This week George Monbiot, the well-known environmental journalist and climate campaigner, has written another polemical Guardian column about Covid, extolling the virtues of mask-wearing in hospitals and endorsing keeping school children with a runny nose or sore throat at home.
He claims that the Government is acting like “Covid-19 is all but over”, unaware of the epidemiological differences between an epidemic and endemic disease, and the vital role of herd immunity. Unsurprisingly, he overstates the risk of re-infection and long Covid, using fear-mongering language.
But most egregiously, he points to “steady rising” Covid deaths, leaving out some vital details. Data from the Office of National Statistics in England and Wales shows there were nearly five times more influenza deaths (1,229) than Covid deaths (255) last week, and 89% of these deaths with Covid were in people over 70 years old.
Unfortunately, Monbiot is just one example of many on the Left who are pushing for such measures. From Leftist intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek and Bruno Latour to journalists such as Amy Goodman and Ed Yong and academics, including members of Independent Sage and the World Health Network, many on the Left became Covid hardliners during the pandemic and promoted a new safety subculture that persists today.
While there are some outward manifestations of this subculture around us — masks, boosters, social distancing, vaccine mandates — it is also guided by a distinct political philosophy: government “complacency” is responsible for “deliberately infecting” people with Covid, and causing a “mass disabling event”, because they are not providing a Covid-safe environment.
Despite pushback within some corners of the Left, these critiques, for the most part, fell on deaf ears. Instead, the pandemic was coopted as a radical moment to “rethink everything”. Hence, lockdowns were praised as an exercise in mass empathy, concerns about social trade-offs were dismissed as a Right-wing conspiracy, large restrictions on free speech were heralded as a necessary strategy to fight “disinformation”, vaccine mandates were promoted as a way to punish non-conformists, and fears about the threat of Covid to the young and healthy were repeatedly hyped up.
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