Read on Twitter
It is easy to rebut this attempted rebuttal by Toby Young to Chris Snowden's piece, I would not attempt a complete thread. But just a few obvious embarrassing instances of bad motivated reasoning:
https://quillette.com/2021/02/05/the-case-against-lockdown-a-reply-to-christopher-snowdon/ 1/
https://quillette.com/2021/02/05/the-case-against-lockdown-a-reply-to-christopher-snowdon/ 1/
"Roughly one in 400 infected people die" . Well, 100,000 people have died. So have 40m UK citizens had the disease? Seems unlikely! particularly given how this would take us to near the fabled herd immunity the Sceptics have been pretending we're near, not 20k infections/day 2/
"if NPIs (non pharmaceutical interventions) worked then you'd seen an inverse relationship between NPIs and deaths". Oh FFS, I thought it was YOUR job to teach Toby about endogeneity ... "If ambulances helped why do so many people who get into ambulances die"-level of bad 3/
We can't run natural experiments in the real world, so we have to do models. But insofar as we can look at the coincidence of data, lockdowns work 4/
"Sweden shows that not locking down gives you an economic dividend, look they grew more in 2020 than the EU". The fair comparison is with the other Scandi countries right around them. Spot which one of these didn't lock down and suffered way more death 5/
I keep logging onto that Twitter feed to challenge my preconceptions, and see if A THOUSAND DEATHS A DAY THROUGH JANUARY might have convinced the Sceptics they got anything at all wrong. I clearly don't get human nature. 6/6
