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PETER HITCHENS: Why do, even now, so few accept that lockdown was like burning down your home to destroy a wasp’s nest?


We will never know exactly how foolish it was to close down the country in the spring of 2020.

It is beginning to dawn on some people that it might actually have been an error. But will it ever be broadly agreed that it was so?

A report published yesterday — hundreds of pages of devastating detail from experts at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. and Lund University in Sweden — concluded the supposed benefits of lockdown were ‘a drop in the bucket’ when compared to the costs. Or, as I would put it, they were like burning down your house to get rid of a wasps’ nest.

This report (in fact a revised version of an earlier document first issued in May 2022) will shock many Lockdown enthusiasts by saying that closing the country saved as few as 1,700 lives in England and Wales in spring 2020.

Wrecked

It ought to weigh heavily on the anti-panic side of the scales. I hope it will. But will it resolve anything? I have my doubts.

I still meet plenty of people who insist that our only national mistake was not to lock down harder and sooner than we did. This is why I am quite sure many of those who supported these moves will never abandon their position.

Those of us who, like me, took the other view, are unlikely to shift either. Why is this?

I have come to the conclusion that it is really about whether people like being bossed about for their own good, or whether they do not. A surprising number of us turn out to love Big Brother. Not only could these illiberal types not get enough of doom-packed propaganda, decrees urging them to stay at home, keep their distance and wear masks, but they were sorry when it ended.

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