On not letting Covid-19 revisionists re-write history

Plus some newsletter updates

Good evening from a very blustery Cornwall. I’m taking a short break here before heading back to London to continue working on my book. Writing a book is an arduous process - ‘a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness’, as Orwell once described it - but I find the going gets easier once you’ve broken the back of the thing and know you have at least 20 or 30 thousands good words. That said, you can only really be sure it’s not a stinker once you’re a few drafts in. Only then does the stress and worry begin to subside.

Plans for this Substack

Many thanks to new paying subscribers. It’s because of you that I’m able to write these newsletters.

I’ll continue writing a long essay each week but as I begin to dedicate less time to writing my book I will start to produce more work here. I also intend to do an occasional podcast covering books and topics that I feel are neglected by the mainstream. The public conversation is becoming increasingly polarised and superficial, a consequence of the way in which the online capitalist ecosystem works: extreme and hysterical rhetoric cuts through and is rewarded with clicks which generate profit (I think the current Israel-Palestine discourse is a striking example of this dynamic, which is why I rarely comment on it on social media).

Covid-19 inquiry

England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty gave evidence to the Covid-19 inquiry this week. During his session Whitty gave particularly short shrift to the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’ (GBD), an open letter signed by fringe academics (fringe but given a huge platform by right-wing newspapers) in October 2020 calling on governments not to impose further lockdowns. Signatories of the letter instead advocated something they called ‘focused protection’, a euphemism for locking up the old and vulnerable indoors while everyone else went about their business. Covid would then be allowed to rip through the population while the old and the vulnerable were somehow able to avoid all contact with the outside world. Signatories believed that this would lead to ‘herd immunity’ against Covid-19 within three months.

Chris Whitty:

‘They were wrong. If this was posited as we know the vaccine was around the corner, we’ve got six months, you could make the argument. In that case, why not wait to do it with the vaccine? They were suggesting this absent of a vaccine. So the idea had a large number of problems, and I thought it was one of the few areas to knock it really hard out of the court, [rather] than say this is an interesting point, lets debate it.’

Whitty described the policy of herd immunity as a ‘clearly ridiculous goal of policy and a very dangerous one’ - ‘all the options were very bad, and some were a bit worse’. The worst of these bad options would’ve been to let Covid rip. Going for herd immunity without a vaccine would have led [as Whitty noted] to an ‘extraordinarily high loss of life’.

A consequence of the policy would’ve almost certainly been the collapse of the NHS as hospitals filled up with seriously ill Covid-19 patients. The poor would’ve felt this a lot more than the privileged, who retain the ability to opt out of using the health service altogether. I mention this because protecting the NHS was one of the central justifications for lockdown; but also because there’s been a lot of fatuous talk swilling around in subsequent years depicting lockdowns as a policy favoured by ‘privileged elites with big gardens etc’.

This is an example of political rhetoric that is not grounded in fact. The working class were more likely to be exposed to Covid in their jobs, less able to work from home, and more likely to be in poor health prior to the pandemic (and therefore more susceptible to falling seriously ill with Covid). They were also no less likely to support lockdowns than any other group (to the chagrin of our libertarian ultras, most British people don’t regret locking down). In other words it’s an inversion of the truth to say that lockdown was a policy favoured by ‘out of touch elites’, which is why public support for the GBD came mainly from libertarians, big business and fringe scientists (one of the authors of the GBD, Dr Sunetra Gupta, argued for UnHerd in May 2020 that ‘The epidemic has largely come and is on its way out in this country’. In May 2020!)

The Covid-19 revisionists, who to this day make confident proclamations that lockdown was a blunder, remind me of something John F. Kennedy said at the height of the Cuban missile crisis: ‘The people who are the best off are the people whose advice is not taken because whatever we do is filled with hazards.’

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The prolier-than-thou style

There is a perfectly sensible debate to be had about the extent to which Britain locked down, and about the level of economic damage that was acceptable if it meant fewer Covid deaths (people invariably died because the economy was shut down, though certainly in fewer numbers than died because of the dithering and delay that accompanied the first lockdown).

The GBD, though, represented the entitled wail of the incredibly privileged. Launched at the American Institute for Economic Research (a right-wing think tank ideologically hostile to any form of government intervention), it was promoted heavily in the British media by people such as Toby Young and Freddie Sayers - neither of whom were averse to telling lies when the Covid data didn’t align with their material interests.

This species of right-wing populist (highly privileged yet claiming some bogus affinity with the working class) has become ubiquitous in recent years. During the pandemic and beyond they’ve often tried to portray lockdowns (and pretty much every other form of state intervention) as a policy imposed on the working class by ‘out of touch elites’.

I wrote in 2017 about the tendency of insufferable toffs to don figurative cloth caps every time they sit down at a keyboard. At the time I called it the prolier-than-thou style. I’ll write about it again soon I think. Tory MP Nick Fletcher encapsulates this form of ‘culture war’ politics to a tee, rallying against ‘champagne-sipping socialists in the leafy suburbs of the liberal elites’. Meanwhile the Right Honourable Member for Doncaster owns 10 buy-to-let properties, which one imagines could fund quite a lot of champagne. He also recently voted against giving more rights to tenants. How’s that for sticking it to elites?

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Now that David Cameron has returned to public life you might be interested in a Dispatches film I produced earlier this year for Channel 4 which looked at the influence of Russian money on the Conservative Party. It was on Cameron’s watch that an appeasement policy was adopted toward Russia, the fallout from which we are dealing with today.

Enjoy your weekend. I’ll be back next week with a longer essay.

For those on social media you can find me on Twitter/X, Threads/Instagram and Bluesky: @james.bloodworth.bsky.social