Kevin Bardosh, Director and Head of Research at Collateral Global, discusses the pandemic response and the uniformity of viewpoint across the planet in what he calls a “totalising vision” of the COVID-19 pandemic response. Discussing his research that addresses both the conversations around the reaction and the social and political factors that fed into the public health response to the pandemic, Bardosh elaborates on the “industry of fear” where public health had a hand in the fearmongering that took place from 2020 onward. Discussing the need for a heterodox analysis, noting the experiences of many scientists who questioned the public policy at the time, Bardosh articulates how the public policy is tasked with making decisions based on making sense of competing interests while also taking decisions based on specific tradeoffs, a framework he maintains which was “completely tossed out the window” during the Covid-19 pandemic. Criticising the suspension of democratic norms, Bardosh observes that those who promoted lockdown policies despite their exaggeration of the dangers of the virus, their fabrications of modelled Covid deaths and who amplified the benefits of lockdown were almost all unilaterally promoted within their institutions while cementing institutional discourse on lockdown with little to no room for heterodox approaches. Bardosh carefully analyses the historical forces that buttressed institutional reactions to the pandemic, from cultural to political to philosophical notions of freedom, all while questioning what would happen were a pathogen with a higher death rate to emerge today. Focussing on his current research in “public health harm,” Bardosh elucidates how public health’s unintended consequences of disruption and harm were dramatic and drastic, classifying the reaction to the 2020 pandemic as an “overreaction.” Bardosh also addresses the quite common human train where individuals in positions of power are reluctant to admit where they got it wrong, referring to the Milgram experiment.
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