WATERSHED: INTRODUCTION
This is the introduction to a book about the COVID pandemic that David had begun to write. But on June 10, 2026, he died of a heart attack, at home, in the middle of singing a bluegrass song with friends[30]. So we’re posting this as a draft.
A watershed is a height of land from which the rivers flow in different directions and drain into different seas. It is also the whole catchment area in which those waters gather and focus themselves towards their final destination. Metaphorically, it refers to a turning point or dividing line separating distinct epochs. The image is not perfect – history is a field of human action not a drainage basin – but I believe that the pandemic that was declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020 was a watershed. I do not mean that it was something that happened all at once. On the contrary, as I hope to show, I think it was the culmination, climax and completion of tendencies and trajectories that had been accumulating and accelerating for a long time. What happened in March 2020 was that these tendencies achieved critical mass and were revealed as a new kind of society and a new way of life. Most notably the entire world was brought for a time under a single government and made to bow to a single sovereign, called Life. Science was mobilized as religion. News media became propaganda agencies. Civil rights were suspended. Statistics turned into liquid plastic.
None of these things were entirely new. Mark Twain had inveighed against the slippery side of numbers in the 19th century – in his famous quip about “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Civil rights had been suspended during wars or other emergencies. Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann had shown that a free media can function as a propaganda system.[1] Historians and philosophers had drawn attention to the religious character of the modern faith in science. What was novel in 2020 and the years following was the way these things coalesced and declared themselves openly as a new form of life and a new style of government.
Also familiar was the strength and assurance of the conviction that seized so many all at once at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. I had seen this sudden certainty before. One case was the “fall of Saigon” in the spring of 1975, when the inevitable ending of an unjust and ill-advised war was repackaged as a dramatic loss for the West. Another instance was 9/11 when everyone seemed to know instantly that an age had ended, and that the becalmed, barely legitimate government of George Bush Jr. was suddenly the plausible protagonist of a War on Terror.[2] Going further back, one can think of German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, watching from his window in Jena as Napoleon passed below on horseback, and believing that he had seen the “world-soul” (die Weltseele) compressed into the person of the triumphant emperor. Participants in these events were all, in some sense, sleepwalkers – to use the image with which historians Chrstopher Clark and Paul Grossman have described the sense of irresistible destiny with which the peoples of Europe marched blindly into World War I in 1914.[3]
What the events I have mentioned have in common is that they all seemed to arrive with their meaning written plainly and unmistakably on their faces. Watching media coverage of “the fall of Saigon” in 1975, I remember feeling as if I were witnessing a stage set revolving in the dark, the actors all silently changing their places, and the lights, at last, being brought up on a transformed scene. The memory of the anti-war movement had been replaced by the beginnings of what Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann called “the reconstruction of imperial ideology.”[4] The same thing happened, mutatis mutandis, in 2020. SarsCov2 was a new virus of unknown origin and virulence. Lockdown was an untried policy, which had had no more than a marginal place and a handful of advocates in the field of public health policy up to the end of 2019. And yet, almost overnight, there was widespread agreement that COVID 19 was, as Canada’s prime minister said, “the worst health care crisis in our history,” and lockdown the only humane and effective response.[5] This instant consensus was so remarkable and so impregnable that Belgian psychologist Matthias Desmet would later suppose that it must have been a form of mass hypnosis.[6] His hypothesis can be questioned, but the depth, durability and instantaneity of the consensus were undeniable. Dissenters and skeptics were soon sidelined, and even the merely quizzical quickly learned to keep their own counsel.
Such “mass formation,” as Desmet calls it, like other elements of the COVID response, has been seen before. In the past, it has usually been recognized, sooner or later, as delusion. Few now claim that fascism or McCarthyism, tulip mania or the South Sea Bubble were either rational, beneficial or necessary. But, in the case of the COVID-19, this moment has not yet come. On the contrary, a general amnesia with regard to the pandemic still seems to prevail. This reinforces Desmet’s hypnosis model, since amnesia is a frequent and sometimes intended sequel to hypnosis. I have often heard from people who were abused by their friends for some lack of precaution or zeal during the pandemic, that those who had done so later denied any memory of the disagreement. When official inquiries have examined pandemic policy, they have frequently concluded that governments failed only in not having done more sooner. This was the case in the U.K. where the primary finding of the Hallett inquiry which reported in November of 2025 was that 23,000 additional lives would have been saved if mandatory lockdowns had been imposed a week earlier than they were. Little was said about the economic devastation, the marginalization of dissent, the prostitution of science, or the demoralization produced by further isolating the already isolated.
COVID-19 was a serious illness, but policy was made before anyone knew how serious, and then continued when it was clearly shown not to be as serious as at first feared. In March 2020, there was panic. Indeed, PANIC was the instruction The National Post gave its readers in a headline that dominated its front page in the wake of the WHO’s declaration on March 11, 2020 that COVID-19 constituted “a global pandemic.” Videos from Wuhan, later shown to be spurious, showed people dropping dead in the street. Television reports from Bergamo in northern Italy pictured a convoy of army vehicles carrying away the dead who were overflowing the town’s crematoria and cemeteries. New York provided images of refrigerator trucks serving as temporary morgues. A model, devised by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London, forecast more than two million deaths in the United States, and more than half a million in Britain without the draconian lockdown they recommended.[7] In the media I was exposed to, this prediction was treated as more or less a matter of fact, rather than as what it actually was – a questionable extrapolation from limited data by a group whose prognostications had proved to be wildly off base in the past.[8] Senior Swedish epidemiologist Johan Gieseke expressed amazement that such a study – unpublished, unreviewed, highly speculative, and in Gieseke’s estimation “not very good” – could drive policy. But it demonstrably did.[9] The template had been set. Journalist Stephen Marche, in a recent reminiscence of the pandemic period in which he recounts no encounter with death by COVID, still speaks throughout his memoir of a recurrence of “the plague” and compares 21st century Toronto with 17th century London.[10] But the last great outbreak of Bubonic plague in London in 1665 killed an estimated 15-20% of the entire population, while Toronto lost a few thousands to COVID – most of them already old and unwell.
The London-Toronto comparison is grotesque, and, like Justin’s Trudeau’s hyperbole about “the worst health care crisis in our history,” dishonours the memory of those who suffered in the cholera ships of the 19th century, or from the Black Death which swept away nearly half of Europe’s population in the 14th century, or during the colonization of the Americas when novel, imported diseases killed as much as 90% of the indigenous population. In the case of COVID, the drastic containment measures that were put in place in March of 2020 and then kept in place for the better part of three years were all devised at a time when no one actually knew the severity of the illness. All people had to go on were computer simulations, sketchy news from China, a reported case fatality rate of 3 in a hundred, photos of mobile morgues, and the vivid expectation of a catastrophic “next one” or “big one” that had developed during the threatened but largely avoided outbreaks of BSE, SARS, H1N1, MERS etc. (Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College team, which set the tone on COVID, had predicted up to 150,000 deaths from BSE (Mad Cow Disease) and up to 200,000,000 from H1N1.[11]) When respected medical statistician John Ioannidis was finally able to calculate the infection fatality rate (IFR) it turned out to be .23% for everyone, and .05 for people under the age of 70.[12] The infection fatality rate is an informed estimate of the number of people who have come in contact with the disease who will die.[13] By Ioannidis’s reckoning, then, COVID-19 was certainly a very severe epidemic, though probably, in the end, not that much more lethal than the Hong Kong flu of 1968-’70, or the Asian flu of 1957-’58, for which comparable IFRs have been calculated. This never became widely known, however. Ioannidis’s research was never reported in any of the media I follow, nor was policy ever revised once it was shown that COVID mainly threatened the old. The panicky impressions on which policy was based in March 2020 were left in place, allowing Stephen Marche to still write melodramatically about plague five years later.
It is time to set the record straight. The fear and misapprehension that sustained a misguided policy in the pandemic years sustains it still, and I cannot see how Canada will ever be able to recover its balance, or reclaim its future, without a faithful and truthful account of what happened here in the years after 2020. History matters, and no agreeable future can be made without an agreed past.
At the beginning of March 2020, the word lockdown, on the common tongue, referred to a repressive policy used to quell disturbances in prisons, and sometimes to respond to violent incidents in big high schools. Masks were generally thought to be ineffective against respiratory viruses. This was the official view of the WHO and of the public health chiefs in both the U.S. and Canada. Vaccines were understood to require many years of testing before they could be considered safe. Immunity acquired through exposure or infection among the healthy population was considered the primary line of defense against viruses that had become too widespread to be contained. The public health profession saw itself as entrusted with the health of the public in its entirety. One elder of Canada’s public health profession – Dr. Richard Schabas, who served for ten years as Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health between 1987 and 1997 – summed up what he understood to be the profession’s guiding principles as follows: 1) dampen panic, (2) rate evidence higher than authoritative opinion, (3) consider the public health as a whole, rather than just a single disease vector, and (4) always prefer persuasion to coercion.[14]
Then, suddenly, all these practices and understandings were abolished, and a new paradigm was put in their place. This new paradigm arrived so fully formed and produced such general unanimity that it gave every appearance of having arrived from some celestial source. Lockdown became a cuddly expression of mutual care. Masks became de rigueur. A new vaccine was developed at “warp speed.” All stopgap remedies were demonized and taken as somehow detracting from this imminent “solution.” Herd immunity was mocked as “letting the virus rip” – most memorably, for me, in the incendiary caption that headlined a column by Andrew Coyne in The Globe and Mail on Oct. 16th 2020: “Herd immunity’s a great strategy, if you don’t mind the millions of dead.” Public health officials fomented panic, ignored evidence, endorsed coercion and excluded every other element of public health, except Sars CoV2, from their purview. When a pantheon of public health veterans sent an open letter to the Prime Minister and his government, calling for “a more balanced approach,” their plea was completely ignored by both its intended recipients and the media.[15]
How this could happen so suddenly and so totally is the conundrum. One key event seems to have been the World Health Organization’s “WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease” that was undertaken between Feb. 16th and 24th, 2020. A team of 25 experts, under the leadership of Canadian Bruce Aylward and Chinese epidemiologist Dr. Liang Wannlian, visited China and, on their return, advised that the draconian measures taken against Covid-19 in Wuhan – these included welding, or otherwise sealing, people into their living quarters – should henceforward “inform the global response.”[16] But this utopian enthusiasm for containment and control, along with its blindness and indifference to the public health tyranny that would eventually push the Chinese people themselves into open revolt, can have been no more than a trigger. Plenty of WHO missions pass quite unremarked. This one precipitated every Western country but Sweden into lockdown within little more than a month. (The United Kingdom briefly resisted, affirming up until mid-March the benefits of herd immunity, but, when the general stampede began, it was little more than a week before the government of Boris Johnson was mocked and bullied into line.)
The rapid coalescence of what British writers Toby Green and Thomas Fazi have called “the Covid consensus” can only be explained as an expression of a certain ripeness or readiness.[17] For several generations societies like ours had been practicing and preparing for this moment. Sometimes the practice was overt. In the fall of 2019, The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a so-called “table-top exercise” in which 15 “prominent individuals from global business, government, and public health” explored possible responses to a simulated pandemic – the fourth such “exercise” Johns Hopkins had staged since 2001. In 2019 the BBC launched the Trusted News Initiative and soon had enlisted a Who’s Who of elite newspapers, press agencies, Big Tech companies, and other broadcast networks like the CBC to join. This initiative established, in advance, the trusted news v. misinformation template that would govern pandemic media coverage and legitimate the exclusion of dissenting voices.
These manifest preparations were just the tip of the iceberg. Much more important, in my view, were what might be called the cultural preparations – the slow maturation of a matrix in which the policy that was imposed in 2020 seemed natural and inevitable. Seven tendencies in the preparations stand out stand out:
1) We are living in what the late German sociologist Ulrich Beck called “risk society.”[18] By this he meant that everyone is exposed, willy-nilly, to enormous, imponderable and incalculable risks. In principle we believe in a “science” which is defined by rigorous testing, but in practice we adopt new technologies, from profligate fossil fuel use to smart phones and AI, without any testing or provision for consequences whatever. This gives our society overall the character of an ongoing science experiment, but one whose outcome can never be determined, since we have no second earth where we might test the effects of nuclear war or climate change, and no spare citizenry to act as controls on our embrace of non-stop communication. This creates an atmosphere of fear and foreboding, and an unreasoning avidity for the control of small risks. In this way we reassure ourselves and hope to propitiate the uncontrollable risks.
2) Closely connected to the first is what I’ll call prospectivism, or a tendency to live in the future rather than the present. Much of the panic that drove policy from 2020 on was inspired by models – mathematical and algorithmic constructions which were only capable of reproducing the speculative assumptions on which they were based – garbage in, garbage out – but which were often treated as virtual matters of fact. Modelling had always had a place as one technique within science. In 2020 the outputs of models began to virtually define science.
3) The mythologization of science: The word science is an abstraction from scores of sciences, each with its own history and ethos, each with its own style of analysis and standards of proof. Geology cannot proceed in the same way as particle physics; epidemiology is not crystallography. Science as such has no concrete existence. But during the pandemic “science” was regularly treated as a compact and consistent oracle capable at all times of offering authoritative and unequivocal direction to votaries who were willing simply to “follow” it. Moral questions were repackaged as scientific questions. The non-compliant were dubbed anti-science. The results have been as fatal to science as they have been to society.
4) Next is the complex of behaviours to which Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, in their book The Coddling of the American Mind, apply the term “safetyism.” They define it as a “cult” that is centred on an exaggerated sensitivity to danger, threat and possible victimization. In their view it fosters fragility and anxiety and has now achieved such ascendancy that it tends to overshadow any competing goods. Its effect during the pandemic was to lend power and plausibility to any intervention, however intrusive or destructive, that promised to increase security or reduce harm.
5) The ascendancy of Life: Saving lives was the banner under which the COVID consensus was mobilized. But these “lives” to be saved were abstracted from all the actual forms of life within which people subsist and without which they are no more than biological data. To be concrete: it became acceptable, in service to Life, to outlaw worship, ban funeral rites, and let the old and the critically ill die alone and unconsoled. This inhumanity, in my eyes, justified the claim that my teacher, Ivan Illich, had made thirty years before: that Life had become an idol – and an idol in this case to which people’s existing allegiances and fidelities could readily be sacrificed.[19] Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has spoken of how “bare life,” life without qualifications or commitments, life as a resource to be managed and conserved, now underpins political sovereignty.[20] The pandemic, again, marked a coming of age for the power and authority of this figure.
6) Another crucial determinant of the pandemic policy was sentimentality – the image of extreme and unclouded benevolence in which so many people today see their reflection. It was sentimentality that enabled frightened, isolated, and masked people to interpret these obvious signs of aversion from one another as evidence of mutual care. I turn away from you because I love you. It was sentimentality, likewise, that banged pots and pans for heroic “front line workers” and fostered the pathos of a besieged health care system that was ostensibly there to save us, but instead needing saving.
7) Finally, the expectation of apocalypse is what I believe drove so many citizens into the arms of self-aggrandizing bureaucrats and bio-crats. Apocalypse is a venerable archetype in societies shaped by Christianity, and it has been immeasurably enriched in recent years by the threat of climate change, the dangers of nuclear war, the prospect of genetic engineering and other end-of-the-world perils. I do not think that the capacity to instantly believe and fear the worst, in evidence throughout the pandemic, can be understood without taking account of an apocalyptic disposition that has so far remained largely unconscious. I propose, as far as I am able, to bring it into the light.
I am sure that others would consolidate or expand, revise or even contradict this curt list. All the better. My aim is to begin, not end, a discussion.
What I’m sure of is that the astonishing about-face that took place in March 2020 requires some explanation. In the event, it passed almost without comment in the organs of polite opinion, where the new status quo of lockdown, coercion and ostracization was taken as no more than a common-sense response to a peril that was said, again and again, in a soothing and stupefying tatoo, to be unprecedented. Repetition of this kind has imparted a sense of inevitability to the policy that was followed, legitimized the new order that was installed, and largely hidden the damage that was done. This damage was immense, and the costs of continuing to repress any acknowledgement of it are very high.
Consider: Countless small businesses were ruined, many of them labours of love built up over many years. Selected monopolies, like Amazon, thrived. Small stores were forced to close, big box stores stayed open. Public finances were thrown into a debt spiral so devastating that no government in Canada currently has either the will or the means to do much more than to continue to mortgage the future of the already heavily overburdened generations to come. The performing arts were devastated – sometimes irrecoverably. Conviviality was undermined, as precious gathering places closed or were placed out of bounds, and people grew accustomed to shopping, eating and socializing on-line. My neighborhood in Toronto still swarms with delivery bikes at meal times, as if half my neighbours have forgotten how to cook. Educational and vocational trajectories were interrupted, and the young were forced into a demoralizing isolation from which an untold number did not recover. Public health suffered, as physical illnesses went untreated, and psychic disturbance, like anxiety and addiction, domestic violence and depression flourished out of sight and out of reach. And, finally, there was the vaccine – a hastily tested inoculation employing a novel genetic technology that was authoritatively declared to be “safe and effective” long before this debatable claim could be decisively established. It was then enforced on the citizenry under the threat of loss of livelihood and civil rights, and evidence that it was neither safe nor effective was excluded from the public sphere as nothing more than the maunderings of “anti-vaxxers” and “anti-science” rubes – an authoritarian proceeding that has fatally injured both science and social harmony.
This list could be extended and elaborated, but my purpose here is not to berate my readers, belabour my argument, or put anyone in mind of Coleridge’s obsessive ancient mariner with his wild manner, “glittering eye” and desperate need to convince others of the harm that has been done. The point, beyond any dispute about the number of this or the incidence of that, is that a kind of stasis has been imposed on our society. I spoke above of the cost of repression. I cannot see how any liveable future can unfold from our present circumstance without a reckoning with what has been done. The transformation of Science into an ideological monolith, and the accompanying conversion of disagreement into disinformation, has evacuated the whole idea of science of any meaning. The treatment of religious gatherings and practices as optional cultural niceties that can be banned by the state at will has revealed a social order in which a large fraction of our citizenry are unwilling to live. The abandonment of the sick and the dying, with its admission that for many people there is now no fate worse than death, has exposed an underlying inhumanity in our form of government. These are matters that must be faced and discussed if we wish to think of Canadian society as, in any sense, one society and not just a heap of incompatible and incommensurable fragments.
Along with what I have called stasis, and its accompanying sense of living in a state of futureless postponement, the pandemic brought polarization – a paralyzing and threatening polarization that has divided society into hostile and essentially non-communicating camps. I know, of course, that our present divisions are not a product of the pandemic alone. On the deepest level, it might be said that they are just the latest expression of the divided mind that has characterized modern societies since its founding paradoxes were announced centuries ago: when Copernicus and Galileo proved that our experience of things is quite opposite to their actual nature, when Machiavelli “lowered the sights” of political economy from the good to the possible, and when Bernard Mandeville argued that “private vices” could yield “publick benefits.”[21] Conflict and contradiction have recurred. The “revolutions,” so called, in England, France, the United States and Russia were all, in fact, civil wars. German’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, launched and named the first culture war, his kulturkampf against what he saw as reactionary Catholicism, in 1871. Much more immediately, one can see harbingers of the present polarization in Brexit and the election of the first Trump government in 2016. But, even allowing that the present discord may only be an outcropping of an ongoing civil war, it is still the case that the pandemic reinforced existing divisions and, in a sense, institutionalized them by greatly increasing the indifference, hostility, and sense of self-righteous vindication with which each faction faced the other.
The preeminent sign that a potentially lethal dialogue of the deaf had begun was the appearance of the so-called Freedom Convoy, and the reaction it provoked, in the winter of 2022. The trucks that converged on Ottawa were big, noisy and inconvenient, and the residents of downtown Ottawa and Parliament Hill were understandably irritated. The crowds that the big trucks brought with them to Ottawa, though often ebullient and festive, were also sometimes aggressive and profane. Even so, it should have been clear to any unprejudiced observer, from the moment that large assemblies began to gather on bridges and parking lots to cheer these big rigs on, that the convoy also represented an emergent public that wanted to present a political argument – namely that vaccine mandates had violated the contract on which these people thought Canadian society should be, and formerly had been, based. This should have led, given the obvious size, conviction and representative character of this new public, to acknowledgement, conversation and mutual accommodation. Instead, the crowds in Ottawa were treated as a hostile army – uncouth and unwelcome invaders with whom no dialogue was desirable or possible. Prime Minister Trudeau called them a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable” views and even asserted, on French television, and quite without evidence, that “these people” were “racist,” “misogynist,” and “against science and progress.”[22] The CBC turned its back. Eventually martial law was declared, and the protestors were driven out of town.[23] They had come to talk, but no one listened, and they left as confirmed enemies.
I found this ominous at the time and continue to find it ominous. Enemies mirror and inflame each other, producing what René Girard, interpreting the 19th century German general Carl von Clausewitz’s book On War, called an “escalation to extremes.”[24] This process is largely unconscious and often unchallengeable, without the challenger coming under suspicion of treason. It was obvious to the partisans of the Freedom Convoy that forcing people to take a novel, barely tested vaccine that demonstrably didn’t prevent transmission of the feared disease was an abuse of science and an infringement of their rights. It was equally obvious to their opponents that they were facing a reactionary and xenophobic mob, made up of ignorant people who were willing to recklessly endanger their fellow citizens by rejecting compulsory vaccination. Tailored media allowed each to hear only what confirmed and intensified these opposing views. Neither recognized their role in producing the behaviour of the other. Common ground, insofar as there had been any, disappeared. The same thing happened, in different forms, in the United States. The militant and determined agenda with which the second Trump administration took power in 2024, so unlike his unfocussed and incoherent first government, measured, for me, the extent of the polarization that had taken place during the intervening, pandemic years.
Wars are easier to start than to stop, but peace must be pursued anyway, and one of the ways in which I think, and hope, that common ground can be reestablished is by a careful unpacking of what went on between 2020 and 2023. Going as far as back as 2016, the political left failed to recognize their own hand in the reaction that erupted against them in the form of Brexit and the Trump election. (Elsewhere, I have challenged the terms left and right as outmoded categories that actually help to perpetuate the cleavage they ostensibly only describe, but here I use them in the way they continue to be conventionally used.) This obliviousness on the left has since grown even more pronounced. The “COVID consensus” that came into force in 2020 abused the canons of science, censored dissenting opinion, and created lasting social demoralization and economic devastation. But, to this day, few who subscribed to this consensus have recognized their role or responsibility in the rise of the right. The right, for its part, is just as blind and just as driven by resentment – unable to see, for example, how blaring air horns and F🍁CK Trudeau banners might fortify the opinions the protestors were ostensibly seeking to mollify. These war-like dynamics, where my enemy’s enemy is my friend, and my enemy’s friend is my enemy, has also produced a strange reversal. The left now supports things it once would have opposed, just because the right is against them, and in this way has very substantially given up its critical and oppositional role. Where the pandemic is concerned, complacency about overreaching state power, and credulity about the pharmaceutical industry’s good faith, are two of many possible examples.
Automatic thinking – I’ll have what he isn’t having – was endemic from the very beginning of the pandemic period. When Donald Trump said that hydroxychloroquine might have some utility as a stopgap against COVID, his opponents immediately declared the drug to be a quack remedy.[25] When three eminent epidemiologists made the Great Barrington Declaration, calling for a policy of “focused protection,” rather than general quarantine, top American public health officials responded, not with reasoned arguments, but with character assassination and a call for a “quick and devastating takedown” of the work of these “fringe” scientists.[26] These responses were presented to the public as science but actually expressed a quasi-religious political zeal. This is further reason why a reconsideration of the pandemic is urgently needed: a society that thinks itself scientific, but is actually in the grip of a militant ideology, has misunderstood its nature. So long as this misunderstanding prevails, this society will remain hopelessly and helplessly lost.
Yet another compelling reason for such a reappraisal is the way in which the policies provoked by the pandemic have revealed the already tightening grip of a social order that is likely to become permanent, and to seem more and more inevitable and logically self-evident, if its premises are not challenged. These premises include: an information control system that will determine what is and isn’t trusted news; an unquestionable biocracy that governs in the sign of Life; a mythification of science which mislays the real genius of modern science in favour of an authoritarian and utopian fantasy; and a polarization of society on terms that mystify our actual predicament and misdirect attempts to inquire into its nature.
“No one wants to hear about the pandemic,” is a statement I’ve heard more than once. I can understand, and even share, this disinclination. But I don’t think the subject can be avoided. To try to avoid it is to acquiesce in a travesty and thus to risk its repetition. This would be fatal to whatever is left of social peace and civic decency. British journalist Freddie Sayers, while criticizing the British inquiry which found that the only trouble with lockdowns was that they hadn’t been imposed soon enough, declared roundly, “If they try another one, we will resist it.”[27] I think he spoke for many. The free hand the American electorate gave Donald Trump in 2024 is one evidence of this, as I’ve already argued. So is the large plurality of Canadians who told pollsters that they were in general sympathy with the Freedom Convoy – 46% in one poll.[28] To the extent that the COVID countermeasures were an experiment in social control, this experiment has been a failure. It may, at first, have seemed to create a general consensus which praised Life and Health, protected our sacred “health care system,” faithfully obeyed Science, and condemned all criticism as a dangerous and ill-intentioned attack on social solidarity. But, soon enough, the cracks began to show. Sheltering in place turned out to be an option only for the already sheltered – the famous “laptop class” as they came to be known. “The science” was shown to be many disagreeing sciences. Existing social differences and discontents were aggravated and, eventually, mobilized. A dual society, long in the making, came into clear relief.
This dual society is polarized by a series of mystifications. The consequence is that the reactions prompted by the pandemic control measures, or by comparable forms of overreach, are apt to be just as misaligned and just as destructive as what provoked them. The supposed contest between science and anti-science, or between trusted news and misinformation, can only be a fantastical and distracting shadow battle if the image of science, or of objectivity, which is at issue, is itself faulty. This essay, accordingly, is written for those who cannot identify with either of the enemy twins who are engaged in this futile war. Many such non-combatants, and I am one, currently find themselves with no place to stand, and no name by which to call themselves or one another. This place can only be created, and its name discovered, by a patient attempt to untangle and unwind the assumptions that drove so many to run so complacently into the arms of Big Brother in March of 2020. In the words of a favourite poet:
I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.[29]
[1] I first became aware of Chomsky and Hermann’s “propaganda model” through their two-volume work The Political Economy of Human Rights (Black Rose, 1979). They developed this model further in Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, 1988).
[2] “barely legitimate” because, at the time, it was not at all clear that George Bush would even have been president, had the Supreme Court had not prevented a recount of the disputed vote in the state of Florida.
[3] Christoper Clark and Paul Grossman, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Penguin, 2010
[4] The second volume of Chomsky and Hermann’s The Political Economy of Human Rights – see note 1 above – was called After the Cataclysm: Post-War Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology.
[5] “la plus grande crise de santé publique de son histoire” – statement in front of the Prime Minister’s residence on March 25, 2020 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzRw-AIeNuY
[6] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green, 2022
[7] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
[8] In 2025 Professor Ferguson had predicted up to 200 million deaths globally from the H5N1, or avian flu virus. In the event 257 people died from that illness. See Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, The COVID Consensus: The Gobal Assault on Democracy and the Poor – A Critique from the Left, Hurst and Company, 2023, 96
[9] Gieseke spoke with Unherd’s Freddie Sayers on April 17, 2020: https://unherd.com/newsroom/coming-up-epidemiologist-prof-johan-giesecke-shares-lessons-from-sweden/
[10] Stephen Marche, The Grey Plateau: When the World Stopped Five Years Ago, Literary Review of Canada, March, 2025
[11] See note 8.
[12] https://iris.who.int/items/675a4c1e-e4f7-4296-9eb1-d4b5e22f6f0e Ioannidis first reported in May of 2020, and his research was published in revised form in the Bulletin of the WHO is September of that year.
[13] The IFR can only be estimated because, even where the number who have died is known, the number who have been exposed is never entirely certain and can only be inferred from sero-prevalence studies.
[14] Dr. Schabas offered this summary of his professional code of conduct in testimony he gave to a Citizen’s Inquiry organized by the Canadian COVID Care Alliance in the spring of 2022: ttps://citizenshearing.ca/testimonies/richard-schabas/
[15] https://healthydebate.ca/2020/07/topic/an-open-letter-to-pm-covid19/
[16] https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.5478668; https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/report-of-the-who-china-joint-mission-on-coronavirus-disease-2019-(covid-19)
[17] See note 6
[18] Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage Publications, 1992
[19] See “The Institutional Construction of a New Fetish: Human Life” in Ivan Illich, In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses, 1978-1990, Marion Boyars, 1992
[20] Agamben has developed this figure in a series of book that began with Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, 1998)
[21] Leo Strauss coined the phrase “the lowering of the sites” to describe Machiavelli’s reorientation of political philosophy away from idealization and towards realpolitik; Bernard Mandeville in his Fable of the Bees made the first demonstration that “greed is good”: https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/mandeville1732_1.pdf
[22] I can no longer find the clip from a public affairs show on a private Quebec network in which the former prime minister makes these remarks – it seems to have disappeared from the internet – but I have seen it and can testify that my quotation is accurate.
[23] Martial law is not hyperbole. The Emergencies Act that became law in 1988, and was invoked against the convoy on Feb. 14th, 2022, replaced what had been called The War Measures Act.
[24] René Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, Michigan State University Press, 2010
[25] Toronto physician Norman Doidge wrote a careful analysis of the unscientific character of the hydroxychloroquine discussion for Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/hydroxychloroquine-morality-tale
[26] The Great Barrington Declaration was written by infectious disease expert Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, epidemiologist and biostatistician Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, and physician and health economist Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford: https://gbdeclaration.org/ E-mails written in response between Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Anthony Fauci, the head of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), were obtained by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) through a Freedom of Information request. The full story is told here: https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-emails-and-some-alleged-science/
[27] This was during an interview with Sunetra Gupta on Unherd on Nov. 22, 2025. Sayers is the editor-in-chief of Unherd, which describes itself as a journal for people who “think for themselves.” It was one of the few venues for critical non-partisan thinking during the pandemic.
[28] https://globalnews.ca/news/8610727/ipsos-poll-trucker-convoy-support-ottawa-canada/
[29] Selected Poems of Robert Frost, Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1961, p. 5
[30] www.legacy.com/ca/obituaries/theglobeandmail/name/david-cayley-obituary?id=61795288