Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has belatedly admitted that he is “not sure” if the draconian lockdown measures imposed on the nation by his government during the Chinese coronavirus were effective in stemming the tide of the illness.
In an excerpt of his upcoming memoirs published in the Daily Mail, Mr Johnson appears to have admitted to being swept up in the panic of the Wuhan virus, sensationally revealing that he considered a literal invasion of The Netherlands to obtain covid vaccines being blocked by the EU, as well as admitting that he had growing doubts about the effectiveness of the lockdown regime he foisted upon the British people.
The former prime minister, who was reportedly initially in favour of taking a libertarian approach to the virus before having personally experienced a serious bout of the illness, after which he instituted some of the strictest restrictions of any Western leader, including stay at home orders, bans on mixing of households, telling people to not have casual sex, the implementation of health passports domestically, to the monitoring and censoring of critics.
Now, over four years after the first lockdowns were imposed, Mr Johnson has suggested that maybe the restrictions weren’t really needed after all.
The ex-PM wrote:
“It was only later that I started to look at the curves of the pandemic around the world – the double hump that seemed to rise and fall irrespective of the approaches taken by governments. There were always two waves, whether you were in China, where lockdowns were ruthlessly enforced, or in Sweden, where they took a more voluntary approach.
Looking back, I wonder if King Cnut was right all along when he stationed his throne on the shore of the Thames and asked his courtiers to watch as he vainly ordered the tide to withdraw. Maybe there are limits to human agency; maybe it isn’t possible for government action to repel the waves of a highly contagious disease, any more than it is possible to repel the tide of the Thames.
I am not saying that lockdowns achieved nothing; I am sure they had some effect. But were they decisive in beating back the disease, turning that wave down? All I can say is that I am no longer sure.”
The admission from Johnson comes after England Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty — one of the chief architects of lockdown restrictions in Britain — acknowledged earlier this week that Downing Street potentially “overdid” its response to the Chinese virus.
Speaking at the Covid inquiry, Whitty admitted: “I was worried at the beginning. I still worry, actually in retrospect, about whether we got the level of concern right.”
“Were we either over pitching it so that people were incredibly afraid of something where in fact, their actuarial risk was low, or we were not pitching it enough and therefore people didn’t realise the risk they were walking into.
“I think that balance is really hard, and arguably, some people would say we, if anything we overdid it, rather than under [at] the beginning.”
According to calculations last year from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), the lockdowns resulted in at least £118 billion in lost GDP for the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, the House of Commons Library estimated that the taxpayer funded between £310 and 410 billion in lockdown-related government expenses.
A study published last year by the Institute for Economic Affairs found that countries with strict lockdown measures faired little better than those which took a laissez-faire stance towards the respiratory virus, such as Sweden, which broadly trusted the public to make their own health decisions.
According to the study, which conducted a meta-analysis of 19,646 studies of coronavirus responses globally, found that lockdown measures only served to reduce mortality by 3.2 per cent during the initial wave of the virus.
The authors of the study said: “The science of lockdowns is clear; the data are in: the deaths saved were a drop in the bucket compared to the staggering collateral costs imposed.”