Where's our apology?

You'll notice that that statement is entirely free of an acknowledgement of the idea that the government - and not just the Spanish government, but governments all over the world - could publicly shoulder responsibility for the damage caused, not by Covid itself, but by their decisions and actions since early 2020.

Over the last three years, everyone in Spain, and everyone in the UK, France and Italy, to name but three comparable countries, has been a victim of unprecedentedly oppressive 'safety' measures, the legality and efficacy of which remain open to doubt. They must be critiqued and examined in the light of what actually happened - yet there is no evidence that governmental health departments are doing this. We therefore have reason to suspect that, when the next pandemic hits, they'll do the same things again (even though, in Spain's case, the spring 2020 lockdown has since been ruled illegal).

In one of his essential pamphlets on Covid, the American journalist Alex Berenson points out that "what went all-but-unnoticed in the push for lockdowns was the fact that major public health organisations [such as the World Health Organization and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention] had for decades rejected them as a potential solution for epidemics". At first, Amazon refused to publish Berenson's healthily sceptical study, absurdly (and sinisterly) suggesting that he "consider removing references to Covid-19 for this book".

I admit that it is a symptom of how jaded and disillusioned I have become with governments that I don't expect an apology, ever, from any of them for making a bad situation worse. But I can still dream of a world in which, instead of toadying statements of 'remembrance', senior government ministers offered something like the following (all entirely my own words and entirely imagined):

"We are profoundly sorry, as governments, for the unnecessary hardship we have caused through a baseless, regressive authoritarianism. We acted on the basis of virtually no understanding of how lockdowns work, or indeed of any of the other possible approaches to an epidemic that should have been modelled long before this one hit. Please know that we are studying our approach to Covid to ensure that our mistakes are never repeated, and that individual autonomy is never trampled on again in the way it has been over the last three years in supposed democracies. Thank you."