What Were Lockdowners Thinking? A Review of Jeremy Farrar Æ Brownstone Institute

To answer this question, I turned to the book Spike, by Jeremy Farrar (with Anjana Ahuja). He is not a well-known figure in the US, but in the UK he is basically their own Dr. Fauci. He wields huge institutional influence, through the Wellcome Trust, controlling both opinion within the epidemiological profession and funding resources for research. He was probably the dominant influence for enacting lockdowns in the UK, more so than Imperial College s Neil Ferguson. 

The book is a tell-all, day by day from the time of the dawning of awareness of the pathogen throughout the year. The book strikes me as forthcoming, and all the more terrifying for it. It reveals much about his friends, associates, frustrations, debates, strategies, worries, internal drama, and intellectual orientation, which is overwhelming in favor of deploying massive state power to control the invisible enemy. 

I m a very polite writer, but I cannot decline to admit my complete alarm at so deeply encountering the mind of a person who did what he did and thinks what he thinks. Once he became completely convinced of lockdownism, he went all in. Social distancing measures should be mandatory, not optional, he writes. A prime minister cannot ask people to lock down if they feel like it&.that is not the way these sorts of public health measures work.

Those little bromides this casual dismissing of all concerns that might have doubts about a medically informed totalitarian state are strewn throughout. I personally cannot fathom the psyche of a person who imagines that his profession entitles him to control all human interactions by police force, with gendarmes prohibiting people from behaving completely normally, and using violence against them for daring to engage with each other, opening their schools and businesses, and otherwise going about their lives peacefully and genuinely believing that this is the best thing for society all told. 

I truly cannot fathom that. Few people can. 

via brownstone.org

And we’ve got Dr. Fauci over here.