The West Copied China’s Lockdowns, Rather Than Following the Science

L ast month, Great Britain launched a Covid-19 inquiry into how the nation responded to the pandemic and what lessons to draw for the future.

Sadly, the inquiry is spending little time and energy on the origins of the pandemic. The “lab leak” theory has grown more and more likely in recent months as evidence emerged that in November 2019 three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became seriously ill with symptoms similar to those of Covid-19. Senator Rand Paul has revealed that some of the funding for the Wuhan’s “gain of function” work on the virus came from the U.S. government even after warnings were issued that such research was unwise.

“From 2016, work on coronaviruses collected from caves in which virus-carrying bats were prevalent was carried out by the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, an arm of the People’s Liberation Army,” A London Times investigation reported last month. “One explanation is that China may have intended to weaponize novel lab-made viruses.”

But Britain’s Covid inquiry decided that China’s failure to cooperate with any independent investigation into the virus’s origins — while highly suspicious — wasn’t going to produce a definitive result.

Nonetheless, the inquiry provides a clearer picture of why almost the entire world abandoned hundreds of years of guidance opposing pandemic lockdowns and instead rushed to mandate them during Covid. Sweden, as the brave dissenter in Europe, implemented polices that avoided brutal economic costs, reduced social isolation, and resulted in fewer all-causes excess mortalities during the pandemic than in almost any other European country.

George Osborne, who ran Britain’s Treasury Department from 2010 to 2016 and still has impeccable sources inside government, testified last month before Britain’s Covid inquiry. He said that Western governments would not have implemented extreme lockdowns if Communist China had not set the precedent.

Osborne said that during his time in office there was zero planning for lockdowns because the clear medical consensus was that in a pandemic vulnerable populations should be protected while most people should be only encouraged to take preventive measures. He has mentioned the worldwide 1969 Hong Kong flu pandemic as a prime example of that strategy.

Kate Blackwell, the lead counsel for the Covid inquiry, asked Osborne, “Would we all have gone into lockdown if China had not locked down in January and February?”

“I think the Chinese lockdown is what gives the rest of the world the idea,” Osborne replied. “And it’s the overwhelming of the hospital system in northern Italy that then leads all Western governments to reach basically the same conclusion, which is we’ve got to do what the Chinese have done.”

Osborne’s evidence is backed up by lockdown zealot Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, known as the “Mad Modeler.” His wildly inaccurate predictions of doom led directly to lockdowns in both Britain and the U.S. In December 2020, Ferguson admitted to the Times that he and his pro-lockdown colleagues never thought a lockdown possible: “China is a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with lockdown in Europe, we thought. . . . And then Italy did it. And we realized we could.”

China, of course, did not end Covid with its draconian lockdowns; it suffered millions of Covid cases. It finally had to lift the lockdowns last year after massive public protests. Its economy has failed to recover since then, and it has become even more of a surveillance state than it was prior to Covid.

Copying the policies of a totalitarian regime such as China was one of the worst things the West could possibly have done during Covid. Yet that is precisely what Western leaders, at every level of government and public life, did.

Let’s all resolve to learn from the disastrous policy errors of the Covid-19 era, so that when the next public-health crisis lands, we will have the wisdom to say “never again” to lockdowns.