We’re grateful that you have brought attention to our book The Covid Consensus through Richard Seymour’s critical commentary (Three years on, there is a new generation of lockdown sceptics – and they’re rewriting history, 23 March), following Larry Elliott’s supportive one last month (The price Britain paid for lockdown was colossal. Was there an alternative?, 12 March). Most readers won’t be shocked that historians do write revisionist histories, or that narratives are more complex than the ones initially cohered around by political elites. When has “history” ever been different?
Seymour claims that capitalism was suspended for a while during the Covid response – which would be news to the world’s billionaires, whose wealth increased by over $4tn in 2020 alone. His critique takes no account of our book’s structural critique of neoliberal capitalism. Meanwhile, his claim that we “minimise” Covid ignores our criticism of treatments of the disease – and our concern that, by crowding people together, lockdown policies made the pandemic impacts far worse for poorer people around the world.
We’re happy to debate these issues in public, and hope that the Guardian will provide a format for this vital discussion to take place.
Toby Green
King’s College London
Thomas Fazi
Rome, Italy
