March 12 2025 - 1:00pm
For 29 years after the end of the Second World War, a Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda fought on against the Allies in a remote Philippine island, refusing to believe that his country had surrendered despite being presented with overwhelming evidence.
It is worth remembering Onoda’s campaign when trying to understand those who, to this day, continue to defend the mainstream response to the Covid pandemic centered around lockdowns, compulsory masks and vaccine mandates.
The lockdown defenders may be a dwindling band, but they include more than a few influential scientists and journalists. Human nature being what it is, perhaps we should not be surprised that even seemingly intelligent people find it hard to interpret evidence fairly when doing so would mean acknowledging how disastrously wrong they were at the time.
A case in point is a Guardian opinion piece published on Sunday, in which science journalist Laura Spinney argues that “early and hard” lockdown was correct, that ”masks worked”, and that the “mRNA vaccines prevented millions of deaths”.
The Covid response involved policies of unprecedented consequence, and it is right that they should be thoroughly debated and critiqued. Indeed, we should never tire of putting the record straight on articles like this, however repetitive we might sound.
For a start, lockdowns, school closures and other compulsory measures were not a prerequisite for turning around infection waves and hence preventing health services from being overwhelmed. There is also no evidence that an earlier lockdown would have saved significant numbers of lives. Additionally, while lockdowns may have caused a small reduction in short-term Covid deaths (though even that isn’t certain), they may well have increased overall excess mortality, and certainly caused unprecedented economic, psychological and social harms which dwarf any possible benefit they might have had.
The evidence on mask effectiveness, meanwhile, is at best weak and uncertain. For example, the gold-standard Cochrane evidence review of their impacts on respiratory diseases found wearing a mask makes “little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/COVID-like illness; and probably makes little or no difference in how many people have flu/COVID”.
Even if mRNA vaccines saved lives, suggestions that they prevented millions of deaths are certainly wide of the mark. Further, we now have strong evidence that, although the care home vaccine mandate was ineffective in saving lives, it was very effective in driving workers out of the sector and destroying trust in vaccines.
Most crucially, though, lockdowns and other authoritarian responses to Covid were unethical in and of themselves, and should never be repeated.
The story of Hiroo Onoda may tempt us to be tolerant of Spinney’s quixotic defense of mainstream Covid policies. What is less forgivable, however, is her assertion that voices opposing those responses “must be muted” on the grounds that they risk an effective response to future pandemics and thus place future lives at risk.
We should have no tolerance of such tyrannical calls to shut down debate. Over the past few years, we have learned more about the worrying attempts to restrict critics of official Covid policies. In the US, the Counter-Disinformation Unit monitored activities of lockdown and vaccine mandate critics and worked with social media companies to limit their reach. Similarly in the US, journalist and vaccine critic Alex Berenson has revealed how the Biden administration pressured Twitter to remove his account, something that is now the subject of a major lawsuit.
Whatever your views on pandemic policy, it should be a point of common agreement that coordinated campaigns to mute dissenting voices in academia, the media, politics and online were not only wrong, but also counterproductive in the way they destroyed long term trust in official public health messaging. Even Rishi Sunak has acknowledged that the lack of open debate contributed significantly to poor decisions being made in government.
Those pushing for crackdowns on dissenting voices argue that doing so protects vulnerable people from incorrect information. The obvious problem with this argument is that governments and so-called “experts” have been as guilty as anyone else of promoting misinformation. History suggests the way to tackle bad information is to promote more speech and debate, not less. It is a shame that the Guardian appears not to have learned that lesson.
David Paton is a Professor of Industrial Economics at Nottingham University Business School.
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