(COVID) "Biopower" Explained

Clearing up (1) what "Biopower" means and (2) how it helps us make sense of Lockdown.

Hello,

Today I just wanted to post part of an essay that I wrote for a recent assessment.

Though it was (intended to be) an answer to a slightly different question, it contains a – I think – compelling argument for seeing the COVID-19 response as a form of ‘biopower’. This term has been tossed around ad-nauseam over the last three years and is the source of the pandemic’s most vomitive coinage: Benjamin Bratton’s ‘Positive Biopolitics’ (Don’t read his book; listen to Elena Lange’s hilarious and excoriating review of it instead!), but that does not make it analytically useless or uninteresting. Far from it.

As such, this post has three parts. In the first, I explain what Foucault meant by ‘biopower’, drawing heavily on the work of Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. In the second, I illustrate how ‘biopower’ can be fruitfully applied to the UK’s coronavirus response, focussing specifically on the relationship between Neil Ferguson’s epidemiological modelling and the policies put in place by Boris Johnson’s government. Finally, in the third section, I briefly run through some of the questions that the framework of ‘biopower’ raises about the UK’s response.

Beachside Cloud Vehicle by Hiroshi Nagai

§ So, what is ‘Biopower’? 

In his Society Must Be Defended (Foucault 2003), Michel Foucault distinguishes between two ways of understanding how power can and has been exercised over human beings and their lives: ‘sovereign power’ and ‘biopower’. In this section, I will describe each in turn, dwelling more fully on the latter. 

The former, ‘sovereign power’, refers to the exercise of power most commonly associated with the medieval or pre-modern monarch, and centres of the sovereign’s ‘right of life and death’ over their subjects (Foucault 2003, p.240). In other words, ‘sovereign power’ is the sovereign’s right to put to death a person, or group thereof, or to let them live – one nicely illustrated by the Roman editor’s hand. In the absence of the Emperor, the editor – the person who had sponsored and organised the gladiatorial games, usually a magistrate or other official – was accorded the right to choose whether a fallen gladiator was to be put to death or allowed to live (McElduff 2020). In the former, he raised a closed fist, in the latter an erect thumb (Corbeill 1997, p.2) but through both he exercised sovereign power over the gladiator’s life.

Now, while this sounds like a terrifying exercise of absolute power over a person’s life, both Foucault and others (e.g. Rabinow and Rose 2006, p.202) have pointed out that it could only ever be a sporadic in nature, intervening only at the point of taking life or letting live. Or, as Foucault put it: 

Sovereign power’s effect on life is exercised only when the sovereign can kill. The very essence of the right of life and death is actually the right to kill: it is at the moment when the sovereign can kill that he exercises his right over life. (Foucault 2003, p.240)

As such, whilst sovereign power had final say in whether a life should end or continue, it also had little say in how it continued and did not intervene to shape it. However, Foucault argues (Foucault 2003, p.242), this began to change over the course of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.     

At this this time, through the development of practices like census-taking and record keeping, and the emergence of new academic disciplines like urban planning or public health, a new way of exercising power over people emerged, one that Foucault calls ‘biopower’ (Foucault 2003). New notions about human life and metrics for assessing them like ‘longevity’ or ‘birth/death ratio’ gave rise to a host of new political problems – such as how to maximise the former and balance the latter – and a range of new interventions to address them. However, contrary to sovereign power’s interventions, these focussed on the process of human life itself, on how people behaved and how this affected the metrics that interested those in power. It was, in effect, a rationalisation of power by techno- or social scientific knowledge, where interventions were designed according to and justified according to some theoretical understanding of what human beings were and needed. 

In their essay, Biopower Today, Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose provide a helpful schematisation of biopower’s structure (Rabinow and Rose 2006, p.197). According to them, biopower is always composed of:

1. One or more understanding of the ‘vital’ characteristics of human beings, and a set of authorities deemed competent to adjudicate on that understanding¹. 

2. Strategies of intervention on human beings’ lives, rooted in the understanding of human beings’ ‘vital’ characteristics. Given that all human beings are assumed to share those characteristics², the interventions will focus on the collective and will usually be performed in the name of life and health. 

3. Modes of subjectification, that is the ways in which the subjects of biopower come to see themselves and their duties and obligations in light of this understanding. 

Given that this is all a bit abstract, I would like to illustrate using an example taken from Foucault’s earlier The Birth of Social Medicine (2019, pp.134-156). In this essay, Foucault discusses medicine’s shift in focus from the individual patient and his needs to the health of the population as a whole, and the subsequent emergence of disciplines and structures that would culminate in our contemporary public health bodies and welfare states. Within this, he describes the rise of labour medicine in the UK. Following a period of rapid industrialisation and infrastructure reform – for example, in the postal service and transport systems – the urban poor came to be identified as a political problem for two reasons. 

The first was political. Previously, the urban poor had depended on precarious employment in the form of delivering people’s mail or running peoples’ errands for money, following the infrastructure reform, they found themselves unable to make a living or meet their needs, including medical ones. This led to a series of popular disturbances which – paired with knowledge of the revolution in France – led those in power to fear the worst, namely that the urban poor would become a political force capable of participating in revolts. The second reason was more clearly tied to medicine and health. As a result of outbreaks of cholera and other epidemic disease, the poor were identified as potential dangers to the life and health of the population – including those in power – as a whole.     

These political and medical worries gave rise to a complex system of medical bodies and legislation whose responsibilities included meeting the poor’s basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, and medical treatment. But their responsibilities also went beyond this and they were also tasked with:

• Control of mass vaccination, obliging the poor to get vaccinated

• Record-keeping of epidemic or epidemic-liable diseases, and of making the reporting of such illnesses mandatory

• The localisation of ‘unhealthy’ or ‘insalubrious’ places and, if necessary, their elimination. 

In this, you find Rabinow and Rose’s basic schema at play. Firstly, you have an understanding of human beings’ ‘vital’ characteristics. In this case, the poor are identified as having basic needs for food, shelter and care and as being potential vectors for disease, which presented a threat to the population as a whole, including those in power. Secondly, you have a series of political interventions on people’s lives that are grounded by this understanding – in this case, the provision of basic necessities as well as vaccination, surveillance for potential outbreaks and, in some cases, the destruction of living quarters.

Incidentally, this example also highlights two note-worthy things about biopower’s interventions. Firstly, it highlights how biopower’s interventions can serve other concerns than those to do with life and health. Foucault specifies (2019, p.152) how these medical policies addressed threats to political stability as well as to population health. This is not to say that they served as a Trojan horse for an effort to suppress revolution (although this is surely partially true), but that the policy-response was shaped by more than one consideration – they weren’t, you might say, just ‘following the science’… 

And secondly, it highlights how these interventions can simultaneously be both ‘regulatory’ and ‘disciplinary’³. Though a policy like mass-vaccination is aimed at regulating population level phenomena like “deaths from epidemic disease X”, its enforcement often involves the threat or reality of coercion for individual people, such as those reluctant to accept inoculation. 

Unsurprisingly then, as Foucault notes (Foucault 2019, p.154), these policies engendered a good deal of popular resistance – Foucault calls it ‘small-scale medical insurrection’ – from those being regulated and disciplined. Various protest groups emerged to defend “the right to life, the right to get sick, to care for oneself and to die in the manner one wished”. They challenged the compulsory medicalisation of the poor by the state and vehemently opposed mandatory mass-vaccinations. In fact, in Stuck, Heidi Larson notes that organised resistance against vaccines may be as old as compulsory vaccination itself (Larson 2020, p.62).

Which brings me onto the third and final point of the schema: modes of subjectification. This refers to the ways in which biopower’s subjects come to understand themselves and their duties and obligations, both to themselves and to others, as a result of the account of human beings’ vital characteristics. In the case of English labour medicine, the identification of the urban poor as a source of epidemic disease and general insalubrity assumedly led to the sense amongst some of them that getting vaccinated was a duty to others – Larson (2020, p.62) states that compulsory vaccination resulted in a peak coverage of 90% in the UK, some of which, I think, must have been experienced as a social duty⁴. 

Before I move on, it is relevant to my over-arching argument to note that biopower is not necessarily a critical concept. In other words, identifying a particular intervention into human life as an exercise of biopower is not necessarily to damn it as morally objectionable or ‘bad’. It is just to offer an account of its structure and its relation to a particular discipline or field of knowledge. For example, it would be quite consistent to agree that the account of compulsory vaccination given above illustrates an example of biopower and to think that the account given of the poor was correct and that such coercive methods were justified. For their part, Rabinow and Rose seem quite sunny about the transformations in biopower, and new modes of subjectification, that the 21^st century’s research into genomics and genetics promises (Rabinow and Rose 2006, p.213).

Instead, as Hubert Dreyfus (2017, p.167) suggests, ‘biopower’ opens the way to thinking analytically about policies and activities that would otherwise have benefitted from the glabrous patina of scientific or academic rationality. It allows us to look anew at concepts that seem so self-evident, like ‘source of disease transmission’, and at the political interventions rooted in them (e.g. compulsory mass-vaccination) and to ask where they came from, whether they were right or justified and what their consequences were (Raman and Tutton 2010, p.714). It also allows us to ask whether everything about us is (or should be) amenable to biopower’s rationalisations and interventions. Is ‘love’? Should ‘reproduction’ be?

Is ‘health’?  

§ “Follow the Science.”

(Dr. Anthony Fauci interviewed by The Economist, 26^th April 2022)

In this section, I will argue that the three-part biopower schema can be successfully applied to the UK’s policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Having briefly described its context, I will describe the scientific modelling that prompted the UK government to emit stay-at-home orders and close schools. I will argue that this modelling provided the government with an understanding of human life and needs, and thus with the rationale for its interventions on human life. I will then briefly touch on some of the modes of subjectification that this gave rise to.  

The stay-at-home orders⁵ imposed in the UK, and across the world in Spring 2020 were largely unprecedented (Wagner 2022, p.33-38). Though some were very briefly tried in Mexico in 2009 and in Sierra Leone in winter 2014-2015 in response to the Swine Flu and Ebola virus respectively, the prolonged, state-wide shutdowns of civic life and the economy that were first introduced by Xi Jingping’s China in response to the coronavirus had never been tried. Indeed, the shorter ones that were implemented were both praised (Wagner 2022, p.34) and criticised as dangerous and ineffective (Green 2021; Cordelia et al. 2017, p.12), and did not even feature in WHO’s most recent report on respiratory disease management (Green and Bell 2021, p.24). 

Unsurprisingly then, the UK government did not initially intend to emulate the CCP and appeared to be adopting a strategy centred on voluntary behaviour changes and reaching herd immunity, similar to the one adopted by Sweden or Nicaragua (Wagner 2022, p.42-44, p.52; Anderberg 2021; Green and Perry 2022). As a later committee report found:

[The Government initially appeared to adopt] a policy approach of fatalism about the prospects for Covid in the community: seeking to manage, but not suppress, infection. This amounted in practice to accepting that herd immunity by infection was the inevitable outcome […] (Science and Health committee 2021, quoted in Wagner 2022, p.53)

However, in the middle of March 2020, something changed.

• One or more understanding of the ‘vital’ characteristics of human beings.

Based on modelling being done by the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), key advisors to the prime minister Boris Johnson began urging him to follow Italy in placing the country into lockdown. Then, on the 16^th of March, SAGE considered a paper that proved pivotal in the UK government’s decision to follow this advice – Prof. Neil Ferguson’s modelling of the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand (Ferguson et al. 2020; Bruce-Lockhart, BurnMurdoch, and Barker 2020; Adam 2020 (1))⁶.

In this paper, Ferguson and his colleagues anticipate the impacts of various NPIs like school closures and population-wide social distancing on two key metrics: deaths from COVID-19 and critical care bed occupancy in UK hospitals. Bridging these and the NPIs was the so-called ‘R-number’ or ‘reproduction number’ which is the average number of cases that each case of COVID-19 is expected to cause (Ferguson et al. 2020, p.3; Delameter et al., p.1). If the R number is greater than 1, then every infected person is expected to infect more than one person and the case numbers, and therefore deaths/critical care bed occupancy, will increase. On the other hand, if R is less than 1, then the opposite in true. Each infected person is expected to infect less than one person and case numbers, and therefore deaths/critical care bed occupancy, will decrease. 

Alongside predicting 510,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the absence of any public health intervention, Ferguson and his team concluded that policies aimed at merely slowing or mitigating the spread of COVID-19 (that is, reducing the R number but not to below 1) like those the government was favouring would not be sufficient to prevent critical care capacity from being overwhelmed. Instead, they said, we needed policies aimed at suppressing the spread (that is, that pushed R below 1) and recommended a policy of “[indefinite] population-wide social distancing combined with home isolation of cases and school and university closures” (Ferguson et al. 2020, p.15). This would require swift action, with interventions being put in place well before healthcare capacity was overwhelmed. 

In effect, this paper gave the UK government an account of its’ subjects’ vital characteristics – that is, what they were and needed – and thereby provided the rationale that shaped its subsequent exercise of biopower. The model focussed on only one aspect of human social life and health: COVID-19. Everything else was reduced to its relation to this disease – to its case-numbers, transmission, deaths, and the associated critical care bed occupancy. For example, human contacts were reduced to ‘transmission events’, with people being sorted into one of two categories: ‘susceptible’ or ‘infectious’ (Ferguson et al. 2020, p.4). 

Within the bounds of this model, COVID-19 is all that matters. It is the sole measure according to which the failure or success of various policy options is judged, and as such the only thing worthy of concern. By the authors’ own admission, they considered neither economic nor the ethical costs of their proposed policies (Ferguson et al. 2020, p.4), and they did not consider the impact it might have on other diseases. Furthermore, they made the “pessimistic” assumption of no spontaneous behaviour change amongst people (Ferguson et al. 2020, p.6), depicting them not just as essentially vectors for the coronavirus, but passive ones to boot.

This sort of reductive interpretation or idealisation of human life and health is an unavoidable aspect of modelling  (O’Neil 2017, p.20), and why models are not usually taken to be literal, exhaustive descriptions of the world. But, given the dire predictions and policy recommendations described above, I think it’s clear that the authors believed that the circumstances warranted its being taken as such⁷. And, by describing some of its policy response, I will try to illustrate why I think that it’s clear that the UK government concurred.     

• Strategies of intervention on human beings’ lives.

Ferguson’s model resulted in the most totalising public health management response that the UK has seen. Though the government’s policies went beyond what Ferguson’s paper recommended, they nonetheless all reflected its interpretation of human life and its singular concern: suppressing the coronavirus.

It started on March 16^th when Boris Johnson advised all Britons – not just those with symptoms – to stop all ‘non-essential’ contact with others and ‘unnecessary’ travel. Then, two days later, on March 18^th, he announced that schools would be closing for the vast majority of pupils in the UK (Wagner 2022, p.54; Cole and Kingsley 2022, p.62). When the emergency regulations finally appeared in law on March 26^th, they did three things:

1. They banned people from being outside the place they lived without a reasonable excuse, 

2. They prohibited gatherings of more than two people in public spaces,

3. They forced ‘non-essential’ businesses to close.

These, in essence, made the model’s interpretation real. They divided our normal lives and activities in two categories, the ‘essential’ (e.g. one form of exercise per day, going food shopping, running a pharmacy) and ‘non-essential’ or ‘unnecessary’ (e.g. socialising with friends, sitting in a classroom, attending a loved-one’s funeral), and then whittled them down around the single goal of suppressing case-numbers, pushing R below 1, and protecting critical care bed capacity. Activities deemed ‘non-essential’ relative to this goal were prohibited.

As a result, policing became a fixture of British public life as a somewhat befuddled force was given new powers to shape the most mundane or private aspects of our lives to this goal (Wagner 2022, p.65). People caught sitting on benches were asked to move along please, groups were dispersed, and everyone from teens having elicit parties to families hiking in the peak district were threatened with heavy fines. Coughing or spitting on someone aggressively became a crime worthy of jail-time (Quinn 2020), and even who you could sleep with was affected, with it becoming illegal for you to have sex with someone outside of your own household for well over a year in some parts of the UK (Wagner 2022, p.85). 

Indeed, the government’s control over our lives became so extensive and granular, that – in a passage describing biopower all but in name – Adam Wagner suggests that the relationship between British life and the law was flipped (Wagner 2022, p.61). Previously, he says, as citizens of a liberal state, British citizens had lived within the confines of the law and were technically able to do anything that was not explicitly prohibited. However, from Spring 2020, we were made to live according to the law, which is to say that we could only do what it explicitly permitted of us. So, on these terms, our lives were moulded to a set of laws that reflected the model’s interpretation of social life and its lone concern: suppressing the coronavirus.  

Even the media-sphere was affected as ‘R’ became a quasi-totemic fixture of the government’s messaging and public concern (Adam 2020 (2)). In a press conference delivered on April 30^th, 2020, Boris Johnson showed a video that echoed Ferguson’s messaging to the letter: “The Government has set out five tests” it said,

That must be met before we begin to adjust social distancing measures. One of the most important tests is [R]. We have to make sure this is decreasing […] To beat coronavirus, we need to keep R as low as we possibly can […] In March, at its peak [R] was around 3, which seems to be the natural rate for this virus. Since then, thanks to you and the social distancing measures you’ve followed, we’ve been able to reduce R and it is now below 1. But we’ve only just passed the peak of the virus and its vital R stays below 1. Over the coming weeks and months the Government will be monitoring R very carefully. It will be a key factor in how social distancing measures are used in the future. (Coronavirus press conference, 30^th April 2020).

The UK government’s COVID-19 laws, messaging, and other policy interventions reflected what Ferguson’s team had identified as human beings’ vital characteristics in Spring 2020. Both the model and the policy it gave rise to, boiled down our lives and health down to a single concern: COVID-19.

Which, again, brings me on to the final part of Rabinow and Rose’s schema:

• Modes of subjectification.

So, what new self-understandings did this reinterpretation of human life and health in terms of the coronavirus give rise to? Whilst I must admit to not having any conclusive answers, it is one of the areas of research that I will discuss in the final section. However, before doing so, I would like to propose two preliminary answers: fear and the abandonment of children. 

As a part of her book on the UK government’s use of fear-messaging during the pandemic (Dodsworth 2021), Laura Dodsworth compiled a number of testimonies from members of the public about their experiences of the policy response. Unsurprisingly, the common theme between them is the experience of fear or heightened anxiety. It seems that many people echoed Ferguson’s model and the government’s policy response in reinterpreting their lives in terms of the transmission and consequences of a single virus, resulting in a profound shift in our experience of the world and our own vulnerability. Many activities that had previously been mundane or innocuous now appeared laced with danger and became sources of great fearfulness. 

One of Dodsworth’s informants (a man with incurable cancer and heart problems) described how just walking past others sent him into a state of panic and how, upon returning home, he’d thrown out his shoes and sat in a scalding bath (Dodsworth 2021, p.14-16). Another (a mother) described how her 13-year-old daughter grew too scared to even leave the house (Dodsworth 2021, p.170-171). To these, we can add the reports of people ‘sanitizing’ their groceries (Morris 2020), mask-wearing, or the experience of reflexively avoiding shop aisles with people already in them. 

Tellingly, in many cases this was not an abstract fear of mortality itself but (as per the model and policy) focussed on the coronavirus itself. A nurse describes how an elderly out-patient broke-down crying, declaring, “I don’t want to die, I’m so frightened, I don’t want to die, I’ll die of anything but not that virus” (Dodsworth 2021, p.161).     

Another place that this shift was clearly seen was in the adult world’s treatment of children. From the start, children were in the odd position of being both at low risk from the illness and in need of particular attentions and care from adults. This means that their needs did not fit comfortably with the singular focus on the coronavirus and, as a result, were often lost from view. 

According to Liz Cole and Molly Kingsley, there was little consideration of the potential costs of the coronavirus-suppression measures that children were subjected to, including school-closures, face-masks, and asymptomatic testing (Cole and Kingsley 2022, pp.37-49). Instead, children came to be treated as little more than vectors for the coronavirus, often at the cost of their own health, education, and well-being (Cole and Kingsley 2022, pp.150-159). 

Nowhere was this better illustrated than when the Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union, Dr Mary Bousted, opined in May 2020 that primary schools should not reopen on the basis that kids are “mucky” (Cole and Kingsley 2022, p.124). Whether you agree with Bousted’s sentiment or not, this reflects the shift in the adult world’s understanding of its duty of care and education to children that occurred in early-to-mid2020.    

§ Questions raised.

In this essay so far, I have argued that Michel Foucault’s ‘biopower’ can be successfully applied to a very recent (even ongoing?) political crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, I will try to show why this application is fruitful by listing some of the pertinent questions that I believe it raises. 

The first of these is ‘Why did Ferguson’s interpretation win?’ As I noted in my account of Foucault’s case-study of English labour medicine, biopower’s accounts of life are frequently shaped by factors other than science. What were the political or social factors at play here? For example, Toby Green (2021, p.49-55 and p.193, respectively) suggests that both the profound polarisation of western politics and an overweening faith in technology and natural science amongst the UK’s political-class played important roles. Similarly, Roger Koppl (2021) suggests that SAGE’s organisational structure encouraged a disciplinary siloing and a failure to consider other, salient dimensions of the problem such as the economy or children’s needs. He also notes that SAGE has no formal procedure of contestation which creates the illusion of ‘unified scientific advice’ for government to follow. 

Secondly, I noted above that biopower involves a rationalisation of interventions by some sort of techno-scientific account of human life. I then said that it seemed like the UK government had taken Ferguson’s account of human life ‘literally’. Clearly, this suggests that being ‘taken literally’ is one of the ways that an intervention can be rationalised by techno-science. But are there others? Especially considering their prevalence in contemporary political and corporate decision-making (O’Neil 2017), are there other ways that models are used to guide policy? Further, under what conditions is it appropriate – if it is ever – for authorities to take a model of something as complex as ‘life’ or ‘health’ literally? And what precedent has the use of models in COVID-19 biopower set of the future?

Finally, modes of subjectification. What impact has the COVID-19 response had on people’s self-understanding? What new obligations, expectations, responsibilities, or even subjectivities have arisen as a result? And what might their long-term impact be? Will having been encouraged to view ourselves and each other as vectors for disease have a lasting impact, especially in children? Do we now have a keener sense of each other’s vulnerabilities but also a greater suspicion of the other? And what about face-coverings? Are these set to become a fixture of our respiratory-virus seasons and political fault-lines? And has our understanding or expectation of personal freedom changed? 

Given that these questions pertain to people’s (including politicians’) practices and self-conceptions, I take them to be conducive to social-scientific investigation. And Foucault’s conceptualisation of ‘biopower’ is one (probably amongst many!) way of fruitfully engaging with them.     

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1. Though all of Foucault’ examples are tied to population-focussed disciplines like epidemiology or demography, Rabinow and Rose highlight how that need not always be the case and that the discipline(s) providing the understanding of man’s vital characteristics (and thus the understanding itself!) will change over time. For example, they explore how the then-new fields of genetics and genomics might come to influence that understanding, and thus the exercise of biopower.

2. On these terms, even ‘anti-essentialist’ accounts of human beings (e.g. such as the one described by Abu-Lughod 1986) can form the basis of an exercise of biopower. If you say that a general account of what a ‘human’ is essentially is impossible because they lack any shared, essential characteristics then you are, in a sense, providing a general account of human beings (just not an ‘essentialist’ one).

3. Which Foucault refers to as “biopolitics” and “the anatomo-politics of the human body” of the human body, respectively (Foucault 2003, p.243).  

4. The example of English Labour Medicine also illustrates a mode of subjectification that Rabinow and Rose do not describe: negative or reactive identification against an account of human beings’ vital characteristics, or a policy rooted in this. The reaction to compulsory vaccination is a good example of this. Protestors refused both the premise that their fellows were sources of epidemic disease and the implication that this justified compulsory vaccination. Though this is a reaction against a particular exercise of biopower, it is no less a case of subjectification as described by Rabinow and Rose since the understanding of human beings’ vital characteristics opened a new way for people to understand themselves and their relation to others.

5. Throughout this essay, I will be using Adam Wagner’s definition of ‘lockdown’ and ‘stay-at-home orders’ as “the [legal] prohibition against leaving home without reasonable excuse” (Wagner 2022, p.61).  

6. And not just the UK government. Ferguson’s modelling reportedly influenced other countries like France (Mucchielli 2022, p.45) and the United States to adopt the lockdown strategy. 

7. To clarify, I am not making the absurd claim that Ferguson and his co-authors actually believed that their models had mysteriously become a literally true, exhaustive representation of the world; I’m claiming that they believed that the circumstances (e.g. 500, 000 hypothetical deaths, an ailing health-service, high levels of uncertainty about the virus itself…) justified treating it as such.