10 Reasons A Second Lockdown is a Terrible Idea

I thought I’d put this list together, just in case anyone needs reminding.

  1. Our rights belong to us by dint of our status as freeborn Englishman. Therefore, if the Government is going to suspend them, it needs a really good reason for doing so. It did not have a good reason when the first lockdown was imposed in March and it doesn’t have a good reason today. (I made this argument in discussion with Prof Michael Levitt on Twitter.)
  2. Quarantining the healthy as well as the sick to stop a virus spreading has been proved not to work historically and, for that reason, was advised against in the UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011. More recently, Dr David Nabarro of the WHO advised governments to treat lockdowns as a “last resort“.
  3. There’s little evidence that lockdowns reduce Covid mortality. The evidence on this is plentiful, but to give just one example the per capita Covid fatalities in the eight US states that didn’t shut down (North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming and Utah) was lower than in the 42 states that did. (See this piece in the WSJ.) The main argument for locking down – and the one we heard yesterday – is that it prevents healthcare systems becoming overwhelmed, something which means more people dying from COVID-19, as well as other diseases. But in those US states that didn’t shut down, the healthcare systems weren’t overwhelmed – and nor was Sweden’s. A group of researchers at Uppsala University plugged Sweden’s numbers into Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College model in early April, hoping to persuade the authorities to abandon its mitigation strategy and impose a lockdown. According to the model, if the Swedish Government continued to pursue its “reckless” policy the capacity of the healthcare system would be overwhelmed 40-fold. Needless to say, it wasn’t even overwhelmed one-fold. In any event, we’ve already built additional critical care capacity into the English healthcare system to mitigate this risk – the seven Nightingale Hospitals, for instance, as well as all those ventilators the Government procured in March and April. Oddly, they weren’t mentioned in yesterday’s Downing Street briefing. As for overwhelmed healthcare systems being unable to treat other diseases, isn’t that already happening in our underwhelmed, Covid-ready NHS? One argument Patrick Vallance made yesterday was that if Covid admissions continue to rise at their present rate, the NHS would have to start turning away other patients in need of critical care. But it’s been doing that since March.
  4. Interrupting transmission among those who aren’t vulnerable to the disease, i.e. everyone under 75 and in good health, delays the time it takes for the population to reach herd immunity and that, in turn, prolongs the period in which the vulnerable have to be shielded and causes needless misery. (See the Great Barrington Declaration.) Given that we’re going to have to learn to live with this virus, and that the “vaccines” are only likely to reduce the severity of the symptoms, what’s the point of continually kicking the can down the road?
  5. Lockdowns cause more loss of life than they prevent. This is contested, obviously, because the number of lives they’ve saved depends on a counter-factual generated by shonky computer models, and, on the other side of the equation, we don’t yet now how much loss of life has been caused by the lockdowns. But given that the average age of the people whose lives are supposedly being saved is 80+ and given the tens of thousands of people who will die unnecessarily as a result of cancer screening programmes being postponed, cancer care being delayed, strokes and cardiovascular disease being untreated, the rise in suicides and the long-term impact of job losses on mortality, it seems likely that lockdowns cause a net loss of life.
  6. Lockdowns wreak havoc with people’s mental health. The Centre for Mental Health estimates that up to 10 million people in England (almost 20% of the population) will need either new or additional mental health support as a direct consequence of the crisis. 1.5 million of those will be children and young people under 18.
  7. Lockdowns cause catastrophic economic damage, destroying businesses and throwing millions out of work. Boris announced today that the furlough programme would be extended for another month. But how do you compensate those people who won’t have a job to go back to? 750,000 people lost their jobs as a result of the first lockdown. How many more will lose their jobs as a result of the second? According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, which keeps tabs on public spending, the Government will have to borrow £372 billion for the current financial year (April 2020 to April 2021), compared to £55 billion in a normal year. And that’s before the cost of new lockdowns and support measures announced today are factored in.
  8. The global economic recession caused by the lockdowns will likely reverse the progress that’s been made in the past 15 years in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the developing world and will cause huge loss of life. From “The Coming Post-Covid Global Order“ by Joel Kotkin and Hügo Krüger: “In its most recent analysis, the World Bank predicted that the global economy will shrink by 5.2% in 2020, with developing countries overall seeing their incomes fall for the first time in 60 years. The United Nations predicts that the pandemic recession could plunge as many as 420 million people into extreme poverty, defined as earning less than $2 a day. The disruption will be particularly notable in the poorest countries. The UN has forecast that Africa could have 30 million more people in poverty. A study by the International Growth Centre spoke of “staggering” implications with 9.1% of the population descending into extreme poverty as savings are drained, with two-thirds of this due to lockdown. The loss of remittances has cost developing economies billions more income.”
  9. Lockdowns are fundamentally undemocratic in that they involve the arrogation of power by the executive branch of government at the expense of the legislative branch, rule by decree, postponing elections so politicians remain in power after their term of office has expired, suspending the right to protest, censoring the fourth estate (see Ofcom’s ‘coronavirus guidance’) and restricting travel. What guarantee do we have that things will return to normal when the pandemic is over? Will the powers-that-be ever declare victory in this war, given that it will mean a diminution of their power? As Milton Friedman said, nothing is as permanent as a temporary government programme.
  10. Lockdowns require police forces to enforce arbitrary, illogical rules in a draconian, heavy-handed way. That undermines the rule of law and destroys policing by consent.

Stop Press: Matt Ridley in the Telegraph has come up with six reasons why a second lockdown is a mistake

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https://lockdownsceptics.org/

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