From the lepers in the Old Testament to the Plague of Justinian in Ancient Rome to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, COVID-19 represents the first time ever in the history of managing pandemics that we quarantined healthy populations.
While the ancients didn’t understand the mechanisms of infectious disease—they knew nothing of viruses and bacteria—they nevertheless figured out many ways to mitigate the spread of contagion during epidemics. These time-tested measures ranged from quarantining the sick to deploying those with natural immunity—those who had recovered from the illness—to care for them.
Lockdowns were never part of conventional public health measures. In 1968, 1 million to 4 million people died in the H2N3 influenza pandemic; businesses and schools never closed and large events were not canceled. One thing we never did until 2020 was lock down entire populations. And we didn’t do this because it doesn’t work. In 2020, we had no empirical evidence that it would work, only flawed mathematical models whose predictions were not just slightly off, but wildly off by several orders of magnitude.
What emerged during lockdowns was not just a novel and untested method of trying to control a pandemic by quarantining healthy people. If we view lockdowns outside of the immediate context in which they supposedly functioned in early 2020, their real meaning comes into focus.
The basic features were already sketched back in 2013 in a book by Patrick Zylberman, professor of the history of health in Paris, called “Microbial Storms” (“Tempêtes Microbiennes,” Gallimard 2013). Zylberman’s description was remarkably predictive of what emerged during the first year of the pandemic. He showed that biomedical security, which was previously a marginal part of political life and international relations, had assumed a central place in political strategies and calculations in recent years.
Even earlier, in 2001, Richard Hatchett, who served as a member of George W. Bush’s National Security Council, was already recommending obligatory confinement of the entire population. Hatchett now directs the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, an influential entity coordinating global vaccine investment in close collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry. The coalition is a brainchild of the World Economic Forum in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“1) Measures were formulated based on possible risk in a hypothetical scenario, with data presented to promote behavior permitting management of an extreme situation; 2) ‘worst case’ logic was adopted as a key element of political rationality; 3) a systematic organization of the entire body of citizens was required to reinforce adhesion to the institutions of government as much as possible. The intended result was a sort of super civic spirit, with imposed obligations presented as demonstrations of altruism. Under such control, citizens no longer have a right to health safety; instead, health is imposed on them as a legal obligation (biosecurity).”
This is precisely the pandemic strategy we adopted in 2020. Lockdowns were formulated based on discredited worst-case-scenario modeling from the Imperial College London, which predicted 2.2 million deaths in the United States.
As a consequence, the entire body of citizens, as a manifestation of civic spirit, gave up freedoms and rights that were not relinquished even by the citizens of London during the bombing of the city in World War II (London adopted curfews but never locked down). The imposition of health as a legal obligation was accepted with little resistance. Even now, for many citizens it seems not to matter that these impositions utterly failed to deliver the public health outcomes that were promised.
The full significance of what transpired over the past two years may have escaped our attention. Perhaps without realizing it, we just lived through the design and implementation of a new political paradigm—a system that was far more effective at controlling the population than anything previously done by Western nations.
For the sake of health and human flourishing, this new normal should never be normalized.
