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    Grayzone: 'Flattening the curve or flattening the global poor?' - lockdown critique Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on December 6, 2021, 2:07 pm

    Long read, click through for links if you can bear to get into this debate again... I valued it mainly for info on how covid played out in the global south - the increased debt gouging by the IMF, loss of export revenue, increases in poverty & starvation and the likely long term effects of reduced access to education (though for me this is always tempered by a critique of what goals this education ultimately serves).

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    https://thegrayzone.com/2021/12/03/flattening-curve-global-poor-covid-lockdowns-human-rights-vulnerable/

    Flattening the curve or flattening the global poor? How Covid lockdowns obliterate human rights and crush the most vulnerable
    Stavroula Pabst and Max Blumenthal·December 3, 2021

    Marketed as life-saving public health measures, lockdowns triggered death and economic devastation on a global scale while doing little to slow the spread of Covid-19. Now, they’re back with a vengeance.

    In October 2021, it seemed as though the lockdowns that still paralyzed societies from Australia to New Zealand and Singapore were coming to an end, as these countries threw in the “Zero-COVID” towel following a year and a half of rolling restrictions and closures.

    But with COVID-19 cases rising in Europe, several countries are implementing lockdowns all over again, often with clearly punitive motivations.

    This November, Austria’s government announced that police would enforce a lockdown exclusively against unvaccinated citizens. Following days of massive protests, the policy was extended to everyone, with steep fines and even prison sentences to be imposed on those who refuse to comply, and a compulsory vaccination requirement tacked on for good measure.

    Next door in Germany, where a new lockdown was announced this December for unvaccinated people, barring them from almost all public places except for pharmacies and supermarkets, Berlin is also weighing a vaccination mandate for all. One German constitutional lawyer has even proposed that refusers of the jab “be brought before the vaccinator by the police.”

    Though statewide lockdowns have eased in Australia, the country is constructing internment camps for those who test positive for Covid, along with their Covid-negative “close contacts.” Harley Hodgson, an Australian held for 14 days in one such camp despite repeatedly testing negative for Covid, said of her experience: “You feel like you’re in prison. You feel like you’ve done something wrong. It’s inhumane what they’re doing.”

    Initially marketed to the public as a means to “flatten the curve” and “slow the spread,” lockdowns now represent one of the most draconian aspects of the perverse New Normal that has metastasized amid an atmosphere of seemingly endless emergency.

    While much of the public accepted such restrictions during the early days of the pandemic, they are now met with increasing resistance by citizens around the world who have suffered from economic devastation, homelessness, suicidal ideation, social isolation, domestic violence, addiction and the cancellation of routine medical procedures as a result of lockdowns.

    The German police chase down anti-mandate and lockdown protestors for the “public health”. pic.twitter.com/mP15RJJc4P

    — Aaron Ginn (@aginnt) November 30, 2021

    The public health justification for these non-pharmaceutical interventions has not only been discredited in the eyes of millions across the globe, but by an array of scientific studies and data demonstrating that they likely caused more deaths than they prevented.

    The lethal impact of lockdowns was particularly pernicious in the Global South, where hundreds of millions of the world’s most vulnerable people were driven into a cascading humanitarian crisis. As the World Food Program warned in 2020, “135 million people on earth are marching towards the brink of starvation” as a result of their economies shutting down to supposedly inhibit the spread of COVID-19.

    In his book, The Covid Consensus, professor of African history at King’s College Toby Green chronicled the misery, migration outflow and mass death spawned by lockdowns imposed on populations from Africa to Latin America.

    “Lockdowns were not a policy that made any sense in societies where many people live largely outside, and SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that circulates inside,” Green told The Grayzone. “Moreover, they made no sense in regions such as Africa where the population is much younger than in rich countries – they merely saw a massive shift of health burden from the global rich to the global young and poor.”

    For most people on the planet, the economic and psychological harm experienced during the past 19 months was not the result of the pandemic per se, but of emergency-order restrictions governments imposed on them and justified as public health measures. In the Global North, such costly efforts did little more than delay the inevitable spread of COVID-19 while transferring wealth into the hands of Big Tech oligarchs who constitute the pandemic’s real “winners.”

    Though public health scholars and some officials warned that lockdowns would do possibly irreparable damage to the global economy while only deepening the public health crisis, the politics of the Trump era enabled supporters of harsh restrictions to caricature critics as dangerous right-wing extremists.

    “Discussion of the inevitable harm of lockdowns has been almost totally forbidden by most of the mainstream media and academia, while the left followed the lead of the Democratic Party, doing all it could to marginalize any discussion of the collateral damage of these measures,” Christian Parenti, professor of economics at the City University of New York and author of several books about policing and mass surveillance, commented to The Grayzone. “Any questioning of lockdown measures was cast as right wing, even fascist. But mostly the left just ignored the emerging facts, particularly regarding the carnage caused in the Global South.”

    [continues at link...]

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    Looks like he (Max Blumenthal) has gone to Bhattacharya, Gupta and Ioannidis of Great Barrington fame / infamy for information, though these aren't the only sources as he's quick to point out in a lengthy Jimmy Dore interview:





    (From around 30:00) They have been 'vindicated' according to him, and denied taking money from the koch bros when he asked them, but he would cite them even if they had done because they have been 'proven right at every turn'. Hmmm... He addresses the criticism that the GB approach would let covid 'rip through' society by saying that the disease has ripped through all the same, even in countries that had strong lockdowns. 'Flatten the curve' gets dismissed though, and he doesn't address the point made by Dan here that limited availability of respirators and other emergency equipment (not to mention lack of available beds) could easily have been flooded by a surge of covid cases leading to big increases in the death rate. I find that 'save the NHS' claim more persuasive on the effectiveness of lockdowns, though questions still remain on why health services around the globe were so ill-prepared for a pandemic like this.

    Anyway, I know a lot of this has been hashed out on the board already, so I feel like I should apologise for even bringing it up! I'll read any critiques people might have with interest but can't promise to engage much... If nothing else, it's of interest IMO that leftist voices have started speaking about this topic, whether you agree with them or not. The JD interview is interesting in this regard for the frank discussion of how they both overcame initial resistance to talking about covid, vaccines, mandates and now lockdowns, citing fear of the disease and reluctance to take on the inevitable backlash from those supportive of govt measures.

    Darren Allen is unsympathetic, accusing the 'lockdown left' of cowardice and pinning their/our psychology to the ultimately managerial role that they/we see them/ourselves as fulfilling, even while outside the circles of power:

    'If we start with what the left does and how they live, we see that they are the management class — they are the professionals who organise, conceptualise, administer or, in the case of the writers we are interested in here, promote and justify the system, or ‘the machine of the world’. The power of the management class comes not, as it does with the owner class, from ownership (i.e. from capital, hence ‘capitalism’), but from management (of and through society; hence ‘socialism’).

    This doesn’t mean that the left do not also have the same kind of power as owners, that they don’t also sometimes hold right wing views, that the two don’t also blend into each other and are, ultimately, in their implicit acceptance of the system, indistinguishable. They do and they are. Nevertheless, when we say ‘the left’ we are referring to those people whose power comes from amassing abstract facts and controlling information and who therefore prejudice education and taste over morality and meaning, and, following this, never criticise the power of the tasteful, educated class.

    [...]

    The left have almost no lived experience of what the people — the working class and the poor — call ‘real life’ and very little ability to see that life as it is, or as it is experienced by those at the sharp-end of their society. Instead they ‘care’ — they ‘care’ about the poor (especially the poor in far-off countries) and about the marginalised and about the rainforests and about the tragic starving children. This leads to two central features of the left. The first is its moral hypocrisy — an expressed desire to ‘help’, combined with a sense of nice, ethical superiority, but with no actual interest in ever doing anything which actually deals with the problem, which actually takes apart the system that they fix and manage. The second feature of those with little experience of life (and again, this is shared with the right) is their intense fear of real life, with all its uncertainties, and of the people who live anything approaching such a life.'     - https://expressiveegg.org/2021/11/28/the-return-of-the-lockdown-left/

    I don't agree with everything he says on covid, but this, along with Blumenthal's depiction of a 'laptop class', seems undeniable as an explanation for why so many on the left (myself included, though that was more for environmental reasons) saw no big problem with lockdowns and even the next layer of state authoritarianism.

    cheers,
    I

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