As in the case of face masking, disagreements about mass public health measures such as lockdowns and physical distancing have dominated the discussion around Covid-19. Policy-oriented discourses such as recommendations and media briefings have argued for more or less severe measures, ranging from national curfews to mandated social distancing, or mitigation strategies built on the premise of quickly reaching herd immunity. All these different measures have been extensively debated in the media and other public forums and continuously monitored by international organizations such as the World Health Organization, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Policy arguments have also been revised or refocused in tandem with a growing body of research and natural experiments as countries began to introduce either mandatory or voluntary policies. This chapter examines various arguments deployed in this debate and the complex dialogue between political, scientific and popular values and discourses.

It is fair to say at the outset that, once again, at least some of the resistance to such measures can be explained by the structural and material incoherence of public policy in many areas of the world. As Devi Sridhar, Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, explains (Reference SridharSridhar 2020), in the case of the UK the late imposition of a full lockdown followed by cycles of short lockdowns, which were not accompanied by an effective test and trace strategy, with people actively encouraged to go abroad on holidays in between these short lockdowns, left many exhausted and confused. Hence, she concludes:

Reference HickmanHickman (2020), Professor of Public Law at University College London, has similarly argued that public policies have obscured the distinction between advice and information about legal prohibitions, which has led to a form of material incoherence that he calls ‘normative ambiguity’:

Furthermore, the arguments supporting the need for and the measures adopted in the implementation of restrictions have been interpreted and applied very differently in various areas of the world, giving some the impression that the measures imposed on different populations are arbitrary and indeed not to be trusted. Early in the pandemic, China introduced a full-blown lockdown in several provinces and imposed very strong measures of control, including barricading of villages, hiring of community guardians, financial rewards for reporting those who broke lockdown regulations and phone apps to track the movement of citizens (Reference Feng and ChengFeng and Chen 2020). Several European countries, including Spain and France, also introduced formal curfews forbidding citizens to leave their homes. In Spain, even children under 14 were not allowed to leave their home for a period of six weeks (Reference HedgecoeHedgecoe 2020), placing immense pressure on them as well as their parents. The level of stress caused by extended confinement varied considerably, depending on the nature of the space in which families experienced the lockdown. Those higher up the social and economic scale, who had more room to work and live, naturally experienced lockdowns and curfews differently from those whose living space was more restricted. As one contributor to a Twitter exchange about the wisdom of lockdowns put it, ‘Lockdown is a luxury of the middle classes. … Middle classes work from their gardens’.

At the other extreme, the Norwegian government’s attempt to introduce an emergency bill allowing the imposition of a limited curfew for a few hours a day, and only in extreme cases, was defeated even before reaching Parliament due to massive public resistance. Similarly, Sweden built its strategy on responsibility and trust rather than enforced restrictions and introduced few behavioural restrictions compared to most other countries (Reference OrangeOrange 2020). The UK’s approach to lockdown perhaps constitutes the starkest example of structural incoherence and led to widespread confusion and loss of trust. It started in March 2020 with the three-point slogan ‘Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’, a clear message that was well received, in part because the National Health Service (NHS) is a widely trusted and much loved institution with which a majority of British people readily identify. In May 2020, however, this slogan was replaced with ‘Stay alert, control the virus, save lives’, leading to much confusion. Not only was the reference to the much loved NHS lost, but the ‘stay alert’ message – which replaced an action with a subjective cognitive state – was too vague. Even government ministers were unable to articulate what ‘stay alert’ meant in practice. Finally, the government went back to the initial slogan of ‘Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’ with the third national lockdown in England in January 2021. By then, the argument supporting the need for lockdowns had lost much ground.

Some of the national differences in the way the pandemic was handled might of course reflect differences in the severity of the outbreaks across regions and nations. Importantly, however, they also reflect differences in values and priorities. Lack of attention to differences in the cultural norms and values that underpin the various measures adopted to control the pandemic may be partly responsible for the increased confusion and resistance on the part of sections of the public in various localities. At the level of policy making, the rationale for adopting any measure has to be woven within a broader narrative of the pandemic and its implications for various sections of a given community: child/adult, young/elderly, healthy/vulnerable, wealthy/poor, working/retired and so on. And given that narratives are ultimately ‘symbolic interpretations of aspects of the world occurring in time and shaped by history, culture, and character’ (Reference FisherFisher 1987:xiii), degrees of compliance with or rejection of imposed restrictions, especially those that involve major disruption to people’s daily lives, will naturally vary among locales and communities, as some of the examples we discuss in this chapter demonstrate.

4.1 Structural/Material (In)coherence or Science vs Values in the Great Barrington and John Snow Declarations

Structural and material incoherence in the scientific discourse about Covid-19 may be ascribed to a lack of acknowledgement of the values underpinning the adversary position rather than inconsistencies in the findings. The debate that followed the Great Barrington DeclarationFootnote ¹ warning against the ‘damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing Covid-19 policies’ is a case in point. The Declaration was written by Dr Jay Bhattacharya, Dr Sunetra Gupta and Dr Martin Kulldorff and released to the public on 5 October 2020. It was originally signed by some 30+ members of the medical community but went on to attract the signatures of over 42,000 medical practitioners, over 14,000 medical and public health scientists and over 787,000 concerned citizens.Footnote ² It recommended an approach that its original signatories dubbed ‘Focused Protection’ and defined as follows:

Writing in The Guardian soon after, on 10 October, Reference SridharSridhar (2020) accepts that the solution to the crisis ‘cannot just be locking down continually’ but points to several instances of material incoherence in the Declaration, without specifically engaging with the values that inform it:

The Declaration was soon countered by another manifesto, the John Snow Memorandum, first published in The Lancet on 15 October 2020 (Reference Alwan and BurgessAlwan et al. 2020) and to date boasting more than 6,900 carefully vetted signatures by scientists, researchers and healthcare professionals.Footnote ⁴ It argued that ‘[a]ny pandemic management strategy relying upon immunity from natural infections for COVID-19 is flawed’; that ‘[u]ncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity and mortality across the whole population’; and that this additional human cost ‘would impact the workforce as a whole and overwhelm the ability of healthcare systems to provide acute and routine care’. Its authors further dismissed the herd immunity approach as ‘a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence’. By framing the issue as a question of evidence for or against herd immunity, the debate quickly reached a dead end. Although the theory of herd immunity is embraced by the authors of the Barrington Declaration, evidence claims and arguments in its favour are almost absent from the text. The Declaration tells a different story. Driven by a desire to ‘protect people’, the group wished to counter ‘grave injustice’ and the ‘devastating effects on short and long-term public health’. The consequences of ‘current lockdown policies’, they argued, include

As Reference CayleyCayley (2020) notes, ‘whether these harms outweigh the benefits of flattening the curve is a moral question, not a scientific one’. While dismissing the validity of its scientific claims, Reference Greenhalgh, McKee and Kelly-IrvingGreenhalgh et al.’s (2020) critique of the Declaration therefore ultimately focuses on issues such as the inhumanity of shutting away the most vulnerable. It also asks questions such as ‘who funded this piece of political theatre’, thus casting doubt on the integrity and characterological coherence of those who issued the statement. Addressing the issue as an expert in political economy, Reference MurphyMurphy (2020) uses stark images to highlight the inhumanity of what is proposed by the Declaration. What it suggests is best described as a ‘cull’ of the population, he states; its content has everything to do with ‘far-right economics’ and little to do with epidemiology or science. His article begins by reminding its readers that ‘The Nazi’s first victims were the disabled, which they saw as an economic drag on society’, and ends by evoking a saying that has had considerable resonance in Anglophone and European societies since the Second World War:

By failing to engage with the values to which the Great Barrington Declaration appeals and focusing instead on the scientific evidence for herd immunity, the John Snow Memorandum fails to argue on the terms of rationality evoked by and relevant to the narrative elaborated by the authors of the Declaration. Furthermore, by not acknowledging the values that underpin that narrative, the authors of the Memorandum fail to address what Fisher refers to as the question of consistency, that is, ‘whether the values are confirmed or validated in one’s personal experience, in the lives or statements of others whom one admires and respects, and in a conception of the best audience that one can conceive’ (Reference FisherFisher 1987:109). In this respect, Reference TangTang (2020) does more justice to the values of the story by acknowledging them as valid, comparing the proposed approach to that already adopted to protect vulnerable sections of the population (mainly the elderly) against influenza, while pointing out the structural incoherence in the proposed ‘Focused Protection’ approach in the case of Covid-19, where no vaccine was yet available at the time:

In asserting the need to engage with the Declaration on its own terms of rationality and address the values that underpin its narrative of the route out of the pandemic, we do not seek to support its arguments or imply that they are informed by scientific evidence. We merely wish to stress that arguments against lockdowns and other measures for which scientific evidence may be lacking can be driven by a commitment to positive values (such as concern about growing social problems and inequities among children and young people). Engaging with such arguments on their own terms rather than by recourse to lack or otherwise of scientific evidence can be crucial in creating a productive dialogue with people who hold these values.

An impression of structural and material incoherence can also result from the oversimplification or deliberate undermining of the values that underpin medical expert opinion. In September 2020, two open letters were sent to the UK’s four chief medical officers expressing conflicting views among medical experts about how the government should handle the then emerging second wave of Covid-19. Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford, Karol Sikora, a consultant oncologist at the University of Buckingham, and 30 others called on the government to adopt a more targeted approach by shielding the most vulnerable groups in society rather than imposing local or national lockdown measures.Footnote ⁵ Trish Greenhalgh, a professor of primary care at the University of Oxford, published an opposing letter – endorsed by 22 colleagues – which supported the effort to suppress the virus across the entire population. This letter argued that it would be impractical to cut off a cohort of vulnerable people from the rest in an open society, stated that this is especially the case ‘for disadvantaged groups (e.g. those living in cramped housing and multi-generational households)’, and pointed out that ‘[m]any grandparents are looking after children sent home from school while parents are at work’.Footnote ⁶

Interestingly, both letters – which mainly express differences in values regarding how to define and shield the most vulnerable – were met with criticism regarding lack of evidence, particularly quantitative data to support their claims, as can be seen in the following Twitter comments on the letter by Greenhalgh and colleagues:Footnote ⁷

The demand for ‘science’ and quantitative data to support the claim that ‘deaths have occurred in all age, gender and racial/ethnic groups’ arguably misses the point – namely, that vulnerable groups are not easily defined and shielded and that everyone therefore needs to be protected, whether through lockdowns or other measures. Knowledge about the exact size of the various groups affected by the virus would not add to or weaken the core argument simply because the argument is not about facts and statistics but about values. Just as the author of the Twitter post (Freeman London) does not see the need to back his claim that we are ‘destroying our country from an economic, health and social perspective’ by numbers because the assertion is a value statement, Greenhalgh et al.’s argument does not hinge on scientific evidence. What Greenhalgh and colleagues are ultimately suggesting is not that more or fewer lives would be lost if the argument for herd immunity wins, or that the economy is not adversely affected by lockdowns, but rather (implicitly) that all lives must be valued and protected, irrespective of the numbers involved and the impact of lockdowns and other restrictions on the economy. This is fundamentally a moral argument about the value of human life and recalls the experience of Dr Clarke, the palliative care doctor whose visceral account of observing the 89-year-old Winston die of Covid-19 we discussed in Chapter 2:

It is important to acknowledge, however, that different people can appeal to the same or similar values to support opposite points of view. Reference CayleyCayley (2020), for instance, argues that in framing the issue as one of not overwhelming the health system to such an extent that doctors are forced to make a decision about who lives and who dies on hospital wards, we merely mask the fact that we are quietly making similar decisions outside the hospital setting without acknowledging them:

Giorgio Agamben, who has been a vocal critic of Covid-19 restrictions – not only lockdowns and various restrictions on mobility but also measures such as the mandatory use of face masks – also appeals to our sense of shared humanity when he argues (Reference AgambenAgamben 2021:60):

Interestingly, too, the argument against herd immunity is often informed by a belief in the value of autonomy and personal freedom rather than the value of all or some human lives per se. Many people instinctively reject the idea of ‘following the herd’ uncritically and prefer to think of themselves as free and independent human beings. As Reference LarsonLarson (2020: 23) points out, the very term herd immunity ‘provokes perceptions of people being herded like sheep and assuming an unquestioning herd mentality, lacking autonomy, and just doing what the “system” dictates’.

To return to the letters by Gupta et al. and Greenhalgh and colleagues, some responses to the latter used the interdependence between health and the economy to point to instances of structural/material (in)coherence, as in the following tweet, which starts with the incoherence of sacrificing the very economy on which the NHS depends for survival and then goes on to question values such as the acceptance or otherwise of a certain threshold for overall Covid-related deaths and the disregard for civil liberties:Footnote ⁸

Paradoxically, an explicit aim of both letters (Gupta et al.’s and Greenhalgh’s) was to argue against a polarized view. The letter by Gupta et al. argues that the debate is stuck in an ‘unhelpfully polarised’ deadlock between those who claim that Covid is ‘extremely deadly to all’ and those who believe that it ‘poses no risk at all’. Greenhalgh et al. also explicitly argue against polarization:

Unfortunately, in the heated debate that followed the publication of the two letters these values of conciliation, the need to embrace uncertainties and the importance of interdisciplinary debate – all of which are explicitly promoted by the authors of both letters – were rarely acknowledged or discussed.

A final limitation on the potential resonance of either side of the debate initiated by the two letters for large sections of the global community is, as one comment put it, that it is all about the UK, with no consideration given to the very different environments in which the pandemic has had disastrous consequences for various sectors of society:Footnote ⁹

Writing on the London School of Economics blog early in the outbreak, on 27 March, Reference Broadbent and SmartBroadbent and Smart (2020) were already aware of differences in the way restrictions on mobility would be experienced in various parts of the world. They argued that a one-size fits all approach cannot work, and focusing especially on Africa and the potential for widespread starvation they pointed out:

In addition to fatalities resulting from potential starvation, Reference Broadbent and SmartBroadbent and Smart (2020) further highlight the impracticalities of social distancing in some parts of a country such as South Africa, where there is a very high level of interdependency among households:

The living conditions they describe are not restricted to South African townships but are typical of many parts of the world, as well as within certain communities in Europe and the USA. Reference Alser, AlWaheidi, Elessi and MeghariAlser et al. (2020) make a similar argument in relation to the particularly dire situation in Gaza, which has already suffered a prolonged blockade since 2007:

Other interdependencies go beyond individual households and extended families; these interdependencies connect the city with the informal settlements that often provide it with vital services. Talking about the challenges involved in implementing Covid-related restrictions in Sierra Leone slums, Reference WilkinsonWilkinson (2020) points out that

Narratives revolving around the wisdom or otherwise of lockdowns and other restrictions that take no account of the specific social, political and cultural realities of a given population clearly will not resonate for members of that population and will not be seen as coherent from their perspective. However scientifically valid and rational they are, the lived experience of each community will ultimately determine its response to such measures and its ability to abide by them. In Fisher’s terms, narratives that are at odds with our immediate experience of the world will be seen as lacking in both probability and fidelity. Inhabitants of a South African township or a Gaza refugee camp will see the contradictions inherent in a narrative that asserts the need to abide by social distancing given the physical reality in which they live, and will judge it as lacking in material coherence. The narrative will also not fare better from the perspective of the logic of good reasons, and especially the third criterion of consequence, as we defined it in Chapter 2 (Reference BakerBaker 2006:152):

Similar considerations will be at play in assessing narratives that attempt to negotiate the tension between health and the economy from a variety of other perspectives.

4.2 Health, the Economy and the State: Resonance and Lived Experience

The tension between health and economic priorities has featured in many debates and venues beyond the sources discussed above, and beyond the medical establishment. Reference BolsoverBolsover’s (2020) analysis of pro- and anti-restriction discourse on social media in the USA from the early phase of the pandemic cites angry tweets that are concerned about the impact of lockdowns and other restrictions on small businesses:

Others point out that at the same time as these restrictions are hitting small businesses hard, they are benefitting big companies hugely, especially online companies like Amazon, in the process bringing up the issue of control over the media and the power of big business to shape policy:

Even those who argue for lockdowns share the concern with the growing wealth and influence of big companies:

In addition to the impact of restrictions on small as opposed to big businesses, some of the debate has also revolved around the distinction between essential and non-essential businesses, where areas of structural and material incoherence could be identified and questioned. Reference HenryHenry (2021) contests the distinction, arguing that ‘small businesses are deemed non-essential, yet they provide the same products that essential, big-box stores sell on their shelves’, and concludes that ‘[a]ll businesses should remain essential with mandatory social distance measures, capacity limits, and necessary safety protocols, so permanent closures and lay-offs are no longer a trend’. Some of the tweets cited in Reference BolsoverBolsover (2020) question the distinction between essential and non-essential services and institutions beyond the sphere of (corporate) business, in ways that reveal deep-seated mistrust of the official institutions in the USA:

The debate about the relative importance of health vs the economy has thus tended to spill out into other areas of political, religious and social life where tensions of various kinds have been fermenting for many years. These tensions may be behind a lack of trust in the same institutions now elaborating particular narratives that promote measures such as lockdowns. And since any narrative is ultimately a story of values, as Fisher asserts, the third criterion that informs the logic of good reasons, namely consistency, is not met from the perspective of those members of society who mistrust these institutions. For the criterion of consistency – as we have already pointed out – requires a positive answer to the question: ‘Are the values [that explicitly or implicitly inform the narrative] confirmed or validated in one’s personal experience, in the lives or statements of others whom one admires and respects’ (Reference FisherFisher 1987:109; emphasis added) and, we might add, whom one trusts. Lack of trust in the institutions that promote and impose restrictive measures such as lockdowns also means that these institutions lack characterological coherence, in Fisher’s terms. The narratives they promote are therefore not accepted as reliable or genuinely intended to safeguard the interests of the population.

Some of the protests against lockdowns and other restrictions focused specifically on their impact on the livelihoods of ordinary people rather than the economy as such. This represented a major concern and a good reason (in Fisher’s terms) for questioning the wisdom and necessity of lockdowns from the perspective of the lived experience of a large section of all populations. Even in wealthy countries like the UK, ‘[t]he biggest victims of lockdowns and curfews have been blue-collar workers, the self-employed and those whose livelihoods depend on servicing the better-heeled in the metropolises of early 21st-century capitalism’ (Reference ComanComan 2020). But as we have already seen to some extent in the previous section and as Reference Carothers and PressCarothers and Press (2020) point out, the livelihood argument against lockdowns was particularly strong in developing countries, ‘which have larger informal sectors where economic margins are thinner and remote work is often impossible’. In April 2020, Aljazeera reported that thousands of street vendors in Malawi marched with banners such as ‘Lockdown more poisonous than corona’ and ‘We’d rather die of corona than of hunger’.Footnote ¹⁰ In Kampala, the capital of Uganda, street vendors likewise continued to scurry to the windows of vehicles in traffic lights and jams, without masks. For them, isolating at home meant starving to death: ‘The street is their workplace, livelihood and home’ (Reference Anguyo and StorerAnguyo and Storer 2020). In South Africa, those working in particularly vulnerable sectors such as hospitality and retail ‘protested against limitations on in-person operations’ (Reference Carothers and PressCarothers and Press 2020). Protests that focused on the impact of restrictions on livelihoods often turned violent: ‘In Lagos, Nigeria, a police spokesman said that workers in the Lekki Free Trade Zone had assaulted police, injuring several officers, after being told they could not work due to public health measures’ (Reference Carothers and PressCarothers and Press 2020). In Malawi – ‘one of the poorest countries on the continent where more than half of the population live below the poverty threshold’ – civil rights organizations applied for a court order to stop the government implementing the lockdown, citing ‘the government’s failure to announce any measures to cushion the poor’.Footnote ¹¹ In countries with a very high level of poverty, the issue of individual livelihoods therefore featured very prominently and invited strong responses (Figure 4.1). Arguments about the impact of restrictions on the economy as a whole, or on small vs big businesses and essential vs non-essential services, were relatively less prominent, reflecting the importance of visceral, lived experience – rather than abstract arguments about health vs the economy – on people’s immediate assessment of the validity of Covid-related narratives.

Figure 4.1

Malawi sex workers protest restrictions on opening times of bars during Covid-19 crisis, 28 January 2021.

AMOS GUMULIRA / Contributor / Getty Images.

The lived experience of populations who had reason to mistrust the state and official institutions also played a major role in shaping their responses to Covid-related restrictions. Reference Carothers and PressCarothers and Press (2020) point out that a recurrent theme in anti-lockdown protests concerned a perceived harshness and inconsistency in the way lockdowns were enforced and a misuse of the new rules by different regimes ‘for repressive ends’. The Freedom House 2020 report, ‘Democracy under lockdown’ (Reference Repucci and SlipowitzRepucci and Slipowitz 2020), acknowledges that the crisis of democratic governance around the world predated the pandemic, but points out that many governments ‘are also using the pandemic as a justification to grant themselves special powers beyond what is reasonably necessary to protect public health’. In Egypt, the military regime ‘used COVID-19 as an opportunity to further repress political activists, rights defenders, lawyers, journalists, and doctors, arresting dozens, denying them basic assistance in places of detention, and placing several on terrorist lists’ (Reference Repucci and SlipowitzRepucci and Slipowitz 2020). Liberia, likewise, witnessed a ‘brutal and corrupt enforcement of curfew orders by security forces’, and in Zimbabwe, the pandemic gave the authorities licence ‘to arrest, abduct, rape, assault, and intimidate human rights activists, opposition party leaders/supporters, civil society leaders, journalists, and other dissenting voices on “allegations of violating lockdown conditions”’ (Reference Repucci and SlipowitzRepucci and Slipowitz 2020). In Uganda, ‘[t]he violent arrest of 23 citizens taking refuge in a shelter serving the LGBT community in Kampala, targeted for their alleged “public gathering”’, similarly raised concern regarding widespread discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) groups (Reference Storer and DawsonStorer and Dawson 2020). Elsewhere, lockdown measures were selectively enforced on some segments of the population rather than others. For example, in Bulgaria ‘Romany neighborhoods were placed under harsher movement restrictions than areas where Roma did not constitute a majority’, and in Kuwait ‘authorities put greater restrictions on noncitizen neighborhoods than on areas where mostly citizens live’Footnote ¹² (Reference Storer and DawsonStorer and Dawson 2020). In the UK, young men aged 18 to 34 who belong to ethnic minorities were found to be twice as likely to receive fines for breaking lockdown rules as their white counterparts.Footnote ¹³ From the perspective of those at the receiving end of such discriminatory practices, the narratives justifying lockdowns and other restrictions lack coherence and consistency and can have little or no resonance. No amount of rational argumentation or scientific, quantitative data brought in to support the need to abide by such measures can compensate for the immediate impact of such communities’ lived experience on their decision-making process.

4.3 Transcendental Values and Conceptions of Freedom

Much of the resistance to lockdowns and other such restrictive measures during the Covid-19 crisis was informed by a specific understanding of the balance between individual freedom and social responsibility, and hence the boundaries of legitimate intervention by the state. According to Reference Carothers and PressCarothers and Press (2020), protests that advocated individual freedom over restrictive public health measures such as lockdowns and quarantines were ‘generally concentrated in developed countries’, including much of Europe, the USA and Canada. They were characterized by a ‘wariness of science and immersion in misinformation’ and ‘highlight the distrust of authority that is coloring so much of global politics today’.

Reference BolsoverBolsover (2020) identifies various understandings of freedom that underpin the debate about pandemic measures, all of which reveal a negative view of liberty as freedom from restrictions, with freedom of movement as a recurrent theme. Many anti-restriction posts considered freedom of movement as the ultimate expression of freedom, as evident in the following tweet, quoted by Reference BolsoverBolsover (2020):

Here, freedom of movement is conceived from the perspective of right-wing nationalism, which places much value on the protection of what it perceives as core American values (or, in other cases, core British values, core Chinese values, etc.). For some, like the author of the above tweet, these are transcendental values that trump any other value – or, for that matter, scientific evidence – because they are part of the core identity of those who hold them, a fundamental means by which they demonstrate that they belong to the community they have come to identify with. However, concerns have also been raised from a very different ethical perspective about how emergency measures negatively impact freedom of movement for vulnerable groups. In an article in OpenDemocracy, Reference Mezzadra and StierlMezzadra and Stierl (2020) argue that the ‘stay at home’ message is highly problematic for ‘people who do not have a home and for whom self-quarantine is hardly an option, for people with disability who remain without care, and for people, mostly women, whose home is not a safe haven but the site of insecurity and domestic abuse’. The consequences of blanket restrictions on movement, moreover, are particularly serious for vulnerable groups who need to move in search of safety and whose freedom of movement was already restricted prior to the pandemic (Reference Mezzadra and StierlMezzadra and Stierl (2020)):

Not only are migrant populations subject to confinement measures that are legitimized by often spurious references to public health, but they are also deprived of ‘this freedom to move’ that for them represents ‘safety from war and persecution, safety from poverty and hunger, safety from the virus’.

Like freedom of movement, the right to religious assembly constitutes a transcendental value for many worshippers, of all creeds. Reference BolsoverBolsover (2020) quotes one tweet expressing frustration with what is clearly seen as interference in religious life in the USA – ‘I’m tired of pastors getting arrested for having church services’ – but similar sentiments have been expressed by other congregations in different parts of the world. Protestors in ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in Jerusalem, for instance, responded violently to police attempts to ‘clear yeshiva classes and religious gatherings being held in violation of lockdown rules’ in January 2021 (Reference Hendrix and RubinHendrix and Rubin 2021). Many Iranian religious leaders resisted the closure of pilgrimage sites ‘as an affront to their beliefs’, and the caretakers of holy shrines refused to close them down (Iran News, February 2020).Footnote ¹⁴ In the holy city of Qom, one individual expressed his anger at restrictions on religious assembly by deliberately licking the grid of a shrine (Reference Hendrix and RubinHendrix and Rubin 2021).

Not all worshippers, of course, and not all religious communities have questioned restrictions on religious assembly in the context of Covid-19. The rector of the All Saints’ Anglican Church in the Waterloo region of Southern Ontario, Canada found it ‘puzzling that religious communities have been at the forefront of the protests’ (Reference VenezaVeneza 2021). His own congregation had moved to virtual media to conduct their faith, prioritizing the need to ‘care for one another’ and recognizing that ‘the simplest way and best way we can care for one another is to protect one another’. Moving to online services, he argued, had further allowed more people to participate who would otherwise not have been able to attend. Imam Abdul Syed of the Waterloo Mosque in the same region confirmed that his congregation, too, was ‘willing to do its part to deal with the health crisis before returning to in-person worship’ (Reference VenezaVeneza 2021):

Here we have two religious communities based in the same region, which seem to identify with the larger, national community in which they are embedded and are hence willing – indeed, feel obliged – to adhere to any measures that they believe would serve its welfare. Such wildly different responses to restrictions on religious assembly by equally devout communities reflect differences in political cultures, the degree of trust in policy makers and the medical establishment and a sense of belonging to a community that is either restricted to or is larger than their immediate religious group. They also reflect different understandings of freedom – in the latter case of worshippers in the Waterloo region, understood as freedom to rather than freedom from.

Ultra-religious groups of all creeds aside, concerns have also been voiced about the consequences of restrictions on religious assembly for vulnerable minority groups. Reference Ekeløve-Slydal and KvanvigEkeløve-Slydal and Kvanvig (2020) report that in India lockdown rules were used by Hindu state officials to target the Muslim minority populations, and Reference HasanHasan (2020) confirms that the targeting of Muslims was sanctioned at the highest levels:

In Georgia, religious assembly was allowed for Orthodox Christians during Easter but the authorities ‘reacted with hostility when Muslims wanted to gather for Ramadan’ (Reference Ekeløve-Slydal and KvanvigEkeløve-Slydal and Kvanvig 2020). Such instances of structural and material incoherence in the implementation of restrictions serve to undermine trust in policy makers and the medical establishment, at the same time as strengthening the need among minority groups to demonstrate identification with their religious community rather than with the overall society in which they live.

A ‘Factsheet’ on coronavirus issued by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom at the start of the crisis, in March 2020, predicted the impact of restrictions on movement on various religious communities and called for addressing their concerns to ensure both respect for their human rights and efficacy of implementation of health policies (Reference Weiner, Lavery and NardiWeiner et al. 2020):

Freedom of religious assembly is a particularly sensitive issue for many, whatever their creed, and efficacy of implementation in this area – as in many others – requires trust in medical advisers and policy makers. But trust is negatively impacted by perceptions of structural and material incoherence that remain unaddressed. As many have pointed out, pandemic restrictions do not distinguish between religious gatherings and other kinds of public events and do not provide a rationale for failing to do so. Writing on the UK Human Rights Blog, Reference KeeneKeene (2020) argues:

For Keene, this is particularly problematic because the evidence given to the UK Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee by the Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Scientific Adviser for England confirms that ‘there has been at best very limited tailored analysis of the specific risk of transmission of Covid-19 in the context of religious services’.

4.4 Public Health Recommendations and the Values and Principles of Evidence-based Policy Making

This brings us to the nature of the medical evidence which has informed policy making throughout the pandemic and the values that underpin it. In the scholarly debate about mass public health measures, some have argued that the pandemic has changed the values and ground rules of evidence-based policy making. Since its emergence in the early 1990s, evidence-based medicine has been founded on the idea of transparent access to the evidence base underpinning healthcare recommendations, through systematic reviews of state-of-the-art research (Reference Timmermans and BergTimmermans and Berg 2003). As such, medical evidence has arguably been detached from the expert and made available through texts that are accessible to everyone. According to Axe et al., authors of The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe (Reference Axe, Briggs and RichardAxe et al. 2020), the current pandemic has reversed these principles and replaced democratic access to evidence with ‘a tyranny of experts’ in which a ‘narrow, professionally biased thinking dictates policy for everyone’ (Reference Axe, Briggs and RichardAxe et al. 2020:156), or as the authors put it in an article following the publication of their book, ‘government bureaucrats with narrow expertise gained the status of infallible oracles’ (Reference Richards, Axe and BriggsRichards et al. 2020). A similar view is expressed by Norman Lewis on Spiked: ‘The experts have set the goal, and the politicians have cast themselves in the role of their spokespeople’ (Reference LewisLewis 2020). This approach has allegedly not only ‘mystified expertise’ (Reference LewisLewis 2020) but also maximized ‘a certain kind of safety, to the neglect of other goods’. This is not necessarily a result of bad intentions on behalf of the experts, Reference Richards, Axe and BriggsRichards et al. (2020) claim, but a result of their limited perspective:

According to Richards et al. (Reference Richards, Axe and BriggsRichards et al. 2020), the status and obscurantism of this new elite of medical expert bureaucrats made it possible to mask material and structural incoherence in their recommendations for some time in the initial stages of the pandemic:

From a very different angle, the same experts have been accused of putting too much emphasis on the values of evidence-based medicine, especially randomized controlled trials. ‘The search for perfect evidence may be the enemy of good policy’, Trish Greenhalgh says in an interview with Science: ‘As with parachutes for jumping out of airplanes, it is time to act without waiting for randomized controlled trial evidence’ (Reference ShellShell 2020). A paper Greenhalgh co-authored with Henry Rutter and Miranda Wolpert (Reference Rutter, Wolpert and GreenhalghRutter et al. 2020) encourages public health experts to embrace uncertainty rather than searching for a unified evidence base:

The debate about various measures enforced to control the pandemic is thus closely linked to a debate about scientific rationality and its underlying values. The various issues and examples discussed in this chapter, moreover, clearly demonstrate that neither pro- nor anti-restriction discourses can make absolute claims to reason or rationality. Ultimately, we reiterate, arguments both in favour of and against lockdowns and other social restrictions are backed by values and normative commitments that are narratively rational even when not backed up by scientific evidence.