The “Listen to the Science” Cult

With Massachusetts seeing a rise in “cases,” I saw someone on Twitter lamenting that he and his fellow Massachusetts residents had “dropped the ball.”

Notice that this person cannot admit that the voodoo doesn’t work. It’s always because the peasants didn’t comply enough.

If you stupid people would just obey us, this thing would go away!

I understand why progressives might be attracted to this way of thinking:

(1) They hold a superstitious belief in the powers of the state — so if the state says it can wipe out a virus, who’s to say it can’t?
(2) It involves “experts” dictating to the stupid rubes, which is their preferred model of governance.
(3) It allows them to ridicule the working-class people they despise — why, if only these backward hicks would “follow the science,” we’d be out of this thing already!

But let’s face facts:

Lockdowns only delay the inevitable, and they leave wreckage in their wake.

(And forget about masks: as I’ve shown before, mask mandates have no discernible effect on the spread of the virus. If they were as effective as people say — e.g., if we’d just wear masks for six weeks, we’d be out of this! — there should be some obvious effect on the charts, but there just isn’t. Believe me, I wish masks could solve the problem so I could get the rest of my life back.)

Peru, Belgium, and the UK (to name three of many examples) had hard lockdowns, and high death rates. Belgium and the UK are locking back down, as is much of Europe.

The crazies, when faced with this data, try to claim that such-and-such country didn’t lock down early enough. It can’t be that lockdowns don’t work, remember. (It’s super-scientific to assume a priori that the approach works!) No, it’s always that those stupid people didn’t “listen to the science,” even though there is precisely zero “science” behind lockdowns. There’s no guidebook, no nothing. Lockdowns weren’t even a thing until 2020.

But you certainly can’t say that Spain didn’t lock down early and hard.

Or Italy, for that matter, much as they try to.

Now the same European countries whose insufferable intellectuals have been lecturing the U.S. for its handling of the crisis are seeing spikes in deaths again.

In Italy, and in the UK, and here and there in other places, at least some people are fighting back.

The last lockdown took everything they had. One video, which has gone viral, shows an Italian woman crying that she has lost everything and has nothing to feed her child.

I guess she’d better “listen to the science,” right?

What a sick, deranged cult this is.

And what is the point of indefinitely depriving ourselves of what makes life worth living, so we can live in an antisocial dystopia? What are we staying alive for then? So we can sit at home and stare at the wall?

There are other concerns in the world apart from COVID-19. Incredible that this should have to be said.

Even some of the elderly are starting to say: I’m at the end of my life, and you want me to spend my final months and years like a vegetable? What’s the point?

Meanwhile, vastly more deaths are being caused elsewhere by the policy. Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta just published a column in the Daily Mail arguing that the response to the virus has been worse than the virus itself.

Even the New York Times noted that excess deaths from TB, HIV, and malaria caused as a direct result of the lockdowns will exceed two million.

I could go on and on about the collateral deaths, but I’m probably sounding like a broken record by now.

As Professor Gupta puts it, “Lockdown is a luxury of the affluent; something that can be afforded only in wealthy countries — and even then, only by the better-off households in those countries.”

By the way, Prof. Gupta describes her politics as “left-wing,” and is aghast that people think she’s part of a right-wing conspiracy because she opposes barbaric lockdowns.

In her column, she pointed to a new initiative aimed at chronicling the devastating effects of lockdowns. I thought you might be interested to take a look: http://www.collateralglobal.org