Among the media and intelligentsia, there was widespread support for the draconian approach to Covid. Early on, they decided that using the heavy hand of government to the maximum was the only way to go. That’s hardly surprising since they favor government control over nearly everything.
As we leave Covid behind, those who don’t remain bizarrely committed to this approach would like us to forget it ever happened. But two leftists, Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, have written a book that is highly critical of the lockdowns and mandates. Australian law professor James Allan reviews their book for Law & Liberty.
Allan writes, “The authors bring swathes of data and evidence to bear to argue that lockdowns were a public policy disaster of gargantuan proportions. They weaponized the police and flew in the face of data that was, in fact, available early on in the crisis. There was censorship, bans, shadow bans, fake and politicized ‘fact checking,’ and the stifling of dissenting views, some directed at the most credentialed epidemiologists in the world. Not least among these were the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for focused protection on the elderly and vulnerable and for leaving everyone else to get on with life and make his or her own choices; this was the gist of every pandemic plan before the start of 2020. What happened in six or seven weeks from late 2019, you might ask, other than an authoritarian government in China welding people into their homes?”
Departing from the standard modus operandi of the left, Green and Fazi look objectively at data and conclude that the most authoritarian governments, including Australia’s, did enormous damage to their citizens, and especially the young and the poor. They aren’t afraid to say that Sweden, for so long viciously attacked by the media because it did not impose lockdowns, made the right decision.
Leftists used to care about the poor (although their prescriptions made things worse for them) and evidently that concern opened the authors’ eyes to Covid realities. Allan writes, “The lockdowns and other governmental responses amounted to a massive transfer of wealth (not to mention life opportunities) from the young to the old. Likewise, these policies shifted money from the poor to the rich. The massive increase in the debt and incredible printing of money delivered big-time asset inflation which benefited (no surprises here) those with the most assets. The pandemic years were the best years ever for billionaires.”
The book isn’t without its flaws, however. The authors just can’t resist the temptation to rant about capitalism even though it should be apparent even the the dullest individual that the Covid mania had nothing at all to do with capitalism and was in fact a gigantic attack upon it. I surmise that these guys, after going so far against their “progressive” tribe, felt the need to show that they haven’t completely gone over to the dark side.
Still, the book is very valuable for its clear analysis of the damage governments did with their Covid policies.