” is bombarded with a very particular set of examples of adverse consequences, and so it is these that stand to determine the shape of negligence. Never mind the social benefits of allowing people to judge for themselves what is best for them and their children, or to apply the much-vaunted precautionary principle according to their own tastes: if you don’t get the vaccine, and the booster shots when they arrive, you’re practically a murderer.

There is a clear and enduring downside to recasting the normal business of everyday life as a special privilege reserved for those who will take their medicine as directed by the government of the day. The upside — increasing the proportion of the vaccinated population from 90% to, say, 98% — is nebulous. Let us keep our heads, while all about us others — France, Australia, New Zealand — are losing theirs, and bear in mind the undeniable fact that we are seeking to strike a balance. In the coming weeks, the Government would do well to consider, very carefully, what is really meant by “reasonable”.

In short, New Zealand’s latest outbreak has merely reinforced pre-existing convictions on both sides of the Zero Covid argument.

But the reality is more complex. While New Zealand has pursued an aggressive elimination strategy, it has — until now — worked, and at relatively low political, economic and social costs. Indeed, the more urgent question now is whether the country’s relative success has lulled it into a sense of complacency, and left it lacking an exit strategy once the pandemic subsides.

Over the past eighteen months, New Zealand has been one of very few countries committed to elimination rather than suppression, with Ardern declaring she wouldn’t put the lives of citizens at risk by trying to live with the virus. The decision was hailed as proof of her leadership driven by empathy and compassion, in stark contrast with the “let it rip” approaches of Johnson or Trump.

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The cruelty of Australia's endless lockdown

By Shahar Hameiri

However, while it certainly complemented Ardern’s brand, in reality her commitment was driven by the cold reality of a woefully unprepared health system — gutted by decades of austerity — which would struggle to manage even a low number of cases. A March 2020 audit found New Zealand only had 221 ICU beds for a population of 5 million, while its testing and track and tracing capacity was deemed inadequate.

It was in this context that the Government announced a strict “Level 4” lockdown on 25 March 2020, which closed almost all retail, hospitality and education settings, banned public gatherings, limited the reasons for leaving home and closed the international border to everyone but returning citizens and permanent residents who had to quarantine. Despite being draconian, these restrictions succeeded in eliminating Covid-19 in the country; by 8 June the lockdown ended, with effectively all restrictions being lifted, except for closed borders. In total, New Zealand experienced 1,504 cases of Covid and 22 deaths between February and June 2020. (The UK experienced 4,432 Covid deaths in March alone.)

Having achieved elimination, New Zealand doubled down, vowing to swiftly respond to any future outbreaks with snap lockdowns. It was a wildly popular decision, with Ardern re-elected in a landslide in October, and 75% supporting the government’s strategy as recently as July 2021.

The reasons for this are not hard to understand. Unlike Australia’s disastrous hotel quarantine system, which has resulted in more than 20 instances of the virus leaking into the community, New Zealand has seen limited breaches, which were quickly contained. As a result, since June 2020, there have only been two brief lockdowns in Auckland, the largest city. Indeed, for the past 16 months, New Zealanders have been living remarkably normal lives; while the British recently rejoiced at “Freedom Day” by flooding pubs, restaurants and football matches, New Zealanders have been enjoying these liberties for over a year.

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We are hostages to Government fear

By Timandra Harkness

Similarly, the economic costs of Zero Covid have been relatively low so far. While the initial lockdown initially led to a drastic 11% decline of GDP, a generous wage subsidy scheme prevented job losses and growth rebounded 14.1% the following quarter. Admittedly, the recovery has been uneven, with the tourism sector — accounting for 18% of the economy — hit particularly hard by border closures. Nevertheless, with unemployment at 4% and debt-to-GDP ratio of 33%, the country’s economic performance compares favourably with most other nations.

So it seems that New Zealand’s commitment to elimination so far has been less “a never-ending nightmare” than an understandable policy with overall low costs. But that doesn’t mean that the country is out of the woods. For ultimately, the issue with Zero Covid is the need for an exit strategy — and this is where the current outbreak has exposed NZ.

On paper, the most obvious exit strategy from Zero Covid is for the whole world to follow it, eliminating the virus once and for all. But the fact that the vast majority of countries have deemed this unfeasible has left New Zealand vulnerable. After all, elimination in one country is not viable in the long term without total isolation from the rest of the world.

The other exit strategy is vaccination. Yet here, New Zealand has stumbled, with only 19.79% of the population fully vaccinated, leaving it second-last in the OECD. The main issue has been complacency. With Covid eliminated, vaccination has not been a burning priority. This resulted in not only the Government setting low vaccination targets that it then crowed about meeting, but among the population only 40% gave any thoughts to vaccination in July. Splendidly isolated in their own little bubble, New Zealanders convinced themselves that the pandemic was happening elsewhere, and did little to prepare for its return. ICU, capacity, for example, has only been increased by 63 beds since March last year, and less than two weeks ago, experts warned a Delta outbreak would risk collapsing the health system.

Suggested reading

How science has been corrupted

By Matthew Crawford

Now that the Delta strain has arrived, however, the folly of this complacent strategy has been exposed. As other countries have found, measures that worked in crushing the virus last year struggle with its more infectious variant. Cases have grown every day, and the lockdown has already been extended to two weeks, while experts gloomily proclaim the country is on “a knife edge”.

What this means for NZ’s commitment to elimination remains to be seen. If the Government gets on top of the outbreak, faith in Zero Covid will persist, bolstered by proof of succeeding where no other countries have with Delta. But this will only reinforce complacency, meaning underlying structural issues will remain unaddressed. Once the country finally does start to open to the world again, these will come to the fore; if Covid returns, lockdowns will once again be a tempting proposition, even with high vaccination coverage. Whether the population will remain tolerant of these remains an open question.

If, on the other hand, the lockdown extends into months, the low-cost nature of elimination will come to be questioned, especially as previous successes recede from view, while the rest of the world moves on from the virus. As Australia shows, overconfidence can quickly give way to recriminations once an elimination strategy leads to a never-ending spiral of lockdowns. In this case, New Zealand may find that Zero Covid is a dead end, from which there is no easy way out.

It could be that Arden’s government is starting to realise this. While committed to stamping out the current outbreak, its Covid-19 Response Minister has conceded that the highly infectious nature of Delta raises “big questions” about the strategy, and that “at some point, we will have to be more open in the future”. Whether a government which has so explicitly nailed its colours to Zero Covid can execute such a pivot remains to be seen.

This is not the mainstream view, to say the least, which is that the pandemic was especially disastrous in the United States precisely because the president was an incompetent populist. The same narrative was central to the way much of the British media covered the pandemic, at least until vaccines saved the day and the prime minister. Even so, it was notable that the parts of Dominic Cummings testimony that attracted the most attention were his criticisms of Boris Johnson as “unfit for the job” of prime minister, “smashing from one side of the aisle to the other,” like a rogue shopping trolley. The New York Times summary was that Cummings had “accused the British prime minister of incompetence that caused tens of thousands of extra Covid deaths”.

For liberal journalists and editors who already had an aversion to populist leaders, the temptation to pin the blame on them for last year’s high excess mortality has been irresistible. We can see the same narrative in Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro is the populist with blood on his hands, and in India, where Narendra Modi gets the same treatment from his political opponents.

An example of where this assumption of populist guilt can lead even the most experienced writer was James Fallows’s article “The 3 Weeks That Changed Everything,” published in The Atlantic last June. According to Fallows, the poor performance of the United States in response to the spread of the novel coronavirus had one, and only one, explanation: the incompetence of the “person at the top of the system”. He quoted an unnamed “veteran of the intelligence world”— one of “some 30 scientists, health experts, and past and current government officials” he spoke to — who summed up his argument neatly: “Our system has a single point of failure: an irrational president.”

Fallows at no point asked himself why so many scientists, experts and government officials might be so eager to pin the blame on Trump. He was too pleased with the analogy between Trump and the pilot of an aircraft. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died prematurely, he concluded, because the pilot was tweeting when he should have been responding to an approaching storm.

You can find versions of the same piece about most if not all of the populist leaders. “Jair Bolsonaro apparently intended to lead the country to herd immunity by natural infection, whatever the consequences,” meaning that he “effectively planned for at least 1.4 million deaths in Brazil,” according to Vanessa Barbara in the New York Times. “In a series of stunningly reckless decisions,” wrote Sumit Ganguly in the Washington Post, Narendra Modi “invited the second wave that is now crushing the country”. This “colossal failure of policymaking” reflected Modi’s “general callousness, crass electoral considerations, and sheer ineptitude.”

The generalisation follows easily: populism kills. “Strikingly,” noted the Christian Science Monitor in April, “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.” In the words of Yascha Mounk of the Council on Foreign Relations: “If you look around the world today, it becomes painfully clear that those countries that are ruled by populists have paid an especially heavy toll in economic damage, case load, and mortality.” Not only the Mexican president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), fits the narrative; so too do the leaders of Bolivia, Ecuador and the Philippines.

The necessary counterargument is not that these populist leaders did a good job and need defending. They all did terribly, with Bolsonaro only just edging out Trump for the number of unbelievably stupid, wildly irresponsible things he did. (The redeeming feature of Trump’s response was Operation Warp Speed, which unquestionably laid the foundation for this year’s very successful vaccination campaign. Bolsonaro’s government managed to bungle vaccine procurement, too.)

Further reading

How America turned into the EU

By Joel Kotkin

Yet to conclude from the populists’ countless sins that the countries in question would have fared much better under different leaders is to draw a dangerously erroneous inference. It would lead you to conclude that, by replacing Trump with Joe Biden, American voters have solved the problem that caused so much illness and death last year; and that Brazilian, Indian and Mexican voters can solve their problems in the same manner when their populists come up for reelection.

There are three flaws to this reasoning, leaving aside the point (made by Brett Meyer in a smart paper for the Tony Blair Institute) that not all populist leaders downplayed the threat posed by the pandemic, while a significant number favoured stringency over laxity. The first is that it is not clear that the countries run by populists did fare decidedly worse than other countries, at least in terms of excess mortality — the best measure of how a country has fared in the Plague Year. The second flaw is that, on close inspection, the mistakes that caused the bulk of premature deaths during the pandemic cannot easily be attributed to presidential or prime ministerial decisions. More often than not, the mistakes were made further down the chain of command, by public health officials and scientific advisers who profoundly misjudged the problem they were facing. Thirdly, and finally, the counterfactuals of better outcomes with different leaders do not stand up to close scrutiny.

Let’s begin with excess mortality data. One study of 32 countries in 2020, which calculated excess age-standardised mortality, arrived at the following worst ten (in terms of mortality per 100,000: Bulgaria came first, followed by Poland, Chile, the United States, Slovenia, Belgium, Czechia, Spain, England and Wales, and Scotland. 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?

Or consider the latest excess mortality figures from the Financial Times, which go up to 5 May. The UK and the U.S. are in the middle of the table with excess mortality of, respectively, 17% and 18% above the baseline. Bolsonaro’s Brazil is worse (34%) and AMLO’s Mexico worse still (55%). But excess mortality has been even higher in Peru (123%), Ecuador (67%), Bolivia (56%), Armenia (43%) and Azerbaijan (42%). The problem in each of these countries was not a powerful populist leader.

In Peru, to give just one example, it is Congress that wields the power, so much so that it has brought down three of the country’s last four presidents, including Martín Vizcarra, who was impeached twice last year and finally forced to resign despite an approval rating above 60%. In the case of Ecuador, too, Lenín Moreno did not conform to the populist stereotype last year. In Bolivia, the pandemic struck after the populist Evo Morales had been ousted from power.

In any case, the idea that presidents are to pandemics what pilots are to severe turbulence or engine failure is, to the historian’s eye, deeply misleading. The reality is that the man or woman at the top is struggling to manage multiple government agencies with “stakes” in public health, to say nothing of state or provincial governments.

In practice, as any serious student of modern government knows, the critical decisions in a public health crisis are not made at the top: it is the scientific advisers and principals of the relevant agencies who must decide on the seriousness of the threat and the policy response to recommend. A president or prime minister becomes involved only if there is a fundamental disagreement within the relevant group of expert and officials, or between the Cabinet-level principals. If there is a consensus in favour of a “herd immunity” strategy, as appears to have been the case in London in the first two and half months of 2020, then a prime minister is highly unlikely to overrule that consensus, regardless of whether he is being distracted by a book deadline, a disgruntled girlfriend, or an outsized interior décor bill.

Further reading

The ideology that broke Britain

By Aris Roussinos

Anyone listening closely to Cummings’s testimony last month, or reading the long Twitter thread which preceded it, will understand that he was not in fact laying the blame for last year’s debacle on Boris Johnson. “Critical as I am of the PM in all sorts of ways,” Cummings wrote, “it’s vital to understand the disaster was not just his fault.” On the contrary, the entire system failed: not just the elected politicians, but the civil servants and the public health experts—all fell “disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect.”

In other words, Boris was a comorbidity. To some extent, the same may also be true of Bolsonaro, Modi and AMLO.

Perhaps the best way to show the weakness of the populist pandemic hypothesis is to contemplate the counterfactuals. If, thanks to some kink in the space-time continuum, Joe Biden had been inaugurated in January 2020, would U.S. excess mortality have been significantly lower? It is easy to claim, as an eminent TV anchor said to me the other day, that it would have been, because Biden and his administration would have “followed the science.”

Yet Ron Klain, Joe Biden’s chief of staff, acknowledged in 2019 that, if the swine flu that struck the U.S. in 2009 had been as deadly as COVID-19, President Barack Obama’s administration would not have done much better: “We did every possible thing wrong. And … 60 million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time. And it’s just purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history. Had nothing to do with us doing anything right. Just had to do with luck.”

And how did the Obama administration do when faced with an opioid epidemic? More than 365,000 Americans died of drug overdoses between 2009 and 2016. Each year saw more deaths than the year before. The most affected age groups were those between 25 and 54, for whom the overdose rates in 2016 were between 34 and 35 per 100,000. For that reason, the total of life years lost may well have exceeded those lost to COVID, albeit over a longer period of time. Yet I have never read an article blaming the opioid epidemic on “pilot error.”

To repeat, I am not here to defend Boris, Trump et al. I am merely arguing that is too easy — and also downright misleading — to lay all the blame for the excess mortality of 2020-21 on populist leaders, though their erratic leadership undoubtedly added some percentage to the body count. What happened in most Western countries, regardless of whether they were led by a populist, a liberal or a technocrat, was a systemic failure of the public health bureaucracy. There were pandemic preparedness plans; they simply did not work. Testing capacity was not built swiftly enough; contact tracing was barely attempted; quarantines were not enforced; the vulnerable (especially in elderly care homes) were not protected but exposed.

Further reading

This is Britain's 9/11 moment

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

These were the costliest mistakes in terms of loss of life, and it is not plausible that presidents or prime ministers were personally to blame for any of them. 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.

To conclude that getting rid of the populists at the top will ensure that we do better when the next disaster strikes is not merely a delusion. It guarantees that, on both sides of the Atlantic, we shall fail to identify where the real points of failure have been and to do something about them, as soon as we possibly can, in every domain of our manifestly dysfunctional systems of government.

That, I think, was what Dominic Cummings was trying to tell us. “The official plan was disastrously misconceived,” he wrote, “DHSC/CABOFF did not understand this or why, & a PlanB had to be bodged amid total & utter chaos.”

This was because Plan A — to go for herd immunity rather than suppress the virus — “was supposed to be ‘world class’ but turned out to be part disaster, part non-existent. … If we’d had the right preparations + competent people in charge, we would probably have avoided lockdown1, *definitely* no need for lockdowns 2&3. Given the plan was AWOL/disaster + awful decisions delayed everything, lockdown1 became necessary.”

Further reading

Dominic Cummings is writing history

By Ed West

According to one poll, 75% of Britons do not trust what Cummings had to say about the government’s handling of the crisis. This is unfortunate, because what we were presented with last month was a rare, unfiltered glimpse into the reality of life in the corridors of power when a full-blown national emergency strikes. If you think it would have gone much better with David Cameron, Theresa May or (imagine it) Jeremy Corbyn in No. 10, then I have a pandemic preparedness plan to sell you.

In any case, the Cummings critique of the British state has never really been about the personality of the prime minister. His question for years has been: “How does the deep institutional wiring of the parties/civil service program destructive behaviour by putting the wrong ppl in wrong jobs with destructive incentives?” Why are “SW1 incentives … ~all about rewarding *process + fake signals*”? These are the right questions to ask, and a similar set of questions could and should be asked about the Washington Beltway.

The irony is that, back in 2016 and 2017, people voted in populist leaders in large measure because they felt frustrated by the dysfunctional inertia of the “deep state,” whether in Whitehall, Washington, Brasilia, or (for that matter) Brussels. The events of the past 16 months have proved that, as was obvious at the outset, the populists were not a real solution to that problem. But the pandemic has also shown us the deadly consequences of leaving the problem unsolved — which is precisely what we shall do if we conclude that the premature deaths were all the populists’ fault.

Niall Ferguson’s new book DOOM: The Politics of Catastrophe has just been published by Penguin Press.

Furthermore, and following the acutely embarrassing Article 16 debacle, an effort was made to reclaim vaccine internationalism for the EU brand. The new line came from the President of the European Council, Charles Michel — whose sanctimonious missive on the matter is a masterpiece of Pecksniffery.

Unfortunately, the EU good guy act didn’t last. Indeed, our neighbours appear to have lost their minds.

Kicking off the March madness was a vaccine export ban to Australia — a pointless and counter-productive move given that the EU could potentially benefit from vaccine imports.

Next, came a completely avoidable diplomatic row with the UK. Ironically, the cause of it was the Michel missive, which in seeking to emphasise the EU’s internationalism accused the British of banning vaccine exports. Except that no such ban exists. Eventually, the EU was forced to admit the truth. There was no apology.

Perhaps we should try to understand the EU’s prickliness. In a Covid-ridden world where vaccines have become an instrument of great power rivalry, the EU is trying to defend a high-minded principle — that of equal access between EU member nations. This is how Monsieur Michel put it in his blogpost: “The goal was to avoid competition and bidding between countries, and to allow all countries to obtain the doses at the same time. Otherwise, the larger or richer Member States would have been the first in the queue and best served…”

Admirable. Except that the joint procurement programme isn’t quite as egalitarian as its billing would suggest. Some countries — including Germany, of course — have exploited its loopholes to serve themselves. Other countries aren’t happy. Last week, the Austrian Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, led five EU countries — Austria, Czechia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Latvia — in demanding an EU summit to address the unfairness:

“…the last few weeks have shown that deliveries are currently not being made according to population keys and that this is set to intensify in the coming months. This approach clearly contradicts the political goal of the European Union — the equal distribution of vaccine doses to all member states. If the distribution were to continue in this way, it would result in significant unequal treatment — which we must prevent.”

Kurz has been accused of seeking a distraction from his own government’s mediocre performance, but he makes a valid point. The EU’s vaccine procurement strategy prioritised fairness over timeliness, and has delivered neither.

Meanwhile, across Europe, governments are uniting in the face of an old enemy. Yes, the EU’s least favourite medicament is back on the blacklist: the AstraZeneca vaccine. This time the flimsy pretext is the report of blood clots in a small number of recently vaccinated individuals. Writing for UnHerd, Tom Chivers explains that it’s unreasonable to expect universal invulnerability to death and disease in a population of millions of older people. It’s also worth noting the assurances given by AstraZeneca itself, the UK government, the Scottish government, the World Health Organisation and indeed the European Medicines Agency.

Suggested reading

Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped several EU governments (including the Germans, the French and Italians) from slapping a temporary ban on the Oxford AZ vaccine. For its part, the Irish government claims to be acting upon the “precautionary principle”. But there is nothing precautionary about snatching away a life-saving vaccine from vulnerable people in the middle of deadly pandemic — not without overwhelming proof of a countervailing danger, which they clearly don’t have.

There’s never a good time to commit an act of calamitous self-harm, but this latest insanity comes at an especially critical juncture. Not much more than a month ago, Covid cases in the EU were at roughly the same level as in the UK and the US. Now, they’re roughly twice the American level, and between three and four times the British level. That’s not just because cases are coming down in the UK and US, but also because they’re heading up in several European countries — and across the EU overall.

Furthermore, new variants of the virus such as those first detected in Britain, Brazil and South Africa are now established and spreading in EU countries — underlining the urgency of getting the population vaccinated. And yet instead of ramping up vaccination — as the British are doing this week from an already high base — European governments are choosing this moment to sabotage their own vaccine supply.

And let’s not forget where we are in the course of this pandemic — and what we’ve sacrificed to contain it. In the West, we’re now 12 months on from the first round of lockdowns. As the UK begins to unlock stage by stage, millions of Europeans face a second spring of confinement. Italy — the first European country to lockdown a year ago — is locking down again as cases surge.

Suggested reading

How the EU humiliated itself

By Peter Franklin

Whatever the medical justifications, one has to ask if lockdown is politically, socially or economically sustainable. If Europe doesn’t achieve herd immunity levels of vaccination by the summer, the pressure to unlock regardless will be immense. It will be argued that if enough of the Continent’s elderly and vulnerable people have been jabbed then that will constitute ‘focused protection’ — thereby allowing the less vulnerable population to take their chances with the virus. Wouldn’t it be an irony if something akin to the strategy set out in the Great Barrington Declaration were to be implemented by the Continentals instead of les Anglos?

Of course, that would provide the new variants of the virus with a vast pool of hosts to splash around in freely. Through the use of mass testing and genomic sequencing, the authorities might be able to monitor and manage the spread and evolution of the variants — but this assumes that sufficient capacity to do so is in place. It isn’t. According to evidence given to the European Parliament by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control most European countries are not where they need to be in order to do the necessary tracking.

How do they get away with it? The EU’s politicians, I mean. Well, it helps that in Europe there’s always somebody else to blame. It might be another country, another institution or one of the EU’s five presidents. The choice is never ending. It also helps that, in times of crisis, people rally behind their governments. Not unreasonably, they put their trust in those politicians with the greatest experience of governing — a tendency that benefits establishment politicians over their populist rivals.

Nevertheless, there are signs that voters are beginning to lose their patience. In Germany, the ruling CDU — until recently surfing on a wave of support for Angela Merkel — crashed to defeat in regional elections. In France, polls continue to show a disturbingly tight second round run-off between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. In Italy, populists account for three of the four main parties — and the non-populist fourth party (the centre-left, pro-European Democrats) are losing ground. In Spain, support for the hard Right Vox party continues to grow — even to the extent of overtaking what had been the main opposition party.

I’d like to think that this week’s renewed attack on AstraZeneca is evidence of a political panic. “Let’s blame somebody else before the voters blame us” would be a logical, if cynical, motivation. However, I fear that it’s not cynicism at work here, but a much more dangerous force: self-righteousness.

Suggested reading

Brexit makes more sense than ever

By Peter Franklin

When you read the words of Charles Michel, a disturbing thought hits you: the people actually believe their own rhetoric. Consider this passage, in which Michel favourably compares the EU to Russia and China: “Europe will not use vaccines for propaganda purposes. We promote our values.”

I wonder, where were these “values” when they tried to impose a hard border on the island of Ireland? Or, now, as they cause millions of people to fear a life-saving vaccine?

But then, for the European Union, self-righteousness is not a character flaw, it’s a necessity. The EU is an enterprise — the “European project”, in fact. As such, it is unlike a real country. A nation, like a family, isn’t defined by what it does and still less what it thinks. It has no need to state its purpose or justify its existence.

The phrase, “my country, right or wrong” is widely regarded as the classic statement of jingoistic nationalism. But properly understood, what it means is that you can admit that your country is wrong, because that won’t change the fact of its existence — or of your belonging to it.

Not so with an enterprise. If it doesn’t work anymore, then it shouldn’t continue — because it is no more or less than it what it does. To fail a test as big as Covid — and in particular the vaccination effort — has existential implications for the European Union.

It is therefore not a question of the EU asking itself whether it’s got this one fundamentally wrong. By its own internal logic, it cannot be fundamentally wrong — certainly not on a matter as important as this one. Rather, the question is how it reconciles this basic assumption with reality.

I really hope the gap between the two narrows, because I fear the next set of answers.

The choice made by Green, the head of animal testing compliance for one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, is one increasingly being made by biomedical researchers across the world — but not because of financial constraints, ethical considerations or scientific limitations.

It is all because of a shortage of monkeys.

On almost every continent, pharmaceutical research is being undermined by a dearth of primates caused by an export ban introduced by China last year to restrict the spread of Covid-19. It’s a measure that was initially welcomed in the West, but which is now being seen as an existential threat to biomedical research in the UK, Europe and the US.

Scientists fear that unless this shortage is addressed, the West will become dangerously reliant on China to test new treatments for heart disease, cancers and neurological disorders. More worryingly, come the next global pandemic, the ability to affect which vaccines are approved — and how quickly — could lie firmly in the hands of the Communist Party of China.

Suggested article

How China could turn off Britain's lights

By Clive Hamilton

“It isn’t too dramatic to say that this could be the beginning of the end for biopharmaceutical research in the West,” says Green. “I believe China’s long-term aim is to become the world leader in the sector, the place you will have to go to if you want to test your products. But you have to ask yourself whether you want China to be in control of such an important part of our lives — and to have access to so much of our intellectual property.”

The past 12 months have well demonstrated China’s growing influence on the West. But while attention has been focused on Covid-19, Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s 5G rollout and the threat to democracy in Hong Kong, its impact on Britain’s research sector has slipped under the radar.

Despite protests from critics, the testing of drugs and treatments on “Non-Human Primates” (NHPs), as scientists call them, cannot be replaced by computer modelling. It remains a requirement for many new drugs — including the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines — before trials can be allowed in humans.

In 2019, 2,015 new NHPs were used in experiments in the UK. Only 220 of them were not imported; most being bred under licence at a government breeding facility at Porton Down in Wiltshire. Some 1,154 came from breeding centres in Africa, largely from the island of Mauritius. And 782 came from Asia — roughly 75% of which came from China.

So when, in January last year, China imposed a ban on the export of all animals, the flow of a sizeable number of NHPs — roughly a quarter of those needed in the UK — was suddenly switched off. But that was only the beginning. British researchers also carry out a significant portion of their research through companies in other, worse-hit countries. And as a result, they have been left scrambling around to find the animals they need to complete their research.

US biotech companies were especially hard-hit. The US relies on China for 60% of its monkeys — some 35,000 a year — and because most of the big pharma companies are multinational, shortages in one area have resulted in bottlenecks in others, including the UK. Desperately in demand, the average price of the animals most-often used — rhesus macaques, cynomolgus macaques and marmosets — has doubled to $10,000 in the past year.

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China's useful idiots

By James Bloodworth

Kirk Leech, executive director of the UK-based European Animal Research Association, which represents contract research organisations (CROs) — private labs that conduct animal research on behalf of pharmaceutical companies — has seen rare cases of desperate firms paying $30,000 a-head for monkeys.

“As China is the primary source of NHPs purpose-bred for scientific purposes, this ban has had a dramatic impact on both the supply and the cost of NHPs around the world and the ability of researchers to access the animals essential for the development of new vaccines and medicines,” he says.

“This export ban is a clear and present danger to human health, creating obstacles to, and additional expenses for, the development of vaccines and therapeutics, including for Covid-19. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine relied on preclinical data generated by BioNTech in Germany, using rhesus macaques. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and the Janssen vaccine have also relied on preclinical testing with NHPs for safety and efficacy.”

In the event of another global health crisis like the one we are experiencing, he warns, the repercussions could be severe: “Imagine a new pandemic; we would need a global response, we would need vaccine research and we would need to use NHPs. If shortages grow worse due to China’s actions, UK researchers would not be able to respond as they have to the Covid-19 pandemic. That is a real fear.”

Surely, then, the answer is simply to breed more monkeys outside China? In the long-term, that certainly seems to be the solution. But for at least half a decade, numbers will remain finite. More important, decisions to increase breeding could, counter-intuitively, make matters worse.

“The problem is we can’t simply increase the numbers of monkeys we have for sale,” one major Mauritian breeder told me, on condition of anonymity. “For every 100 breeding females, only around 60 babies are produced, and they are usually sold at two years. In order to increase the numbers, we would have to hold back females for breeding instead of selling them, and that would add to the shortage.

“We would have to hold them back for a further three years until they were mature enough to breed, and a female will produce only one baby every 18 to 20 months. A monkey generation [the time it takes for an animal to be born, reach adulthood and procreate] is five years, so that’s a whole generation taken out until numbers can be increased.

“Since the Chinese export ban, we’ve been receiving calls from researchers all round the world begging for monkeys. Some people sound desperate, but there’s nothing we can do in the short term.”

Suggested article

The Left's shameful silence on China

By Paul Embery

But if the situation is so potentially-damaging to the UK’s life sciences, why isn’t the research sector issuing dire warnings over its future ­— or lack of one?

According to senior industry insiders, there is a two-pronged reluctance to publicly debate the problem. First is the memory of violent demonstrations against the animal research sector at the turn of the century, when staff at Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) in Cambridgeshire were targeted by extremists. Brian Cass, managing director of HLS was beaten outside his home by three men; the company’s marketing director, Andrew Gay, was temporarily blinded in a chemical spray attack; and the homes of workers and contractors were firebombed.

Violent animal activism has since all but evaporated. Yet memories endure of its peak in 2006, when extremists dug up the body of Gladys Hammond, a member of the family which ran Darley Oaks in Staffordshire, a farm which bred guinea pigs for the research industry. Three people who “ransomed” the body in return for the farm halting its business were jailed for 12 years each, but the fear of attracting such levels of violence and hatred remain.

Second, and more significantly, there is concern among CROs that if it became public knowledge that they were being affected by primate shortages, their pharmaceutical clients might turn elsewhere — probably China.

Only one CRO in the UK was prepared to comment publicly, yet anonymously, saying the Chinese ban “will result in global demand exceeding supply and what initially began as a US issue will also negatively impact the European research sector. The lack of access to NHPs due to the China ban will create obstacles to the development of vaccines including for Covid-19 and therapeutics globally.”

Leech — who represents the CROs, as well as pharmaceutical companies, private researchers and some universities — has called upon the British government and the European Commission to demand China lifts the ban, arguing it is in breach of World Trade Organisation General Tariffs and Trade rules. He says importing countries had bio-safety arrangements in place within a month and that the ban could have been lifted by then. The UK and European Commission say they are conducting internal discussions but have not yet agreed to act.

As for why China would deliberately starve the US and Europe of such a vital resource, I twice asked the Chinese Embassy in London to address the accusation that its actions were designed to undermine research in the West, but it failed to reply.

Suggested article

The West's utter failure to see China's end game

By Mike Martin

It is worth noting, however, that such allegations about China’s quest for pharmaceutical dominance are nothing new. In 2016, David Cyranoski, writing for the journal Nature, was granted access to the Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research near Kunming in south west China. In his article “Monkey Kingdom”, he described a research nirvana where animal rights activism doesn’t exist and bureaucracy presents no obstacles.

“With support from central and local governments, high-tech primate facilities have sprung up in Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Suzhou and Guangzhou over the past decade,” he wrote. “These centres can provide scientists with monkeys in large numbers, and offer high-quality animal care and cutting-edge equipment with little red tape.”

He described how “many [researchers] have since sought refuge for their experiments in China… Some of the Chinese centres are even advertising themselves as primate-research hubs where scientists can fly in to take advantage of the latest tools, such as gene editing and advanced imaging.”

Finally, and with estimable prescience, Cyranoski concluded: “With China fast becoming a global centre for primate research, some scientists fear that it could hasten the atrophy of such science in the West and lead to a near monopoly, in which researchers become over-reliant on one country for essential disease research and drug testing.”

Deborah Green agrees. “When you look at China’s stated intentions for their industry, there have been a number of moves that seem intended to drive research towards it,” she says. “That’s everything from their control over lab supplies, PPE, research animals and so on. You can look at what China is spending on pharmaceutical research and development. The US is the biggest investor in this sector but China is now very close, and that number has gone from a very low number to rivalling that of the US in a very short time.”

“This all adds up to a reason to believe that China is trying to take control of this sector,” says Green. “Between the moves to push research towards China, and the animal rights activity in Europe and the US, we are going to see a continuing diminishing of research in the western world and a shift of it towards China. There are already researchers from major academic institutions in the US, and Europe sending their primate work to China. It’s cheaper, there is less regulation and they have the capacity to do it.”

But if major institutions and drug companies start sending highly advanced and hugely sensitive research to be advanced in China, isn’t this a risk every bit as great as that posed by Huawei, whose role in Britain’s 5G infrastructure is now being blocked by the UK government?

“I think this all presents serious issues when you look at China’s attitudes to intellectual property (IP), in that it has a very poor record on respecting IP rights,” says Green. “There is a great risk in taking the products that we develop and sending them over there for testing”

One solution, she says, would be for Western governments to help to create the infrastructure to breed NHPs. “These animals can’t simply be bred anywhere,” she admits. “They need sub-tropical conditions because ideally from a welfare point of view, they should be raised outdoors in large spaces. But where this is possible in parts of the United States and southern Europe, a bit of government protection from animal rights activists would be welcome. In the meantime, we’re hanging on, but we’re losing by inches.”

And if the West does lose, it seems there will be only one winner: China.