Covid fallacies, part one
A reflection on the anniversary of a remarkably trying time for everyone
Midnight on Tuesday next will mark the fourth anniversary of the Irish government’s decision to enact the first of many lockdowns imposed with the goal of combatting Covid-19; in something analogous to a coincidence, the Taoiseach who enacted it just announced his resignation. To observe the occasion, I’d like to take the opportunity to reflect on what a strange period in modern Irish history those two horrific years were. I’d also like to cap the era off by presenting a personal catalogue, containing some of the lazy arguments and shoddy reasoning offered by the hawks who argued in favour of aggressive and prolonged anti-Covid restrictions.
I had ample time and opportunity to collect these fallacies amidst what would eventually become one of the longest and most restrictive lockdowns in Europe, during which time there was little to do besides going for long runs and debating the efficacy of this or that restriction via social media. Was this a productive use of my time?1 Perhaps not, but it’s not like there were many alternative activities available. (You can hardly admonish a Very Online person you disagree with to go outside and touch grass™ when a moment ago you were calling them a selfish granny-murderer specifically because they would like to go outside and touch grass™, if it’s all the same to you.)
Among the Covid hawks with whom I got into repeated sparring matches in Reddit and other online spaces, there were certain extremely obvious errors in reasoning and misapprehension of basic facts which came up again and again with tiresome predictability. And they always seemed to be delivered in a uniform tone: a strange blend of dismissive, withering condescension and emotionally manipulative histrionics, which I’m sure is familiar to anyone who’s ventured into Irish Twitter.
Needless to say, the fact that many of the people eagerly supporting lockdowns and other restrictions were so obnoxious and underinformed is not, in and of itself, an argument against these measures. Any sufficiently popular policy proposal is bound to be defended by some number of people with a poor grasp of the relevant facts and a sophomoric approach to inductive reasoning. But what I found striking about Covid was the conspicuous lack of a gulf in the quality of argumentation between the architects of lockdowns and the footsoldiers on social media who defended them. It was far from uncommon for an epidemiology expert to produce a model of projected Covid deaths which was later shown to be orders of magnitude off the mark - and for this model to be rabidly defended by a horde of hawks long after its key predictions and assumptions had been shown to be bunk.
I imagine almost everyone has one bugbear: a specific topic they find it almost impossible to discuss in a disinterested fashion without losing their cool, whether abortion, gun control or Israel-Palestine. Readers, I must confess that mine is the Covid response. While I can discuss a wide array of exceedingly sensitive and controversial topics (including plenty which affect me directly) in a calm and dispassionate tone - my calm restraint largely goes out the window when this topic comes up.
Why is this? No doubt a large part of it is simply the invasive, totalising character of the restrictions: there was hardly a single aspect of my lifestyle that Covid didn’t affect in one way or another, the overwhelming majority for the worse, each one a reminder of the control that Covid hawks in government wielded over me. But there was also something in the character and attitude of the aggressively pro-lockdown faction that really got under my skin. One could argue that Covid was the culmination of some perverse sociocultural tendencies which had been bubbling away beneath the surface of the Western woke progressive set for years, only to find their most horrific expression to date the moment the pandemic struck. In this category we might include:
A proclivity to disguise the political orthodoxy of the moment under the label of “science” and to insist that anyone who departs from that orthodoxy is a conspiratorial crank: “people [who] worship ‘the science’ but have, shall we say, a selective understanding of it”
The valorisation of “experts” as a priestly caste whose authority can never be questioned by a lay person, no matter how many times these experts’ empirical predictions fail to come to pass (all provided the expert is following the party line, that is)
The assumption that, in any policy debate, the correct policy to enact is always obvious and straightforward, and anyone who disagrees with that policy is either a bad actor, or simply too stupid or uneducated to understand the question; a rejection of the concept of a political trade-off, in which every option available comes with desirable gains and serious costs
A risk-averseness and childlike propensity towards safetyism which is dangerously narrow-minded
The almost bottomless loathing of ordinary working people exhibited by members of the professional-managerial class, which is conveniently rationalised away (as it must be, many PMC members still nominally considering themselves socialist) with moralising sanctimony about the working class’s selfishness, small-mindedness, lack of education or all of the above
The rejection of community spirit, in favour of promoting atomisation, individualism and introversion as virtues in themselves
A “relaxed contempt for the flesh”: a dismissiveness and cultivated ignorance towards physical labour and exercise (and those who carry them out), in favour of a retreat into fictional fantasy worlds and the virtual, abstract “knowledge economy”
Without apology, this will not be a “both sides” article. I am well aware of the existence of people who think that Covid doesn’t exist, that the pandemic was ginned up from whole cloth, that it’s all a conspiracy by the Bilderberg Group to install the New World Order etc. The existence of such people does not excuse the poor arguments and sloppy reasoning offered by the pro-lockdown, pro-restrictions side of the debate. Nor does it let them off the hook for the range of catastrophic effects their preferred policies wrought and continue to work on Irish society.
In the interest of heading off the predictable accusations directed against just about anyone who expresses scepticism about certain components of the Western Covid response, I would like to clarify some of my beliefs out of the gate:
Covid is a real respiratory virus which poses a grave risk to old, infirm, immunocompromised and/or obese people.
The impact of Covid is plainly visible from charts of excess mortality in almost any country in the years 2020-22. Every one of these deaths was an unspeakable tragedy, which is not to imply that all (or even most) of these deaths were preventable in any meaningful, durable sense.
While their capacity to prevent transmission of the virus was dramatically oversold (perhaps even knowingly), the various Western vaccines are safe and generally effective at preventing illness serious enough to merit hospitalisation. For this reason, old, infirm, immunocompromised and/or obese people are well-advised to get vaccinated, and to receive regular boosters every winter. While I belong to none of those categories, I was nonetheless fully vaccinated against Covid, although I have not received a booster shot for some time.
I have yet to see any persuasive evidence that the vaccines pose a significant risk of causing heart failure or heart conditions in those who receive them.
I am not a “eugenicist”. Nor is anyone else who recognises that Covid affects some groups more than others, for easily understood biological reasons largely unrelated to societal discrimination. Nor is anyone who recognises that everyone dies eventually.
Covid is a biological virus which is wholly unrelated to the provision of 5G towers or the availability of Wi-Fi in a given region.
The vaccines do not contain microchips fabricated by Bill Gates in an effort to control population. Nor are they designed to sterilise their recipients.
With all of that throat-clearing out of the way, please read on.