Where Lockdowns and Fast-Tracked Vaccines Came From

I’ve been taking a closer look at what happened at the start of the pandemic and how it came about, and what we can do to stop it happening again.

There are two basic questions that need answering. One concerns the origin of the virus itself – was it engineered or natural, when did it emerge or leak and where, and what explains its changing behaviour in different times and places? The second concerns the origins of our response: where did the lockdowns, social distancing, masks and other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) come from, and why did everyone adopt them even though they had never been used before and there was no evidence such costly measures would achieve anything of significance?

Here’s what I currently think happened – this article is deliberately concise, to serve as a summary. Follow the links to read more detail on each aspect.

The lockdown and NPI agenda began in the Bush White House in 2005 – though China had previously used lockdowns/NPIs in response to SARS in 2003 and claimed success (despite SARS disappearing everywhere and not just where NPIs were used). U.S. President George W. Bush was worried about biological attacks after 9/11 and the Iraq invasion and asked his team to come up with a whole of society response. The 2005 bird flu scare added impetus to the emerging agenda of ‘pandemic preparedness’ (despite the fact that the scare came to nothing). The plan the team came up with was based on the use of NPIs for social distancing – very similar to what China had used, though the team members themselves did not credit China for their idea but, bizarrely, the high school science project of one member’s 14 year-old daughter.