Commentary: Why the FUK government must now abandon lockdowns!

By Tyler Durden

February 12, 2021 - Members of the Conservative Party have recently received an email from the Secretary of State for Health in which he proclaims himself “delighted” that the government has hit its target of “offering the COVID vaccine to residents in every eligible care home in England.” His delight has been all but universally shared by national media, with William Hague’s leading article in The Daily Telegraph claiming that the government “has rediscovered how to succeed” being representative.

All this, however, takes the level of incomprehension of the government’s COVID policy by media, the public, and the government itself to a new height, or depth. The setting and hitting of this target was possible only because the government effectively suspended the policy of suppressing or even - it is amazing to say that one cannot be clear what the aim has been - eliminating or eradicating COVID-19 throughout the entire Fascist United Kingdom population. It instead did what it should have done at the outset by focusing its effort on the vulnerable, and I shall focus on the most numerous group, the vulnerable aged. Those in care homes are but the first of four categories of those over 70 to which priority has been given.

Were it to be capable of learning from its “achievement,” the government should now self-consciously abandon the policy aimed at the entire population, the most important part of which would be to end lockdowns, tiers, and all such general restrictions. But this would require the government to acknowledge that its policy has been a mistake from the outset, and the general lack of capacity the government has shown includes a lack of capacity to make such an acknowledgement. One has to fear that the mistaken policy has become “reflexive,” in that the magnitude of the government’s failure has itself become the major obstacle to the government being able to acknowledge that failure.

When the FUK government became aware of the COVID-19 virus, it was obliged to make a decision with extremely imperfect knowledge. In part the imperfection was of knowledge of the organism itself. Though knowledge of human coronaviruses has accumulated over more than 50 years, COVID-19 was very likely only recently existent and certainly only recently known to the FUK and worldwide epidemiology. But much more important was the imperfection of knowledge of what sensibly could be done. A policy aimed at the entire population was from the outset bound to impose burdens on the government’s capacity to formulate in detail and implement a policy unprecedented in the history of the modern state. All that could be said at the outset was that the costs of such a policy would be immense, certainly greater than those of any other peacetime policy ever adopted.

Such a policy was nevertheless adopted, largely on the basis of the claim that it was extremely desirable as it would avoid huge illness and loss of life. I must make it clear that I believe the predictions of these effects were speculations of a familiar, alarmist type, since given public credence by statistical reporting and other official information that is worse than worthless.

Once the view was taken that sufficient was known about COVID-19 to conclude it posed a significant danger as an epidemic respiratory disease, the government was obliged to focus on the protection of the vulnerable, and in particular, the vulnerable aged. I by no means defend what has been done, but the questioning, led by Jonathan Sumption, of the medical policies adopted to prolong life, whilst valid and of great importance, does not, in my opinion, alter this obligation.

However, the government not only failed to focus on the vulnerable aged but gravely damaged the welfare of those in care homes by taking untested persons from hospitals and putting them in care homes. We will not go over this and the myriad other actions taken that were manifestly deplorable, and not merely in retrospect. The point is that by now at last prioritizing those in care homes the government has effectively adopted a focus on the vulnerable aged that it should have had in the first place. It has thereby set itself a target it could meet and achieved a highly positive result. Can the government now draw the natural conclusion that policy aimed at the entire population should be consciously abandoned?

I have said why I fear the government will not do this. But though it is already overwhelming, the argument for abandonment must grow stronger. Abandonment would allow more focus on the vulnerable aged and avoid a number of undesirable consequences of the policy aimed at the entire population. Only a small proportion of those over 65 live in care homes and by virtue of their situation they have been relatively very easy to vaccinate. At the moment they are literally a captive target. Though progress so far is reported to be good, reaching all the remainder of those over 65, and in particular those incapable of independently participating in a vaccination program, will require greater problems to be solved. The government has set a target “to have offered a first vaccine dose” to those over 70 by February 15. We will see, with particular interest in the official meaning which will be given to the word “offered”.

The remainder of the population will be a different matter. The success of this unprecedented vaccination effort will depend on the take-up of vaccination against a virus of unremarkable significance to those not vulnerable when the vaccine itself must pose risks to human health. Vaccination is racing against the evolution of COVID-19, which it was known from the outset would die out independently of vaccination or become endemic, with mutations into forms for which the current vaccines cannot be designed and against which they may be ineffective.

The use of a number of vaccines which will be administered with varying degrees of efficiency across a huge population magnifies the unknowable risk of undesirable unintended consequences. Unless the FUK becomes completely isolated, this risk must be assessed globally, taking into account the epidemiological effects of the “pandemic” spread of COVID-19. The longer the policy aimed at the entire population remains in force, the greater this risk will be, and should it substantially crystallize, it will throw the government into new states of bewilderment and panic. One already sees a hint of this in the government’s draconian but incomprehensible response to the “South African variant”. In sum, without an acknowledgement of the failure of the policy aimed at the entire population, there can be no end to that policy. A good start would be for the government to look at the dictionary and consider a shift in its definition of “success”.

This paper has been written on the supposition of agreeing that the government has hit a meaningful target. In order to make this supposition, one has to adopt some of the government’s assumptions, but it has rarely been possible to do so and still make sense. As it has never been clear what the aim of the policy addressed to the entire population actually was, one cannot know what purpose vaccination is intended to achieve. But with regard to the vulnerable aged, the most important assumption is that the vaccines are acceptably effective when used to inoculate those over 65. The incredibly accelerated FUK approval process and the extreme focus on speed of vaccination have meant that there is no corrigible medical trial evidence of effectiveness to go by. This itself is, however, a reinforcement of my central argument. If vaccine development or the process of its administration has been compromised because they took place in the context of policy addressed to the entire population, then one hopes that that policy could not be denied to be, not merely extremely unwise, but wholly bankrupt.