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This type of contrarianism … is almost completely missing from the national conversation

Canadians have two traits that serve them well in normal times: First, they by and large trust their governments. Second, they tend to do as they are asked. But despite plenty of evidence that our health authorities have let us down in a number of ways — poor planning, vacillating leadership, political lethargy, politicized decision-making, appalling communications — the actual path they’ve got us on has gone pretty much unquestioned. Anyone who second-guesses how the pandemic is being handled increasingly finds him or herself accused of armchair quarterbacking, of impugning the integrity of public servants, or of coming down from the hills to shoot the doctors while the battle is still raging.

This is a very bad state of affairs. Why? Because the current plan to have everyone except the most essential workers sit at home until a vaccine is available sometime in 2021 is madness. But instead of calling out the madness for what it is and demanding credible alternatives, what we are seeing instead is a large-scale circling of the wagons around the responsible authorities. This defensiveness is not partisan in the political sense, but it betrays a strong bias toward protecting the intellectual expertise class.

The enforced intellectual conformism here contrasts very poorly with the United States, which has seen a flourishing of seriously outside-of-the-box thinking. For example, the economist Robin Hanson has been pushing the idea of variolation, or controlled infection. His argument is that since it seems likely now that almost everyone is eventually going to get infected, lockdowns only increase deaths by exposing people to very high doses of the virus from the members of their family who get infected. His proposal is that we can significantly cut the death rate through voluntary infection of relatively young and healthy people with a very low dose of the virus — as we used to do with smallpox. Hanson claims his modelling shows that controlled variolation could cut deaths from COVID-19 by anywhere from three to 30 times.