https://thecritic.co.uk/lockdown-was-a-choice/
Lockdown was a choice
Agree with the policy if you like, but you can’t argue Lockdown harms
were caused by Covid
ARTILLERY ROW
By
Tom Moran
13 May, 2021
Chemotherapy is not always the most appropriate course of action for
cancer patients. Put simply, the side effects of chemotherapy, which can
have an extremely detrimental effect on the patient’s quality of life,
must be taken into account in the context of the Hippocratic oath (first
do no harm) before any treatments are prescribed. Where a good chance of
recovery is not present, subjecting the patient to possible months of
nausea, loss-of-appetite, fatigue, insomnia, hair loss, compromised
immunity, anaemia or other debilitating conditions, may not be
proportional to the benefit. This is why, in every individual case,
decisions are made by clinicians in consultation with the patient and
their family to decide whether chemotherapy is the best course of action.
Sensible decisions can only be made when the harms caused by cancer and
the negative side-effects of chemotherapy are seen as mutually
exclusive. Were doctors to conflate the two, a cost-benefit analysis
would be rendered impossible. No oncologist would ever tell their
patient that the hair loss they were experiencing was “because of the
cancer”, knowing full well that it was a side-effect of the treatment.
Chemotherapy is undoubtedly a highly-effective and life-saving treatment
with years of efficacy data to support its implementation — but even in
cases where the benefits clearly outweigh the harms, the treatment is
always regarded as a choice with repercussions.
Imagine if, from its inception, chemotherapy had become an ideology.
Imagine that respect for this miracle of science had transcended into
zealotry, whereby no side-effects were ever considered and all
debilitating symptoms were ascribed to the cancer itself. Many patients
would have undergone this treatment unnecessarily, suffering a huge blow
to the quality of their remaining life without any real benefit. The
ability to weigh up risk and reward is a prerequisite for any healthcare
practitioner or policymaker.
There is a very deliberate line of rhetoric designed to shut down any
retrospective analysis of lockdown
Consider society as a patient. The novel coronavirus is the cancer. The
government’s scientific advisors are the oncologists and the measures
they “prescribe” are the treatment. No one can deny that the response to
the threat of SARS-CoV-2 has been extreme. Unlike chemotherapy, the
treatments advocated by public health advisors are novel and
experimental. Thus far, the side effects have included, but are not
limited to, the largest drop in GDP in over 300 years, at least 70,000
families facing homelessness, alcohol deaths rising to a 20 year high, a
doubling of suicide-related calls to the London Ambulance Service,
increased eating disorders in children and young people, a 60% increase
in domestic abuse, 350,000 missed cancer referrals, 50,000 delayed child
surgeries, and 2.9 billion cut from the foreign aid budget. On a global
scale, Unicef has forecasted 1.2 million child deaths as a result of
lockdowns, not the virus itself.
Articles about collateral damage widely use phrases such as “due to the
pandemic” or “because the government was forced to lockdown”. This is a
very deliberate line of rhetoric designed to shut down any retrospective
analysis of this course of action by conflating the fallout from
government policy with the effects of the pandemic itself. Before 2020,
“social distancing” was an alien concept. “Lockdown” was not a word in
our vocabulary. Face coverings in the community were widely seen as an
ineffective and possibly counter-intuitive response to an epidemic. One
year on, we are prohibited from questioning the efficacy of any of these
new and extreme ideas, and are largely tricked into believing that these
measures were the only possible course of action.
But there was a choice. The government made that choice. Whether you
feel that this choice was appropriate or proportional to the risk is not
the issue here. At the very least, one has to understand the importance
of separating collateral damage caused by our measures from the effects
of the virus itself. Following an initial cost-benefit analysis
predicting 200,000 deaths as a result of the first lockdown, the
government seemingly lost all interest in forecasting the collateral
damage of their pandemic response, presenting their measures as the only
viable option.
Cancer does not cause hair loss. Viruses do not make people homeless
Even when an independent study predicted the equivalent of 500,000 lives
lost to ongoing coronavirus policies, the majority of politicians showed
little to no interest. Now that the damage has been done, we have an
obligation to evaluate the side-effects of the treatment and decide
whether those effects were proportional to the benefit, not least so
that we may improve decision-making as and when new viral threats
emerge. This will not be possible until journalists and MPs abandon the
transparently manipulative strategy of conflating the cure with the disease.
Cancer does not cause hair loss. Viruses do not make people homeless. We
have just participated, without consent, in the largest medical
experiment in human history. Are we not entitled, at the very least, to
a fair and logical evaluation of the outcomes?