Daniel Hadas, whose sensitive and measured commentary on the pandemic I’ve long valued, recently offered these remarks on lockdowns and mass vaccination on Twitter:
It needs to be understood that the true motivation of the lockdown and forced vaccination Covid response really was Saving Lives.
Saving Lives wasn’t a smokescreen for some other hidden plan.
Of course, there was opportunism: there were those who used the state of emergency to claw power, money, fame to themselves. There were both supporters and opponents of the Covid measures who did that.
Where [there] is opportunity, there will be opportunists.
But mere opportunism is not enough to drive forward the leaders and followers in a revolution on the scale of the Covid response.
That requires faith, and the faith that drove this revolution was the faith in Saving Lives.
To deny the authenticity of the project to Save Lives is to remain perilously ready to sign up to all current and future projects to remake society and morality in the name of Life-Saving.
And it is to remain blind to the fact that Saving Lives has come to mean hacking away at the limits of what can be done to men, women and children in the name of saving their lives and those of others.
It needs to be understood that the true motivation of the lockdown / forced vaccination Covid response really 𝑤𝑎𝑠 Saving Lives.
Saving Lives wasn’t a smokescreen for some other hidden plan.
— Daniel Hadas (@DanielHadas2) July 23, 2023
This thesis angered many people, at least some of whom misconstrue what Hadas is arguing. The point is not that a genuine commitment to ‘Saving Lives’ might excuse the response or make it better. Rather, a commitment to Life-Saving public health interventions is in Hadas’s view the ominous root of the problem, because Life Saving is in fact a shallow goal that sounds good enough to rationalise all manner of harmful, destructive policies. Almost anything can be justified – any amount of collateral damage accepted – if it is for Saving Lives, and this is why all of us should cultivate a distrust of self-appointed Life Savers everywhere we encounter them.
In this sense, then, Hadas’s thesis seems undeniable: the millions who signed on to lockdowns and demanded their governments force-vaccinate their peers were not just wrong in a direct, empirical sense – that is, for believing that lockdowns and vaccines would improve health in any way. They were also much more profoundly wrong in a moral sense. Even if lockdowns and vaccines had the potential to stop the virus, nobody deserves house arrest or forced medical treatment for the crime of being a potential vector of infection. Placing Life Saving ahead of all other outcomes is very dangerous and also very stupid, for the simple reason that we are all going to die. As a justification, it functions as a mere pretence to ignore the very real trade-offs that lurk in any alleged solution to anything. Explaining how it could be a good idea to delay the deaths of some elderly and sick people at the cost of the well-being, physical health and autonomy of billions is very hard. Pleading that ‘we need to save lives’ is easy.
That said, I find the thesis less than complete. The public health establishment and its media collaborators carefully manufactured public support for their response by sowing far and wide the belief that it was necessary to Save Lives. Had we acted otherwise – say, by staying open and not doing very much – this, too, would have been marketed as the Best Way to Save Lives, and many millions would have believed it just as sincerely as they believed in lockdowns. To this comes the fact that Life-Saving in one form or another is proffered as justification for a wide range of modern political pathologies, from mass migration schemes to climate change. Especially in ageing European countries like Germany, where an ever-growing number of pensioners and their health anxiety dominate national discourse, there are few better ways to sell noxious political programmes to the masses. Without our naïve Life-Saving ethos, it’s not clear to me we wouldn’t have had lockdowns, though they would have required a much different kind of argument.
Read More: Were the Lockdowners and Vaccinators Really Just Trying to Save Lives?
