The fifth anniversary of Ireland’s official lockdown fell last week, but there was a muted quality to the media retrospectives. That may reflect a limited public appetite for further stories about an experience most would rather forget.
The Government seems equally demotivated. Ireland has been an international laggard in setting up its official inquiry and, while Prof Anne Scott was appointed last autumn as chair of the promised “evaluation” of the State’s performance, we still await details of how and when it will take place.
The leisurely pace may be due in part to a sense that there’s a lot of pain but not much gain for policymakers in being interrogated over decisions made under extreme pressure and with limited information.
A telling passage in a recent BBC report quoted an unnamed university researcher who had been so traumatised by the abuse they had received online in 2020 that they would never again comment publicly on Covid-19 control measures.
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But there is important work to be done. Nature abhors a vacuum and you don’t have to venture very far on the internet to find yourself lost in a forest of crazy about what really happened in 2020.
These days, in fact, you only have to look at the upper reaches of the US Government. Last week Peter Marks, who led the Covid vaccine roll-out in the US, resigned his position in the Food and Drug Administration, citing the dangerous and misleading anti-vax pronouncements of health secretary Robert Kennedy Jnr
The best way to combat this stuff is with clear-eyed, objective analysis of the evidence. That should be rooted in but not limited to the scientific facts. The pandemic and lockdown were generationally defining, historically unprecedented events.
Far from being scientifically inevitable, lockdown depended a particular set of political, technological and social contingencies, in which media played a central but as yet unexamined part.
They included a remarkable scientific and logistical achievement in the rapid vaccine roll-out of 2021. But alongside that came a range of political decisions with massive social and economic consequences.
The slowness of Ireland’s evaluation has been criticised by media commentators. But it is worth asking whether the media itself requires an evaluation of its own.
There is much to reflect on in the interactions between journalism and the different organs of Government – politicians, health professionals, law enforcement, the education system – between 2020 and 2022.
That BBC article was exploring at the outcomes, five years on, for countries which had not implemented the strict restrictions that Ireland and many others introduced in late March 2020.
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At the time, the different approach taken by Sweden was the subject of furious debate. The related argument over whether lockdown in many countries, including Ireland, was too long or too severe remains unresolved. As does the question of whether legitimate scepticism towards that policy was stifled.
Nowhere has this debate been more polarised than in the US. A new book by Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argues trenchantly that “truth-seeking institutions” – journalism, science and academia – did not function as they should have during Covid.
There was, they argue, a premature policy consensus, an unwillingness to re-examine assumptions and an intolerance of criticism and divergent points of view. That led, they say, to a failure to course-correct when more information about the disease became available.
Some aspects of policy were not treated with the scepticism and spirit of inquiry which a well-functioning media is supposed to provide.
Social scientist David Zweig’s book, An Abundance of Caution, is even more critical of how Democrat-run US states failed to push back against school closures which went on far too long with devastating long-term consequences for many children.
It is a feature of media that it tends not to hold itself to the same standards it demands of others.
These critiques are rooted in the polarised US experience, where taking a side on restrictions became a badge of ideological identity. But their descriptions of institutional groupthink and flawed decision-making in the latter stages of lockdown will resonate with many in Ireland.
One of the strengths of the Irish response to the crisis was the level of social solidarity and community cohesion it revealed. But social solidarity can often slide into unquestioning conformism.
It is a feature of media that it tends not to hold itself to the same standards it demands of others. There are functional reasons for this: the incentive structure created by sales, broadcaster ratings and online traffic does not encourage retrospection.
There were also particular challenges in covering what was happening in a locked down society. And the vast majority of journalists did not have the necessary skills to report with authority on the complex scientific questions raised by Covid.
The result, as even a cursory glance over the archives will show, was a top-heavy information flow. I recall a sense of unease at the fact that every bulletin led with the latest statement from a State body, while commercial breaks were filled with Government-funded advertising.
Meanwhile, lockdown was not affecting everyone equally. It would be an interesting project for a enterprising researcher to analyse how well media covered the impact of school closures that in retrospect were clearly overextended.
If Covid had happened 10 years earlier, lockdown as we know it would not have been imposed because the cloud-based IT systems that made remote working possible were not yet available.
If a similar pandemic takes place in the next few years, it is highly debatable whether the population would accept similar restrictions again, or whether the State could afford to pay for them.
Far from being scientifically inevitable, lockdown depended on a particular set of political, technological and social contingencies, in which media played a central but as yet unexamined part.
