A (lukewarm) defence of Karol Sikora

Professor Karol Sikora has been among the most reviled UK lockdown sceptics as of lately: on opposite ends of the political spectrum, both Owen Jones and Piers Morgan have called for his silencing.

A few — the usual suspects — have rushed to Sikora’s defence. These apologies have focused mostly on the following three points:

1. When it comes to predictions about Covid, Sikora was right on some things and wrong in others. In a field ripe with wrong predictions, Sikora doesn’t have a better or worse track record than most.
2. Sikora’s lockdown scepticism is closely tied to his concern about cancer diagnosis and services. By using his platform to encourage people to get tested for cancer symptoms, Sikora has likely saved more than one life.
3. As a scientist and medical professional — and in fact simply as a member of society — , Sikora is entitled to an opinion, no matter how wrong he is.

The above is, of course, all correct. But in this commentary I would like to focus on two other things that seem to have elluded all commentators so far, and that I would argue are mainly what send the likes of Jones and Morgan into a frenzy. More generally, this will also allow me — principally for myself, perhaps for others too — to start disentangling the various components of what I call the lockdown matrix (i.e. the system of thought that is at the foundation of the decision to make lockdowns the policy of choice for basically everything).

Sikora isn’t one of my go-to sceptic voices — probably no fault of his own, but rather due to my own preferences: I do think he was too prediction-happy, and I am not normally a fan of the motivational positivism he displayed in the earlier days of the pandemic. In those days, he was not a sceptic yet, but there were already signs that he wasn’t fully sitting inside the lockdown matrix. He did buy into the “lockdowns are a necessity” narrative (or at least pretended to: he even represented the pro-lockdown side at a debate at Cambridge University), but dispensed with the doom and gloom that the lockdown matrix enthusiastically encouraged, and in fact, required. When the numbers were encouraging, Sikora always said so. When they weren’t, he said so too, but always added some positive messaging to it (“hang in there”, “things will get better” — yes, trite messages ultimately, but I will confess that I found them a great source of relief more than once, when all we saw from the mainstream media was the above-mentioned doom and gloom, making me wonder if the Apocalypse was indeed real and had just started.

Crucially, Sikora’s positivity — that he has kept throughout even as he evolved into more sceptic positions — is not only a matter of tone. Deep down, it undermines two crucial tenets of the lockdown matrix:

1. Sikora has consistently repeated: this will end. This is not forever. Things will get better. Really. But, since the aim no. 1 of the lockdown matrix is to perpetuate itself, it can never accept the notion that the pandemic — like all pandemics throughout history — will end at some point. (This tenet of the lockdown matrix is best seen in all the hand-wringing — even from Global Health professors! — about how Covid will “overwhelm our medical systems” forever if we don’t go for ZeroCovid. Like, has anyone ever explained to you the difference between pandemic and endemic? But I digress.).
2. With his constant insistence that people get tested for cancer, Sikora is sending another message that is antithetical to the lockdown matrix: with or without Covid, life goes on. There’s still cancer. There’s still heart disease. There’s still mental health, marital and family crises, and yes, there’s still good moments too. The existence of the lockdown matrix depends on on everybody making Covid the sole centre of their lives, so of course they are going to object that someone like Sikora has the bad taste to suggest that, yeah, people might be concerned about other things too.

What likely enrages the high priests of the lockdown matrix the most is that Sikora makes these two points — which, I repeat, undermine their hole raison d’etre — tacitly, consistently and nonchalantly. If Sikora said to his opponents something like, “You imply that the pandemic will go on forever, and you are wrong, for reasons x, y and z”, the high priests would have two options at hand: they could say: “Hey, what are you talking about, we never said this, you are paranoid”. Or they could decide to go full zealot and say: “You denialist, are you ignoring SCIENCE? What about long Covid? What about mutations?”.

The lockdown matrix — we will see — depends to a great extent on never fully articulating its tenets — because most of them are too mental for normal human logic and accepted norms of social consensus. Instead, they bank on them being accepted tacitly but without challenge — like, say, a very religious society that has only recently moved to secularism: in theory it is ok to be an atheist and it is not against the law and people will even say so aloud; in practice, if you are an atheist you are weird and just not part of polite society. (I saw a lot of that in my childhood).

The genius of Sikora consists of paying the lockdown matrix in their same coin. He simply acts as if these tenets do not exist; he refuses to engage with them. Of course the pandemic is going to end. Of course life goes on. What are you talking about? This doesn’t even need saying.

In this, we lockdown sceptics could all perhaps be a bit more like Sikora.