Since so-called ‘Freedom Day’ on 19 July 2021 when the Tory government ended public health measures to control the spread of coronavirus, more than 25,000 people have died of Covid-19 across Britain. Millions have been infected with the virus, hundreds of thousands are now suffering from the effects of Long Covid. The NHS has virtually collapsed under the pressure of treating tens of thousands of patients while trying to address a backlog of at least six million patients awaiting treatment. Yet the government is determined to end the few public health measures that exist under its ‘Plan B’ by the end of January, and tell us we now need to ‘learn to live with the virus.’ Throughout the surge of infections caused by Omicron and the thousands of resulting deaths, the government set its face against new measures, and was adamant it would not implement a fourth lockdown.
This seems a far cry from the first lockdown in March 2020, introduced as a panic measure following the failure of the government to heed public health advice and allow the virus to rip through the population. Tens of thousands were to die, the vast majority needlessly. Yet the radical investigative website The Grayzone now claims that ‘lockdowns now represent one of the most draconian aspects of the perverse New Normal that has metastasized amid an atmosphere of seemingly endless emergency’ (Max Blumenthal and Stavroula Pabst, The Grayzone, 3 December 2021). It implies that lockdowns have become normalised as the first choice of the major capitalist countries in dealing with coronavirus pandemic. As we shall see, this is untrue.
The Grayzone has a strong record of exposing US imperialist aggression across the world, and defending those who stand up to its belligerence – Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua in particular. Yet at a time when libertarian views are merging with those of conspiracy theorists and fuelling the rise of right-wing populism, there is a danger in seeing such developments as some sign of progress, and The Grayzone falls into this trap. Its celebration of what are overwhelmingly reactionary protests against not just lockdowns, but against any public health measures to the spread of coronavirus, is based on a serious misunderstanding of the forces involved. The reality is that far from wanting to normalise lockdowns, capitalist governments were extremely reluctant to impose them because they interrupted the production of profit, and were quite happy for working class to pay the penalty.
In reality, The Grayzone’s article accepts many of the tropes of the neo-liberal right and Covid-sceptics: that governments adopted lockdowns purely to control their populations rather than the virus; that the dangers of Covid-19 were deliberately exaggerated in order to justify such control, and that they were ineffective in managing the virus’s spread.
Were lockdowns the first choice?
The Grayzone is very selective in the evidence it presents on this. It begins by claiming that Australia, New Zealand and Singapore had now ‘thrown in the “Zero-Covid” towel’, but significantly mentions China just once in the entire article and then only in passing. Surely an analysis of China’s pandemic strategy would be the place to start for a serious analysis of the merits or otherwise of a Zero-Covid strategy? China, where the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was first detected, and with 19% of the world’s population has detected only 0.04% of cases (around 100,000 cases in total), with fewer than 5,000 confirmed Covid-19 deaths. A study published in the British Medical Journal (24 February 2021) calculated that there were 6,000 excess deaths in Wuhan between January and March 2020 compared with the same period in 2019. This refutes those who claim China’s figures are fiddled. Except in Wuhan, no increase in overall mortality was found during the three months of the Covid-19 outbreak in other parts of China, and the outbreak had been brought under control by April 2020, without a single national lockdown.
Granted the measures implemented in China, with its state-capitalist command economy can’t be replicated in free market capitalist states, but this is not an argument against Zero-Covid but rather an argument against free market capitalism which is clearly unable and unwilling to protect its populations from the death and disease associated with a dangerous virus. Britain and the US, which epitomise the free-market capitalist states have detected over 14 million and 50 million Covid-19 cases, and over 150,000 and 850,000 confirmed deaths respectively as of early January 2022. In New Zealand, the Zero-Covid policy worked until the latter part of 2021 – to dismiss it by saying it had now thrown in the towel is not serious. And in Cuba, until the arrival of the Delta variant, very tight public health measures had proved most effective in limiting the number of cases and deaths from Covid-19.
Contrary to The Grayzone’s supposition, lockdowns were not the first choice of the overwhelming majority of governments, and were only implemented when it was evident health systems would be overwhelmed. As a general rule, those states with right-wing populist governments proved most resistant to any lockdowns – President Trump in the US and Republican-controlled state governments, Bolsanaro in Brazil, and Prime Minister Johnson in Britain. Locking down was not a first choice in capitalist countries as it interrupted the flow of profits essential to the survival of the system as a whole. But even basic public health measures were a problem for capitalism, and it was the failure to introduce them on a timely basis that then made lockdowns inevitable.
Were lockdowns effective?
Did lockdowns control the spread of the virus, in The Grayzone’s words, did they succeed as ‘a means to “flatten the curve” and “slow the spread”’? Of course they did. A study of 11 European countries in May 2020, showed that lockdown and social distancing measures, averted some 3.1 million deaths. Another study of published in Nature, estimated that lockdowns in China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France and the US had prevented or delayed around 530 million Covid-19 cases. A study published in Journal of Infectious Diseases (15 November 2020), showed US stay-at-home orders increased epidemic doubling times (ie slowed the epidemic) from 2.7 days to 15 days between March and April 2020. The February 2020 lockdown of Hubei province in China brought daily incidence of Covid-19 down from a peak of approximately 7,000 cases to around 30-40 cases by May 2020.
The airborne virus spreads by human contact and breaking that contact reduces transmission to manageable levels preventing healthcare systems from becoming overwhelmed. In the meantime, China implemented a containment and suppression strategy, involving active case-finding, comprehensive testing, contact tracing and isolation of contacts of infected persons, as well as strict two-week quarantining of all international arrivals. These measures taken together helped to eliminate Covid-19 from China, with all subsequent outbreaks the result of importation. A 19 March 2021 report from the Resolution Foundation has shown that Boris Johnson delaying the third lockdown in England until 4 January 2021 led to an estimated 27,000 more deaths than would have occurred had the government locked down sooner.
The authors quite rightly condemn lockdowns ‘with no social support’ imposed by repressive governments in Africa, Asia and Latin America, countries where workers are dependent on the informal economy to survive. This is a critique of these repressive capitalist states which have nothing but contempt for their populations. It is not a valid critique of the public health efficacy of lockdowns. Social support provided in Cuba, Venezuela or China during their lockdowns is not mentioned in the article, while socialists in general were demanding such social support in those countries where it was not available. Nevertheless, The Grayzone claims ‘For most people on the planet, the economic and psychological harm experienced during the past 19 months was not the result of the pandemic per se, but of emergency-order restrictions governments imposed on them and justified as public health measures. In the Global North, such costly efforts did little more than delay the inevitable spread of Covid-19.’ This is just not true. The spread of Covid-19 was not inevitable; such a notion is just equivalent to saying we have to ‘learn to live with Covid’, the demand of the extreme right wing Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs in Britain and subsequently the official position of the government itself.
Is Covid-19 serious?
In order to rubbish the value of stringent public health measures, The Grayzone inevitably has to diminish the lethality of Covid-19, claiming that ‘a haze of reporting in early 2020 made the coronavirus appear more deadly than it turned out to be.’ However, a study by Joseph Wu published in Nature Medicine shows the case fatality rate (CFR) was 4.5% in Wuhan, and the symptomatic case fatality risk (the probability of dying after developing symptoms) was 1.4% overall by 29 Feb 2020. These are not trivial numbers and were observed in spite of the public health control measures widely imposed in Wuhan. The Grayzone then decides that in reality, the ‘[infection] fatality rate’ (IFR) is 0.15% overall (and 0.05% for under 70s), citing a study by well-known Covid-minimiser John Ioannidis. Ioannidis is on record (11 March 2021) as saying ‘collateral damages [from lockdowns] is 10-100 times worse than Covid-19’, and that he is against a Zero-Covid approach. However his figures on ‘collateral damage’ are pure invention. It is astonishing that The Grayzone treats him with any seriousness.
A proper study by Robert Verity published on 30 March 2020 in the Lancet, showed the CFR was 1.4%, and the overall infection fatality rate was 0.66% in China which increases with age (1.9% for 60-69 year olds, and 0.6% for 50-59 year olds). An 8 December 2020 study by Meyerowitz-Katz in the European Journal of Epidemiology, warned that ‘the overall IFR for Covid-19 should not be viewed as a fixed parameter but as intrinsically linked to the age-specific pattern of infections’; and there was an ‘exponential relationship between age and IFR for Covid-19…IFRs are very low for children and younger adults but increase progressively to 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65, 4.6% at age 75’. They cautioned that ‘an English person aged 55–64 years who gets infected with SARS-CoV-2 faces a fatality risk that is more than 200 times higher than the annual risk of dying in a fatal car accident. These results also confirm that Covid-19 is far more deadly than seasonal flu, for which the population IFR is about 0·05%.’
These results are in good agreement with Verity’s results and show that Ioannidis’s results quoted by The Grayzone, should be treated with caution, given his bias. Ioannidis himself produced a second figure published 14 October 2020 in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, showing an IFR of 0.23%. Taken at face value (despite the huge statistical margins) that would make Covid-19 almost five times more deadly than flu. What all these data show is that if allowed to spread unchecked Covid-19 would have killed very large numbers of people of all ages. In addition to all this the virus has been shown to:
- lower sperm count and motility up to two months after symptoms had resolved,
- damage the lining of the brain (significant reduction in thickness of grey matter in areas associated with smell, memory) even in those with ‘mild’ symptoms up to four months after infection
- causes neurological complications in 36% of all cases and in 45% of severe cases
- increase the risk of psychiatric disorders, strokes, dementia, muscle disorders significantly higher, even in the non-hospitalised
- reduces cognitive function even in non-hospitalised people with just one episode of Covid-19 infection
- linger in several other organs of the body including brain, heart, for months after infection
While the Covid-sceptics or anti-vaxxers worry about the long-term effects of the Covid-19 vaccines, they airily dismiss or decline to consider the long-term effects of Covid-19 itself (which is still being studied) – and so does The Grayzone. Instead, it talks of the ‘one in 50,000 chance of hospitalisation and two in a million chance of death for children’ (both dramatic underestimates) – but not the 3-7% chance of Long Covid. Covid-19 is classed as ‘like the flu’ or now ‘like a common cold’, The Grayzone claiming ‘Covid is a seasonal virus that tends to flourish in winter, much like the flu’. It is not seasonal: such a view would be unable to explain why it has spread in tropical countries such as Brazil. It has spread all year round for two years and will flourish as long as there is community transmission and human contact.
Allowing mass infection with a dangerous neuro-invasive virus by refusing to take basic public health measures in a timely manner, or even emergency action such as lockdowns if and when necessary, is social murder. The consequence will be the deaths of millions, while millions more will die early after a reduced quality of life as the long-term effects of degenerative disease, strokes etc play out. Life expectancy in the US has fallen by 1.8 years in 2020, the biggest fall since 1945, and Covid-19 became the third-most common cause of death. The notion that it is a winter affliction fails to explain why for instance, Covid-19 has ravaged tropical countries, and specifically why the second Brazilian wave started in December 2020 – the middle of the Brazilian summer.
Cosying up to right-wing neo-liberals
The most concerning aspect of The Grayzone article is its promotion of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) and its chief author, Stanford professor of medicine Dr Jay Bhattacharya, whom it presents as a ‘public health scholar’. Yet while leaning heavily on Bhattacharya for its arguments, The Grayzone does not examine the GBD or its origins. Bhattacharya himself is on the advisory board of Panda, an anti-vaxx, anti-mask website that spreads Covid-19 misinformation. Other board members include former Trump advisor Scott Altas. The GBD is sponsored by the Charles Koch fossil fuel industry-backed AIER (American Institute for Economic Research), a libertarian, free-market think tank. The Koch Family Foundations have spent $145m directly financing 90 groups that have attacked climate change science from 1997-2018 (Greenpeace). The GBD opposes social or public health measures on those ‘who are at minimal risk of death’ so that they can ‘live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.’ The notion that there are those who can be socially isolated while others get on with their lives is a middle class fantasy, which is probably why the Daily Mail offered its pages to Bhattacharya (17 December 2021) to propagate his views. GBD authors claimed that its ‘focused protection’ approach would lead to herd immunity within three to six months – a ludicrous claim which The Grayzone does not mention.
The GBD scenario in no way acknowledges the way working class families depend on elderly family members for child care, for instance, or how elderly people would themselves survive social isolation. When The Grayzone complains that ‘supporters of harsh restrictions’ have been enabled ‘to caricature critics as dangerous right-wing extremists’, it should perhaps consider why it has ended up agreeing with the Daily Mail, the Covid Recovery Group, the Koch Foundation and sundry Covid-sceptics, and asserting ‘the ineffectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions’ in general, not just lockdowns. Such a stance would favour the sort of vaccine-only strategy to manage coronavirus that the Tory government has in essence adopted.
Straw man arguments
The nub of The Grayzone argument is that lockdowns have caused deaths and failed to halt the pandemic. Of course lockdowns are harmful to the economy and also to wider society, living standards and mental health. But no serious public health expert has ‘marketed’ lockdowns as a ‘public health measure’ as the authors claim. The World Health Organisation (WHO) said 13 October 2020: ‘Lockdowns are not sustainable solutions because of their significant economic, social and broader health impacts…but there’ve been times when they are needed to swiftly suppress the virus and avoid health systems being overwhelmed…Lockdowns need to be limited in duration. They’re best used to prepare for longer-term public health measures.’
The Grayzone article does not provide any examples of any such ‘public health experts’ who call for lockdown as a first-choice ‘public health measure’. It doesn’t cite those public health experts who have consistently argued that lockdowns are a sign of the failure to implement basic public health measures such as widespread masking, local find, test, trace, isolate and support systems, ventilation and (global) vaccination including of children, such as Dr Deepti Gurdasani or Professor Gabriel Scally. Their warnings have been borne out by events. In consistently refusing to implement adequate basic measures the British government has been forced completely against its will to impose three lockdowns.
School closures
Nor have serious public health experts ‘clamoured for school closures… in the face of a handful of new cases’ as The Grayzone article claims, but rather that schools be made safe so they can be kept open, by universal masking with high grade P2 or P3 masks; testing of all children and staff; vaccinating children and staff; decreasing class sizes so children can socially distance; isolating any positive cases and their contacts (ie the whole class, not pupils seated on either side of them); providing internet technology for those isolating so they can continue studies remotely; and improving ventilation in schools by introducing CO2 monitors and air purifiers. These measures incur additional costs to the capitalists and so they have consistently refused to carry them out. Children have the highest infection levels due to lack of protective vaccination and masks, and are usually the index case in households with children, seeding infection into the community. We all know that ‘a handful of new cases’ can quickly become thousands of cases if care is not taken to control transmission. All epidemics start with one case, the index case, patient zero. The right-wing imperialist media constantly ridicules China for taking drastic action in the face of a few cases: The Grayzone shouldn’t be indirectly amplifying such attacks.
Attacking disease modelling
Instead of addressing the work of public health experts such as Dr Gurdasani, The Grayzone focuses on Prof. Neil Ferguson, a mathematical modeller of infectious diseases at Imperial College London. Ridiculed as ‘Prof Lockdown’ by the right-wing press and blamed for producing modelling that forced the UK government into the first March 2020 lockdown, he has become a target for Covid-deniers. His 16 March 2020 paper predicted 510,000 deaths if the government took no action to mitigate an epidemic and 250,000 deaths if a mitigation strategy was pursued. Such worst-case scenario modelling does not pretend to be hard and fast prediction, but illustrates the need to act, and is only as good as the underlying assumptions. The Grayzone does not consider what actually happened in Britain thereafter: the NHS over-run and over 30,000 dead in two months, then over-run again in early 2020 and early 2021, and now 175,000 deaths with Covid-19 on the death certificate. Ferguson’s figures were in this instance, of the right order.
The attacks on Ferguson have been extended to other modelling that called for urgent action in the face of the spread of the new Omicron variant. Scientists who advise the British government as part of Sage (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) and Spi-M (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling) warned that Covid-19 infections driven by Omicron could lead to over 2,000 daily hospital admissions, and a total of 24,700 deaths between 1 December 2021 and 30 April 2022 if no actions beyond the government’s ‘Plan B’ are taken. The government and media ignored the assumptions and attacked the modelling that led to these estimates. Daily hospital admissions in mid-January 2022 regularly exceeded the predicted 2,000 daily admissions, and the number of deaths exceeded 5,300 in the month to 18 January.
In dismissing Ferguson’s work, The Grayzone ignores an article published on 7 July 2021 by Ferguson’s team at Imperial College, Evaluating the Roadmap out of Lockdown for England: modelling the delayed step 4 of the roadmap in the context of the Delta variant. This predicted that lifting all measures on 19 July (‘Freedom Day’), would lead to 14,000 deaths and 112,500 hospitalisations in England between 2 July 2021 and 1 June 2022, in an optimistic scenario assuming the R number increased gradually from 2.7 to 5.5 by 1 September, and assuming two million doses of vaccines were being administered weekly. The article also predicted 75,500 deaths and 546,000 hospitalisations in a pessimistic scenario, and these are the figures the media jumped on. In reality, R fell rather than rose, as people cautiously returned to reopening, from 1.4 on 19 July to 1.1 on 1 September; vaccination rates only reached two million a week in late October. Nevertheless, between 2 July 2021 and the date of the first confirmed Omicron death on 13 December, there were indeed 14,913 deaths and 124,697 hospitalisations in England.
The modelling correctly predicted this disaster, and casting doubt on the scientific modellers simply allows the government to get away with social murder. As the Covid sceptics argue whether people are hospitalised ‘with Covid’ or ‘from Covid’ or died ‘of Covid’ or ‘with Covid’, deaths, hospitalisations and Long Covid rates are on the rise globally. There were 24.7 million confirmed cases globally in December 2021, a rise of 8.5 million cases above November’s figure (16.2 million cases). 212,000 Covid-19 patients died in December 2021. Minimising the dangers of Covid-19 provides a cover for social murder. While The Grayzone provides a vital service to socialists with its defence of progressive regimes in Latin America, against imperialism, its position on managing the Covid-19 pandemic merely reframes right-wing neoliberal views. Lockdowns were never the first choice of capitalist governments to control the spread of the virus; public health scholars never argued for them in this way; they were immensely damaging for the working class and poor in the way they were implemented; but we cannot make scientific or political concessions to populists and conspiracists.
