Amnesty to end vaccine wars?

God help us when, not if, there is another infectious disease outbreak on the scale of Covid. The pandemic left in its wake death and fear. Also anger and alienation.

“Follow the science” was the call of the Covid crusaders. It’s a compelling battle cry. But as research results and experience accumulated, it became obvious that scientists, doctors, politicians and the media at every step along the way had overstated the strength of the evidence on which they were making life-changing policy decisions.

These elisions, exaggerations and downright lies – as well as the suppression of contradictory information – were being done supposedly with the best of intentions. In fact, their actions often visited substantial harm on those in whose best interests they were ostensibly serving. No wonder that the result has been bitterness, distrust and fury.

What is now needed, writes Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, is amnesty. Writing in The Atlantic, Oster this week penned an earnest plea for the combatants “to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about Covid”.

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“Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard … is preventing us from moving forward. We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty,” she writes. Fat chance of that.

Few people, especially not those who warned of medical over-confidence, pharmaceutical greed and governmental overreach, are in any mood to forgive and forget.

The National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty writes that “forget everything, learn nothing” is a bad way to ensure institutional accountability. Mary Harrington, an editor at UnHerd, writes that no “amnesty” is possible without an acknowledgement of wrongdoing.

“Those who drove Covid policy presented themselves not just as people doing their best, but as the sole bearers of rational truth and life-saving moral authority.”

Then Harrington gets to what is surely the crux of the dispute: what happened is of more than just historical interest because it influences how we will deal with such events in the future.

“The very foundation of moral authority is a shared trust in the integrity of scientific consensus … Covid has left us in no doubt that there is a great deal of grey area between ‘science’ and ‘moral groupthink’.”

Not all medical scientists were oblivious to this “grey area”.

In a series of webinars I conducted at the very beginning of the Covid crisis with Professor Robin Wood, Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of Cape Town, he presciently and repeatedly warned against the “fear driven” responses of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the South African government and the “cherry-picking” of data.

Wood was one of very few South African scientists who also dared to criticise the WHO. He picked out WHO’s delayed response to declaring a pandemic, its refusal to countenance evidence that the outbreak might have originated in a Wuhan laboratory, its muddled masking policies, exaggerated concerns about youth mortality, and its insistence that the virus was not spread through the air but by physical contact.

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When I spoke with Wood this week, there was no sense of vindication on his part at being proved correct. Instead, he bemoans the pressure on leaders to “do something”. Regrettably, this doesn’t mean being open-minded.

“I can understand the growing public scepticism, the lack of confidence in the existing medical system and the global institutions that are supposed to manage our existence. In my view, if a new pandemic comes along, we are less well equipped to deal with it than ever before.”