The government cannot be trusted

The argument

Boris Johnson's administration has consistently spewed misinformation regarding the effects, transmission, and data regarding Covid-19. The directives have changed, the information has been proven to be misleading, and the government itself has refused to abide by its own directives. The government cannot be trusted to enforce lockdowns, especially when the public does not have the truth. The guidance coming from the Johnson government has been contradictory, often within days of each other. Early on, citizens were simply told to wash their hands and work from home if possible. Then, in the same month of March, the government imposed a nationwide lockdown. In May, the government recommended the use of masks, but in July they became mandatory, with unmasked people facing a £100 fine. In early August, the government recommended going back to offices, suggesting there was "little evidence" to suggest Covid-19 was spreading in the workplace. But by September, Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove told people to work from home "if they can." With another lockdown looming, how can people be sure the government is doing the right thing? The figures coming from Public Health England (PHE) are also incredibly skewed. The agency marks that someone has died from Covid-19 as long as they have tested positive for the virus beforehand. There is little research done at PHE to determine if Covid-19 was the cause of the deaths, but that instead someone could test positive for the virus, fully recover, and then be hit by a bus and PHE would still count their death as a Covid-19 fatality. Public trust is also waning in this government, as a poll conducted in June shows. This mismanagement of data, and the general misinterpretation of models at the outset of the pandemic, proves the UK government cannot be trusted to enact or enforce any sort of lockdown.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The government has been adapting and changing the way it makes decisions during the pandemic, just as the public has been changing the way we do things during this time. Just because the government hit a few bumps and made a few mistakes, does not mean that their broader guidance should not be trusted.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise conflates changing advice with misinformation. Guidance that shifts as evidence accumulates is what an evolving epidemic produces, and no case is offered in which a claim was known to be false when it was made. [Rejecting P2] The chronology supports that reading rather than the argument's: hand-washing advice in early March followed by lockdown later that month tracks the case numbers of that period. Officials breaching their own rules is a serious charge about those officials, but it is not evidence about whether the rules were sound. [Rejecting P3] The conclusion does not follow from distrust. If the data are unreliable, the remedy is better data and independent scrutiny — which is what the sibling test-and-trace position proposes — rather than removing restrictions. The complaint about how deaths were counted also describes a publicly documented definitional choice that was subsequently revised, and the bus illustration is a rhetorical device rather than a case.