Futile Covid regime is becoming Western leaders Vietnam

By Niall McCrae-

With her daily televised address to the Scottish people, Nicola Sturgeon is riding high. She has taken to the Covid crisis like a duck to water, scoring political points over Westminster and casting herself as saviour. But this may be pride before fall. In reality, the Scots have no better record than the English in controlling the pandemic. Sturgeon’s strategy seemed to have boosted the nationalist cause, but its demonstrable failure against the virus risks the First Minister’s credibility.

When governments fail, they blame the governed. Boris Johnson’s three weeks to ‘flatten the curve’ was followed by local and regional ‘tiers’ and ‘circuit breakers’, and by a second and third national lockdown. Remember the costly track-and-trace system, piloted on the Isle of Wight? And now we are told that the vaccines, hurriedly approved and administered throughout the land, will not get us back to normality (in other words, they are not very effective). Meanwhile the hawks of SAGE want the draconian restrictions to be tightened.

The spread of Covid-19 is our fault, according to the authorities, for not fully complying with the rules of social isolation and self-muzzling. Consequently, we are stuck in a seemingly endless tunnel of lockdown, hoping that the next turn will bring a glimmer of light. Our leaders prod us onward, stubbornly persevering on a journey of destruction and despair. They won’t admit their error, and so we go further and further from the happier days that we left behind (preserved, for nostalgia, on television shows and movies).

Carnage on the high street, pubs lingering on furlough before finally boarding up, and the few shoppers scurrying about like masked Zombies. It’s an apocalyptic scene. But with no sign of governments letting up on their hubristic efforts to slay a virus, the damage is likely to be lasting. The Covid regime has done more harm than good: lockdown kills. With mounting human casualties of this folly, Western liberal democracies might never regain respect and trust. For this is their Vietnam War.

For eleven bitter years the Americans persisted with their mission to stop Vietnam falling to communism. The US government could not face defeat, so they ploughed on, as thousands of young conscripts returned in body bags. More and more men and weapons were thrown into the conflict, but military might was humbled by Hanoi’s absolute commitment to national liberation. Just as lockdowns can’t stop a virus, carpet-bombing couldn’t cull the nimble North Vietnamese forces and Viet Cong guerrillas.

A critic might stop me here: the government is trying to save lives; surely the opposite of Vietnam? But the terminology of war is frequently used by ministers, and they can hardly claim to be winning.

Among many parallels with the Vietnam War, the ‘mutant strains’ of Covid-19 are like the Tet offensive of 1968, justifying an escalated response. Like the black granite wall naming the Vietnam veterans in Washington DC, a prominent memorial for the Covid dead is mooted by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Prime Minister. But the new edifice won’t tell the whole story. The commemorated dead will not include an unknown, unrecorded but disturbingly high number who died because they could not get the treatment they needed, or suicide victims whose livelihoods were destroyed.

Covid-19, like a bad influenza, is a killer. But what if we had responded in the same way that we do for any other seasonal upper respiratory react infection? That doesn’t mean doing nothing. The NHS does not abandon flu victims, although it is often poorly prepared and overwhelmed by a sudden surge in the cold and damp months of January and February. Leaders talk of eradication, but Covid-19 will become one of several endemic coronaviruses. Lockdown, masks and shop closures have not stopped the disease from spreading, or from taking the lives of frail elderly.

Lockdown zealots argue that if we had not taken such action, double or treble the deaths would have ensued. But this does not stand up to scrutiny. Sweden, Belarus and Japan did not place their citizens under house arrest, yet have lower mortality per head than in the UK. We have the same outcome as the Swedes, but at unfathomably higher cost. The belief that anything that the government does is better than not doing it would fail Karl Popper’s test of scientific validity: it is not disprovable and thus cannot be considered as logical reasoning.

What if the Americans had not embroiled themselves in Vietnam? The argument was similar to that of the Covid regime: if communism had been allowed free rein, it would have reached as far as Australia, and that although the US forces couldn’t claim victory, they at least stopped the enemy in its tracks. Again, this isn’t borne out by events. Vietnam eventually settled into a fairly stable country, which has embraced free markets and modern lifestyles. Countries to the south did not succumb to Maoist revolution, but to credit the US Army for this would be dubious.

Sadly, the young men drafted to fight the communist peril died in vain. How will we review the Covid response, ten years from now? If we are still free to speak, we might say that a whole way of life was shattered in a desperate but counterproductive zeal. By treating a coronavirus with a 0.25% fatality rate as a great plague, and severing the fabric of society, the West is stuck in a war it should never have started.

The response to Covid-19 was remarkably consistent across the West. But while interventions were similar, there is a subtle and sometimes stark difference between national leaders in how they have presented the restrictions on liberty and closure of schools and businesses. Johnson is at heart a libertarian, who has struggled to appear authoritative as governor-in-chief of house arrest. Sturgeon, by contrast, was able to be herself, micromanaging and disciplining the populace. But this will be to her cost. Instead of the heroine of independence, Sturgeon might be remembered as Madam Covid. Her daily recital of the death toll, always preceded by ‘sadly’, is beginning to sound like the voice of Washington’s ‘Five O’Clock Follies’ beamed into American homes, circa 1968.