The Colchester Gazette printed a shorter version of this article on November 19th, here is the full and improved (I hope) text with links to sources.
Back in March 2020, the battle cry went up: stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives. Occasionally, the stern men and women who stood at the lectern and read us our daily sermon stumbled in their words and said “protect lives, save the NHS”, before correcting themselves. They were letting the face mask slip, so to speak, and revealed the true reason behind the lockdown: not to protect the vulnerable from the virus, not even to save lives, but to protect the NHS from the public. They were the High Priests, preparing the congregation for the ultimate sacrifice to pacify the gods: the lives of the young.
Through a combination of propaganda and misinformation, irrational fear of the virus was stoked, as it might have been for the Devil of old. Sentimentality was inflated on behalf of the faithful servants of the god, the “doctors and nurses” – who for want of PPE surplices were given a little badge of glory – so it was easy to get the congregation of worshippers to stand outside their homes to pay homage to this secular deity by the collective clapping of hands, banging of pots and pans or even (in my neighbourhood) the sending up of fireworks; acts that the sociologist Emile Durkheim would have described as “collective effervescence” according to religion expert professor Linda Woodhead.
The “rebel” Banksy made a mural to praise this 70 year old institution, and books were published, much like the Victorian collections of sermons, such as Dear NHS – A Collection of Stories to Say Thank You. (It’s remarkable that thanks should be addressed to an administrative model, as if to a person, rather than to the actual persons working within it or the people paying for it, the taxpayers). The audio-book version has various celebrities reading the lessons, paying their homage to the idol of our age. And no politician seems able to refer to the health system as the NHS anymore; it is now Our NHS, having replaced Our Father.
You may think it hyperbole to say that we were preparing to sacrifice the nation’s young. But look at what is happening to students: denied the normal life of a young person, defrauded of the full value of an expensive education, denied the building of friendships, of relationships, parties, sex and all the things that make life worth living, not to mention job opportunities, as coffee shops, pubs and restaurants close their doors, many forever. All the while, at the time of writing, about 655 people under the age of 45 have died with Covid 19 on their death certificate, according to the ONS. 90% of the dead are above 65 and 54% are above the age of 85. The average age of mortality is about 82. According to professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University, the mortality risk for most people ranges from 0.006% (up to age 19) to 0.15% (up to 49) and 0.6% (up to 59) and a recent report (published 29th October) from Imperial College, says: “…a recent analysis using pooled data from national serological surveys to estimate age-specific IFRs [infection mortality rates] found that the IFR rose steeply with age, ranging from <0.01% in those aged under 30 to 7.3% in the 80 and older age group, broadly consistent with previous estimates.“
With this in mind, let’s consider also the point made by Philip Thomas, professor of risk management at the University of Bristol, writing in the Spectator: that the reduction in the economy due to the lockdown restrictions is likely to cause the loss of 650,000 average lives (calculated according to expected life span). He went on to say that even in a worst-case Covid-scenario, “If 250,000 people die — who have a mean age of 79 and who have two or more existing serious medical conditions — then this would be equivalent to 45,000 average lives being lost. There is no doubt that this would be a very bad outcome. However, it is less than 10 per cent of the loss of life the nation will incur by subjecting itself to a prolonged lockdown of the sort currently envisaged by the government.”
This completely blows the argument of “lives vs. the economy” out of the water. The economy is lives, and we are currently causing ten times more lives (measured by average life spans) to be lost through the lockdown measures than the virus would have killed, even in the unlikely scenario of letting it run wild, (which nobody is proposing).
Even by the normal standards of a cost/benefit analysis, lockdown is not worth it. Usually, the NHS, through NICE, approves a treatment if the cost is between £20,000 to £30,000 per quality-adjusted life-year saved. A conservative estimate put the cost of the first lockdown at £180,000 per life-year saved. The cost is currently going up very steeply indeed. David Miles, Professor of Financial Economics, Imperial College Business School, writes in a recent analysis that if we use the same “yardstick” for covid 19 as we do for other conditions, “it would seem as though the benefits of continuing with the lockdown are lower than its costs.”
Lockdowns do more harm than good: socially, mentally, economically, but also crucially, in terms of lives saved.
You may remember that at the start of the first wave of infections, patients were moved out from NHS wards into care homes without being tested for the virus. As these were mostly elderly, and therefore vulnerable to the virus, this was at best desperately incompetent, at worst a callous act of calculation; in either case it was driven by the blinkered panic that Our NHS had to be saved, come what may.
We were supposed to have a short lockdown in order to slow the spread of infections and “flatten the sombrero”, as the Prime Minister so vividly explained it, enabling the NHS to get ready and to cope with the influx of cases. But here’s the rub: if the NHS is not able to cope with a viral outbreak, then the solution is not to imprison the citizens to save this failed model, but rather to reform it so that it does work.
Perhaps we could have just about accepted the first lockdown if it was used to start reforming the NHS to cope with the real world, but the government has wasted time building a flawed testing system, and in November the government was again imposing a general lockdown, even though we now know that this will cause more harm than good. Why? Again, the justification was presented to us (with outdated statistics) in terms of how the spread of the dreaded lurgy would affect the NHS, whilst no information was given us on how a lockdown would affect the rest of society, as pointed out by Dr Alberto Giubilini, a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford:
“…the intended solution to the problem has become part of the problem. Lockdown undermines people’s health and it threatens lives, as surely as Covid. Unlike the virus, however, lockdown inflicts its agony across the whole population (especially on young generations) instead of on a well-defined portion of the population who could be protected with shielding measures.”
It is a strange state of affairs when an administrative model, the National Health Service in its current form, has taken on such importance that people’s liberties, livelihoods and even lives have to be sacrificed in order to preserve it at, literally, any cost.
We know that the virus affects different groups very differently. It would therefore seem more rational to target protection at those groups, as the scientists, economists and public health experts behind the Great Barrington Declaration have recently made clear.
We have had news lately that an effective vaccine may now actually be ready to roll out. This could again buy Our NHS a new expensive lease of life. But is it not time to at least have a debate on whether the current model of the NHS is fit for purpose or not? As Dr. Kristian Niemietz points out in his book Universal Healthcare without the NHS: Towards a Patient-Centred Health System:
“In terms of outcomes, quality and efficiency, social health insurance systems are consistently ahead of the NHS on almost every available measure. They combine the universality of a public system with the consumer sovereignty, the pluralism, the competitiveness and the innovativeness of a market system.”
Dr. Niemietz also points out that what the NHS lacks is old-age reserves, meaning that healthcare is a constant transfer of wealth from those who are currently working and paying taxes, the young, to those on whom most of the healthcare budget is spent, the old. The immoral sacrifice of the young for the old is, in other words, woven into the very fabric of how the NHS works, and the current pandemic only brought this out in neon-light flashing starkness of relief.
At the start of the pandemic we sacrificed the nation’s elderly to Our NHS, then we went on to sacrifice the young. The Prime Minister should be careful. In ancient Greek civilizations, the ultimate sacrifice to the gods was a male representative of the queen. But if they come for him, Mr. Johnson can take solace from the fact that he is being sacrificed for Our NHS. At least he will know it’s worth it.
M.W. Hagerup – Words Matter 