Us For UsForThem? Maybe.
Airing some doubts about a recent open letter.
As of last Wednesday, I am1 a signatory of UsForThem’s open letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, raising concerns about the UK’s Hallett inquiry into the government’s management of the COVID-19 inquiry (UsForThem 2023).
I signed the letter immediately, even impulsively. I am a fan of UsForThem’s tireless advocacy against coronamania over the last three years and am worried (indeed convinced) that this inquiry is closer to an institutionalisation of the lockdown-til-vaccine strategy rather than an attempt to earnestly re-examine and reflect upon the policy decisions and assumptions of the last three years. As such, any attempt to thwart the crystallisation of lockdowns as received wisdom seemed like something worthy of support, regardless of its details.
However, upon rereading the letter and mulling its contents over, I am no longer certain that I was right to sign it. Though I do not strictly disagree with anything written (in particular, the criticisms of the inquiry), I do not believe that UsForThem’s demands go far enough – and that in failing to do so, they concede too much to the establishment view of lockdowns and science-led policy-making. These reservations are worth spelling out because they go to the heart of what is wrong with much of the lockdown scepticism.
So, what does this letter actually say?
Importantly, UsForThem agrees with the Hallett inquiry’s stated goal – to “learn the lessons that will inform future pandemic responses in the UK”. However, they are concerned that the inquiry is currently deviating from this goal in a number of key ways:
Firstly, in its evaluation of the lockdown response. UsForThem’s letter observes that the inquiry has made no serious attempt to evaluate the UK’s lockdown strategy or to compare it with possible alternatives (such as Sweden’s softer approach). Instead, the inquiry seems to have just assumed that the lockdowns were “necessary, proportionate, and justified” and that the government failed in not imposing them sooner and harder. As the letter points out, the inquiry cannot possibly learn the lessons of this pandemic if it isn’t ready to challenge SW1’s received wisdom and to critically re-examine all of the COVID-19 policies, decision-making processes, and assumptions.
Secondly, in its examination of government’s decision-making ecology. UsForThem note that the inquiry has thus far shown itself to be remarkably supine before the government’s scientific advisors, in particular those that were pro-lockdown, and uncritical of either their testimony or the role they played. Consider, for example, Hugo Keith KC’s nauseating obsequiousness during his questioning of friend-of-the-blog John Edmunds (“…you are but one of a number of brilliant scientists and advisers who assisted the government and the country in the remarkable way that you did…” (UK COVID-19 Inquiry 2023)) and contrast it with his studied coldness during the questioning of Dominic Cummings or Martin Reynolds. The inquiry has made much of the administrative incompetence and inefficiency of the bumbling, Brexity Johnson administration – it has made much less of the the narrowness of the scientific advice it employed, and the way this may have affected policy. Additionally, the inquiry has not looked at the processes or justifications for by-passing, and indeed suspending, parliamentary (i.e. democratic) decision-making for much of the policy, and has not considered the paltry use of the Moral and Ethical Advisory Group (MEAG) throughout the lockdowns and mass vaccination (See also Kingsley et al. 2023, p.105).
In response to these criticisms, UsForThem make four requests of the COVID inquiry:
To make sure that metrics other than deaths from COVID-19 – including the notorious ‘QALYs lost’ (Quality Adjusted Life Years lost) – are used in its evaluation of the lockdown strategy.
To implement an “independent and thorough review” of all the relevant data on the NPIs and an examination of their underlying assumptions.
To investigate the role of government agencies in monitoring and actively censoring or discrediting commentaries and opinions that contradicted government’s official policy and messaging.
And, finally, to scrutinise the ethical aspects of government’s policy making over the last three years, including its fear-driven messaging campaigns (See Dodsworth 2021).
And this, really, is where my problems begin.
My reservations.
To briefly repeat myself, I largely concur with UsForThem’s complaints about the inquiry’s investigations. However, I also believe that their requests do not go nearly far enough. More precisely, UsForThem’s letter does not challenge the moral and epistemic hegemony that public health and its subsidiary disciplines like epidemiology enjoy over swathes of our policy-making (and, indeed, our hearts and minds) and so cedes too much ground to some of the logics and practices that made lockdowns politically feasible.
From the crisis’ beginning (and long before that), public health and epidemiology were accorded a monopolistic authority to frame the “problem” we faced and to set the terms of the debate over possible “solutions”. To be taken seriously by the policy machine, any proposed strategy (be it ‘Zer0COVID’, ‘focussed protection’, or ‘rolling lockdown-til-vaccine’) had to be rooted in concepts and concerns that make sense within public health’s disciplinary cosmology. Strategies or concerns external to public health (like human rights, civil liberties, religious faith, local knowledge etc.) were side-lined and given a choice: keep schtum, offer post-hoc rationalisations to a strategy already legitimised by public health, or be decried as an anti-science crank. Needless to say, most opted for the first two – those, like Giorgio Agamben, who didn’t were sorely punished for it.
UsForThem’s requests do not actually challenge the public health hegemon. In effect, (1) and (2) demand that the inquiry quantify the harms associated with various NPIs (e.g. lockdowns, masks, endless testing) as a part of its evaluation, ostensibly with the implicit premise that if these are found to exceed the benefits then the NPIs should be judged to have been wrong. While in principle I don’t have many objections to the project of laying bare the harms caused by the lockdowns2, I do take issue with this premise.
Cost/benefit terms are not a challenge to public health. On the contrary, they are often used by public healthists to assess and justify policy-decisions – including the lockdown-til-vaccine pursued by most occidental states. You can (as lockdown sceptics do) think that governments made the wrong call in 2020/2021 but if you accept cost/benefit as your terms of policy evaluation, you make a major concession – that if benefits exceed costs, if QALYs saved exceed QALYs lost, then lockdowns are a legitimate policy response and exercise of power.
This is a massive concession for UsForThem to make and one that I would prefer to see re-examined and challenged by lockdown sceptics3. Lockdown harms matter, but it is not self-evident that they matter because they exceed lockdown’s benefits. It may be that they matter because they are the consequence of a barrage of ethically or epistemically unjustifiable policies that should rightfully never have been imposed.
Fundamental, philosophical questions like this need to be publicly explored – as does the impact of public health’s moral monopoly on the answers that were provided throughout the crisis. Ideally (it’s a pipe-dream), this would happen as a part of the inquiry and government would be brought to consider possible strategies for institutional reform that could help to break public health’s total control of policy. In a recent interview with UnHerd, for example, Anders Tegnell suggested that one of the reasons that his country didn’t lockdown is that the government (and therefore public health) is limited in the sorts of emergency powers that it can take for itself:
Sweden’s constitutional order does not allow for the declaration of a state of emergency. Fundamental civil rights and freedoms can only be suspended in the case of war. Public health emergencies are therefore regulated by ordinary law… It is legally impossible to enforce a general quarantine or “lockdown” measures. (Sayers 2023)
While I haven’t been able to confirm this claim, it may be that the UK needs to consider similar limits on government power to avoid future lockdowns.
In any case, all of this is seemingly absent from UsForThem’s demands to the inquiry. Indeed, ironically, if the organisation has accepted the cost/benefit framing, then the lesson that they have learned from the pandemic may not be all that different from the one that the inquiry will inevitably learn – that under certain circumstances, lockdowns may be “necessary, proportionate, and justified”. They may, in effect, have accepted a form of corona-centrism (Tucker 2021). While, as I say, I don’t wholly regret signing their letter, I also insist that UsForThem and other lockdown sceptics need to push beyond the cost/benefit discussion and demand that fundamental moral and philosophical questions be asked. They – we – cannot keep settling for the terms dictated to us by public health and epidemiology.
Now, if these sorts of fundamental questions sound like self-indulgent drivel or not otherwise relevant to the hard work of making policy, then I respectfully suggest that you give up on talking about “rights” or “liberty” or “flourishing” or even “liberalism”, as working out what any of these mean involves posing questions like these. Making cost/benefit analysis the whole of your moral imagination means abandoning these difficult, fundamental questions. It means conceding to life as an animal in a temperature-controlled pen - mostly comfortable and well-kept, but ever at the mercy of the farmhouse’s ledger.
Merry Christmas 🎄🎅!
References:
Dodsworth, Laura. 2021. A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Pinter & Martin.
Kingsley, Molly, Arabella Skinner, and Ben Kingsley. 2023. The Accountability Deficit: How Ministers and Officials Evaded Accountability, Misled the Public and Violated Democracy during the Pandemic. 1st edition. UK Book Publishing.
Sayers, Freddie. 2023. ‘Anders Tegnell’s Lesson for the Covid Inquiry’. UnHerd. https://unherd.com/2023/12/anders-tegnells-lesson-for-the-covid-inquiry/ (December 22, 2023).
Tucker, Ian. 2021. ‘Prof Francois Balloux: “The Pandemic Has Created a Market for Gloom and Doom”’. The Observer. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/07/prof-francois-balloux-the-pandemic-has-created-a-market-for-gloom-and-doom (December 22, 2023).
UK COVID-19 Inquiry. 2023. ‘Transcript of Module 2 Public Hearing on 19 October 2023 UK Covid-19 Inquiry Archives’. UK Covid-19 Inquiry. https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/documents/transcript-of-module-2-public-hearing-on-19-october-2023/ (December 22, 2023).
UsForThem. 2023. ‘Open Letter to Rishi Sunak Raising Concerns about the Covid Inquiry - UsforThem’. https://usforthem.co.uk/concerns-in-relation-to-the-uk-covid-inquiry/ (December 22, 2023).
As far as I can tell. I can’t quite work out their email confirmation system 😩. I may have signed it three times, I may not have signed it at all. Please don’t hold my vulgar boomerisms against me or my arguments.
I do have reservations about the limits and usefulness of quantification here.
In fairness, maybe this is implied in the fourth recommendation but the wording is so vague that it is hard to know.