No it wasn't. I will keep repeating this fact on HN until my fingers fall off - lockdowns do not work. They. Do. Not. Work. The data is in and the data is unambiguous, lockdowns have no effect at all. The UK having worse outcomes than some other regions that had far less strict measures should be enough to kill this idea off completely, yet you cite that very fact even though it clearly disproves the notion that lockdown timing had anything to do with the UK's results.

As for your cited quote, would you like me to cite the thousands of other things government leaders have said over the course of the year that support my point? Yes, the PM is a naturally optimistic guy. None of the people around him are, and they've all been ramping the fear factor to 11 continuously, and in particular they controlled the public messaging not the PM. With the result that there is now a serious problem in the UK with people who are afraid to leave their own homes.

... The UK lockdown was very strict, but it was also very late. Lockdowns work fine, they just don't work when you call them after everybody already has it.

Strictness and timeliness are unrelated characteristics.

Being afraid to leave your home has, for large parts of the last year, been very reasonable behaviour. The coronavirus has already killed 5 times more people than the blitz. Being an at-risk person in the middle of one of the UK waves was about as dangerous as regularly riding a motorcycle without a helmet.

They don't work regardless of when deployed. The idea the UK was late is doing the rounds inside the UK establishment but it's wrong. If they worked places that stopped doing lockdowns would have seen huge surges and higher death rates than places that kept them, but that didn't happen and there are by now many such examples. Lockdowns don't work because (a) COVID doesn't seem to care about them and (b) COVID is nowhere near deadly enough to justify them, as demonstrated by the counter-example states and countries that rejected them and saw far less than the predicted mortality.

> The idea the UK was late is doing the rounds inside the UK establishment but it's wrong.

You seem frankly a bit divorced from reality. If you go to a chart of the daily incidence rate before either the first or the second wave, then mark on it when the lockdowns occurred, it's clearly visible that they occurred too late.

I had to discourage my at-risk mother from going to a choral Christmas concert last year, at a time when they were clocking 40,000 new cases every day and that number was doubling every few days. That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was, and at the time, conservative ministers were still going on TV and talking about a five day christmas.

If you go to the deaths graph, you can see that as a result of this awful mistake, tens of thousands of people died. This is plainly visible in the statistics. Whatever political axe you have to grind is frankly irrelevant, and to be honest, facetious.

You seem to be trying to identify causation from a single graph. That's not how data analysis needs to be done. You have to compare different datasets that vary in the control variable. In the case of Europe the UK vs Sweden is a good comparison because they are similar in most ways that should affect viral propagation except for lockdowns. Sweden has seen significantly better death rates than the UK, despite the theory saying they should have done much worse, meaning the theory is wrong. Because the theory is wrong you can't derive anything by looking at UK curves in isolation and comparing them to a theoretical counterfactual.

You can also look at the different performance of US states (none) despite very different measures.

That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was

In other words you were terrified and forced that fear on your family, based on a mis-understanding of how to use data to draw scientific conclusions. And now you're accusing anyone who points out the truth to you of political axe grinding, although it's you who just threw in a random mention of "conservative ministers" implying their politics is responsible for lots of deaths. That's a political talking point!

it’s ironic that you use the phrase “overwhelmingly non-skeptical” to negate a totalitarian supposition, when totalitarianism, or more narrowly authoritarianism, requires, and in fact subjugates their populace to being (via propaganda), a docile and unquestioning public. “skeptical yet willing” would be more deserving of credit than “obliviously following”. the public should absolutely question and challenge ‘experts’ (i take issue with this framing itself but that’s a discussion for another time), because not only are experts often wrong but not doing so sets a dangerous sociopolitical precedent.

Firstly, I don't think skepticism is the inverse of docility, or even necessarily aligned with being questioning. Skepticism is traditionally characterized by an attack on the methods of knowledge-production, and as such, can engender docility and make questioning incoherent.

Vaccine skepticism isn't based on a question or challenge towards experts - questions or challenges exist within a specific framework, a specific body of knowledge. Rather, it is based on a challenge to the value and nature of expertise itself. As such, it's absolutely compatible with docility, totalitarianism, and antipathy towards questioning. In fact, since experts are experts by virtue of their existence within a specific body of knowledge, they are always by their very nature open to questions and challenges. Attacking the idea of expertise can as such be a way of attacking these areas of open questioning and challenge.

A good example of this is how authoritarian governments are typically hostile to academic institutions.

skepticism is an “attack” on certainty, particularly unjustified uncertainty, for which blindly trusting (esp. only government-sanctioned) experts plainly qualifies. only by shedding our false veils of certainty do we inch ever closer to seeing the world as it truly is.

there are a plethora of open questions in vaccine science and epidemiological policy that naturally allow for skepticism. it’s not only political or partisan. you can strip away the political and still be left with plenty valid skepticism.

and yes, skepticism challenges the notion of expertise itself. it suggests humility is undervalued, that an ‘expert’ knows so little against the backdrop of the world’s knowledge (much less the world itself), especially when the ego becomes intertwined with the ideological. experts over time trend toward surety rather than openness and inquiry, especially as stature rises in a field. it’s so common that the out-of-touch know-it-all is a storytelling caricature.

while it’s not always a valid line of attack, questioning the basis of “expertise” can certainly unveil erroneous assumptions, poor methodology/data, and faulty reasoning. the raison d'être of skepticism is to push knowledge forward, not hold it back, and this sort of challenge is just as valid as any other in this regard.

finally, authoritarian governments are hostile toward academic institutions due to concerns over its power and legitimacy as embodied by... skepticism (of the state and its propaganda).