27. LOCKDOWNS
"Lockdowns kill people. There is strong evidence that lockdowns – through social, economic and other public health damage – are deadlier than the alleged virus."
Bendavid reported “in the framework of this analysis, there is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (‘lockdowns’) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, or the United States in early 2020.” We’ve known this for a very long time now but governments continue to double down, causing misery upon people with ramifications that will likely take decades or more to repair.
The benefits of the societal lockdowns and restrictions have been totally exaggerated and the harms to our societies and children have been severe: the harms to children, the undiagnosed illness that will result in excess mortality in years to come, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation in our young people, drug overdoses and suicides due to the lockdown policies, the crushing isolation due to the lockdowns, psychological harms, domestic and child abuse, sexual abuse of children, loss of jobs and businesses and the devastating impact, and the massive numbers of deaths resulting from the lockdowns that will impact heavily on women and minorities.
Lockdowns kill people. There is strong evidence that lockdowns – through social, economic and other public health damage – are deadlier than the alleged virus.
Could the Covid19 Response be More Deadly than the Virus? – OffGuardian (off-guardian.org)
Dr David Nabarro, World Health Organization special envoy for Covid-19 described lockdowns as a “global catastrophe” in October 2020: We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of the virus[…] it seems we may have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition […] This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe. We appeal to all world leaders, stop using lockdown as your primary control method” Min 25 Andrew Neil, Spectator TV
HART Group (Health Advisory and Recovery Team)
HART is a group of highly qualified UK doctors, scientists, economists, psychologists and other academic experts.
The data is in: lockdowns serve no useful purpose and cause catastrophic societal and economic harms. They must never be repeated in this country. Lockdowns were explicitly not recommended even for severe respiratory viral outbreaks in all pandemic planning prior to 2020, including those endorsed by the WHO and the Department of Health.
https://www.hartgroup.org/covid-19-evidence/
American Institute for Economic Research - December 2020 - 35 studies proving lockdowns do NOT control Coronavirus
The use of universal lockdowns in the event of the appearance of a new pathogen has no precedent. It has been a science experiment in real time, with most of the human population used as lab rats. The costs are legion... There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control.
In a saner world, the burden of proof really should belong to the lockdowners, since it is they who overthrew 100 years of public-health wisdom and replaced it with an untested, top-down imposition on freedom and human rights... Fear, panic, and coercion are not ideal strategies for managing viruses.
Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence | AIER
5. “Comment on Flaxman et al. (2020): The illusory effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe” by Stefan Homburg and Christof Kuhbandner. June 17, 2020. “In a recent article, Flaxman et al. allege that non-pharmaceutical interventions imposed by 11 European countries saved millions of lives. We show that their methods involve circular reasoning. The purported effects are pure artefacts, which contradict the data. Moreover, we demonstrate that the United Kingdom’s lockdown was both superfluous and ineffective.”
8. “Full lockdown policies in Western Europe countries have no evident impacts on the COVID-19 epidemic” by Thomas Meunier. MedRxiv Pre-print May 1, 2020. “Comparing the trajectory of the epidemic before and after the lockdown, we find no evidence of any discontinuity in the growth rate, doubling time, and reproduction number trends. Extrapolating pre-lockdown growth rate trends, we provide estimates of the death toll in the absence of any lockdown policies, and show that these strategies might not have saved any life in western Europe. We also show that neighboring countries applying less restrictive social distancing measures (as opposed to police-enforced home containment) experience a very similar time evolution of the epidemic.”
15. “Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison” by Christian Bjørnskov. CESifo Economic Studies March 29, 2021. “The lockdowns in most Western countries have thrown the world into the most severe recession since World War II and the most rapidly developing recession ever seen in mature market economies. They have also caused an erosion of fundamental rights and the separation of powers in a large part of the world as both democratic and autocratic regimes have misused their emergency powers and ignored constitutional limits to policy-making (Bjørnskov and Voigt, 2020). Comparing weekly mortality in 24 European countries, the findings in this paper suggest that more severe lockdown policies have not been associated with lower mortality. In other words, the lockdowns have not worked as intended.”
24. “Government mandated lockdowns do not reduce Covid-19 deaths: implications for evaluating the stringent New Zealand response” by John Gibson. New Zealand Economic Papers, August 25, 2020. “The New Zealand policy response to Coronavirus was the most stringent in the world during the Level 4 lockdown. Lockdowns do not reduce Covid-19 deaths. This pattern is visible on each date that key lockdown decisions were made in New Zealand. The apparent ineffectiveness of lockdowns suggests that New Zealand suffered large economic costs for little benefit in terms of lives saved.”
33. “Inferring UK COVID‐19 fatal infection trajectories from daily mortality data: Were infections already in decline before the UK lockdowns?” by Simon Wood. Biometic Practice, March 30, 2021. ...the currently most reliable openly available data strongly suggest that the decline in infections in the United Kingdom began before the first full lockdown...
35. “Covid Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature” by Douglas W. Allen. Working paper, Simon Fraser University, April 2021. “An examination of over 80 Covid-19 studies reveals that many relied on assumptions that were false, and which tended to over-estimate the benefits and under- estimate the costs of lockdown. ..it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history.”