The tide has turned. Finally. Recently that organ of pro-lockdown orthodoxy, the New York Times, ran an editorial to the effect that during the Covid pandemic no schools should ever have been closed. And that it would take decades to recover from this public policy fiasco. Sure, the NYT buried this editorial in a Saturday edition. But it’s a start. Especially for those of us who doubted the imposition of lockdowns from day one, publicly and in print, and were faced with a barrage of unhinged abuse about being ‘grandmother killers’ or ‘denying the science’ or having some talking head suffering from a toxic overdose of his own supposed virtue ramble on about ‘not on my watch’ as regards adopting the Swedish approach.

Last week the front page of the London Telegraph (far more sane through the pandemic, by the way, than the Australian) published a front page piece with a headline ‘lockdown effects feared to be killing more people than Covid’. In fact, the article by the paper’s science editor Sarah Knapton cites excess deaths data from Britain’s Office for National Statistics that make it plain this will happen. Knapton says that ‘over the past two months, the number of excess deaths not from Covid dwarfs the number linked to the virus’. Even some doctors’ organisations, who were all too willing to try to suppress and cancel lockdown dissenters for over two years, are doing about faces – not least the British Heart Foundation. Others, like the man who goes by the moniker ‘The Naked Emperor’ (for obvious reasons) on Substack, have taken this data and drilled down further. For instance, for the week ending 5 August there were 1,350 excess deaths in England and Wales.

Guess what? That is 14.4 per cent higher than the 5-year average. And you’re seeing those noticeably higher excess deaths in Australia too. But the Naked Emperor makes a point the science editor of the London Telegraph still shies away from, a point related to wide-open, honest debate: ‘There is no doubt that lockdowns are one of the major causes [of these really high excess deaths numbers] but it would be stupid to not even consider vaccines. Investigate whether they have contributed to these excess deaths in any way, present the evidence and then say no they haven’t. But don’t just dogmatically say they are safe and not look into it.’

That sums up the view of this twice-vaccinated, no-boosters, writer. I have so little trust in the expert class (including the medicos) after the last two years I am taking nada, nothing, zero on trust from these people. Many of them spent the last two-plus years stifling dissent; or keeping their heads down and being too cowardly to voice honestly held doubts; or revelling in a heavy-handed ‘we are the incarnation of science and we’re not prepared to brook any dissent’ form of modern-day aristocracy. And this in the context of Anders Tegnell’s Swedish approach (the same as the one recommended by the Great Barrington Declaration) looking better and better with each passing day – on every axis of concern and on every criterion. Not just as regards kids’ schooling outcomes. Not just all the economic outcomes from debt to small business closures to ruined CBDs to incredible asset inflation. Not just the invidious massive transfers of wealth from the young to the old and from the poor to the rich that lockdowns (and the money printing and massive spending needed to support those lockdowns, triggering the above-mentioned asset inflation, now price inflation and a hammered private sector) brought about.  No, even on straight-up ‘which policy choice will have the fewest excess deaths’ criterion, lockdowns were a mistake. The right choice, the one that was WHO and British policy in October of 2019 based on a century of data, was to protect the vulnerable and leave everyone else alone to make their own calls while definitely not locking down, not closing schools, not weaponising the police as the enforcement arm of two-bit public health bureaucrats. It was right even if the only axis you cared about, the only one, was how many deaths your response to Covid would lead to.

So to be blunt, Australia’s response to Covid was nothing to be proud of. As time goes by it is looking worse and worse. Scott Morrison and John Howard may say that Australia’s response was top of the class.  But I strongly disagree. I don’t know what data they’re looking at but what I’m seeing indicates bad choice piled on bad choice – all while shutting down dissenting views; centralising decision-making within an incredibly narrow band of people; and maybe worst of all ‘engineering a situation whereby those with decision-making power had no skin in the game’. They paid virtually none of the costs they imposed on others.

When I made this critique a year ago and more, most people said I was wrong on the facts. These days more and more agree with me on the substance. They concede we should not have gone down the road we did. But they offer this secondary defence of our (and to be fair most of the democratic world’s) political and public health castes. They say something along the lines of: ‘Look, there was great uncertainty. No one knew for sure how potent this virus was. It was better to be safe than sorry, to opt for the least risk option. Maybe we were too slow to reverse course. But in the swirl of uncertainty we can forgive the initial lockdowns, school closures, massive spending, etcetera, etcetera.’

Again, count me a strong dissenter to that plea in mitigation. In the face of uncertainty that is exactly the time when you should be guided by your core principles and values.  If your initial response is to copy China and more or less weld people in their homes that seems, to me, to be a despotic and wrong-headed response. It is certainly not a recognisably liberal response. It amounts to invoking the precautionary principle on steroids, all while doing only ‘benefit’ analysis, not ‘cost-benefit’ analysis – because many people right at the start pointed out all the many likely medium-term costs to this sort of authoritarian, thuggish lockdown response. Yet throw in some wildly wrong modelling by Neil Ferguson out of Imperial College. Stir in a bit of Pravda-like fear porn press coverage. Add a lot of cancelling those with dissenting opinions, especially by Big Tech. And here we are today. But uncertainty in no way justifies what our politicians did. Heck, if we’re giving the full picture there was much less uncertainty than this attempted defence suggests. Right from the start they had the data from the cruise ship Diamond Princess. Not a single young person on that boat who caught the disease died or went into ICU. And the death rate even amongst the many elderly cruise ship passengers never came close to that of the Spanish Flu, forget the Black Death.

Anyway, I want politicians who fall back on liberal values in the face of uncertainty, when it counts. I don’t want those who, faced with uncertainty, resort to what you’d see from the Chinese Politburo.

Vote them all out. They richly deserve it.