We need to be able to have a dispassionate conversation about death in our society. The fact is, when you get to your 80’s, you have a high chance of dying of all diseases. There are many diseases that kill millions of people a year - tuberculosis, malaria, AIDS, influenza itself - all cause more than a million deaths a year. This year we will have some COVID-19 deaths, which will be more than a million worldwide. But the fact is there are 70 million deaths every year, and next year we will have many fewer COVID-19 deaths. This, according to retired professor of pathology and former NHS consultant pathologist John A. Lee, speaking in a Raidió Teilifís Éireann debate moderated by Miriam O'Callaghan.

In Israel, the average age of death is about 82. The average age of death associated with COVID-19 is a bit older than the average age of death, so there is no evidence that COVID-19 is really impacting on the overall lifespan of the population. "Yes, certain people are more susceptible to this disease," Lee says, "and it can obviously cause a nasty disease. But the fact is, this societal response is something that has never been done before."

He continues: "For several months now it's been clear that this virus is not the new plague that it was feared that it would be, and yet we continue to act as if it is that new plague. We've also continued to act in this way despite major harms caused by lockdowns, and despite very little evidence that lockdowns, 'social distancing', masks, and all the other things that have been introduced actually work on a societal basis. So we're actually causing more harm, clearly causing more harm, both in terms of deaths and in terms of quality of life by the actions we're taking for this virus.

"If your health service or any health service isn't up to providing the care that's needed, you should increase capacity. What you shouldn't do is imprison your entire population and do epidemiological and virological experiments on people which don't have any way of being verified, which don't have any evidence to support them, and cause great harms."

Economist Dan O'Brien spoke in the same debate. Referring to lockdown, he said: “I think back in March, it was to protect the health system and it was warranted at that time, because the speed at which cases and deaths were going up was horrific, and we didn't know internationally where it would top out. There was a very famous medic in this country who predicted 120,000 people dying, back in March. Nowhere in the world has had that kind of death rate, absolutely nowhere in the world, thankfully.

“So now we're in a more difficult situation where the government is saying, that the strategy now is to wait until we have a safe vaccine. Now, that could be many years, and my fear is that we’ll get two or three years out, we still won't have a safe vaccine, the economy will be destroyed, we’ll have mass unemployment, we’ll have mass personal bankruptcies, we’ll have mass business bankruptcies, and the costs of all of that, we get to a point where we still haven't eradicated the virus, and the government goes bankrupt, and we're in an absolute meltdown catastrophic position where the virus then runs through the population anyway."

Lee continued: "There's also a problem that in this phase of the pandemic, people have equated positive tests with cases. Now this isn't correct, this is simply wrong. In the normal winter, we never obsessively test the population for any virus to the extent to which this virus is being tested for. And the fact is, if you have a positive test but you're not unwell, you cannot be regarded as a 'case' of this disease. You’re just someone who’s got a virus. The only people who in a normal winter turn up as cases of this disease are people admitted to hospital, people who’ve become seriously ill, and they were a very tiny proportion of the number of positive tests that you would do if you if you tested everybody."

This point has been stressed repeatedly by experts worldwide. For example, Laniado Hospital Emergency Medicine Department Director Dr. Amir Shachar, one of the founders of the emergency medicine profession in Israel, said: "Most of the people identified as carriers are not sick, or they are very lightly ill, and I'm trying to say that this figure of 3,000 or 4,000 new patients a day is simply using wrong definitions. There is no disease that is diagnosed by identifying the contagion in the throat. There also need to be symptoms and most of the people identified as positive and get the label 'sick' are not sick."

The interviewer answered Dr. Shachar, "They're carriers..."

"They're not even carriers," answered Dr. Shachar, "They're people who were exposed to the virus. Hundreds of viruses pass our way every day."

Lee went on to say: "So the fact is that for people under 70, the infection fatality rate for this disease is 0.05%, which is about half of flu, and is likely to be even lower than that because of course we don't truly know what the denominators are, because we haven't been testing in the wider population. And many of the tests that have been done - the antibody tests - are the wrong tests to be doing because we should be testing people’s T cells, which would show that a lot of people already have pre-existing resistance to this virus.

"So on very many levels, the approach to this virus, both scientifically and medically - but also in terms of societally, what we’re doing with this - is simply wrong. My view is that we should have no more lockdown. We should go back to living life normally, we should travel normally, we should go to work, go out, and people who are vulnerable, people who are at risk of disease, the elderly - if they want to, they can be advised to look after themselves, but frankly if I'm 70 or if I’m 80, I don't want to have many of the things that make life worth living taken away by government, and government responses that infantilize the population and tell us that we can't make risk assessments for ourselves as we go about our daily lives.

"The government needs to focus on what it can do and spend less time focusing on telling other people what they can't do."

“We’ve had too much of this during this entire pandemic; we hear epidemiologists giving some modeling-based suggestions for what we should be doing with our lives, and the fact is they've been conclusively wrong, consistently, forever basically about this.

"The fact is these simplistic and biologically naive models do not work on a population basis. They do not capture many important things in viral spread. These viruses, remember, have been around since the dawn of time. The fact is these things spread at very low population densities.

"So the only way you can actually maintain a reasoning for doing this is in the belief that this is such a lethal virus and if we don't do it, as we heard some people say, the number of beds in intensive care units will be overwhelmed. The fact is, in the UK, for example, we set up the Nightingale hospitals very quickly in March. Within four weeks, there were thousands of extra beds. It's perfectly possible for governments to do this, there’s simply no excuse for imprisoning the population. It's simply not fair to anybody under the age of 70, and it's not fair to people over the age of 70, because it removes many things that make life worth living. There’s simply no justification for it in the science.

"We have taken kids out of school, we have ruined the lives of young people just as they are getting to that point of independence and living their lives. We really need to ask how much punishment are we going to put younger people on in particular, force people into mass unemployment, when the risk to those people is so, so low?

"I think it's quite unlikely that we'll have the vaccine that's effective for this virus or that’s effective for very long for this virus. The UK had a Common Cold Institute for 43 years which was solely tasked with producing a vaccine for similar viruses to this one, and it shut down because they never had a success.

"These viruses are very adept at evading antibodies and the vaccines that are introduced for them. So the idea that somehow we're going to have a magic bullet which is going to come right over the horizon anytime soon and give a get-out-of-jail-free card I think is just wishful thinking.

"We are never going to eradicate this virus. I think it's very unlikely that we're going to reduce community transmission significantly enough to make a difference without having such punitive measures that cause far more harm than the actual thing that they're trying to prevent."