‘Untold Economic Damage’: Jordan Peterson Criticizes Governments for Copying CCP’s Pandemic Response

Jordan Peterson speaks at the 2018 Young Women's Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Dallas, Texas, on June 15, 2018. (Gage Skidmore/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Best-selling author and commentator Jordan Peterson criticized the global response to COVID-19 in a pre-recorded address to the National Citizen’s Inquiry (NCI), arguing that “untold economic damage” was done by copying the pandemic strategy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“In our panicked idiocy, we copied one of the most authoritarian societies that have ever existed on the planet, and that would be the Chinese Communist Party,” Peterson said.

“All things considered, we should seriously be ashamed of ourselves.”

The NCI, a “citizen-led and citizen-funded initiative,” is currently holding hearings in various locations to examine how the pandemic measures impacted Canadians’ health, fundamental rights and freedoms, social well-being, and economic prosperity.

The psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto has long been critical of the Canadian government’s response to COVID-19.

In his NCI testimony, which was shown during the first batch of hearings in Truro, Nova Scotia, on March 18, he said governments suspended citizens’ basic rights, including the right to travel, freedom of association, the right to free speech, and the right to bodily integrity, “and there’s barely a more fundamental right than that.”

Peterson said that in the face of COVID, an “unknown threat of indeterminate magnitude,” governments around the world used panic to justify the “imposition of a tyranny that was modelled for us by an authoritarian state, led by the Chinese Communist Party.”

Shortly after COVID-19 was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the CCP instituted a policy of strict lockdowns to prevent the virus’ spread. The regime then adopted a “COVID Zero” pandemic strategy, which involved attempting to completely eradicate the virus through lockdowns, testing, and contact tracing.

While other countries did not adopt China’s COVID Zero strategy, they also implemented a series of lockdowns in an attempt to prevent the virus from spreading. Lockdowns have since been found to be associated with several harms, including worse mental health outcomes, higher rates of suicide, and excess deaths due to missed medical appointments.

“We had a crisis of a new illness. We put in incredibly restrictive policies to hypothetically cope with it,” Peterson said.

“We lied about the fact that those policies were justified by science. We recreated untold economic havoc on our society, we hurt the educational opportunities of children, and we failed to attend to the fact that the reaction to a crisis can produce a worse crisis than the crisis itself.”

He said political responsibility for dealing with the pandemic was abdicated to public health officials, who then would “adjudicate between a number of competing ethical claims.”

“We then manipulated public opinion in the most egregious possible manner using collusion between corporations—primarily the pharmaceutical industry—governments, and media, who all colluded together to use fear to impose tyranny,” he said.

Peterson said COVID-related public health measures have resulted in “untold economic damage” to global supply chains, raised the price of food and energy, and damaged people’s faith in science for “at least a generation or more” to come.

He pointed out that Sweden’s pandemic policies, which did not involve lockdowns or mandatory masking, have resulted in the country having among the lowest excess death rates in Europe.

Peterson also argued that politicians “lied through their teeth” about the utility of masks, as well as “circumvented the scientific process” while approving COVID-19 vaccines.

“We’re gonna pay a big price for that and we’re certainly not done paying that,” he said.

Conservative leaders in Canada also failed during the pandemic, he argued, as they did not abide by the law of unintended consequences when responding to COVID.

Peterson suggested that if governments had done “nothing at all” in the face of the pandemic, “things would have turned out better than they did.”

“So I think there’s ample room for all of us as citizens, and especially those of us who were leaders during this time, to be as ashamed of ourselves as we possibly could,” he said.