Vaccines disguised the errors of our lockdown policy

Liz Truss’s statement that she would never authorise another lockdown and The Spectator’s interview with Rishi Sunak have triggered a new debate about whether the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 were justified. The most widely discussed positions are that lockdown occurred too late or that there should never have been any lockdowns at all, alongside the view that what happened was about right. But there is another position here – in many ways perhaps the most obvious position – that rarely gets an airing.

When lockdown was first introduced, Boris Johnson said the point was to ‘squash the sombrero’ of cases, so that the peak number of hospitalisations each week did not overwhelm the NHS. That was the original rationale for lockdowns, and it was an excellent one. At the time, we were being told that around 20 per cent of cases were leading to hospitalisation and the UK authorities estimated that in an unmitigated epidemic, 95 per cent of the expected 40 million infections would occur in a nine week period.