Anti-lockdowners cling to their pet experts, who have been horribly wrong
There’s an old joke concerning someone sceptical about the effect of gravity. He throws himself off a tall building, and as he falls past each floor, he says, with undiminished confidence: “So far, so good.” I am reminded of this by the Covid-19 sceptics (or lockdown sceptics, as some call themselves).
When the reported infection rates began soaring at the beginning of winter, their go-to expert, a former Pfizer executive with a PhD in respiratory pharmacology, Michael Yeadon, declared this was a “casedemic” rather than a pandemic: these were almost all “false positives”. Then, as the ICUs began filling up at an alarming rate, he asserted that the increased numbers were people with other conditions: Covid-19 was not really the cause of their hospital admission. Yes, any increase must be happening because so many more old people have been falling over and suffering broken hips this winter. Whatever.
And this month, as the Covid deaths escalated, Yeadon — who has denounced as unsafe and unnecessary the vaccine made by his erstwhile employer — took to Twitter to assert, “We do NOT have EXCESS DEATHS”. To put it most politely, his opinion does not tally with the findings of the Office for National Statistics, which released figures last week showing that in 2020 the number of “excess deaths”, as a proportion of the population, amounted to a 12.1% rise over the average of the previous five years. As Sky’s outstanding data analyst, Ed Conway, wrote: “That’s the biggest leap in any year since 1940 ... the only other years that came close — save for 1940 — are 1929, in which there was a global flu pandemic on top of an economic crash; 1918, year of the Spanish flu; and 1915, during the First World War.”
But was Yeadon referring only to the winter deaths? Well, the official England and Wales figure for mortality over the last five weeks of 2020 was 59,195, compared with an average of 48,901 over the past five years. Which might explain the inability of some hospital mortuaries to meet demand, and the opening of emergency facilities for storing the bodies.
But, confident in the wisdom of Yeadon, Toby Young, the creator of the Lockdown Sceptics website, declared this month: “If you compare mortality in December of 2020 with average December mortality over the last five years, there doesn’t appear to be any increase at all.” The Conservative MP Neil O’Brien, citing the actual figures, accused Young of lying. This might be to overestimate Young’s intellectual grasp of the matter: to lie — as opposed to being merely ignorant — means you understand what the truth is, and choose to deny it.
Funnily enough, I had a (courteous) email from Young last week, critical of some of my columns, which had supported the government’s policies of mandatory social restrictions and attacked the so-called lockdown sceptics, not least for their dismissing so many victims as old or vulnerable folk who were due to meet their maker soon anyway. Young told me, “I’m not sure you’ve fully grasped the case [of lockdown sceptics], but I think the case you make is often against a caricature of our position.”
Well, Toby, you did write, in March: “Spending £350bn to prolong the lives of a few hundred thousand mostly elderly people is an irresponsible use of taxpayers’ money.” Leave aside the moral issues, he, in common with others of this opinion, never attempts to calculate the counterfactual: what would be the economic consequences, not least for the hospitality industry, of adopting a so-called herd immunity strategy and letting the virus rip. A number of serious economists — free-market ones, not lovers of big government — have done so. I’m thinking of Sam Bowman of the Adam Smith Institute, Julian Jessop of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Ryan Bourne of the Cato Institute. They have all supported the policy of government-mandated social distancing.
Of course such calculations involve considerations of the cost of preserving lives. One of the most familiar critiques of the government has been that it “sacrificed the lives of cancer sufferers”. It is true that during the first wave of the virus, the NHS, to a much greater extent than was necessary, cancelled thousands of procedures to clear the decks for Covid-19 cases — and the ejection of the elderly from hospitals back into care homes without checking if they were infected was, as I wrote at the time, “protecting the NHS but writing off the most vulnerable”. However, we are now seeing exactly what the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, warned about in September: the extent of the second wave — a second wave that Young, along with the rest of the “lockdown sceptics”, adamantly insisted would never happen — has led to thousands of cancer procedures being postponed, as hospitals are inundated with those at risk of immediate death from Covid-19.
I am interested to know what Sunetra Gupta thinks of this. She is the professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, regarded as some sort of goddess by the “sceptics”. In March she published a paper with a model purporting to show half the population of the UK had already had the virus, and so we were near herd immunity. In May she said Covid-19 was “on its way out” — later adding that it would not resurge in London — and that the infection mortality rate was “definitely less than one in 1,000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000”. When she said this, we had already seen 36,000 Covid deaths. So, even if 100% of our citizens had been infected, we would have to have had a population of 360 million for her low-end estimate to be right.
Yet Gupta, the principal academic critic of lockdowns, has never retracted anything and was consulted by Boris Johnson when the PM rejected the advice of Whitty (an epidemiologist himself) to reintroduce a lockdown in October.
The point is that journalists such as Young, and others in my trade who take the same line, rely almost entirely on the spurious authority of Gupta and Yeadon for the unshakeable confidence they have in their own opinion. Their now ridiculous articles confidently dismissing the dangers of Covid-19 stemmed not from any original thought but from blindly trusting what they took to be experts. This is quite funny, as it’s the same accusation they make about those of us who trusted Whitty.
But there are consequences. On the day I heard from Young, I also got an email from a hospital doctor: “Not just me but every doctor I work with in acute care has treated people sick or even dying with Covid-19 who point-blank refused to believe it was real or that they had it, because of what they read or heard on social media or from certain commentators.” And there are no jokes to be made about that.