COVID - Why are we still where we are?

I am writing this, bizarrely you may think, on the advice, even the request, certainly the encouragement, of a Professor Mattias Desmet, professor of psychology at the University of Ghent in Belgium. Check him out on YouTube. He has been trying to address a question I have been asking for many months: Why are we in the western world, not just Britain, mindlessly pursuing horribly damaging policies in the face of the Covid virus?

Particularly now. As I write, the virus is taking the shape of the Omicron variant. The evidence from South Africa, where it started, is that the variant is milder than its predecessors, though more infectious, more transmissible. The hard evidence in Britain confirms this: massive increase in infection; but deaths and hospitalizations have remained consistently low, actually since Delta became the main variant in July – even before Omicron, which is, as indicated, believed to be milder. According to Professor Sir John Bell of the Vaccine Taskforce, mass deaths and hospitalizations are now “history”.

And yet – we are faced with continued border controls, endless testing, isolations, including isolation of healthy people, mask wearing, and the constant threat of further restrictions. All these things, including lockdowns, are referred to, in a typically inelegant expression, as “Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions”.

Why? As Professor Chris Whitty was heard to say many months ago – perhaps stepping slightly out of line - we’ll have to learn to live with the virus.

But there is a much more serious point that seems to be ignored, as the world continues to agonize over the number of “cases” being reported: the horrendous cost of the NPIs. Do I need to specify? The most serious is one where the ultimate costs are impossible to quantify and where the effects won’t be evident for many years: the immense damage being done to the education of a generation of children and young people, almost none of whom are affected, either badly or at all, by the virus.

Again, why are we contemplating, or even willingly submitting to, yet more of these NPIs? And why do a majority of the public (if opinion polls are even partly to be believed) tend to support them?

The only answer I have been able to come up with – before listening to the learned Professor Desmet - is FEAR. The British government, when faced with Covid at the beginning of 2020, decided to go down the lockdown route. They also decided that to get people to obey what was indeed the unprecedented removal of traditional freedoms, they needed to frighten us all. It turned out to be quite unnecessary. People happily complied – and had actually started to do quite a bit of isolation before the rules came in. What we have all now discovered is that it’s very easy to frighten people, but not half so easy to un-frighten them. You have to say that the danger has gone away. And that can’t be done. See above, as per Chris Whitty. We will have to live with the virus, which is likely to stay with us.

Here I must revert to Professor Mattias Desmet, who has another theory. He is a psychologist, but also – importantly – a statistician. He was alerted to the issue, wearing his hat as a statistician. Back in May 2020, when we were all still locking ourselves down, very significantly on the basis of our own Professor Ferguson’s alarming forecasts of 500,000 deaths (very soon revised downwards, of course, and now discredited), Desmet spotted statistical errors, but also was able to see from hard evidence that the forecasts were demonstrably wrong. For example, Ferguson had predicted 80,000 deaths in Sweden if they didn’t lockdown. They didn’t. Six thousand died. Desmet asked himself why the restrictions still continued, on the basis of flawed scientific predictions - but with massive public support.

He had studied, in completely different contexts, what he refers to as “mass formation”, the alarming process whereby large numbers of people are effectively hypnotized to follow a particular political narrative. The examples he quotes, and which he had studied, are Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. These occurred in situations where there were widespread levels of public anxiety, in the case of Germany as a result of economic collapse and the fear of communism, the political narrative being supplied in the way we know only too well.

Mercifully, we live in more benign times. But Desmet notes parallels: widespread levels of social anxiety – nothing to do with pandemics – the sort of anxieties that some people blame on the social media, but he is more specific. He notes loneliness and the lack of social bonds; people feeling that their lives are meaningless, with “bullshit jobs” (quoting from a book with that indelicate title); and what he refers to as free floating anxiety and frustration – all these things evidenced by the staggering number of anti-depressant pills being consumed. Desmet sees this as a fertile ground for a narrative that identifies a danger and proposes a solution.

Do we recognize ourselves in this scenario? We certainly have a perceived danger, a danger that has been much exaggerated (see above). We also have a “narrative” – a solution. We can avoid the dangers, we can “stay safe”, if we isolate, stay at home, close pubs and restaurants, even close schools.

In Desmet’s view, this is powerful stuff. The public becomes in his word “hypnotized” and ready, even eager, to embrace the solutions proposed by the narrative, even when those solutions are – in his words – “demonstrably absurd”. Worse than that, people become aggressively hostile to anyone who suggests an alternative approach – for example, the vilification meted out to Professor Sunetra Gupta for her co-authorship of the Great Barrington Declaration.

What do we do about it? One approach – one that people have encouraged me to take – is to forget about it, get on with life so far as one can, regard it all as well outside one’s control. Desmet speculates that in conditions of “mass formation” – they should try and come up with a better phrase! - there are probably only about 30% who are fully paid-up supporters, about 30% at the other sceptical end of the spectrum, and say 40% who swing with what they perceive to be the crowd, the consensus. On the basis of this, he says that the sceptics shouldn’t be afraid to speak out. It’s only when the consensus swings over that we’ll get away from the powerful force of the alarmist “narrative”.

Otherwise we’ll be here for the rest of our lives – certainly mine. Every winter, perhaps more often, a new variant or even a new virus will emerge to threaten us all. Our scientists will identify it and, struggling with their Greek lexicons, give it a new name. They will also explain, in somber tones, that it MAY be more dangerous than the last one – they will be right, of course it MAY BE more dangerous, even if it’s more likely not to be. And back we all go: more lockdowns, more NPIs.

It’s for this reason that I’m following what Professor Desmet says. Speak out. (Listen to him on YouTube.)

And have a Happy New Year, in the hope that we can all turn a corner in 2022!

Tony Herbert

31 December 2021