The policies of lockdowns, vaccine passports, mandates, and masking are contagious. They spread between neighboring countries and regions. We discovered this at the very beginning of the pandemic. Many governments in the West had plans for a pandemic caused by a SARS-like respiratory disease. The United Kingdom’s government had a very detailed plan that included identifying those who were especially vulnerable while protecting liberty for the maximum number. But then the leader of their public-health response saw what Italy was doing (partly on the advice that Italy was receiving from China), and suddenly it became plausible. “It’s a Communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought,” said Neil Ferguson, “and then Italy did it. And we realized we could.”
Well, they’re getting away with it again. And the contagiousness of these measures is why even as an American, it is nerve-wracking watching Europe these days. Austria tried a lockdown of the unvaccinated, which failed instantly to control spread and was abandoned for broader non-pharmaceutical interventions and impositions. But that didn’t stop Germany from imposing the same policy weeks later.
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