1. Since this thread took off, I’ve read a lot of pro-lockdown content. These are huge twitter networks, dominated by people claiming to be academics, doctors.

Their ideas and statements are some of the most extreme political content on the internet. https://twitter.com/eugyppius1/status/1341446197983277056

2. They are radicals with a cause equivalent to great failed social engineering projects like the Great Leap Forward

It is not uncommon, for example, to hear that the goal of mass containment is the *eradication* of corona. In this framing every single infection is a failure.

3. B/c it is unquestionable doctrine that lockdowns are the right strategy, infections that happen despite lockdowns are the fault of people breaking the rules. Lockdowns continue entirely because of individual responsibility; they could stop if we would just be responsible.

4. They will continue forever, until people discover responsibility. There is no point at which they will no longer be justified, only a utopian threshold, when everyone obeys & they are no longer necessary

These are insane views that reflect months of relentless media agitprop.

5. The risk that Covid poses to every demographic is relentlessly exaggerated, particularly to defeat observations that the young are not at risk. Covid makes you blind, deaf, infertile, permanently disabled. Long Covid forever.

6. Low Covid mortality is laid at the door of medical professionals. There are legions of people out there who believe Covid would be as deadly as SARS, if it weren’t for amazing modern medicine.

7. What our doctors do to save so many lives, is unclear: Most of these people are also hostile to or ignorant of pharmaceutical interventions, astoundingly uninterested in vaccines, firm believers in reinfection. Only Non Pharmaceutical Interventions can win against Covid.

8. All of this started with talk of curves and waves, and everyone in these circles loves to talk about exponential growth. The awkward fact that almost no countries have exponential growth in cases right now, is totally ignored.

9. The mantra is always: As bad as things are, they would be worse without lockdown; they are as bad as they are, because you are breaking the rules; places with fewer measures where it’s better, have more responsible people; this will only end, when you are responsible;

10. ... economic destruction, depression, suicide, are also the inevitable consequences of this terrible pandemic, because the lockdowns that appear to be their immediate cause, are only obvious and necessary policy response to Covid.

11. Covid infections are punishment for recreational and religious activities: Children playing, adults talking in pubs, people going to church, visiting family, holidays. If we stop all this, we stop corona, and if corona doesn’t stop, it’s because we haven’t stopped this.

12. I won’t link to any threads; you can easily find examples of this yourself

Interacting with these people inflames them, & over time they have responded to contrary evidence & arguments not by reassessing views, but by adopting circular & unfalsifiable formulations