The media is wrong about the "science" - but Covid isn't about science anyway

Why science shouldn't really matter when discussing Covid policies

For those who know me and have been following my content on Twitter in the past years, this will seem like a strange title. I have spent the best part of 18 months trying to get to the bottom of what the actual science says about viruses, infectious diseases, and, especially, viral “transmission”. I have studied both sides of the Covid argument, the avid “lockdowners”, mostly proclaiming their plans to be carried by the morally good and based on TheScienceTM, and the “lockdown sceptics” on the other side. Amazingly, it appears both sides claim science to be on their side, bombarding each other with studies, pre-prints, lab analyses and the like.

You will also know that, after careful intake of both sides’ contributions, I am firmly on the sceptics side. In a nutshell, here is what I believe to be true: initially, in early 2020, weird things happened in China, and a giant propaganda machine was set in motion to advocate, for reasons I do not claim to know, lockdowns, closures, and other measures that are damaging to society. The West, and I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, followed and imposed restrictions which they believed to be effective against the virus. Trouble is, they were based on awful science, such as an unwavering belief in asymptomatic transmission as a driver of the disease, and a lack of understanding of the basic transmission principles, adhering, in blind faith, to a concept of person-to-person droplet transmission that made no sense to the logical thinkers in the first place.

This was the first of three elements that have created this mess. When the realization came that perhaps this wasn’t all right, that the disease wasn’t as bad and didn’t threaten the huge majority of the population, politicians saw vaccines as the “golden bullet” (as the excellent Sebastian Rushworth put it) - all they needed to do was prolong the sense of crisis and fear until vaccines arrived. Their policies would seem proportional and they would be able to congratulate each other on their successful vaccination campaigns to save the world.

The second element of the mess came when it emerged that these vaccines weren’t all that brilliant, that they would not stop anyone from getting infected, and that - god help us - perhaps the crisis would fade away anyway, perhaps too soon (as the current panic campaign related to Omicron illustrates). Governments had, of course, bought vaccines for years, for everyone.

The third element of the mess is the global leadership’s wet dream of a digital identity, easy to track and trace, with a tap to services, freedoms and wealth that can be turned off whenever our centralized leadership so desires. This is a complex matter, and I do not claim to know the full background of these strategies but it’s clear that digital currencies and the fear of losing control over the financial markets plays a big role here.

None of these three things, in my view, were part of a master plan. They converged and the key stakeholders of each element found in each other natural allies. So what if we overrated Covid and ruined our societies (with little empirically evident gain) - keep the fear up until vaccines save us. Let’s produce vaccines for the entire world, the biggest business of all time. Let’s use vaccine passports as a springboard to a digital ID. There isn’t much difference between different, converging plans, and conspiracies, if you think about it.

So why doesn’t science matter? One would imagine we will ultimately arrive at conclusions to all the questions that we are debating. Did lockdowns actually save one life? How much damage did they do, and was it worth the trade-off? Does physical distancing make sense against a largely airborne virus? What impact does mask wearing have on community infection levels and what harm does it do? There will be consensus on these questions soon, maybe in five or ten years, and they may lead to a reckoning but more likely, will be acknowledged slowly and imperceptibly and the majority of the population won’t notice - they’ll just be happy to have a normal life again.

It doesn’t matter, though. Science should not matter at all when it comes to the key decisions in this complex situation. Man is different from animals in many ways but most importantly, humans have moral standards on which our civilizations are based, and you can trace them all back to the concept of “humanity”.

One would imagine that such a concept includes the right of people to not have their expiry date determined by others. In the best-case scenario where lockdowns would save twice as many people as they harmed, governments would still determine, with only a few lines in a press release, who gets harmed and who gets to benefit. One could argue such decisions are taken every day - but not in that magnitude. The only thing that comes close to lockdowns as a selection process are decisions taken in war time - which city to attack, for example, and which military groups to sacrifice in the process.

If you are twenty years old, living in the dirty suburbs in a small apartment with your big family, one press release can kill you. Your job suspended for months, you will no longer be able to care for your family, parents and children. You’ll not have committed any error or crime but your government will have decided (on the off chance it will actually work) to protect a wealthy 80-year old in a retirement home over you. It will have made a choice - who to live, who to die. Science, here, is a side topic, irrelevant in the discussion.

Think of the famous example of the self-driving car, whose computer will need to take a decision to run over the kid chasing a ball across the street, or to crash its driver into a wall . It would be crazy to build in such decision making into a computer car, though it will undoubtedly happen or has happened already.

Lockdowns and other restrictive measures are, of course, exactly the same thing - only with a terrible caveat: we are not sure they work to protect for balance.

Masks, then, are an even more dramatic example. Most countries survived the first Covid wave in March 2020 without masks, and established science said they wouldn’t help at all to limit disease spread. They then became some kind of totem for the lockdowners, the morally superior, and the zero-Covidians. No-one really knows why, or what scientific discovery, if any, has led to this shift.

What we know is that the lockdowners all agree on their key points, while the anti-lockdown group all agree on a totally different science, with almost no overlap between the two belief systems. That in itself is of course the most bizarre situation, with science widely known to be constantly changing and evolving. The only explanation for this cold war like situation is that one of the sides is making everything up.

For masks, again, science should not matter at all. If you remove faces, you remove humanity. You remove what distinguishes humans from animals, effectively turning them into sheep. Maybe that is the motivation here, to turn individuals into members of a herd, so that you can influence them as one, rather than dealing with individual belief systems.

What screams Wrong should not be considered at all, even if science backed it up. And science doesn’t, which basically makes it a crime to put masks on children’s faces. The question of children should be an outrageous debate, boosted by mass civil unrest. The reason it isn’t is probably that they put masks on us adults first, and therefore, turned us into a herd, and killed our individuality.

I believe that science will ultimately recognize the importance of viral loads, and consequently, the understanding will grow that normal life, a mix of the young and old, the healthy and the sick, is the best way of getting through viral outbreaks. Funny that we had this strategy already (we followed it for thousands of years) but chose to abandon it here, only to get back to it years later, one must hope.

If you are not sure which science is right, maybe you should ask yourself which science sounds morally right: restrictions and the stifling of emotions, or prudent but normal life. The Covid policies should never have been based on “science”, right or wrong, they should have been based on the use of our moral compass. It’s just a coincidence that ultimately, I believe, following our moral compass would have led us to what will prove to be the correct science.