Eradication of Covid Is a Dangerous and Expensive Fantasy

It seemed to work in New Zealand and Australia, but now ruinous, oppressive lockdowns are back

By Jay Bhattacharya and Donald J. Boudreaux. Excerpt:

"Among all countries, New Zealand, Australia and especially China have most zealously embraced zero-Covid. China’s initial lockdown in Wuhan was the most tyrannical. It infamously locked people into their homes, forced patients to take untested medications, and imposed 40-day quarantines at gunpoint.

On March 24, 2020, New Zealand imposed one of the most onerous lockdowns in the free world, with sharp restrictions on international travel, business closures, a prohibition on going outside, and official encouragement of citizens to snitch on neighbors. In May 2020, having hit zero-Covid, New Zealand lifted lockdown restrictions, except quarantines for international travelers and warrantless house searches to enforce lockdown.

Australia also took the zero-Covid route. While the initial steps focused on banning international travel, the lockdowns there also involved closed schools, occasional separation of mothers from premature newborns, brutal suppression of protests, and arrests for wandering more than 3 miles from home.

New Zealand’s and Australia’s temporary achievement of zero-Covid and China’s claimed success were greeted with fanfare by the media and scientific journals. China’s authoritarian response seemed so successful—despite the country’s record of lying about the virus—that panicked democratic governments around the world copied it. The three countries lifted their lockdowns and celebrated.

Then, when Covid came back, so did the lockdowns. Each government has had multiple opportunities to glory in achieving zero-Covid by hairshirt. Australia’s current lockdowns in Sydney are now enforced by military patrols alongside strict warnings from health officials against speaking with neighbors. After Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the U.K. must “learn to live with” the virus, New Zealand’s minister for Covid-19 response, Chris Hipkins, imperiously responded, “That’s not something that we have been willing to accept in New Zealand.”

Humanity’s unimpressive track record of deliberately eradicating contagious diseases warns us that lockdown measures, however draconian, can’t work. Thus far, the number of such diseases so eliminated stands at two—and one of these, rinderpest, affected only even-toed ungulates. The lone human infectious disease we’ve deliberately eradicated is smallpox. The bacterium responsible for the Black Death, the 14th-century outbreak of bubonic plague, is still with us, causing infections even in the U.S.

While the eradication of smallpox—a virus 100 times as deadly as Covid—was an impressive feat, it shouldn’t be used as a precedent for Covid. For one thing, unlike smallpox, which was carried only by humans, SARS-CoV-2 is also carried by animals, which some hypothesize can spread the disease to humans. We will need to rid ourselves of dogs, cats, mink, bats and more to get to zero.

For another, the smallpox vaccine is incredibly effective at preventing infection and severe disease, even after exposure to disease, with protection lasting five to 10 years. The Covid vaccines are far less effective at preventing spread.

And smallpox eradication required a concerted global effort lasting decades and unprecedented cooperation among nations. Nothing like this is possible today, especially if it requires a perpetual lockdown in every country on earth. That’s simply too much to ask, especially of poor countries, where lockdowns have proved devastatingly harmful to public health. If even one nonhuman reservoir or a single country or region that fails to adopt the program, zero-Covid would fail."