Our strongest weapon against Covid was always the law. The blindfolded Lady Justice holds the weapon in her…

Our strongest weapon against Covid was always the law. The blindfolded Lady Justice holds the weapon in her hand. A thread. /1 https://t.co/eWD9xoZp1U

From the beginning of the pandemic, politicians have claimed the need for us to ‘balance’ action to defeat the pandemic, against economic disruption. We should have been immediately suspicious, as these same politicians have spent decades using this idea of balance…/2

…to undermine action on climate change. When action against climate change is ‘balanced’ against economic disruption, there is never any action against climate change. And never mind that the entire discipline of public health, established by governments, was invented…/3

…to do this actual balancing, to keep the public healthy and functioning in the face of health threats. A politician saying their own balancing mechanism has to be balanced again, with the Economy, you know they’re speaking with a forked tongue. But alas it wasn’t called out. /4

Politicians of old knew a bit about balance. Humanity’s greatest invention to provide balance in society is something politicians create. Law. The whole idea of law is to create a balance across all of society, in a particular area. We are ‘all equal before the law’. /5

That’s what that saying means. Law ‘weighs’ competing priorities and creates a balanced outcome for all parties. It does it ‘blindly’ (Lady Justice’s blindfold). She weighs it with her scales, ignoring rank, position, etc. And don’t be sidetracked if somebody questions…/6

…what this has to do with public health or the Economy, because both of those activities use law heavily. And they use it to create the balance modern politicians love to speak about. A Public Health Order, a set of legal rules to fight a pandemic, is the most balanced…/7

…public health tool we have. More even than vaccinations, which have differential efficacy according to age, pre-existing conditions, etc. A legal pandemic rule will apply to all, equally. The poor and rich alike are beholden to it. A ‘lockdown’ (idiot, political term)…/8

…’locks down’ everybody. It’s the strongest expression of ‘we’re all in this together’, because it’s all of us making the rule, through our elected representatives, to then apply to all of us in turn. ‘Personal responsibility’, the nonsense our current leaders suggest as an…/9

…alternative, is entirely at the whim of personal circumstances. Society’s wealthiest and most powerful people will have vastly more options to avoid becoming infected and seriously ill, than those without wealth or power. They often don’t need to work, for starters, and…/10

…the world over they’ve been retreating to their super yachts and bunkers, educating their children at home, waiting for Covid to feast on the rest of us, before they re-emerge. Without a ‘lockdown’ the rest of us continue to work to support these parasitic leeches,…/11

…providing their food and drink and other services. Vaccines don’t re-balance things, because the privileged are still able to avoid contact with infection much more than others. We should see the global rush to strip away public health orders, legal weapons against…/12

…Covid, as driven mostly by these same people. The tax avoiders, the people who have teams of lawyers and accountants working full-time in normal times to avoid their legal obligations. Ignore their crocodile tears about ‘balance’, it was always self-interested bullshit. /13

To finish, I think it’s worth unpacking a little some similarities between the legal and public health uses of the concept of a ‘case’. A legal case is, I think, possibly the greatest invention in all of human history. (Bear with me.) /14

All of our history as societies revolves around answering one question. What is the best way to balance the needs of individuals against the needs of the groups that they’re a part of? Or the needs of nations, against the needs of the international community? Same question,…/15

…at every scale of society. The local versus the global, the micro versus the macro. Etc. All of our politics fights about these questions, disciplines are set up around them (micro- and macroeconomics). But the crazy thing is, humanity already solved this problem. /16

The law solved it. It’s the root of all law. A legal ‘case’ is both individual and collective, local and global, at the same time. Every new legal case (individual, local) has to work with the precedent of previous cases (collective, global). /17

The individual case makes no sense without the precedents, but the individual case can also alter those precedents, if it decides against them. The law completely ignores scale, it says it doesn’t exist. Every case is both singular and universal, at the same time. Laws even…/18

…get named after the individual cases that sometimes prompt them. Laws that will apply to all of us. To compare with a public health ‘case’, a Covid infection. It’s exactly the same. Despite the attempts by disgusting political libertarians to ‘ring-fence’ infections…/19

…in poor areas, in this pandemic (which didn’t work), an infection is both localised and globalised, at the same time. The individual is infected, with a virus that circulates globally. Their infection in turn has collective, global effects. Why does this matter? /20

Because every case, every infection, is both the individual being infected, and the whole society being infected. You can’t separate them. The reason law is the most powerful weapon against a pandemic is because it can deal with cases, in both meanings of the word. /21

That’s not coincidental. Law is what binds societies, what creates parts and wholes, individuals and groups. Law is the way we build societies. Where being an individual and being a group is the same thing, not 2 things. /22

Law would have ended this pandemic already. If we’d stuck with it. /end