In The COVID Consensus, Toby Green argues that, by the end of 2020, the global consensus that had emerged in March to quarantine and lock down large segments of the population had caused more harm than good. Drawing from research reports, epidemiological models, newspaper articles, press conferences and white papers from national governments, universities and organizations such as the WHO, he pieces together a story of rapid consensus that would have been hard to imagine in 2019. Using predictive models and comparing them with death rates in places such as the UK, Green shows that lockdowns did little to limit death while wreaking financial havoc on individuals and nations. African nations, for instance, began borrowing money as remittances and other contributors to their economies dried up and as lending nations and organizations implemented more draconian austerity measures. In making this argument, Green reminds us that we live in an interconnected world where migrants travel for work and send money home. Countries in the global South in turn rely on that money and international commerce to fund even the most basic social services. As these interconnections are severed, as in the case of the lockdowns in March and April 2020, it is the people of the global majority who suffer most. This is indeed a most tragic result of the Covid consensus as well as Green’s most persuasive argument.

One of the most provocative aspects of Green’s argument is the way he places the global consensus around lockdowns in the larger context of the rise of fascism, particularly in Europe and the USA. He describes the visit of WHO representatives to China to learn about its handling of the virus, positing that it led to the universal recommendation of lockdowns. Green argues that, because it originated in an authoritarian state, this approach to pandemic management is an authoritarian strategy – one that the liberal left accepted in the name of public health. While provocative, it seems to me that this argument faces its limits if one attends to the overlap between the rise of white nationalist movements and anti-mask and anti-vax movements. In places such as the USA and Europe, those most opposed to public health measures are often the same people who support right-wing fascist political parties. Perhaps, then, it is less about the character of people’s political leanings (authoritarian or not) and more about a racialized understanding of Covid-19 (the ‘China virus’), driven by China’s influence on isolation and quarantine measures, that determined who has supported public health measures and who has not.

Posing more of a challenge to Green’s argument that the lockdowns were all deleterious is the example of the USA. As, state by state, the country closed down in March 2020, the federal government passed a series of large relief bills. These bills included both extended and added unemployment benefits designed to keep workers home as well as eviction moratoriums, expanded dependant support, and bailout funds for airlines and other businesses. In many senses, these bills represent the largest expansion of the social safety net in two generations. And they have been successful: the relief bills cut poverty nearly in half in a matter of months. This was all the more impressive considering that, at the time, it looked like the USA might see the largest recession since the Great Depression. While the pandemic relief was temporary, its success has opened up new possibilities for political futures in the country. In some senses, this was made possible by the lockdowns.

Green’s book is certainly provocative. He makes important points about how nationalistic responses to the pandemic served only to harm the most disempowered nations and the most disempowered in those nations in an interconnected world. However, it is not clear to me that the Covid consensus, as he calls it, was as universally damaging as he suggests. The expansion of the social safety net in the USA, the global uprisings in the summer of 2020, and a new attention to the central tenet of public health – to care for and protect the vulnerable – have all offered new possibilities for thinking about how we live together and how we support one another in this world. The jury is still out on what will happen, especially in the face of vaccine apartheid and the emergence of new variants. I, myself, am growing more sceptical by the day that we will emerge from this pandemic with a new, more caring, more equitable world. Nevertheless, the early days of the pandemic, and the mass uprisings that followed, offered glimmers of different futures – futures that centred care for the vulnerable and that offered a potential challenge to the politics of global inequality.