“Can we believe the lockdown sceptics?” read the title of a Full Fact article from December 2020. Richard Tice, Nigel Farage, Julia Hartley-Brewer and Peter Hitchens were the usual suspects who came up for examination, and the Great Barrington Declaration, pushing for focused protection and herd immunity (authored by epidemiologists from Harvard, Oxford and Stanford) was at the heart of their argument. This too had come to be tainted with the “lockdown sceptics” brush. “A rightwing stealth campaign” was how one Guardian op-ed described it, keen to stress the Declaration’s apparent association with a libertarian think tank.

Lockdown, unprecedented in many ways, still found its way into the great political divides of our time. Why was this the case? In hindsight, its impact reads like a progressive nightmare. The biggest increase of billionaire wealth on record, an increase in poverty, wage disparity, domestic abuse, decades lost in educational progress and social mobility, all of which inadvertently hit hardest on the poorest, youngest and most vulnerable. The growing dissent was also no secret. By 5 March 2021, at the end of the country’s third lockdown, the New Statesman was reporting on polls of Labour voters that expressed deep concern about the policy. From unions to intellectuals, where was the opposition on the left?

It’s a question that Professor Toby Green still struggles with. His book, The Covid Consensus, co-authored with Italian journalist Thomas Fazi, is a compendium of these horrors inflicted by government pandemic policies across the world, alongside the question: what did they actually achieve? It was virtually ignored by the mainstream press when first published in 2021. Praise, however, is now starting to trickle through. Writing in the Guardian in February, Larry Elliot (another rare lockdown critic on the left) praised the book, linking Britain’s current economic and socio-economic woe to the “long-term scarring” of lockdowns. This sort of coverage, Green admits when I meet him in London, is “a relief”.

Fazi and Green are an unlikely but formidable duo. Fazi is an Italian journalist, a contributor to Unherd who has emerged as a vocal critic of pandemic policy across the world. Green is an academic living in Cambridge, a professor of West African history at King’s College London, gentle, articulate and about the last person you’d expect to wade into controversial and divisive pandemic wars. He doesn’t use social media much, something he credits as part of the reason why he avoided the algorithmic groupthink that came to dominate much of his industry at the start of the pandemic. “Colleagues are starting to be nicer to me now,” he says with a smile as we reflect on the strange past two years in which speaking out against the government’s pandemic policies in his circles has been a rarity.

Talk to Green long enough about the covid-19 pandemic, however, and there’s the odd flicker of anger. For Green and Fazi, self-described men of the left, the winners and losers of the Covid Consensus are clear. The last two years have placed an ever greater amount of power and wealth in the hands of a small elite at the expense of the poorest. “A dystopian future,” the book warns in its conclusion, “is one potential future to emerge from the ashes of the pandemic.”

This grim potential legacy lies at the heart of the book’s central argument: the failure of the pandemic’s favourite mantra of “follow the science”. The pandemic revealed “the severe limitations of the scientific method when stripped of its social scientific context.” In light of this, Green and Fazi are keen to offer their perspective, not as scientists but as economists and historians of socio-economics. Such a perspective, they argue, was much needed to challenge the covid orthodoxy in which public health policy decisions were based largely on mitigating a virus that predominantly killed those over the age of 80. As the pandemic went on, and circumstances changed, this argument became more and more convincing. By the time of the second lockdown in the UK, there was a sizable body of evidence to suggest that the harms being inflicted by the policy, alongside its efficacy in reducing virus, were at odds with the long-term aim of preserving the lives of the healthy. So credible was this evidence that in September 2020 three “lockdown sceptics”, Carl Heneghan, Sunatra Gupta and Anders Tegnell, even had the ear of the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, in trying to persuade him to delay the prospect of a second lockdown in order to prevent further economic damage.

Green and Fazi challenge the consciences of the progressive laptop classes

But two weeks later Britain was in lockdown again. For Green and Fazi this was no surprise. The Covid Consensus is not a dry analysis of the data, it’s also a critique of our collective societal response to dangers. “The experience was transformative,” the authors declare at the start, pointing out the way in which the response to the pandemic was a “radical continuity” of many trends latent in global society, that concern everything from our confused attitude towards death to the slow creep of “authoritarian capitalism”, and the digital technologies that enable it. Green is eager to point out that the book isn’t just a history of the pandemic, it’s a warning about how we might fail to respond appropriately to future crises.

As an argument against global policy on the covid-19 pandemic, Green and Fazi’s book is lively, lucid and formidable. Whereas right-wing sceptics of lockdown were often dismissed as cranks, contrarians or mad libertarians (sometimes unfairly), Fazi and Thomas present a much-needed challenge to the consciences of the progressive “laptop classes”, who undoubtedly benefited from the pandemic. Overnight, progressives threw out one of the fundamental arguments that had both rallied them through the years of austerity and galvanised political movements under Corbyn and Sanders: that economic prosperity and health are closely linked. Covid kills. But then, so too does lockdown. A debate rages to this day on how far the shutdown of healthcare and society is linked to the recent rise in excess deaths – particularly amongst the young.

Beyond debating the efficacy of lockdowns (academic studies arguing both for and against now number in the hundreds) at times the Covid Consensus relies on a sense of moral outrage. This is most effectively conveyed when detailing the suffering of children in some of the world’s poorest countries. A March 2020 UNESCO report warned of the devastating impact on children’s wellbeing and health brought about by pursuing lockdown policies. Despite this, the policy prevailed in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries. In the Philippines, for example, children were not allowed out of their homes for twenty months, and in Angola not for seven months. Education inequality, mental health problems and child sexual abuse soared. Perhaps the biggest failure of the pandemic was the imposition of a “one size fits all” policy that led to120 million people being pushed into the most extreme form of poverty around the world, much of which Green and Fazi argue was accountable not to the virus but to the policies pushed by a global health establishment.

Yet lockdown came in many forms. What was tried in one country was not the same in another, something the book acknowledges when weighing up the huge number of studies on its efficacy. How far then do some of the book’s arguments apply to the West? Here is where it gets more complicated. The apocalyptic economic damage predicted by the lockdown sceptics has been staved off by a bit of fiscal magic, what John Lanchester calls “a technocratic masterpiece”. The debate about whether or not lockdown saved lives also rages, but it brought time for the vaccine to arrive, which has been successful in reducing mortality (if not in the initial false claim, which was used to push unnecessary mandates, that vaccines dramatically reduced the spread of the disease). For Fazi and Green, despite the economic damage, the Covid Consensus has somehow shapeshifted into a recovery of sorts. The technocrats have won again. Profits and reputations, including those of global pharmaceutical companies, are largely intact. In the US inflation is lowering. The world’s attention has lurched onto the crisis in Ukraine.

The many wounds of lockdown are yet to heal, however. For Green, the silence of the left is perhaps the biggest. I ask if he thinks more people will come forward. On the evidence of the past two years he remains sceptical, but there are clear ideological schisms identified by Fazi and Green that may yet play out: confusing neoliberal state intervention for “the return of the state”, the reliance and trust in global mega corporations and their profits to tackle the world’s problems. These ruptures are likely to re-emerge as the world deals with climate change and pushes for “net-zero”, something that could once again threaten the lives of the world’s poorest. Though silent during the pandemic, the left may be forced to face some of the contradictions drawn out by Green and Fazi, as new catastrophes loom.