Two left-leaning authors, historian Toby Green and economist Thomas Fazi, have written a new book on the global response to the Covid pandemic, The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor? A Critique from the Left. For some reason, they chose to subtitle it with a question. Was the standard response to Covid an “assault on democracy and the poor”? That punctuation might lead readers to expect a fraught debate about the wisdom of Covid policy across the globe.

There is no debate. The authors’ answer is unambiguous, and no reader of this book will die wondering what they think. Not about how governments responded to the Covid-19 pandemic (barring a Sweden here or a Florida there). Nor about the authors’ own left-wing principles, both economic and political, and how they bear on recommendations for the future. The authors bring swathes of data and evidence to bear to argue that lockdowns were a public policy disaster of gargantuan proportions. They weaponized the police and flew in the face of data that was, in fact, available early on in the crisis. There was censorship, bans, shadow bans, fake and politicized “fact checking,” and the stifling of dissenting views, some directed at the most credentialed epidemiologists in the world. Not least among these were the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for focused protection on the elderly and vulnerable and for leaving everyone else to get on with life and make his or her own choices; this was the gist of every pandemic plan before the start of 2020. What happened in six or seven weeks from late 2019, you might ask, other than an authoritarian government in China welding people into their homes?