Major Study on Lockdowns Shows The Obvious: It Was All For Nothing
A Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis of all the credible studies concerning lockdowns has found that government measures to contain covid were useless:
While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.
The researchers from JHU’s Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise defined lockdowns broadly “as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI). NPIs are any government mandate that directly restrict peoples’ possibilities, such as policies that limit internal movement, close schools and businesses, and ban international travel.”
Such measures, according to the analysis, “only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average.” This is statistical noise, and meaningless in the face of economic and educational devastation - which was all known to be the logical result of such policies, and admitted to by government leaders worldwide, before lockdowns were enacted.
They implemented historically unprecedented draconian orders for a gain that was patently impossible - you cannot stop a respiratory virus or eliminate it - for a tragic loss that was always an utter certainty.
When the researchers compared mortality rates in proportion to the stringency of lockdowns in various states, they came to the following finding:
Hence, based on the stringency index studies, we find little to no evidence that mandated lockdowns in Europe and the United States had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality rates.
The final words of the study are devastating:
The use of lockdowns is a unique feature of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns have not been used to such a large extent during any of the pandemics of the past century. However, lockdowns during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic have had devastating effects. They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best. Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.
Please, let us not pretend that it was somewhat understandable for governments to do this at the beginning.
It was not. The objections to this idiocy were always obvious.
How were grocery workers going to be saved by stay at home orders? What about the entire supply chain? Healthcare workers? Police? Civil servants? Public hygiene? Society can only be stopped for a select few.
Why would transmission not just take place in the cramped places where people would have to remain during the lockdown?
Why was this Chinese model never treated with any scepticism by the media?
Where does the air go when you breathe out, even when wearing a mask? How can a mask stop an aerosol virus?
Why did we not focus on protecting the vulnerable when we knew from the beginning the risk was heavily stratified by age and co-morbidities?
What did we think was going to happen to at-risk children?
What did we think was going to happen to the informal sector of the economy?
Were such revolutionary actions really proportionate to the death rate of covid?
The worst of it now is that there has been no apology from anybody. And we are still meant to take the authorities’ advice as gospel. And even where restrictions have been loosened, the basic architecture of testing and masking and viewing all citizens as disease vectors, remains.
Let me conclude with another thought, however.
And this concerns the fact that I do not feel vindicated by this, I do not feel morally superior.
In fact, I feel ashamed that I did not say more, that I did not do more, and that I am, in fact, complicit in this great evil to some extent.
Lord, have mercy.
We are always all complicit to some extent because of the inter-related nature of the world, but you at least Sir, have been one of the moral voices of truth in a really difficult time
We the people have little influence on mobs. The proper response is to remove the tyrants, hopefully "with extreme prejudice," but removal will be sufficient.
Ultimately, the cause if the disaster was the gullibility of much of the public to be driven to panic by malicious governments, like a bovine stampede. Competent people are not, and were not, so easily manipulated. This was a natural outcome of several generations of failed education system. Until we reinstitute critical thinking as a primary focus of education and journalism, we can expect these events to become more common.