Three of the top four countries that spent the most time in 100% lockdown (the UK, Italy and Belgium) are also in the top four for deaths per case. The three countries that spent the least time in 100% lockdown (Sweden, Luxembourg and Denmark) are also in the bottom four for deaths per case. That’s pretty damning evidence that lockdowns don’t achieve what most people think they do.

Anyone who continues to claim lockdowns saved many lives and therefore were morally and politically justified is clinging to a position not supported by the evidence, the facts, the data, the reality. One such person is Boris Johnson, who very unfortunately for the people of Britain, is the Prime Minister of the UK and the most powerful man in British society. He recently claimed the steep decline in cases was more due to lockdowns than the UK’s extensive vaccination efforts. It’s possible he said this just to help maintain public support for lockdowns and that he doesn’t actually believe it himself, but if I had to bet, I’d say his claim was a sincere reflection of what he believes. Apparently, no amount of evidence will change his mind on lockdowns. The evidence for lockdowns continues to weaken, but Johnson’s faith in them only strengthens.

Such is his hubris and his desire to go down as one of the great men in British history, Johnson will very likely keep claiming his lockdowns saved many lives until his dying breath. The good news for him is that it will be a few more decades until he breathes it.

The same cannot be said for the several tens of thousands of people, of all ages, who were sent to early graves in 2020 by his draconian and foolish pandemic policies. They are dead and buried. Totally ignored by the people in government whose dictates led to their deaths in one way or another. It’s as if they never existed. Johnson will die believing he saved many lives during the great pandemic of 2020. The victims of his policies will die believing they were just unlucky.

As Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University has said, lockdowns were only ever the illusion of control. A dangerous illusion. One that bewitched politicians who were only too eager to exercise totalitarian control over a scared public who themselves wanted to believe the government could control the virus and keep them safe.

My friends, we must admit we were fools to trust the managing of the pandemic to the government. We were fools to put so many people’s lives and well-being in the hands of a few people wielding the full power of the coercive apparatus of the state. Next time, we must place our faith in the medical community, indeed in ourselves, and not in mass coercion. Or a similar public health disaster will happen again.