Coronavirus: Is shutting down Britain – with unprecedented curbs on ancient liberties – REALLY the best answer?

Peter Hitchens

Some years ago I had the very good luck to fall into the hands of a totally useless doctor. It was hell, and nearly worse than that, but it taught me one of the most important lessons of my life. He was charming, grey-haired, smooth and beautifully dressed. He was standing in for my usual GP, a shabbier, more abrasive man.

I went to him with a troubling, persistent pain in a tender place. He prescribed an antibiotic. Days passed. It did not work. The pain grew worse. He declared that in that case I needed surgery, and the specialist to whom he sent me agreed with barely a glance. I was on the conveyor belt to the operating table.

In those days I believed, as so many do, in the medical profession. I was awed by their qualifications. Yet the prospect of a rather nasty operation filled me with gloom and doubt. As I waited miserably for the anaesthetist in the huge London hospital to which I had been sent, a new doctor appeared. I braced myself for another session of being asked ‘Does this hurt?’ and replying, between clenched teeth, that yes it blinking well did. But this third man was different. He did not ask me pointlessly if it hurt. He knew it did. He was, crucially, a thinking man who did not take for granted what he was told.

He looked at my notes. He actually read them, which I don’t think anyone else ever had. He swore under his breath. He hurried from the room, only to return shortly afterwards to say I should get dressed and go home. The operation was cancelled. All I needed was a different antibiotic, which he – there and then – prescribed and which cured the problem in three days. He was furious, and managed to convey tactfully that the original prescription had been incompetent and wrong.

The whole miserable business had been a dismal and frightening mistake. He was sorry. Heaven knows what would have happened if Providence had not brought that third doctor into the room. I still shudder slightly to think of it. But the point was this. A mere title, a white coat, a smooth manner, a winning way with long words and technical jargon, will never again be enough for me.

It never, ever does any harm to question decisions which you think are wrong. If they are right, then no harm will be done. They will be able to deal with your questions. If they are, in fact, wrong, you could save everyone a lot of trouble.

And so here I am, asking bluntly – is the closedown of the country the right answer to the coronavirus? I’ll be accused of undermining the NHS and threatening public health and all kinds of other conformist rubbish. But I ask you to join me, because if we have this wrong we have a great deal to lose.

I don’t just address this plea to my readers. I think my fellow journalists should ask the same questions. I think MPs of all parties should ask them when they are urged tomorrow to pass into law a frightening series of restrictions on ancient liberties and vast increases in police and state powers.

Did you know that the Government and Opposition had originally agreed that there would not even be a vote on these measures? Even Vladimir Putin might hesitate before doing anything so blatant. If there is no serious rebellion against this plan in the Commons, then I think we can commemorate tomorrow, March 23, 2020, as the day Parliament died. Yet, as far as I can see, the population cares more about running out of lavatory paper. Praise must go to David Davis and Chris Bryant, two MPs who have bravely challenged this measure.

It may also be the day our economy perished. The incessant coverage of health scares and supermarket panics has obscured the dire news coming each hour from the stock markets and the money exchanges. The wealth that should pay our pensions is shrivelling as share values fade and fall. The pound sterling has lost a huge part of its value. Governments all over the world are resorting to risky, frantic measures which make Jeremy Corbyn’s magic money tree look like sober, sound finance. Much of this has been made far worse by the general shutdown of the planet on the pretext of the coronavirus scare. However bad this virus is (and I will come to that), the feverish panic on the world’s trading floors is at least as bad.

And then there is the Johnson Government’s stumbling retreat from reason into fear. At first, Mr Johnson was true to himself and resisted wild demands to close down the country. But bit by bit he gave in.

The schools were to stay open. Now they are shutting, with miserable consequences for this year’s A-level cohort. Cafes and pubs were to be allowed to stay open, but now that is over. On this logic, shops and supermarkets must be next, with everyone forced to rely on overstrained delivery vans. And that will presumably be followed by hairdressers, dry cleaners and shoe repairers.

How long before we need passes to go out in the streets, as in any other banana republic? As for the grotesque, bullying powers to be created on Monday, I can only tell you that you will hate them like poison by the time they are imposed on you.

All the crudest weapons of despotism, the curfew, the presumption of guilt and the power of arbitrary arrest, are taking shape in the midst of what used to be a free country. And we, who like to boast of how calm we are in a crisis, seem to despise our ancient hard-bought freedom and actually want to rush into the warm, firm arms of Big Brother.

Imagine, police officers forcing you to be screened for a disease, and locking you up for 48 hours if you object. Is this China or Britain? Think how this power could be used against, literally, anybody.

The Bill also gives Ministers the authority to ban mass gatherings. It will enable police and public health workers to place restrictions on a person’s ‘movements and travel’, ‘activities’ and ‘contact with others’.

Many court cases will now take place via video-link, and if a coroner suspects someone has died of coronavirus there will be no inquest. They say this is temporary. They always do.

Well, is it justified? There is a document from a team at Imperial College in London which is being used to justify it. It warns of vast numbers of deaths if the country is not subjected to a medieval curfew.

But this is all speculation. It claims, in my view quite wrongly, that the coronavirus has ‘comparable lethality’ to the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed at least 17 million people and mainly attacked the young.

What can one say to this? In a pungent letter to The Times last week, a leading vet, Dick Sibley, cast doubt on the brilliance of the Imperial College scientists, saying that his heart sank when he learned they were advising the Government. Calling them a ‘team of doom-mongers’, he said their advice on the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak ‘led to what I believe to be the unnecessary slaughter of millions of healthy cattle and sheep’ until they were overruled by the then Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King.

He added: ‘I hope that Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance show similar wisdom. They must ensure that measures are proportionate, balanced and practical.’

Avoidable deaths are tragic, but each year there are already many deaths, especially among the old, from complications of flu leading to pneumonia.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) tells me that the number of flu cases and deaths due to flu-related complications in England alone averages 17,000 a year. This varies greatly each winter, ranging from 1,692 deaths last season (2018/19) to 28,330 deaths in 2014/15.

The DHSC notes that many of those who die from these diseases have underlying health conditions, as do almost all the victims of coronavirus so far, here and elsewhere. As the experienced and knowledgeable doctor who writes under the pseudonym ‘MD’ in the Left-wing magazine Private Eye wrote at the start of the panic: ‘In the winter of 2017-18, more than 50,000 excess deaths occurred in England and Wales, largely unnoticed.’

Nor is it just respiratory diseases that carry people off too soon. In the Government’s table of ‘deaths considered avoidable’, it lists 31,307 deaths from cardiovascular diseases in England and Wales for 2013, the last year for which they could give me figures.

This, largely the toll of unhealthy lifestyles, was out of a total of 114,740 ‘avoidable’ deaths in that year. To put all these figures in perspective, please note that every human being in the United Kingdom suffers from a fatal condition – being alive.

About 1,600 people die every day in the UK for one reason or another. A similar figure applies in Italy and a much larger one in China. The coronavirus deaths, while distressing and shocking, are not so numerous as to require the civilised world to shut down transport and commerce, nor to surrender centuries-old liberties in an afternoon.

We are warned of supposedly devastating death rates. But at least one expert, John Ioannidis, is not so sure. He is Professor of Medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University in California. He says the data are utterly unreliable because so many cases are going unrecorded.

He warns: ‘This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4 per cent rate from the World Health Organisation, cause horror and are meaningless.’ In only one place – aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess – has an entire closed community been available for study. And the death rate there – just one per cent – is distorted because so many of those aboard were elderly. The real rate, adjusted for a wide age range, could be as low as 0.05 per cent and as high as one per cent.

As Prof Ioannidis says: ‘That huge range markedly affects how severe the pandemic is and what should be done. A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05 per cent is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.’

Epidemic disasters have been predicted many times before and have not been anything like as bad as feared.

The former editor of The Times, Sir Simon Jenkins, recently listed these unfulfilled scares: bird flu did not kill the predicted millions in 1997. In 1999 it was Mad Cow Disease and its human variant, vCJD, which was predicted to kill half a million. Fewer than 200 in fact died from it in the UK.

The first Sars outbreak of 2003 was reported as having ‘a 25 per cent chance of killing tens of millions’ and being ‘worse than Aids’. In 2006, another bout of bird flu was declared ‘the first pandemic of the 21st Century’.

There were similar warnings in 2009, that swine flu could kill 65,000. It did not. The Council of Europe described the hyping of the 2009 pandemic as ‘one of the great medical scandals of the century’. Well, we shall no doubt see.

But while I see very little evidence of a pandemic, and much more of a PanicDemic, I can witness on my daily round the slow strangulation of dozens of small businesses near where I live and work, and the catastrophic collapse of a flourishing society, all these things brought on by a Government policy made out of fear and speculation rather than thought.

Much that is closing may never open again. The time lost to schoolchildren and university students – in debt for courses which have simply ceased to be taught – is irrecoverable, just as the jobs which are being wiped out will not reappear when the panic at last subsides.

We are told that we must emulate Italy or China, but there is no evidence that the flailing, despotic measures taken in these countries reduced the incidence of coronavirus. The most basic error in science is to assume that because B happens after A, that B was caused by A.

There may, just, be time to reconsider. I know that many of you long for some sort of coherent opposition to be voiced. The people who are paid to be the Opposition do not seem to wish to earn their rations, so it is up to the rest of us. I despair that so many in the commentariat and politics obediently accept what they are being told. I have lived long enough, and travelled far enough, to know that authority is often wrong and cannot always be trusted.

I also know that dissent at this time will bring me abuse and perhaps worse. But I am not saying this for fun, or to be ‘contrarian’ –that stupid word which suggests that you are picking an argument for fun. This is not fun.

This is our future, and if I did not lift my voice to speak up for it now, even if I do it quite alone, I should consider that I was not worthy to call myself English or British, or a journalist, and that my parents’ generation had wasted their time saving the freedom and prosperity which they handed on to me after a long and cruel struggle whose privations and griefs we can barely imagine.

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The neo-fascism we never talk about

It isn’t only because of the non-stop media coverage of Covid-19 that yesterday’s conviction for one of the worst acts of extremist violence of modern times has not generated much discussion. It is also because that act of extremist violence was executed by an Islamist. And we just don’t like talking about the problem of Islamism. We certainly don’t try to galvanise people in opposition to it, as left-wingers do following far-right acts of violence. And nor do we dig down to try to uncover the ideologies and tensions that might have energised the violent outburst, as media outlets do whenever a white man shoots up a school. No, we move on. We say it was probably a rarity. We say, ‘Don’t look back in anger’.

This is the real reason why yesterday’s guilty verdict against Hashem Abedi for 22 murders has not trended or stirred up much debate or even made a huge dent in the news cycle. Not only because we’re all obsessing over the coronavirus, but also because talking about Islamist extremism is a no-no in these stringent PC times in which nothing must ever be allowed to expose the discontents of the ideology of multiculturalism. Twenty-two murders. You might expect that to warrant rather more discussion. Those 22 victims were, of course, the attendees of Ariana Grande’s concert at the Manchester Arena in 2017, where Hashem’s brother, Salman, detonated a suicide bomb that slaughtered children and parents and pop fans.

Yesterday, at the Old Bailey, Hashem was found guilty of assisting his brother in this violent act of extremist hatred and Islamist supremacy. Hashem assisted his brother through the entire process. They sourced chemicals together. They bought thousands of bolts and screws that were packed into the bomb in order that it would inflict as much harm as possible. Hashem’s fingerprints were found at key addresses where the plans were hatched and in a car where the bomb materials were stored. Prosecutors said Hashem stood ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with his brother in the preparation of the bloody act and was ‘just as guilty as murder’. That guilt has now been established. Hashem is now, following yesterday’s verdict, one of the most notorious mass murderers in the history of this country.

Where’s the debate? The outrage? The concern that an extremist ideology – ISIS-inspired Islamism – has fuelled numerous mass acts of violence over the past five years, leading to the deaths of scores of people in stabbings, vehicle attacks and bombings? Where are the hashtags, the anti-fascist statements, the gatherings of activists to say, ‘We have to weed this dangerous extremism out of our society’? That is the kind of thing we always see and hear following far-right violence. Such violence is always held up as proof of warped thinking in certain sections of society and as a sure sign that the neo-fascistic threat lurks in everyday life. But we never hear those kinds of things being said in relation to Islamist extremism.

In fact, we hear the opposite. Don’t get angry, we’re told. Don’t talk about it too much. Don’t look too far into the community tensions and supremacist ideology that motors this violence. Don’t even name it: witness the hostility heaped on those who refer to this kind of violence as Islamist or Islamic. They will be accused of Islamophobia. They will be told that they are stirring up racial hatred. They will be demonised as the true threat to the social fabric. The authorities’ instinct after every Islamist attack in recent years has been to stymie public discussion, negate social concern, and police strong emotions. That’s why Oasis’s ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ became the anthem of our national grieving after the slaughter in Manchester carried out by Salman and Hashem – not only because it’s a Mancunian pop classic, but also because it captures officialdom’s obsessive concern with neutering emotional and political responses to radical Islam.

Such are the double standards that social commentators are even made uncomfortable by any suggestion that there should be a firm response to Islamist terrorism. When it comes to far-right or neo-fascistic groups, we are told they must be fought; they must be defeated; there must be an unforgiving response to these dangerous, hateful groups. But with radical Islamists, it’s all about ‘de-radicalisation’. Which effectively means therapy. They are seen as not being fully in control of their own ideological convictions and dire crimes. The very use of the term ‘radicalised’ reduces them to passive creatures who have had something bad done to them, probably by a twisted preacher on the internet. Apparently they need our help. Fascists must be defeated, but violent Islamists must be cared for, put on the couch, pitied. They are treated as more sympathetic than other extremists – that is how far the ideology of identitarian pity for certain groups has gone.

This erasure of debate, this clampdown on strong emotions, is explicitly designed to guard contemporary British society from interrogation and discussion. Has the ideology of multiculturalism made us more divided? Why are there fairly significant numbers of people who feel completely un-integrated into British society? Why do people who were born here or who lived here for a very long time loathe this society with such violent passion? It is the desire to avoid these kinds of questions that motors the collective amnesia enforced in the wake of Islamist attacks. And so even though Hashem Abedi is a worse mass murderer than Peter Sutcliffe, and a more violent extremist than Soho gay-pub bomber Paul Copeland, his name is unlikely to be remembered for long. And even though the Manchester Arena bombing was one of the worst acts of violence in modern British times, it is rarely commemorated or talked about. ‘Don’t look back in anger’ is becoming ‘Don’t look back at all’.

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Nudging: an elite disease

Throughout the coronavirus crisis, the UK government has insisted over and over again that its decisions are guided by ‘the science’. And, at first glance, this sounds sensible. After all, experts in medical science have much to tell us about how the virus spreads, and how we might best manage it.

But that isn’t the only kind of science that UK prime minister Boris Johnson is relying on. His government is also drawing on the work of the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), also known as the Nudge Unit. Established by then prime minister David Cameron a decade ago to aid government decision-making, BIT is now a private consultancy with government clients worldwide. It is part-owned by the UK Cabinet Office, its employees and the innovation charity Nesta.

According to reports, BIT has been using computer modelling to explore potential public reactions to possible government measures that could be used to deal with Covid-19. So, for instance, the government’s decision not to encourage greater social isolation is said to be informed by BIT’s view that people will suffer ‘fatigue’ with such measures if imposed too early in the crisis. More generally, BIT is reported to be shaping the presentation of government messaging, finding ways to ‘nudge’ people into changing their behaviour, rather than ordering them to do so.

This science is not a medical science. It is what BIT and others are pleased to call behavioural science, a relatively new and conspicuously trendy branch of the social sciences that uses glib psychology to model and find ways to change people’s behaviour. According to BIT, behavioural science can help you in your love life (‘do not under any circumstances trust yourself’), reduce sexual harassment, and cut ‘phishing’ viruses infecting your email. Clearly, it is powerful stuff.

The problem here is not just that the government is exploiting expert authority for political ends. It is also that the expertise being relied upon is entirely suspect. For nudge theory is a theory premised on the belief that the public no longer consists of rational decision-making beings, but of half-conscious, half-baked creatures who need to be subtly guided in what experts deem to be the right direction. In fact, this is not really a science at all — it is a patronising worldview, couched in psychobabble.

The use of nudge theory in relation to Covid-19 has been roundly criticised, and not just by those with a more enlightened view of the people’s capacity to make decisions for themselves. It has also been criticised by those who might ordinarily support behavioural science. The Guardian, for example, has been picking apart Johnson’s weakness for BIT-style nudging, contending that it has warped Britain’s approach to the Covid-19 crisis.

The criticism is justified. By using nudge theory to justify certain decisions, such as not yet enforcing social isolation because people could get bored, the government has invited a lot of questions and accusations of a lack of transparency. On what system of modelling and assumptions are these decisions based? Where is the evidence, for example, that people will tire of government bans on social interaction? From where and when was that evidence taken? Might not the context of Covid-19 be different to that of earlier examples where public ‘fatigue’ with state bans has kicked in?

BIT’s website doesn’t offer any further clue as to how such decisions have been reached. An article warns about medical disinformation – fake news – in the Democratic Republic of the Congo around Ebola, and about how ‘corrective’ information against fake news about the Zika virus in Brazil didn’t actually help. But that’s it. It publishes no more examples of its work on previous epidemics, and reveals none of the assumptions that drive its computer modelling of Covid-19. Ironically, the very same article about Ebola and Zika says that authorities dealing with epidemics should be transparent, and ‘show people the work that is being done behind the scenes’. Which is the very thing too much of the government’s response to Covid-19 has lacked.

In Britain and elsewhere, people appreciate clear, decisive leadership about what they should do about Covid-19. What they don’t appreciate is being ‘nudged’, using psychological tricks that implicitly deny their moral autonomy to make choices as they see fit. And they don’t like being viewed implicitly as passive objects who receive and transmit behaviours as though they themselves form an infectious virus. From on high, what BIT calls ‘messages’, targeted at different social groups or personalised through IT, smack to the public of know-all elitism.

However, before simply siding with today’s critics of the nudgers, let’s remember that too many have embraced the assumptions that justify nudge theory. When the book which popularised nudge theory – Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s seminal Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness – was published in 2008, the Observer praised it for ‘saving us from our inability to act rationally’. Likewise the Guardian has since proclaimed that integrating behavioural science with Big Data and green design offers ‘promising solutions to the challenge of getting people to behave more sustainably’. Indeed, whether it is to change our diets or levels of alcohol consumption, nudging the plebs still commands enormous assent among Britain’s elite. Thus, UK chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, who is playing a pivotal role in the current crisis, is an enthusiastic supporter of BIT’s work across HMRC, the Department of Work and Pensions, Ofgem and Public Health England.

Those now obsessing over the role of nudging in the UK government’s response to the coronavirus crisis are hypocrites. They fault Boris and the Tories for nudging because they loathe Boris and the Tories, not nudging itself. If it was a set of pro-EU politicians they support doing the nudging, no doubt they would be all for it.

What these critics in fact share with No10, and its fondness for nudging, is an endless suspicion of, and contempt for, what they see as an easily manipulated public. The only thing they dislike is that it’s not their government doing the manipulation.

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Only the 'Crooks' Can Save Us Now

The Left hate drug companies with a passion
  
A specter haunts progressive America — the possibility that a company might make too much money solving the world’s coronavirus problem.

At the last Democratic debate Bernie Sanders called the leaders of the pharmaceutical industry “a bunch of crooks,” who are telling themselves in the midst of the epidemic, “Wow, what an opportunity to make a fortune.”

Op-eds have sprung up warning, “Drug Companies Will Make a Killing From Coronavirus” (The New York Times) and “How Big Pharma Will Profit From the Coronavirus” (The Intercept).

This would seem the least of our problems right now, but the pharmaceutical industry is such a boogeyman that it gets roundly attacked even while racing to provide a boon to public health.

Bernie’s view that drug company executives are “crooks” betrays his Marxoid belief that profit is a form of theft. Of course, even people who aren’t socialists are scourges of the industry. Pharma brought much of this on itself with the opioid debacle. Yet these companies routinely create medical miracles.

Yes, they make money doing it, but the profit motive is the reason why they exist in the first place. There’s a reason we introduce more new therapies than any country in the world.

When faced with what’s been called a once-in-a-generation pathogen, would we rather have a robust commercial drug industry or not? Brilliant, creative people scattered throughout companies and universities working to be the first to a solution or not? Investors looking to back promising research or not?

If your answer to any of these questions is “no,” you are probably a socialist, a populist firing at the wrong targets or someone incapable of doing basic cost-benefit calculations.

As Chris Pope of the Manhattan Institute notes, if a new drug — even an expensive one — obviates hospital stays and physician care, it can reduce health care costs over time.

Consider the current crisis. The costs of the “medieval” methods we are using to try to control the coronavirus virus are unimaginably high — shutting down swaths of the economy and throwing millions of people out of work. Gross domestic product could drop 10% or more this quarter.

What would we pay for a vaccine to render all this needless? Even if it were a trillion dollars, the price of the Trump-proposed stimulus package, it would be a bargain.

That said, the price for a vaccine probably won’t be exorbitant. The nightmare stories of ungodly expensive treatments usually involve drugs for rare diseases affecting a small number of people. This is different. There’s a vast pool of people who will want the coronavirus vaccine.

The overall picture of prescription drugs is more complicated than advertised. Once new drugs come off patent, cheaper generic drugs arrive. This is why per capita spending on traditional drugs has been declining.

As for patents, the point of them is, as the Constitution puts it, “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” They ensure that companies get the benefit of research that is expensive and risky. Even in the best circumstance, after perhaps spending $2 billion on research, a company may wait a decade for Food and Drug Administration approval.

If a company doesn’t have a period of protection for its intellectual property when it can reap the market benefits, much of this research would dry up. And who’s going to step up and fill the gap?

It is a marvel that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is already working with a Cambridge, Mass. company, Moderna, on a vaccine trial. This is a model of public-private cooperation. Anyone who would want to subtract Moderna from the process because it stands to profit is an ideological zealot heedless of public health.

This crisis brings home the incalculable value of a world-class pharmaceutical sector. We can continue to shelter in place or hope that the “crooks” pursuing breakthrough drugs and treatments make the current disruptions in our national life completely unnecessary.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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