The sobering reality of opening up

Lisbeth Latham

In recent weeks, political and media commentary about the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia has focused on the question of when, in the context of growing vaccination rates, the country should consider ‘opening up’ (in this context a permanent and total break from lockdowns).

This discussion conveniently ignores the reality that the situation in Australia -particularly in NSW and Victoria - is increasingly out of control and, consequently, neglects the more urgent questions of what should be done now. Despite the situation in NSW, the state government is pushing ahead with its plans to lift restrictions for the vaccinated leaving many of the poorest and most culturally and linguistically diverse local government areas in lockdown[1].

Are Lockdowns sustainable?
This is not a simple question. Nonetheless, it is the case that there is a limit to how long the current lockdowns can be sustained. This is due to the insufficient support being provided to those in the most economically precarious circumstances. This lack of support, which has only worsened as the pandemic has progressed, only serves to punish workers whose work has enabled communities to lockdown in the first place. If this was addressed, the capacity to maintain lockdowns would be expanded, yet at a certain point key sectors of the economy - those necessary for sustaining lives - would also be disrupted. Luckily, no one has ever suggested permanent lockdowns. Instead, governments have advocated for lockdowns of sufficient length to suppress the virus to levels that enable us to protect lives and health.

Mental Health
A major argument against lockdowns has been that they contribute to community mental health concerns. There is no doubt that lockdowns are tough; loneliness and isolation are significant predictors of mental health problems and lockdowns are often very lonely experiences. In addition to these commonly shared impacts, many people are experiencing additional stressors. These include the constant threat of infection; concerns around income loss and the cost of living; relationship stress arising from home confinement; and supporting and caring for children with little to no understanding of the restrictions’ purpose or necessity

However, much of the media discourse around mental health feels disingenuous, many commentators seem to believe that lockdown is the only cause of the current strain on the mental health system and that it’s lifting the only solution. Such commentators conveniently ignore the range of support mechanisms that could be further deployed to support community mental health. Furthermore, their constant depictions of lockdowns as wrong and corrosive are demoralising and may negatively impact people’s ability to cope and persevere. Lifting the lockdowns in the context of widespread community transmission is a recipe for mass infections and large scale death - both of which would devastate communities, particularly when the people dying are your loved ones. Too often media discourse around the psychological impact of lockdowns is nothing more than a cynical exercise aimed at building pressure for opening up, with little or no consideration for people’s actual mental health.

Debate in epidemiology
From the beginning of the pandemic, there have been notable discrepancies in the advice being given by epidemiologists regarding the preventative measures that should be applied to minimise the spread of COVID-19. To an extent, these differences should come as no surprise; COVID is a novel virus and it took time for the mechanisms via which it spreads to be fully understood. Furthermore, with professional reputations at stake, it is unsurprising that many experts have doubled down on their own position or attacked the conflicting opinions of their colleagues. The additional seduction of building a media profile by publicly endorsing or criticising government position(s) has not helped matters either. Nonetheless, a much bigger debate has unfolded within epidemiology throughout the crisis. This debate centres on how and when to make judgements about the adoption of various preventative public health mechanisms. On the one hand, epidemiologists from the “medical-based evidence” camp have resisted adopting measures without conclusive evidence that supports their value or efficacy. These experts argue that the potential cost of such mechanisms far outweigh any benefits - benefits which they say are at best unproven and at worst, nonexistent. On the other hand, were the epidemiologists who argued that, in the context of a major global public health crisis, it was neither possible nor prudent to simply wait for the evidence to come in. For these epidemiologists, adopting measures such as masks and social distancing was essential because their potential to curb infection risk far outweighed any potential costs, most of which were financial. This debate has occurred publicly, most noticeably in the Boston Review, but also in the exponential increase of opinion pieces and media interviews with epidemiologists regarding not only what actions work, but also what level of effectiveness is worth the social and economic cost. Early in the Pandemic, in response to statements by Bill Gates that “COVID was a once in a lifetime pandemic”, Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis wondered if the coronavirus pandemic might rather be a “once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.”

I’m not in a position to judge the scientific merits of the modelling, but it is important to recognise that these judgements are not purely objective, but informed by subjective judgements regarding how we ought to weigh threats to life against the economic impacts of policy options. I personally stand by the idea that preserving human life and health is where we need to place our priorities - not only because saving lives is the whole point, but also because of the harmful impacts mass illness and death have on people’s livelihoods and the economy at large. Those who prioritise the economy at the expense of human life are not only lacking in empathy but have an unaccounted for, built-in error in their calculations.

Vaccinations: are they a magic bullet?
Since the emergence of viable vaccinations for COVID - public discourse has shifted towards the idea that the way to deal with the virus is to focus on mass vaccinations and that a vaccinated population would effectively eliminate the need for lockdowns. This argument has a number of flaws. First, reaching mass vaccination has been slow. This is understandable, since achieving mass production of vaccines takes time. In particular, the mNRA vaccines such as Pfizer and Moderna are essentially new technologies, meaning that whole new production and supply chains have had to be created from scratch.

Related shortages in production have contributed to and exacerbated the uneven distribution of vaccines globally. This is not just devastating for those populations left unvaccinated and who are left more vulnerable to infection and death; the mass transition also creates much better conditions for the mutation of the virus and is associated with the development of new strains, some of which may be more infectious, more deadly and/or more resistant to available vaccines. For this reason, it is essential that overcoming global inequalities in vaccine distribution becomes a priority for all rich countries, including Australia - not just as an act of solidarity (though this should be the primary driver) but also as an act of self-preservation.

In addition to the problem of vaccine inequality and the associated risk of new and increasingly deadly strains, much of the discourse around vaccination has overstated the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing infection, illness, and transmission between and among populations. While the effectiveness of vaccines is uneven, no vaccine for any illness delivers these outcomes. This disjuncture between promise and reality has thus lent undue credence to bad-faith actors, expanding and legitimising opposition to vaccinations and lockdown. Opponents, therefore, argue (or at the very least imply) that inaction is preferred to measures that cannot guarantee a 100 per cent success rate.

Still, the reality that mass vaccinations will not eliminate the virus has done little to impede the proliferation of media commentary linking mass vaccination to “opening up”. Instead, it has led to a growth in public discourse about the need to “live with the virus”. Such discourse initially relied on technically true statements that the vaccine would make it less likely for the vaccinated to get infected, to become seriously ill, and to die or infect others. Yet as concerning levels of infections continue to be recorded in countries with much higher vaccination rates, the rhetoric from a section of capital, political parties/leadership and the media have attempted to normalise infections and COVID-related deaths, arguing that these are acceptable price pay for ending “unsustainable lockdowns”. This push has, in many cases, been heavily reliant on modelling by researchers at the Doherty Institute whose research has informed the National Plan to transition Australia’s Covid response. What is clear is that this modelling is inadequate, but also that even the most optimistic projections include much higher levels of infection and death than Australia's previous strategy ever contemplated. Moreover, it is also clear that many of the assumptions which underlie this more optimistic projection, such as effective test, track and isolation mechanisms do not currently exist. Australians are thus being softened up for precisely the horrors seen in other countries - horrors which our collective sacrifice of lockdowns was aimed at avoiding.

This pressure is not new. It has been at play in Australia since the start of the pandemic. The idea that the economy should be prioritised over life - a position that was resisted not only by unions, but sections of capital, and most importantly some of the state and territory governments - most notably Victoria, WA, and Queensland - has drawn persistent attacks from large sections of capital, the media, and the LNP. This is despite the complete failure of their preferred model. Thus these ongoing attacks are not only bad in terms of their intent or potential outcome but are divisive and demoralising, sapping people’s reserve of endurance and tolerance. Lockdown is hard enough without constant reminders that it is too hard, unnecessary, or the supposed fever dream of a crazed dictator. While those who think lockdowns are horrible but necessary are unfairly denounced as mindless cultists, such discourse continues to create fertile ground for the conspiracy theories being actively spread by the far-right.

Human Rights
Questions surrounding the implications of lockdown measures for human rights, including the most appropriate means for convincing people to adhere to public health measures have also been a constant topic of debate. There is no doubt that the impact of lockdowns has been uneven, with race and class location significantly impacting certain populations' experience of not just lockdown but also some of the more repressive measures deployed by governments in the name of public health. For this reason, there need to be not only more and better resources allocated to support those in lockdown, but also increased accountability and scrutiny of the actions of the police. Having said this, focusing on the rights of individuals to not be impacted by the state ignores the intent and positive consequences that such health measures have on reducing infection rates. Protection from potentially life-threatening and debilitating illness is also a significant human right and in weighing these two rights we need to form a judgement about where to place our emphasis. In this respect, I am firmly in favour of preventing loss of life and promoting health. Public health orders play an important role in achieving this goal, and in order for them to be meaningful, there need to be consequences for breaching them - consequences which also must be appropriate, proportionate, and consistent in their application.

Pressure on public health
Part of the discussion regarding the response to’ COVID-19 has focused on pre-existing problems in public health systems, both in Australia and across the globe. These critiques point to the impact that decades of underfunding have had on public health systems as part of the neoliberal transformation of our societies. This transformation has effectively reduced both the available staffing in frontline and support roles and the number of available beds. It has also meant that, despite long-standing concerns regarding the risk of an emergent pandemic, little was done to prepare for it. These are important critiques. Nonetheless, it is important to recognise that even in the most ideal situation COVID, with its high level of infectiousness and increased risks of hospitalisation and long term complications, would have been a challenge. This can be seen that globally, despite the different capacities of health systems globally, as well as the different suites of policy responses have had varying degrees of horrific outcomes with a few notable exceptions.

Concerns about lifting lockdown restrictions prematurely
This concern is based on the fact that there is only a narrow margin for error and getting the timing and details wrong would put significant pressure on the country’s already strained health care systems. The reality is that while decisions about how hospital beds are used can be made quickly, simply designating additional beds for ICU or ventilation isn’t sufficient. In order to make these arrangements work, hospitals need additional qualified and trained staff - and those staff simply don’t exist. The Victorian health unions went further on September 17 released a joint statement which included: 

‘‘This has been a long, tough and incredibly stressful 18 months for healthcare workers. The impact on their mental and physical wellbeing has been huge. We need the Premier to hold the line and maintain strong public health measures to help keep the pressure on the hospitals and the healthcare workers as low as possible. We must stop counting bed capacity and start looking at healthcare worker capacity, both mental and physical. Healthcare workers are at breaking point. You have no health system without health professionals to run it”.

So, what are we to do? It is true the current lockdown will eventually need to end. However, the question of when and how must be contested. While rates of community transmission remain high you can’t substantially weaken the provisions without also substantially increasing the level of vaccination rates in the community. Even at this point, the measures need to account for and seek to protect those sections of the community that are unable to be vaccinated. This means that most of the social distancing and PPE measures that have been in place for the virus will need to be retained, at least at some level, for the foreseeable future. Finally, we should not accept the idea of a permanent end to lockdowns. In the event that infections rise again, we must continue to look to lockdowns as an option to protect people and to safeguard health care systems which, if overwhelmed, would exacerbate the possibility of further (and otherwise preventable) loss of life.

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1 As a disclaimer, it is important to acknowledge that, like the vast majority of commentators in Australia, I am not an epidemiologist. As such I will not attempt to interpret models or do my own modelling, instead, I seek to simply explore issues that I feel are being overlooked in the current discussion.

This article is posted under copyleft, verbatim copying and distribution of the entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved. If you reprint this article please email me at revitalisinglabour@gmail.com to let me know.

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Misplaced Sympathies: Anti-Lockdown Protests Undermine Social Solidarity

Lisbeth Latham

As more Australians enter lockdown in response to the spread of COVID-19 there has been an associated rise in protests against lockdowns and other public health measures designed to curb the spread of the virus. These protests are not a new phenomenon but have been occurring since the beginning of the pandemic. Although initially condemned, in Australia at least, there are now attempts to paint these protests in a sympathetic light or even as somehow progressive. According to these commentators, the protests, although misguided, are really a response to the state’s failure to deliver sufficient support to working people. Yet while financial hardship may be a motivating factor for some participants, remedying financial stress is by no means the objective of these rallies. Instead, the protests rely heavily on militant individualism and opposition to state limitations on behavior which are justified by appealing to a range of interlocking conspiracies that question the reality of the pandemic and the motivations for the various state responses to it.

In most countries, the early protests against lockdown and other public health measures aimed at limiting the spread of COVID. This was particularly aimed at the compulsory wearing of masks and the limiting of movement. The right-wing character was made clear not just by the groups pushing heavily within this framework - such as in the US militias, and other far-right currents such as the Proud Boys, and various Christian patriot groups, but the language that was used to justify and legitimise refusal to comply. These were heavily drawn from highly individualistic, right-wing libertarian sources, such as sovereign citizenship etc. which apart from denying the right of states to govern rely heavily on completely nonsensical quotes of non-existent legal arguments regarding the Magna Carta and other historical and totally irrelevant documents. These mobilisations were often also pushed by sections of capital who did not want to forfeit their right to make a profit at the cost of saving lives.

One of the numerous anti-lockdown advertisements published by Clive Palmer in major Australian newspapers.

In July of this year, the protests in Australia were bigger than earlier protests. This has lead to some on the left searching for a basis for this growth, the answer that a number have come to the conclusion that the driver is the shift in the level of financial support provided by the government to workers in lockdown and as such the protests are really, to paraphrase Marx, the sigh of the oppressed. While there is some appeal in being able to explain the growth in the protests as simply the growth in anger at financial difficulties brought on by the pandemic, you do need to be able to establish more than a correlation to demonstrate causation particularly if we are not descending into vulgar forms of materialism and accelerationism. However, the advocates for a position that this is a prime driver provide limited if any evidence. Tom Tanuki, in an article in the Independent Australian, whilst acknowledging that it is:

“a ’big tent’ conspiracist movement that houses discordant ideas and sometimes leaderless factions. It’s given direction by a ruling caste of portrait-video-filming figureheads who often scrap with each other for viral supremacy. The attention-seekers among them get a sugar rush of shares, the grifters get lots of money and the political careerists try to craft a future voting bloc.”

Despite this Tanuki plays down the significance of this reality and instead posits the movement, at least in Sydney, as “left” based on the participation of the working-class and sections of the Lebanese community from Sydney’s South West - however, no evidence is provided to support any of these claims. Christopher Knaus and Michael McGowan writing in the Guardian outline the global far-right network that has been seeking to build the anti-lockdown movement globally and notes that at least some of the organisers in Australia are embedded in these global far-right networks. However, Knaus and McGowan also cite Josh Roose, a senior research fellow specialising in extremism at Deakin University, as suggesting:

“While there were elements of far-right rhetoric among the protestors, what they actually shared was a level of marginalisation and distrust in authority.
“There are some similarities and commonalities to the far right in terms of content but these protests are not driven by the far-right per se,
“What immediately distinguishes these sorts of protest groups from the far right is that they’re highly multicultural and they’re made up not just of angry men at a patriot rally but also women.
“In both Melbourne and Sydney the people and areas being represented are the areas that have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic. There’s also issues here with the cultures and communities often have a deep-seated distrust of government, often for good reason.”

Again no evidence is provided to support either the observation or the conclusion. The idea that the presence of workers, people of colour, or women, may not fit with some people’s stereotypes of the far-right, but all of these identities are heterogeneous and historically they have all been sources of recruitment, particularly amongst more marginalised sections of communities, for the far-right even if our image of the far-right are young white men.

In questioning this argument I am not saying that financial hardship is not a factor. There would undoubtedly be people at the protest who have suffered financially - moreover, there are many people experiencing severe financial hardship due to the inadequacy of state and Commonwealth financial support. For some, this experience may have been a driver for their participation. Whether it is a driver of mobilisations, we should be raising demands not only to increase the level of financial support to workers, the self-employed, those reliant on welfare payments, and small business. Such financial support policies need to be consistent and locked in to provide greater certainty for people in the coming months. Our demands need to go beyond simply demanding the reinstating JobKeeper, and the COVID support supplement, but addressing the significant flaws in JobKeeper, many of which were entirely by the design of the Morrison government and for the COVID support supplement to be incorporated into all government pensions.

In saying this, I am also saying those advocating that financial hardship as the primary driver, or even a significant driver, need evidence that is the case. For me, a key basis for judging motivations of mobilisations are the public justifications for the mobilisations and the demands raised spontaneously within the participants. On this, the evidence does not suggest that seeking to address financial hardship is a key driver. It does not feature highly in the calls to action or with the homemade signs. Instead, we see calls for “freedom” and around the need for an end to lockdowns and other social distancing mechanisms, such as masks, and rejections of vaccines - which are core issues of this movement since its initial development.

Also, the growth and development of the movement internationally while not uniform, suggests it is growing irrespective of the financial and social distancing regulations which are actually in place in any given city or country. So rallies have occurred in cities without lockdown or provisions such as compulsory masking in place, although in these cities the protests tend to be smaller - which you would expect as the perceived threat is not present.

This does beg the question as to why there has been a growth in the anti-lockdown movement? Well, I don’t think it is for a singular reason. One factor is that there has been significant disinformation spread regarding both the virus and the various mitigation measures, including masks and vaccines. This is highlighted by the recent seven-day suspension of Sky News Australia from YouTube over the spreading of Covid misinformation. As the distress of lockdown and other limits on movement have built, it is understandable that some people who are experiencing extreme emotional distress would find the idea that that distress is both unnecessary but also can be ended simply by ending lockdowns. This is particularly the case in a country such as Australia where the health impact of COVID has been more limited - it is easier to imagine proceeding as normal without the fear that infections could explode to the levels experienced in other countries. This is contributed to discussions in both mainstream media and on social which talks about the Australian experience without contextualising it in the global context: at the same time the discussion also tends to discuss the Australian governmental response as far more repressive and restrictive than other states - this is particularly notable in discussions of Australia’s border policy as being unique in closing and limiting travel in and out of the country - which a review of sites such as the International Air Transport Association’s COVID-19 Travel Regulations Map - it is clear that Australia is not alone in having travel restrictions in place, nor does it currently have the harshest restrictions internationally.

Even in countries where infections and deaths have been much higher, most of the experience has been isolated to sections of the community particularly health care workers, and those who have experienced close family and friends become extremely sick and die. This is reflected in experiences in a number of countries of hospitals being targeted by anti-lockdown/COVID sceptical individuals as being part of a big lie to justify incursions on civil liberties.

The problem with identifying the drivers of protests is that they are not singular. However, it is clear that the process of the pandemic and associated public health measures have been extremely distressing for the vast majority of society. This is not a real shock, particularly when we consider the lack of certainty faced by many individuals, will they have work, will they be able to go see friends, will they be able to see family or travel. Uncertainty is highly stressful. It makes us feel anxious and that we have no power, or ability to control our own lives. It should be no surprise that psychological distress would help to create a fertile medium for conspiracy theories and anti-science denial to grow and take root. These ideas provide certainty, against a reality of a virus that might kill you and your loved ones - a counter reality where there is no virus and the restrictions are simply part of a conspiracy by the powerful to control us, can be appealing on many levels. That detachment from reality would not necessarily be a problem if it weren’t for the reality that rejecting the public measures increases the risk of exposure of everyone to a highly infectious virus that not only kills but causes long-term health problems in many of those who catch it.

These dynamics can only get worse as the emotional wear of the pandemic builds.

So what is the answer? While we must always come from a position of empathy, and understand that many participants in the protests are coming in situations of significant and understandable distress - I don’t think that empathy should let us fall into a position of accepting their arguments and motivations as being legitimate. These actions are aimed at undermining measures that protect public health - whilst people should not be treated with excessive or unreasonable force - the protests do need to be limited and prevented as they are aimed at disrupting the limits on social distancing needed to suppress the virus and save the lives and health of the broader community. Our efforts to maintain support for public health measures need to be premised on social solidarity and the idea that through some individual pain it is possible to reduce the severity of the impact on any individual - which means that the pain does need to be shared across the community - the idea of locking down working-class communities and communities of colour in order to enable rich suburbs to go on as if nothing is happening is unconscionable and reasonably erodes the idea that we are trying to protect everyone.

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This article is posted under copyleft, verbatim copying and distribution of the entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved. If you reprint this article please email me at revitalisinglabour@gmail.com to let me know.

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