“Lockdown will have at best a short-term impact on Covid cases”: One public-health expert challenges the Canadian media’s consensus.
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INTERVIEW
Dr Richard Schabas, former Chief Medical Officer of Ontario and the country’s best-recognized lockdown critic, granted the following interview to davidwinch.website.
Q. Dr Schabas, first a bit of background: you served as Chief Medical Officer of Ontario in the 1990s. What kind of issues did you have to deal with then? Were there epidemiological crises at the time?
Sure. Probably our biggest infection “emergencies” were localized outbreaks of meningococcal meningitis. Scary at the time, but not on the scale of Covid. Most of my work was focussed on non-communicable diseases – heart disease, cancer, motor vehicle crashes, etc. – which account for at least 95% of all deaths. Tobacco addiction, for example, causes about 15,000 deaths in Ontario (40,000 in Canada) every year. Reducing tobacco addiction was the cornerstone of my public health career and, as a result of our efforts, annual deaths are already coming down substantially.
Q. What kind of reception did your policies get in the media? Were they receptive to your point of view, even on any controversial issues?
I have generally found the media receptive to my opinions. Even when my views were controversial – SARS, H5N1 (bird flu) and universal influenza immunization – I generally thought I got a fair hearing. Covid is different. The mainstream media has little or no interest in dissenting views.
Q. In March 2020, WHO declared a pandemic. Most Western states responded with a general quarantine, or lockdown, closing schools, stores, restaurants, and limiting travel. Was this a reasonable response at the time?
No. Lockdown was a response undertaken in panic with no better rationale than that China and Italy had locked down. We spent years developing pandemic plans and then threw them away. We adopted strategies that we never planned for and with which there was no experience. There was little or no consideration of the harms of lockdown. We didn’t set any goals and objectives. We just did it in a panic and have been committed to it ever since.
The Canadian media “assume that the science of lockdowns is well established and those who question it are like anti-vaxxers”
Q. When did you realize that you dissented from the broad consensus that lockdowns were effective and necessary?
I saw the steamroller about the 10th of March [2020]. I was surprised that there was almost no pushback from public-health officials. Lockdown is anathema to many of the basic principles of public health. When I realized that almost all of my colleagues had either bought in or acquiesced, I knew it would be hard to oppose.
Q. Lockdowns enjoy much political and media support. Is this because they seem intuitively correct, protecting people from dangerous conditions? How is a virus different from normal threats?
The most important development in medical science in the past 40 years (the span of my career) has the adoption of the principles of evidence-based medicine. We have learnt that many things that we did because they made sense don’t actually work and, in many cases, do harm. Logic is good enough for philosophy, but science requires evidence. So, it is entirely consistent with the spirit of evidence-based medicine to be sceptical about an intervention that is not supported by evidence. Also, it is entirely consistent with the Precautionary Principle to be cautious about an intervention that manifestly does harm.
“Lockdown is anathema to many of the basic principles of public health”
Q. With the decline of the first Covid wave in most Western countries in late spring 2020, was there an opportunity to change course? How would you have directed a public-health response later in 2020, if you had such authority?
We knew a great deal more about Covid by last summer and most of the affected areas of the Northern Hemisphere got a relative respite. We should have used this new knowledge to change course. By far the most important new knowledge was the relative mortality based on age and comorbidities. The fact that the great majority of people are at very low risk of death or serious illness should have translated into strategies that protected the vulnerable, but allowed those at low risk to get on with their lives.
Q. In October 2020 a manifesto called the Great Barrington Declaration, launched by top university epidemiologists (see Notes below), sought to make anti-lockdown positions more visible and acceptable. Do you support that effort? And how could its influence be extended?
I signed the Great Barrington Declaration and agree with its principles. The one coherent knock on the GBD was that it didn’t clearly articulate practical strategies to protect the vulnerable. However, the vaccine is rapidly taking care of this. In my opinion, the GBD now makes more sense than ever.
Q. The second wave this winter again convinced people in Ontario and Quebec that extensive and growing lockdown measures were necessary. What if any impact will these measures have?
Lockdown will have at best a short-term impact on Covid cases. Two recent studies of the European experience in the spring suggest at most a small impact. European experience this winter shows that many of the countries that seemed to do well with lockdown in the spring have now done very badly. The problem doesn’t go away.
“Lockdown will have at best a short-term impact on Covid cases”
Q. The Canadian media are generally, indeed hegemonically, in favour of lockdowns. They feel this offers protection and can resolve the issue. How would you respond to them in early 2021?
I think the mainstream media has bought into the idea that it’s somehow unpatriotic to question lockdown. They see it like a war. They seem to have assumed that the science of lockdowns is well established and those who question it are like anti-vaxxers. All I can do is keep pushing them to consider alternatives.
Q. Your anti-lockdown position in Ontario was recently covered in a large Toronto newspaper, the National Post, How has coverage differed for you during the pandemic?
I’ve had almost no media exposure since March. I have been effectively cancelled, along with people who think like me. I accept that we are a minority, but the deliberate lack of media coverage exaggerates this.
Thank you for this interview.
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Notes
The Great Barrington Declaration: https://gbdeclaration.org/
“Basic epidemiological theory indicates that lockdowns do not reduce the total number of cases in the long run and have never in history led to the eradication of a disease. At best, lockdowns delay the increase of cases for a finite period and at great cost.” https://gbdeclaration.org/frequently-asked-questions/
Addendum
While Dr. Schabas has been the most-noted critic of lockdowns in Canada, a December op-ed debate in the Toronto Star highlighted similar issues, as articulated by Dr. Matt Strauss of Queens U Medicine:
The Saturday Debate: Are pandemic lockdowns causing more harm than good? | The Star
@DavidWinch Editorial, 2021
