The Real Costs of the Lockdowns

What does £192 million get you today? That’s roughly R4.3 billion. Spent wisely, that’s an Alexandra urban regeneration project that could alter the complexion of one-fifth of the township. A hospital or two, technical colleges on the Cape Flats, thousands of scholarships – and if you don’t have 2010’s scum spiking the prices of stadia, possibly one of those too.

A war chest of R4.3 billion – given the relatively low cost of access to business in South Africa – could launch a generation of entrepreneurs. If you gave that amount of money to a little group of Church volunteers (women), threw in an accountant of the same profile who learned the ropes counting copper coins, amplified them with a few geeks, added an early 1990s general manager of a bank and built a Cat Matlala-proof ring of steel around the initiative, you could end up with breathtaking progress.

But the question must be asked in proximity of original currency: what does £192 million get you today in the United Kingdom (UK)? Nothing.

Actually, it gets you less than nothing – a long, painful commission of inquiry resulting in a press conference where a frumpy Baroness clears her throat before addressing the assembled reporters: “What the UK Covid Inquiry has taught us,” she says, “is that had the UK locked down one week earlier, 23 000 lives would have been saved.”

Balls

Baroness Hallett is talking balls or being instructed to. That guesstimate of 23 000 comes from the same discredited modelling that has utterly failed the people of the UK whenever it's been used, be it bird flu or mad cow disease. Who it actually belongs to – either Imperial College or its posterboy Neil Ferguson – and what condition the code is in remains shrouded in nervous curiosity.

This was the modelling used to warn a hopelessly unprepared government that unless it battened down the hatches, 35 000 lives would be lost.

Just as egregious as the sight of cash being spaffed against a wall like this is the claim that lockdowns actually work. Not only do they not work, but they come with things called “costs”. The figure estimated by the International Monetary Fund for the UK’s pandemic adventures, nearly all of which were spectacularly unsuccessful, hovers around the £410 billion mark.

During the chaos of 2020 and 2021, Sweden was demoted from the name of a country to a profanity. This is because its experts refused to panic and submit before the emerging expert orthodoxy raging through governments across the West.

Tragic

Another tragedy about this inquiry was that it was led and managed by the same people who plunged the country into the lockdown crisis. Profiling these people is critical.

Starting in the mid-2000s, the UK began manufacturing a specific model of middle-ish administrator. This individual aspired to right-on thinking, specifically on issues related to identity, because it was taught to do so at university. This training also made it see itself as elite-adjacent but society as a burden, so the process of managing it was absorbed begrudgingly – something eased by excessive use of classification – excel spreadsheets, in other words.

Lanyards soon followed, accompanied by a role in front of a computer at a long desk featuring many other computers. If the individual was employed by the civil service or the British Broadcasting Corporation, then it needed two additional features: a copy of The Guardian newspaper, and a fold-up bike (the sight of which filled the individual’s nostrils with the sanctimony of “look at me, respect me, I’m not contributing to air pollution”).

Around a decade after its production, with some occasional retrofitting as it pertained to emerging fashionable ideas, this individual was damaged by the UK’s departure from the European Union, which it was taught (again at university) was the highest point of progress. This event prompted indignation and loathing and an acceleration of virtue; here it convinced itself that it was a better model of human – delusions enhanced by invariable promotions and overpromotions.

But not included on the initial production line was the capacity for deductive reasoning. Critical analysis was thus impossible – just not wired that way. But the factory settings did include space for catastrophising. This is critical.

Fronting up

Starting in February 2020, this was the profile tasked with fronting up to a virus - positioned at first on the fringes of a newly elected government. Health advisors, mathematicians, politicians, media bores, civil servants, council leaders, corporate executives, and even clergymen. If things like interference or supposition were to be entertained in the emerging data, based primarily on the theatrics from China or northern Italy, then it would have to be blended with the political biases of their operating models. Initially, this profile was positioned at the edges of the government.

But the Tory government was drunk and stumbling, still celebrating from its landslide victory in the general election the previous December, unaware that those creeping in from the edges – by then upgraded to “experts” – loathed every inch of it.

When Prime Minister Boris Johnson sought to convince colleagues that Sweden’s approach seemed the more pragmatic, these experts responded: over our dead bodies, or preferably – yours. Johnson was hospitalized in April 2020 but not before capitulating to this “expert” profile and its alarmist, irrational functionality.

The real virus

Lockdowns and lockdown enthusiasm were real viruses. At no point was any economic implication discussed – and the spirit endured throughout this sham of the inquiry. There was no scope to litigate the vaccine rollout – to say nothing of measuring any harms, which is an entirely reasonable examination given the speed at which they were produced. There was no scope to examine the disastrous policing and enforcement strategies, the government’s financing of the media and the harmful content subsequently delivered.

This was an exercise in conviction hindsight, a way of reverse crediting the discredited – many of whom should have been interviewed (at the very least) on the basis of scientific misconduct.

The ultimate loser is the public. £192 million smackers spaffed, never to return – no stadia or entrepreneurs, just a class of all-knowing middle managers eager to pronounce their self-righteousness one more time.