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I am extremely anti-lockdown but I also don’t see any problem with locking down the population for the right virus.
I think most people have a freedom + utilitarian framework where you pick freedom as much as possible.
I think prior drug wars were a failure but I think fentanyl might just be bad enough for some draconian measures. We probably have 60-70K excess deaths per year right now due to fentanyl and not general deaths of despair.
Fentanyl is a symptom of the drug wars. If people could buy pure oxycodone pills from reputable companies at the drug store no one would be buying counterfeit fentanyl pills from the cartels
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Well the failure mode of this attitude should be obvious (because we lived through it): if you say "no population level mass incarceration EXCEPT for the right virus" then that just incentives neurotic hypochondriac safetyists to hysterically propagandise that a virus barely worse than the common cold IS the right virus.
And then we go back to playing the ol' "Redefine words out from under people" shuffle, where if you lose, you get locked up in isolation for 2 years while the government folks keep on partying (see: Boris Johnson's "Partygate", Obama's birthday garden fetê, etc.)
Johnson was ousted from power because of Partygate, what more could you ask for?
What more could I ask for? In the UK, the maximum penalty for falsely imprisoning someone is 20 years. The government has, collectively, ~210,000,000 counts of false imprisonment to answer for. So the most I could ask for is Boris being imprisoned approximately until the sun explodes.
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It is also worth to note that prior to COVID, the experts went against lockdowns as effective epidemiologic measure. So there was no prior consensus to lock down the whole population for a virus unlike let's say other scenarios such as evacuation due to natural catastrophe or martial law during war. This means that in theory any threat can lead to lockdowns as the consensus can shift in matter of days.
Well, maybe, but I'm cynical enough to believe that this was also "Massage the science until it agrees with the policy we already wanted to do in the first place": namely, economic growth be-all-end-all-ism. The politicos didn't want a hypothetical pandemic interfering with their Line Going Up. It's only in the actual advent of a pandemic that the safetyists came out of the woodwork and demanded the opposite prescription. But in both cases the "scientific consensus" was more a function of political climate than actual data, because the scientists who say what the powers that be want to hear are the ones who get funding / airtime / the ear of the Premier.
Then we should be able to find this woodwork that they came out of. I've looked for it before. It ain't there. There's no segment of the public health community that, prior to 2020, thought imprisoning the entire population of a country in their own homes in the long-term was a suitable response to anything.
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