THREAD ON LOCKDOWN SKEPTICS: There are lots of threads circulating listing all the ways that the “lockdown skeptics” have been wrong. But this misses the point. They never aimed to be right: they were playing a completely different game. From early on, people around the Lockdown

Skeptics movement understood that our government was not sympathetic to implementing the sorts of public health measures needed to suppress the virus. What this meant was that the lockdown skeptics didn’t need to provide reasons for them not to do it, but instead they just needed

to provide a level of plausible deniability for a government that was always more than happy to split with the scientific consensus. Every single time the scientists and public health advisors proposed action, the lockdown skeptics would say “but this one piece of data this is

founded on isn’t correct, and so any public health intervention based on it would be absolutely wrong.” Or “We speculate the infection fatality rate is lower than the scientists think.” Or “because the model used wasn’t exactly right, we should go for an entirely different

approach, which might kill a whole lot more people.” It didn’t matter that time after time they were proved wrong - about whether masks worked, about how many people had been infected, about how close we were to herd immunity, about whether there was going to be a second wave,

about whether there would be huge numbers of excess deaths, about whether PCR testing was useful. Their point was never to be right about these things: it was to introduce just enough uncertainty, with just enough authority, to give the government an excuse not to act. It was

done in the full knowledge that taking these positions would get them a platform on the BBC on the basis of “balance” (the BBC fell for this hard, in the same way they did for climate change denialism for many years, which has operated on governments similarly. In fact all of the

tactics of climate change denialism have been put to use by these people.) Meanwhile, our government has tried to find every excuse not to act. In order to do that they have leveraged their academic credentials, they have played on people’s wishful thinking in the middle of a

catastrophe, they have exploited people’s hope and their scientific illiteracy, all for a social and political project.

There are questions about why they did what they did. It seems like they had a range of reasons. Some were simply in the pay of corporations (as we saw with

the Great Barrington Declaration.) This is not a surprise: while the pandemic has caused global recession, it has also seen a massive transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest. There are ample profits to be made in a crisis. Some, like Sunetra Gupta, are old fashioned

eugenicists: for a long time her theories have been grand, naturalising phylogenetic fantasies, in which epidemics are the fulcrum of evolution. Some are political eugenicists: certainly for Toby Young, Dominic Cummings, and many around the Spectator, a disease that kills the

old, the disabled, the people they consider weak, people who are reliant on the state for benefits and pensions - this is a wet dream. And all the better if they can use it to argue against all any any state intervention for the public good. Then there are people like Karol

Sikora: old-fashioned right-wing cranks who see the NHS as “the last bastion of communism” and probably couldn’t wait to see it crushed by an epidemic. Finally there are people like Carl Heneghan, who probably started out with good intentions but got hooked so much on the

ego-boosts offered by the idea that the truth is counterintuitive, that he fell into believing that everything that is counterintuitive is, in fact, the truth. He has had all the ego boosts he needs. But the point is that it doesn’t matter that all these people were wrong, over

and over again. What matters is that they were cunning opportunists and got what they wanted from the situation, and never even had stakes in the truth. The result has been a human catastrophe, a health catastrophe, and an economic catastrophe to boot. But none of this lot is

doing to badly.

Part of what scares me, though, is the extent to which there are now senior policy people, journalists, even figures in senior positions in public health, who consider these positions as legitimate science. Meanwhile, enough senior scientists have lied or

covered for the government, that nobody trusts anyone. Now the denialists don’t even need to provide new plausible deniability - bits of the state will do it for them.

I would love for people to do serious, quantitative and qualitative research on the influence here. There

should be a large collaborative project that looks at the phenomenon of Covid denialism: tracing flows of money; influence in institutions, the media (especially the BBC), and policy; how the public’s wishful thinking was abused; how this flourished under conditions in which the

government and the state more generally have made no effort to give the public any scientific education about what virus; comparing the strategies of denialists with wider forms of corporate lobbying, especially with regard to for example the tobacco industry and climate change;

accounts of how scientists who rightly often say “we don’t know” were prayed upon by opportunists who perpetually recast the absence of evidence for the evidence of absence; and how a scientifically illiterate political and media class both sanctioned and benefitted from all of

this. In any case, the people who are now victoriously proclaiming the lockdown skeptics were wrong have missed the point.