Pandemic Correctness

When an informed conversation is a potential threat to consensus

The enormity of reality is such that questions can hardly alter it. So better don’t ask any. Truth is so overwhelming that retrospective thoughts can only legitimise lies. Better keep quiet and follow the instincts of those who outnumber you. When the world is challenged by what man has failed to defeat for so long, what is required is not the consolation of alternative ideas but a consensus on the wisdom of others.

Or it’s what a world in the grip of a pandemic demands from potential flamethrowers. Solidarity alone can sustain the Order of Fear.

Maybe such an unwritten code of conduct is needed when unhinged conspiracy theorists are at play, and they have a lot to peddle, from Trump’s defeat to the origin of the coronavirus to the secret centre of global power. Maybe faith and trust are virtues that can make a benighted place a lot more tolerable, its inhabitants better citizens. Maybe it’s a necessary protection from deniers and debunkers.

Still there comes a time when the Order wants complete control over knowledge, when there are good experts and bad experts, and when an informed conversation is a potential threat to consensus. When what-went-wrong is an irrelevant introspection in the time of a plague. And in such times discordant voices are suppressed or dismissed as scaremongering. For the ‘responsible’ majority, censorship, or collective repudiation, is the duty of civic morality. Increasingly, it’s the pandemic morality as well.

When what had come to be known as the Great Barrington Declaration was released, it was mostly dismissed as academic arrogance. The report, libertarian in nature and authored by Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), Sunetra Gupta (Oxford) and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), all epidemiologists and public health scientists, didn’t lack the authenticity of scholarship. It questioned the orthodoxy of initial Covid management and recommended what they call “focussed protection”. They elaborated on what they meant by focussed protection: “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.” When lockdown was the undisputed ideology of survival for governments across the world, the Great Barrington daring was blasphemy, and it was treated as such.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Alex Berenson, who had serious trouble self-publishing his booklets on “unreported truths about Covid-19 and lockdowns” on Amazon’s Kindle Direct, argues that mainstream media organisations are “increasingly unwilling even to ask ideologically inconvenient questions. Few acknowledge that top biologists are calling for an independent investigation into the possibility that Sars-Cov-2 is the product of a Chinese laboratory accident”. Berenson’s booklets are now bestsellers, but to get them published he needed endorsement tweets from the likes of Elon Musk, because he thinks “many measures to control the coronavirus have been damaging, counterproductive and unsupported by science”. A former New York Times reporter who doesn’t consider himself a “coronavirus denier” or “conservative”, he has become a kind of pandemic revisionist.