Globally, elections are skirting the major issue

More people in more countries are casting more ballots in 2024 than in any previous year. Yet the biggest issue is going undebated.

The biggest issue is, of course, the lockdown, which led to a sharper recession than anything we experienced during the two world wars or the Great Depression. That economic contraction led to a burst of inflation. And the unparalleled confiscation of liberty altered the relationship between state and citizen, paving the way for more authoritarian politics.

Yet it has not been a campaign issue on any continent. We have just had elections in India, South Africa, and the European Union. In all of them, there was an anti-incumbent swing, in no small measure driven by the price rises and tax rises that were bound to follow after governments took to paying people to stay at home. But in none of them, as far as I am aware, was there any debate about whether the reaction of those governments was proportionate. Nor is it an issue in the British general election, nor in the U.S.

The more I think about this, the odder it seems. In almost every field of policy, the brute fact of the lockdown sits mountain-like in the middle, while candidates of every party scurry silently around it.

Education? There is no more immediate issue than the disruption suffered by an entire generation, which disproportionately affected children from the poorest households and which even now is leading to elevated rates of truancy.

Tax? We spent two years borrowing from our future selves. Every government on the planet is now wrestling with that debt in proportion to how hard it locked down.

Healthcare? For years, we will be dealing with the consequences of missed cancer screenings, lack of exercise, mental health, and other conditions caused by subordinating every other health concern to one virus.

The cost of living? Governments around the world conjured up unprecedented sums of money to pay for the lockdowns. Incredibly, central bankers denied that there would be inflationary consequences. Now we know better.

Productivity? Even now, government employees have not returned to the office in their pre-lockdown numbers.

Human rights? People were sentenced to house arrest without any process, while the various courts and tribunals that are supposed to prevent abuses by governments said nothing.

I could go on, but you get the point. There should be no more urgent conversation than whether the measures decreed around the world were justified. I am not interested in blaming anyone. When faced with an unknown menace, politicians, health advisers, and yes, the general public were bound to err on the side of caution.

But now that we have actual data instead of models, should we not be asking whether non-pharmaceutical interventions worked? How many lives were saved by lockdown? At what cost? What might we do differently?

These are not academic questions. Sooner or later, there will be a new pandemic, and we need to know how to react. It should not be a technical question for virologists and epidemiologists. There are issues of principle at stake. Do we draw any distinction between the interests of young and old? When should guidance be replaced by the full power of state coercion? How much faith should we place in future technology, such as yet-to-be-discovered vaccines? Is it acceptable to reverse the burden of proof — to argue, as governments did in 2021, that it was for opponents of restrictions to show that opening up would not be dangerous?

These things should be discussed and debated. We need to have protocols in place so that decision-makers are not driven by panicky headlines.

In 2020 and 2021, journalists talked of little other than their governments’ responses to the pandemic. The same story led the news month after month. Abuse was often thrown at politicians who took a different line, such as Govs. Kristi Noem (R-SD) and Ron DeSantis (R-FL).

Yet now that we have all the numbers in, now that we can compare real excess mortality rates instead of putative models, everyone seems to have lost interest.

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In the British general election’s party leaders’ debate, the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, was challenged about hospital waiting lists. He responded, perfectly truthfully, that waiting lists had risen everywhere because of the pandemic, but were much lower in Conservative-run England than in Labour-run Wales. Bad mistake. The audience hooted and jeered. No one wanted to be reminded of a lockdown that, in most cases, they themselves had demanded.

Nothing has been learned. Nothing is even being discussed. Should we end up here again, we seem determined to repeat our mistakes.