In March of 2020, with the data I had in hand, I asserted that the best way to deal with the spread of COVID-19 was to follow the protocol for flu prevention that has been tailored to address the coronavirus. This included no lockdowns but vitamins, exercise, and good ventilation.
In October 2020, thousands of epidemiologists, public health professionals, and scientists signed the Great Barrington Declaration. The recommendations emphasized “focused protection” of the vulnerable and building herd immunity through vaccines AND natural infection recovery.
Anyone not invested in lockdowns because of fear, politics, or ignorance derided restrictions imposed upon millions of people “by experts.”
A new study from Johns Hopkins University confirms that lockdowns failed spectacularly to stop either the spread or resulting deaths.
Lockdowns had “little to no effect” on saving lives during the pandemic — and “should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy,” according to economists in a new meta-analysis of dozens of studies.A group led by the head of Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics analyzed studies from the first surge of the pandemic to investigate widely pushed claims that stringent restrictions would limit deaths.Instead, the meta-analysis concluded that lockdowns across the US and Europe had only “reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average.”Worse, some of the studies even suggested that limiting gatherings in safe outdoor spots may have been “counterproductive and increased” the death rate, the authors noted.
The paper, entitled ” A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality,” was authored by Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke. Their findings are extraordinary, and I would like to highlight four reasons the lockdowns didn’t work as advertised.
1. Changes in social behavior cannot be mandated; they work best when people are persuaded to alter their actions voluntarily (e.g., social distancing).
2. Second, mandates only regulate a small portion of the potential contagious contacts and cannot really regulate nor enforce handwashing, coughing etiquette, distancing in supermarkets, or other rules.
3. As predicted, when closed bars and restaurants reopen, the disease will spread again.
4. Finally, and my favorite: Unintended consequences. Forcing people indoors increased their exposure likelihood and chances of infection rather than the reverse. It increased the viral load among those in the same house, causing more severe infections. Limiting shops that could remain open drove up the chance of infections as people were limited to where they could purchase items.
Of course, the greatest of those unintended consequences was the non-covid excess deaths that occurred because of the lockdowns, as well as other long-term problems that we will be dealing with for decades.
From May 2020 to April 2021, the U.S. recorded 100,306 drug overdose deaths, a 28.5% increase from the 78,056 deaths that were recorded in the previous 12-month period, according to CDC data.A study from the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice last year found that domestic violence incidents increased 8.1% in the U.S. after lockdown orders were issued.About 97% of U.S. teachers said that their students have experienced learning loss during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a Horace Mann survey last year….”These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best,” the researchers in the Johns Hopkins University study wrote.”Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.”
We have just had two years of our lives sucked away in the guise of the largest scientific experiment on humans in history.
In part, the loss is directly due to the suppression of free speech. Everyone who argued that lockdowns would not work (as early as March 2020) was classified as “misinformation” by Big Tech, Big Media, and Big Bureaucracy.
Based on this study, it must be asked how many other elements of the pandemic policies still being pushed are ineffective and detrimental? I will now assume all are…based on Science™.
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