The West Needs a Covid Lockdown Debate

Mr. Sunak trails Foreign Secretary

Liz Truss

in the race to lead the Conservative Party and replace

Boris Johnson

as Prime Minister. Lockdown skepticism plays well with the Tory rank-and-file who are casting the votes this month. This may be a Hail Mary to revive his campaign, but it has the virtue of being true.

Evolving knowledge about the novel coronavirus and new data about the harm of lockdowns have triggered renewed debate about the quality of the science that led to school closures, business shutdowns and other unprecedented restrictions on personal liberty. Public-health experts have questions to answer about their failures.

Mr. Sunak is raising a separate and equally important question: How and why did elected politicians seem to delegate their policy judgment to public-health officials? Mr. Sunak says one problem was that the scientists misstated what they knew. He says the U.K. government’s main scientific advisory panel went so far as to edit dissenting opinions out of the official minutes of its meetings.

But the ex-Chancellor also points to a failure of elected politicians to ask probing questions and to understand the scientific models they were being fed. This made it impossible for politicians to assess the larger public good beyond incomplete epidemiological estimates when setting policies that we now know were destructive to education, employment and other public-health concerns.

Mr. Sunak participated in Britain’s lockdown policy-making despite the misgivings he now claims he harbored. He says it would have been irresponsible to quit in protest, although given the stakes perhaps it was worse not to expose the poor way such far-reaching decisions were made. This also deserves to be part of the political reckoning over lockdowns, and not only in the United Kingdom.