Two left-leaning authors, historian Toby Green and economist Thomas Fazi, have written a new book on the global response to the Covid pandemic, The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor? A Critique from the Left. For some reason, they chose to subtitle it with a question. Was the standard response to Covid an “assault on democracy and the poor”? That punctuation might lead readers to expect a fraught debate about the wisdom of Covid policy across the globe. 

There is no debate. The authors’ answer is unambiguous, and no reader of this book will die wondering what they think. Not about how governments responded to the Covid-19 pandemic (barring a Sweden here or a Florida there). Nor about the authors’ own left-wing principles, both economic and political, and how they bear on recommendations for the future. The authors bring swathes of data and evidence to bear to argue that lockdowns were a public policy disaster of gargantuan proportions. They weaponized the police and flew in the face of data that was, in fact, available early on in the crisis. There was censorship, bans, shadow bans, fake and politicized “fact checking,” and the stifling of dissenting views, some directed at the most credentialed epidemiologists in the world. Not least among these were the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for focused protection on the elderly and vulnerable and for leaving everyone else to get on with life and make his or her own choices; this was the gist of every pandemic plan before the start of 2020. What happened in six or seven weeks from late 2019, you might ask, other than an authoritarian government in China welding people into their homes? 

Green and Fazi look at Sweden, which came in for huge criticism from the mainstream press, along with the doctorly caste and social media. Sweden was widely castigated for going against the lockdown zeitgeist that demanded widespread business closures, masking, mandates, isolation of many from their loved ones even when death was in the offing, and a myriad of inane rules. The whole Swedish approach was pilloried by the great and the good because it served as a control case, a counter-example, to what virtually every government on earth opted to do to its own citizens.

As I write this review in March 2023, Sweden has the lowest cumulative excess deaths in the entire OECD from the start of the pandemic till now. Governments and cheerleaders of the orthodox response might be able to game the question of who died from Covid (as opposed to something else) but it is much harder to game excess deaths. Sure, there is a bit of wiggle room about when to start counting and what prior years to look at to set the benchmark to measure excess deaths, but this really is the gold standard. If more people died with lockdowns than without them, they clearly didn’t work.

In Australia, where I live, excess deaths are currently running at about 15 to 17 percent above pre-pandemic expectations. The US, Britain, and continental Europe are all likewise bad on this measure—the ungameable one. But the same press that trumpeted every octogenarian’s death and a relatively meaningless “case count” is, well, deathly silent now. The Swedes’ chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell— who says “I only followed the pre-pandemic existing plans by the WHO and by Britain and did not panic”—should win a Nobel Prize for medicine, not to mention everyone’s gratitude for bravery. Of course, he will not. 

The more perceptive readers might by now suspect that I am still seething with anger at what these policies did. Indeed, their perspicacity antennae might have picked up that I am something of a lockdown skeptic myself. For some time I have been a weekly op-ed contributor to the Spectator Australia (owned by the British parent brand). Our publication, alone in all of Australia, came out in March 2020 against the lockdowns and the panic, and never wavered from that position, in light of the ongoing data available, along with a foundational commitment to people’s civil liberties and freedom. I am on record from March of 2020 as saying that lockdowns were a betrayal of core liberal principles and of good policy-making.

In one sense then, I am wholly in the camp of the authors of this book. Where so many others gave way to panic, they stayed true to the data bringing reams of evidence to the case against lockdowns. They show that the biggest losers of the lockdown response to Covid-19—to be clear, not of the virus itself but of the governmental response to it—were the young, the poor, and the non-laptop class of workers. The lockdowns and other governmental responses amounted to a massive transfer of wealth (not to mention life opportunities) from the young to the old. Likewise, these policies shifted money from the poor to the rich. The massive increase in the debt and incredible printing of money delivered big-time asset inflation which benefited (no surprises here) those with the most assets. The pandemic years were the best years ever for billionaires. 

Who will pay back the debt? The same young people who were barred from going to school for months and years, many of whom will never catch up to where they otherwise would have been. The same young whose chances of dying from Covid were one one-thousandth (or less) than that of an over-75-year-old. For a fit under-25-year-old, that means they were effectively zero, as was clear from very early in the pandemic. And as hard as these policies were on poor people in the rich world, what happened to the poor in the Third World is truly heart-wrenching. Green and Fazi explain how the consequences of Covid policy were most brutal for those who had begun to clamber out of grinding poverty. They quickly found themselves back in it, with few opportunities to rise again. Lockdown proponents who think they were on the side of the angels, as opposed to “the granny-killers” who opposed these lockdowns, need to be forced to read these bits of this book again and again.

All that said and conceded, the foundational left-wing politics and economics of this book left me wholly unconvinced. Indeed, the last chapter’s attack on “authoritarian capitalism” reads like some sort of seminar based on the work of Thomas Piketty. And I don’t mean that in a good way. But before I get to my few disagreements with the book’s claims, let me give readers a quick overview. The book comes in two parts. The first is largely descriptive; it describes what happened. There is the lab leak versus zoonotic theories of the virus’s origins and the censorship and attacks on those who thought the evidence pointed to the former. (Again, many readers will know that today—after years of vitriolic attacks on those holding this position including by one Anthony Fauci—the lab leak theory is now widely considered to be the most likely explanation, including by the FBI, Matt Ridley, and plenty of democratic governments.) 

There is a chapter on how the search for the truth about what happened in the external, causal world came under political pressure and collapsed into a politicized claim about “the Science” that supposedly supported the lockdown orthodoxy. There are two chapters on vaccines. These do not make pleasant reading, least of all for me as I spent seven years on the ethics committee of my former New Zealand university where “informed consent” was, I used to argue, being taken to ridiculously extreme lengths when data could not even be linked to any individual. During the pandemic, it seemed, informed consent suddenly meant nothing at all. 

Part II of the book is more evaluative. Did lockdowns save lives? Actually, if you focus solely on Covid deaths, even that is not clear. Once you factor in all the other ways people can die—from missed cancer checks, obesity, mental health problems leading to suicides and alcoholism, missed operations, the list goes on and on—it’s not even close. Lockdowns led to loads more overall deaths. Just go and check out that Swedish excess data again and watch how bad it gets over the coming years. 

There is a chapter on how much harder these lockdown policies were on the young and the poor. There is one on the economic effects. All these are completely devastating to the standard pro-lockdown position. My guess is that in a decade, you will be hard-pressed to find anyone who admits to having been in favour of lockdowns. That is how much of a fiasco this has been in terms of public policy. One real question is whether there will be any actual and serious accountability for this woeful decision-making, suppressing of dissent, modeling that was off by orders of magnitude, and complete failure by the press to do its job. The London Telegraph’s release of the “Lockdown Files”—the WhatsApp messages of the then British Minister of Health to and from the other main players during the bulk of the pandemic years—make it clear that the political class was deeply compromised, along with most of the medical establishment. They won’t be anxious to push for accountability.

In all of that, which comprises the vast preponderance of its pages, this book is a powerful and damning critique of the many ways in which the “Covid Consensus” was a disaster, most especially for the young and the poor and those outside the laptop class (some of whom did quite well through the Covid years). For all of that, I recommend this book to you wholeheartedly.

So where does it go wrong? As a quibble, I found the various snide asides directed at former President Donald Trump to be as tiresome as they were wholly predictable. And while the authors admit that the left side of politics did not cover themselves in glory, that point is soft-pedaled. It’s true, as the authors point out, that the government of Sweden was a left-of-center one that performed more admirably than any other national government in the rich world. I salute it. But outside of Sweden, leftists were by far the biggest cheerleaders for lockdowns and other Draconian state policies. 

Of all the US states that resisted the full force of lockdown mania, all had Republican governors—while California and New York were outperformed by Florida, Texas, and South Dakota (on the authors’ own criteria including keeping the schools open). In Britain, Boris Johnson and the Tories were bad, but Labor was pushing them to go harder and stricter on every despotic measure. And on vaccine mandates, something the authors rightfully abhor, the left side of politics across the Anglosphere was and is far, far worse. (The US is the last country left that still, right now under a Biden administration, will not allow unvaccinated non-citizens to enter, though there is no scientific basis for this rule.) 

As for media outlets, those leaning left were far more supportive of lockdowns than those on the right. It does seem that one would need some very different economic first principles to read the last chapter as a convincing attack on conservative politics and economics. For one thing, the corporate class (speaking in generalities) votes for and donates to the Democrats. The authors’ many critiques of Bill Gates, for instance, are hardly attacks on a card-carrying conservative. Any authoritarian streak amongst capitalists is, in all likelihood, one in a Democrat or Labour supporter.

But those are quibbles in the greater scheme of this book’s endeavor to try to ensure this heavy-handedness never happens again. On that front, this is a wonderfully powerful and convincing effort. It deserves a wide audience, even amongst those of us who think the political and economic first principles of the authors are wrong-headed. Buy it and give it to some pro-lockdown person you know. They’ll hate you for it unless they read it.