John and Curran have convincingly shown that Scanlonian contractualism is a valuable resource for evaluating pandemic response policies, and that we should reject cost–benefit analysis in favour of a contractualist framework. However, they fail to consider the part of contractualism that Scanlon constructed precisely to deal with the question of when the state can restrict individuals from making choices that are harmful to themselves and others: the value of choice view (VoC). In doing so, they leave it open for opponents of lockdowns to misuse contractualism to justify mistaken policies.