ANALYSIS: Were Covid Measures Based On Science?

The slogan of “Follow the Science” was used as a disguise for imposing a line of power

The usual narrative in the Covid crisis tried to persuade the public that various mandates and coercions, limiting people’s individual freedoms, were all based on science. The myth of this has visibly eroded, as it has been revealed how much of the strategies, influencing the lives of millions, was based on fear, pressure from media and political tactics. Reference to science was often enough used as a disguise.

Key messages:

• Fear and its systematic incitement stifled rational debate on the measures applied in the tackling of Covid crisis, thereby influencing the assessments of many experts and the decisions of those in power.

• At the same time, there were a number of highly acclaimed experts who presented evidence-based and relevant facts on the Covid-19 outbreak as early as spring 2020, but the authorities chose to ignore them and even censor their views.

• Decisions on the Covid crisis were often made not on the basis of rational and evidence-based considerations, but for other reasons and or motives.

• In many countries, authoritarian measures and restrictions on individual freedoms were presented as "following the science", even though evidence often pointed in the opposite direction.

• No impact assessments were carried out or presented upon the implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions (i.e. restrictions and coercion).

Authorities in many countries claimed in the Covid crisis that restrictions on individual freedoms and coercive measures aimed at "the public good" were based on expertise and an evidence-based approach. 'Follow the science' was a constantly repeated call to justify the official approach, even going so far as to label criticism of decision-makers in power as anti-scientific.

This message mantra is falling apart, and has now led Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, among others, to admit that the authorities lied about a series of facts that, in retrospect, turned out to be disputed or untrue, thus significantly undermining public confidence. The biggest social media owner does not take such an assessment lightly, as social media companies were systematically pressured by the authorities to censor Covid's messages (see: Analysis on the explosion of censorship, Part 1 and Part 2) and silence dissent.

The information that has come to light in a number of countries as the background for the decisions taken over the Covid crisis shows how little these authoritarian decisions had to do with rationality and evidence-based information.

Fear choked

Information about a viral outbreak in Wuhan, China, at the beginning of 2020, soon sparked a tempered fear that affected many of the world's most decorated experts. The events in Wuhan culminated in the Communist dictatorship's decision to lock down both Wuhan and the entire province of Hubei. The ensuing footage of people collapsing from a supposedly new disease in China, and later, for example, a video of lorries in Bergamo carrying large quantities of Covid corpses, took fear to new extraordinary levels in the West. However, most of the Chinese video clips had little to do with Covid-19, and trucks in Bergamo transported the dead mainly because the outbreak of the disease led to the decision to cremate the dead instead of burying them, and the number of crematoria was limited.

Videos from China emerged in January 2020 (screenshot from Youtube)

Michael P. Senger has thoroughly exposed the systematic activities of the Chinese Communist Party in spreading fear and disinformation about the effects of lockdown into the West. Newspapers around the world that, for instance, shared videos and information from China without checking their authenticity, were in breach of journalistic basics. In many ways, fear stifled rational debate and a considered response to the outbreak. Mainstream media fuelled fear day after day, demanding of politicians that something must be done to contain the disease. Such an atmosphere was described by a BBC journalist to a British parliamentary inquiry in November 2022:

“I am having to give this evidence anonymously because of the climate of fear within the newsroom of ‘going against the narrative’. When the daily death toll was read out - something we had never done for any other disease - my worry about the impact of the fear mongering on our audience increased. I raised my concerns with senior colleagues and the reply came back that suggested anyone who thinks differently from the editorial agenda is a ‘dissenter’ and lacks credibility regardless of their peer-reviewed and accredited experience, qualifications and education.”

Dr Knut Wittkowski, whose critical views on Covid measures were censored by Youtube as early as April 2020, has underlined that fear keeps people in a state of submission to the orders of the authorities. It is through fear that people can be controlled. This is why politicians and the media also spread fear and nowadays go much further than any situation would really justify. Journalist Laura Dodsworth has described the systematic transmission of fear messages in the United Kingdom (UK) in her 2021 book "A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic". According to her, fear is spreading in the media like an airborne virus, but even faster. If a piece of news frightens the public, it must be broadcast. In 2020, it became clear that fear had been given special wings and that it sold even better than sex. What happened during the Covid-crisis was a relentless and unmitigated campaign of fear on television, in newspapers, on the radio and on the internet.

A notable trigger for the Red China-style lockdown and coercive measures in the West was London Imperial College's infamous so-called Neil Fergusson model of March 2020, which predicted piles of corpses (up to 500,000 deaths in the UK and over 2 million deaths in the US) within months if "suppression measures" were not immediately implemented. Sweden, for example, and the US state of South Dakota, where societies were not shut down in the spring of 2020, despite the global media pressure, should have been devastated within months according to this modelling. The 'scientific' prediction of Fergusson et al. turned out to be completely wrong. Unfortunately, big lies and/or unprofessionalism often have the magical ability to incite masses to make irrational decisions.

Who kept their common sense

But not all the experts lost their common sense. Standford University professor and later initiator of the Great Barrington Declaration Jayanta Bhattacharya, along with her colleague Eran Bendavid, wrote as early as March 24, 2020, that fears of Covid-19 were based primarily on misreported death rates reported by the WHO and other agencies. This was exaggerated by a factor of several times as it did not consider the actual rate of infected people. Bhattacharya and Bendavid stressed that there was already sufficient data on Covid-19 at the time and also made it clear that the true death rate is the proportion of infected people who die from Covid-19, not the number of deaths from cases that test positive. A report from Italy, one of Europe's epicentres of an early outbreak, as early as March 20, 2020, found that the median age of the 3200 deaths that tested positive for Covid-19 was 78.5 years, and over 95% of them had at least one or more comorbidities.

Prof J. Bhattacharya (Taleed Brown, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Martin Kulldorff, Professor of Medicine at Harvard University, wrote on April 10, 2020, based on the data from Wuhan, that there were vast age-specific differences of risk in regards to Covid-19, and stressed that outbreak responses should be clearly age-specific as well and targeted at older people and the more vulnerable. Otherwise, lives would be needlessly lost.

Prof Martin Kulldorff (Thérèse Soukar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

One of the world's most cited scientists, Professor John P. Ioannides of Stanford University, scientifically showed in a study published in May 2020 that the risk of dying from Covid-19 in people under the age of 65, even in pandemic epicentres, was very low, and deaths in people under the age of 65 with no preexisting medical conditions were remarkably rare.

So there is no basis to the claims of some scientists, including former US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director R.Rochinsky, that we did not have enough information about Sars-Cov-2 at the start and were therefore forced to make drastic decisions of imposing restrictions and coercive measures. According to the testimony of Professor Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University before the US Congress, this justification was not true, as the health officials refused to change their dogmatic positions even when the scientific data clearly showed that the officially established line was wrong, e.g. in the case of strong acquired natural immunity from recovery and in many other cases.

John P. Ioannides carried out a series of studies in the early months of the crisis, which revealed both a much more widespread outbreak and a virus that was many times less dangerous than officially claimed. According to a study published on October 14, 2020 in the WHO's official journal, the median mortality rate for those infected with Covid-19 was 0.23-0.27%, and 0.05% among people under 70, dozens of times lower than the WHO had previously assumed. These arguments should have at least had a sobering effect, if not a clear indicative for the authorities, as well as other experts and opinionists, to change the course. But they did not do that.

Prof J.P. Ioannidis (CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The role of the Scientific Council - the UK example

Present UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer throughout the Covid crisis, explained in August 2022 that he had repeatedly raised his concerns with the government about the spill-over effects of locking up the society and the coercive measures imposed. However, his words went unheard, and those matters were not even discussed at the government level. Lockdown, including the closure of schools and large parts of the economy, while the police were sent to harass people sitting on park benches, was the most severe coercive policy ever introduced in peacetime. According to Sunak, a cost-benefit analysis and impact assessment, a basic requirement for any public health intervention, was never carried out. "I was not allowed to talk about trade-offs," Sunak said. Ministers were given instructions by Prime Minister Boris Johnson on how to deal with questions about the lockdowns corollaries. According to the instructions, collateral damage was never to be admitted. The key message was that there would be no compromise since what was good for our health was presumed good for the economy. But Sunak was not just talking about economic effects, he was also talking e.g. about education - he urged others to admit that school closures and children missing from school was a big nightmare. Silence was all that followed.

Sunak demanded adequate analyses of various restrictions and coercive measures, but he did not receive them. According to him, for at least a year, the policies of the UK government and the fate of millions of people were decided on the basis of rather inexplicable graphs drawn up by scientists from SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies). And it was SAGE that was the so-called body of experts that actually directed the country's entire response to the Covid-crisis. Prime Minister Johnson wanted to present the harsh measures as 'following the science' rather than as a political decision, and that meant elevating SAGE, a dispersed group of scientific advisors, to a committee that essentially had the power to decide whether or not to shut down the country. Whoever therefore wrote the minutes of SAGE's meetings, consolidating its deliberations into guidelines for the government, also determined the government's policy. No one, not even members of the UK Cabinet, knew how these decisions were made. But Sunak, through his representative, was at least aware that these all-important minutes of SAGE meetings often excluded dissent, and that decisions were almost always taken by the authoritarians. This repeated even at the end of 2021, when, with the arrival of the omicron strain of the virus, SAGE strongly recommended locking down the society again. SAGE's main analysis predicted that without a fourth lockdown, Covid deaths could reach 6,000 per day. This was grossly wrong - the actual number was 20 times (sic!) lower. But we only know this because this time the government did not accept SAGE's recommendations. The only reason it failed to do so was that the British Conservative MPs (and a part of the Cabinet) objected and demanded that Prime Minister Johnson stops following SAGE's assumptions.

Cumulative excess deaths - the UK and Australia in particular applied a strict lockdown policy during the Covid crisis, Sweden's approach was different. (source: The Spectator, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-covid-and-excess-deaths-a-look-at-the-data/)

Sunak's blunt assessment of the government's crisis decisions and the role of SAGE in them is not shared by the scientists who were there, who stress both the recommendatory nature of the SAGE guidelines and their ignorance of many of the facts about the virus, and claim the ultimate responsibility rests with the politicians.

Who is responsible?

It is precisely the latter, i.e. the responsibility of the politicians, that has been stressed by Devi Sridhar, Professor at the University of Edinburgh, who is considered to be one of the main advocates of 'zero-Covid', coercive measures and lockdowns in the UK, in her statement of June 13, 2023. A formal inquiry into the Covid-crisis is currently underway there, and a growing number of experts and politicians are recognising the flaws in the decisions taken in the crisis. For example, one of the latest studies by economists Steve H. Hanke, Lars Jonung and Jonas Herby concludes that the lockdown of societies was "a global policy failure of choice on a gigantic scale".

Devi Sridhar, however, says there is no need to blame scientists for the mistakes made during the Covid-crisis. She argues that while policy measures such as the closing of gyms or schools or playgrounds or imposing mask mandates were communicated to the public as "scientific" decisions, they were not that in reality. Scientists may have put forward the likely risks and benefits of policy options, but the final decision did not belong to them, having lain with politicians whose job it was to 'balance the different streams of recommendations'.

No such 'balancing of recommendations' or assessment of adequate evidence-based input is evident in the infamous 'The Lockdown Files', which are around 100 000 Whatsapp messages between the UK Health Minister Matt Hancock, other government ministers and experts. These exchanges took place during the Covid crisis, and that massive information was made public in February 2023 by journalist Isabel Oakeshott who had helped Hancock write a book about the crisis for nearly a year.

The draconian lockdown policy originated in Communist China and was later implemented in many other countries

These thousands of messages show that rationality, evidence and prudence were by no means the main prerequisites for the implementation of Covid measures. Isabel Oakeshott specifically highlights the crusade to vaccinate the whole population against a disease with a low mortality rate among all but the very elderly, and calls mass vaccination one of the most extraordinary cases in our political history. On January 3, 2021, Matt Hancock told The Spectator that once priority groups have been vaccinated (13 million doses), "freedom will cry out". Instead, the government continued to systematically attempt to vaccinate everyone, including children, and freedom did not arrive for at least another seven months. It is now known that a number of young people have died or suffered permanent damage to their health as a result of the side-effects of the vaccines they did not even need. But what are the other long-term health consequences of this policy? Hancock's messages also show that his attitude to the side-effects of the vaccines that were rushed in was rather indifferent.

In addition, the Lockdown files highlight how Health Minister Hancock constantly tried to intimidate the public through media messages to comply with the strict lockdown rules. The mask mandate was introduced mainly because it was a measure that was visible to all, gave an impression of the government that something was being done and it did not cost too much. In Oakeshott's view, those scientists and doctors who disagreed with the government's line did not deserve Hancock's mercy in the slightest - in his view, anyone who fundamentally disagreed with his approach was mad and dangerous and needed to be silenced. Among them, for example, Professor Carl Henegan, who pointed out as early as the summer of 2020, that there was no high-quality evidence or research to justify the mask mandate. Yet the mandate was imposed and dissident scientists were censored, threatened and smeared.

Renowned professors Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta and Jayanta Bhattacharya, who stood behind the Great Barrington Declaration, were widely vilified. The Great Barrington Declaration argued that public health efforts should focus on protecting the most vulnerable, while allowing the rest of the population to build a strong and durable natural immunity against the virus. The views of Professor Gupta, Professor Henegan and epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, who led the Swedish national response to the crisis, were described as "absurd" by Health Minister Hancock.

B.Johnson had to resign for violating self-imposed coercive lockdown measures (10 Downing Street, OGL 3 http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3, via Wikimedia Commons)

Tragicomically, key political decision-makers, both Hancock and Prime Minister Boris Johnson, were tripped by their own rules - both of them violated the very same coercive measures that they imposed terrorise millions of healthy people. Professor Neil Fergusson, whose terrifying prediction led to the implementation of the lockdown policy in the UK, was also caught breaking these rules. This hypocrisy speaks volumes about the origin of these measures and whether or not they were based on sufficient evidence.

On which basis were the decisions taken

As early as in August 2020, the advisor to the UN Scientific Advisory Board (SAGE), Professor Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh, stated bluntly, both in public statements and later in his book "The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir", that the coercive measures and lockdowns implemented were panic measures, driven by fear and the inability to think of anything else. He also criticised the closure of schools for not being 'epidemiologically sound' and said the focus should have been on care homes rather than the children. In his view, locking up the societies was a monumental mistake of a global scale and this reaction should never be repeated.

Prof Woolhouse has pointed out that, as a close adviser to the government, he never saw any impact analyses of coercive measures as there simply weren't any - there were no damage analyses of the economy, education, the health system or people's mental health. So all these harms were not calculated.

Professor Carl Henegan of the University of Oxford, who has consistently pointed to the lack of evidence for the imposition of, for example, a mask requirement, has concluded from his own experience of decision-making in the Covid crisis:

"Policies affecting millions were decided on whims, independent scientists were persecuted, and grossly substandard work was cooked up to justify an evidence-free policy if anyone bothered to look."

In Germany, in February 2023, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, who led Germany's introduction of drastic coercive measures, finally admitted that while most of what was done was rather justified, some of Covid's restrictions (running in masks, restrictions on outdoor activities, etc.) were "idiotic" and the lengthy school closures were "a big unnecessary mistake". On what basis such idiocies and mistakes were imposed at the national level, Lauterbach did not specify, but throughout the crisis the Germans tried to give the impression that the measures were being implemented on the basis of science.

Marty Makary, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in the US, has repeatedly pointed out that those in power during the Covid-crisis made many tragic mistakes, from closing the schools and requiring children to wear masks to denying natural immunity and forcing vaccines on young healthy people. In his view, the decisions of the Covid crisis and implementation of public policies were often not based on evidence, but followed other motives. According to Prof Makary, the managers of public health agencies (Food and Drug Administration or FDA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC, etc.) used weak or flawed data to make critical public health decisions. Such decisions were determined primarily by what was politically convenient for the Washington administration. A serious drawback was that the health officials focused myopically on a single virus rather than on overall public health. According to Dr Makary, the biggest spreader of misinformation about the coronavirus crisis was the US administration and health officials, who, for example, communicated false messages to the public that:

• Sars-CoV-2 spreads through surfaces,

• vaccination provides stronger protection than recovery,

• myocarditis was more common after recovery than after vaccination,

• masks were effective in stopping the spread of the virus, etc.

Dr Marty Makary (New America, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Vinay Prasad, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of California, US, has repeatedly criticised the misguided decisions of the health authorities during the Covid-crisis. In his view, authorities lied about many aspects of Covid-19, such as natural immunity, myocarditis, masks, school closures, "long Covid" and vaccination. In doing so, the authorities lost their credibility and may never earn it back. In Prasad's view, any backlash is fully deserved. Among other things, he has stressed that recovery from Covid-19 offers strong protection against future severe disease and should have been taken into account when mass vaccinations were carried out, but it was not. In Prasad's view, the entire health care establishment lied to the American people, for which they (CDC et al) should be held accountable.

Prof Mark Woolhouse has also highlighted one particularly important lesson from the crisis. While at the beginning the response was slow and hesitant (inadequate protection for the elderly and vulnerable with co-morbidities), later on the decision-makers panicked and overreacted, quickly leading to coercive measures and locking down the societies. In his view, any future designs will rather need to protect us from ourselves. Should a situation like this ever rise again, we have to make sure we have all the evidence we need. We have to ask: What is proportionate? What is effective? What is sustainable?

Part 2 of the analysis continues with "Five evidence-based facts that the authorities ignored".