COVID and the Expansion and Abuse of State Power

Commentary

Years of living with increasingly oppressive COVID-19 restrictions and mandates tell a story of many villains complicit in tyranny and a few resistance heroes. It’s the story of venal, inept politicians and brutal police—thugs in uniform—acting at the command of power-drunk apparatchiks.

What was there to like about the COVID era? It was medically stupid, economically ruinous, socially disruptive and embittering, culturally dystopian, and politically despotic.
If you were Big Pharma, you’d be talking about billions.
If you were Big State, you would have unchecked power.
If you were a chief medical officer, you would have power over a state’s entire population as well as fame with extended daily TV appearances on all channels.
If you were the World Health Organization (WHO), you would have more money and power over the world’s governments and people.
If you were a climate zealot, this would be your action plan.
If you were a cop looking for free rein to unleash your inner bully, this is the place to be.
But anguished despair if you’re a concerned citizen who values individual liberty and autonomy.

Until 2020, the existing frameworks, processes, and institutional safeguards under which liberal democracies functioned ensured expanding freedoms, growing prosperity, an enviable lifestyle and quality of life, and educational and health outcomes unparalleled in human history. Abandoning them in favor of a tightly centralized small group of decision-makers free of external scrutiny, contestability, and accountability resulted in a dysfunctional process and suboptimal outcomes: very modest gains for significant long-term pain.

Many risked their lives to protect our liberties during two world wars, but in the last three years, many have given up liberties to prolong their lives. The uber-surveillance state and a Stasi-style snitch society developed a co-dependency.

When confronted with the coronavirus pandemic as a “black swan” event, most countries chose a hard suppression strategy with varying degrees of lockdown. Because of the history of failed catastrophist warnings from professor Neil Ferguson, the Pied Piper of pandemic porn; the massive economic costs that also have deadly consequences; the draconian infringement on individual liberties; and the availability of other more targeted strategies rather than the mythical “do nothing” alternative, there should have been more caution.

The science-denying policy interventions inflicted devastating long-term social, economic, educational, health, and mental health costs, particularly on young people, despite the virus posing a negligible risk of serious harm to them. It should not have come as a surprise to any health professional that, as social creatures, humans are scarred by social isolation imposed by state diktats promoting the message that humans are disease-ridden biohazards.

On the one hand, COVID was rarely at the top of the list of deadly killer diseases for the vast majority of poor people in developing countries; on the other hand, lockdowns proved cruel, heartless, and lethal. Their plight was ignored by the very people and countries that loudly proclaim their concern for vulnerable and marginalized communities.

The extent of coercion and force used by some of the most well-known champions of democracy and liberty was one of the most shocking developments as the pandemic progressed. The line between liberal democracy and draconian dictatorship proved to be as thin as a virus. Repression tools like unleashing heavily armed cops on peacefully protesting citizens, which were once the defining characteristics of fascists, communists, and tin-pot despots, became uncomfortably familiar on the streets of Western democracies.

Lockdowns ruined the three “Ls” of life, livelihood, and liberty. Governments stole nearly three years of our lives. Preemptive press self-censorship aided in normalizing the rise of the surveillance-cum-biosecurity state in the name of keeping us safe from the virus so lethal that hundreds of millions of people had to be tested to know they had it. The Freedom Convoy in Canada exposed the stark reality that lockdowns are a class war waged by the laptop class against the working class, the cultural elites against the great unwashed outside urban centers, and the virtue signallers against independent free thinkers.

Australia sparked international outrage with its authoritarian measures to “crush and kill the virus.” The case of Zoe Buhler, the pregnant mother handcuffed in her lounge room in front of her children, will be remembered as the defining image of Australia’s pandemic state of siege. The episode is the epitome of a police state. How do we walk Australia back after we’ve crossed the Rubicon? A good place to start would be criminal prosecution of cops carrying out dictatorial edicts, as well as the officers and ministers who authorize such action.

Vaccines were initially recommended and later mandated under the slogan “No one is safe until everyone is safe,” despite the implicit admission in the slogan that they do not protect the vaccinated. Opposition to vaccine mandates has hardened as a result of evidence of benefit gaslighting, denial of collateral harms, refusal to conduct or otherwise publish cost-benefit analyses, and prohibition of alternative treatment options.

The policy conclusion is that mandates should be lifted in public settings and companies should be barred from imposing them in most business settings, leaving people to make informed decisions in consultation with their doctors, free of pressure from drug regulators. Also, reinstate all employees who were fired for refusing the jab.

The longer health officials pushed COVID-19 vaccination, exaggerating its benefits, downplaying its rapidly waning efficacy, ignoring safety signals on its list of harms, and banning alternatives, the more focus shifted to drug regulators enabling pharmaceutical interventions rather than acting as watchdogs on behalf of public health and safety. In liberal democracies, health authorities and regulators shifted the balance decisively from individualism to the collective safetyism of technocrats and experts.

The WHO’s performance was mixed. Its credibility was harmed by its tardiness in raising the alarm, its shabby treatment of Taiwan at China’s request, the initial investigation that whitewashed the virus’s origins, and flip-flops on masks and lockdowns that contradicted its own collective wisdom developed over a century and distilled in a 2019 report. This makes it all the more surprising that a concerted effort is underway to expand its authority and resources through a new global pandemic treaty and amendments to the legally binding International Health Regulations.

In covering COVID, journalists lost their skepticism toward official claims and became addicted to fear porn. A critical and skeptical profession would have blown up the government’s and modellers’ claims and savaged them for the magnitude of errors in their predictions. Instead, we went “from disinterested journalism to Pravda in a single bound,” as the Telegraph’s Janet Daley put it. Indeed, all institutional checks on executive overreach and abuse—legislatures, the judiciary, human rights machinery, professional associations, trade unions, the Church, and the media—proved to be ineffective.

We had to relearn two fundamental truths: Governments rarely relinquish more powers voluntarily, and any new power that can be abused will be abused, if not today by current agents of state, then sometime in the future by their successors. When crimes against humanity are committed by foot soldiers, the highest level decision-makers, like those in command, must be held accountable. This is necessary to ensure that wrongdoing is punished, victims receive emotional closure, and future acts of comparable malfeasance are discouraged.

Will COVID illiberalism be reversed, or has it become a permanent feature of the democratic West’s political landscape? The mind tells you to be fearful, but an eternally optimistic heart still hopes for the best.