Lockdowns, authoritarian mandates, and their consequences
Detrimental Effects of Lockdowns Divided by Section (15/1-22)
Le manuel de survie en dictature (The Dictatorship Survival Manual)
The Ugly Truth About Lockdowns (end of March '21): PANDA’s co-founder, Nick Hudson, was the keynote speaker at the March 2020 inaugural BizNews Investment Conference in South Africa. His presentation, “Time To Reopen Society” begins with the early days of the pandemic recalling the confusion, the conflicting information, the ever-changing recommendations. By following the data and official communications from global organisations, PANDA unravels what transpired that led us into deleterious lockdowns, which continue to have enormous negative impacts across the world. This presentation negates the fear and gives clear reasons why ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’ in the story of the COVID-19 pandemic response. (video was banned from YouTube after a few days only)
93 year-old holocaust survivor compares masks to the yellow star but says the current situation is worse. It is insidious. She would rather exchange her life for the youth than suffer the hypocrisy of the government and those who "defile" their children with masks. (25/3-21)
Child Suicide is Becoming an ‘International Epidemic’ Amid Restricted Pandemic Life, Doctors Warn (16/3-21): The damage we’re inflicting on children is too devastating to be waved away in the name of public health—it’s quickly becoming an emergency in its own right.
The Entrenchment of Lockdown Denialism (9/3-21): Why do major media outlets continue to engage in this wiley rhetorical game? Consider these headlines:
Pandemic caused changes, disruptions for drug treatment programs, specialty courts
WHO says pandemic has caused more ‘mass trauma’ than WWII
Pandemic caused $220 billion of global dividend cuts in 2020, research says
Pandemic caused ‘staggering’ economic, human impact in global south, study says
Pandemic caused 10% drop in community college enrollment
Pandemic caused dramatic job losses
Covid-19 pandemic caused alarming rise in mental illnesses across globe, say experts
Pandemic caused worst year for US economy since 1946
Has the pandemic caused a crisis in child care?
How the Pandemic Can Trigger Depression
The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers
Why were lockdowns such an awful idea? — Jeffrey Tucker on Newsmax's 'Save the Nation' (7/3-21): Tucker explains that lockdowns have nothing to do with disease mitigation. He describes the attitudes in the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) preceding the Covid-19 pandemic as anticipating an emerging pathogen as an opportunity for experimental lockdown policies: "an experiment that we could have known from the outset was going to fail." However, in the wake of economic and public health damage, and political backlash, lockdown policies are unlikely to be repeated in the future. "It was a grotesquely irresponsible use of government power which did nothing."
Understatement of the... century? Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford Doctor, Calls Lockdowns the 'Biggest Public Health Mistake We've Ever Made' (8/3-21): «I stand behind my comment that the lockdowns are the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years. We will be counting the catastrophic health and psychological harms, imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth, for a generation.
At the same time, they have not served to control the epidemic in the places where they have been most vigorously imposed. In the US, they have – at best – protected the "non-essential" class from COVID, while exposing the essential working class to the disease. The lockdowns are trickle down epidemiology.»
We focused on covid. Now our other patients are suffering. (8/3-21): Doctors like me are now treating patients who’ve succumbed to the virus’s many unintended consequences — addiction, untreated disease and despair.
Two Leading Swedish Health Experts Explain That COVID Lockdowns Have Killed Millions of People (2/3-21): Two of Hans Rosling’s former colleagues at Karolinska Instituet, professor Anna-Mia Ekström and professor Stefan Swartling Peterson, have gone through the data from UNICEF and UNAIDS, and come to the conclusion that at least as many people have died as a result of the restrictions to fight covid as have died of covid directly.”
Every public health official and anyone who thinks the current lockdown approach is reasonable, should have a copy of this article: COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink (26/2-21): The lockdowns implemented in the name of public health entailed trade-offs that were not adequately considered. Lockdowns may prevent some COVID-19 deaths by flattening the curve of cases and preventing stress on hospitals. At the same time, lockdowns cause severe adverse effects for many millions of people, disproportionately for those already disadvantaged among us. The collateral damage included severe losses to current and future wellbeing from unemployment, poverty, food insecurity, interrupted preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic healthcare, interrupted education, loneliness and deterioration of mental health, and intimate partner violence. The economic recession has been framed as the economy vs. saving lives from COVID-19, but this is a false dichotomy. The economic recession, through austerity in government spending on the social determinants of health, can be expected to cause far more loss of life and wellbeing over the long-run than COVID-19 can. We must open up society to save many more lives than we can by attempting to avoid every case (or even most cases) of COVID-19. It is past time to take an effortful pause, calibrate our response to the true risk, make rational cost-benefit analyses of the trade-offs, and end the lockdown groupthink.
Lockdowns don’t save lives and Sweden is all the proof you need (19/2-21): History will record Covid-induced lockdowns as the product of pseudoscientific ideology, manifestations of an unprecedented mass hysteria and drummed-up fear.
Scientific Analyses and Papers on Lockdown Effectiveness (14/2-21): Here collated are the papers of shame – the lockdown ideology is destroying our societal health, selling the lie of saving lives. Lockdowns cost net suffering and lives – by a huge margin. Here we gather together the evidence.
COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria (3/2-21): "First, the state authorities should stress the breathing problems of COVID-19 patients because human beings have a primordial fear of death by suffocation, which can easily trigger panic. Second, the experts emphasized that fear should also be instilled in children, even though there is next to no risk to children´s own health. However, children could get easily infected by meeting and playing with other children. According to the report, children should be told that when they infect their parents and grandparents in turn, they could suffer a distressful death at home. This communication advice intended to invoke anxiety and feelings of guilt. Instilling guilt is another measure used by governments to make the population more supportive. The recommended message instills fear of being responsible for infecting others who die a distressful death."
"Mass hysteria can have enormous public health costs in terms of psychological stress, anxiety, and even physical symptoms. To these costs must be added indirect adverse health effects from alcoholism, suicides, or damage from deferred treatment and delayed recognition of illness. Policy failures in mass hysteria can lead to economic decline and poverty, which in turn negatively impacts public health and life expectancy.
Studies of mass hysteria have mostly focused on outbreaks in localized settings of schools or businesses. However, in the digital age of global mass and social media, the possibility of global mass hysteria exists, a phenomenon that has not yet been studied. Our study of the political economy of mass hysteria draws on the well-established psycho-logical phenomenon of mass hysteria and applies it to a new and innovative context of global mass hysteria for which no literature exists yet. More specifically, we analyzed how the political system can influence the likelihood and spread of mass hysteria in a digitized and globalized world based on economic principles. We discussed how the state and its size increase the likelihood of mass hysteria by comparing an idealized minimal state with an idealized welfare state, addressing a previously completely unexplored research question. Our findings are highly relevant and important because the policy failures induced by mass hysteria are potentially catastrophic for public health.
We found that the size and power of the state contributes positively to the likelihood and extensions of mass hysteria. The more centralized and the more power a state has, the higher the probability and extension of mass hysteria."
Depression, Self-Harm, Suicide – Devastating effects of lockdown on children (3/2-21): The actions of the government in following a science that involves imposing dictatorial tyranny and stripping the general public of their rights and freedoms, to supposedly prevent the spread of a virus that statistically kills less than 0.02% of those it infects, has had a devastating effect on a forgotten generation. Children.
The scientists insisted that the government take a sledgehammer to crack a walnut to prevent thousands upon thousands of unnecessary deaths occurring in an age group of people that were statistically at the end of the road anyway – the over 75’s. But in doing so they have created an epidemic of depression, self harm and suicide across the younger generation who’s job it will one day be to pay off the enormous debt this country has burdened itself with thanks to the general public’s docile compliance with authoritarianism.
We Should Worry about a Permanent Covidocracy (3/2-21): «Freedom once surrendered can be hell to claw back.»
Bill Buckley once said, “A liberal is someone who is determined to reach into your shower and adjust the water temperature for you.” That’s probably true of all persons given the power to reach into your shower. We either set firm goalposts now – when do the masks come off; when does the distancing end; when do kids return to school and restaurants operate at enough capacity to stay in business – or we risk many years of control.
For those who're still asking similar questions, "Why is this clusterfuck so successfully maintained?!?", Michael Wengraf summarises it really well (31/1-21):
"For example, by preventing communication and collectivity. There are hardly any meeting places anymore, small restaurants, coffeehouses and bars are - and probably will remain! - closed. Home office and homeschooling atomize people and prevent mutual resistance. In addition, as part of the Covid 19 measures, small and family businesses are being eliminated in the interests of the large, global players. Most of them do not survive lockdowns. A war of annihilation inscribed in the "Right Revolution" is being completed here.
Corona also promotes reified thinking. The neoliberal myth is spread that Covid-19 is responsible for the wasting of the "economy". A narrative that leads us to believe that the economic crisis is not due to the operators of radical market turbo-capitalism, but to an uncontrollable force of nature. What is most clearly recognizable, however, is that Corona perfectly realizes neoliberal ideas of authoritarian rule. Many fundamental rights such as assembly and demonstration are no longer in force. Government is governed without parliaments by means of ordinances and exceptions."
LOCKDOWNS ARE CATASTROPHIC ALL OVER THE WORLD (31/1-21): Quantified assessment of lockdowns in France and abroad: a general health disaster
Covid: The devastating toll of the pandemic on children (30/1-21): They are not likely to get seriously ill with Covid and there have been very few deaths. But children are still the victims of the virus - and our response to it - in many other ways. From increasing rates of mental health problems to concerns about rising levels of abuse and neglect and the potential harm being done to the development of babies, the pandemic is threatening to have a devastating legacy on the nation's young.
Heribert Prantl: "I hope that society wakes up" (30/1-21): The former head of politics at the Süddeutsche Zeitung and lawyer says: The Basic Law is not subject to a pandemic reservation.
I'm not afraid for myself. I am afraid for our basic rights. I am anxious. Fundamental rights are the most beautiful and best and most important thing we have in our state. I have a feeling that in the pandemic they are being made small or sometimes pushed aside. I am concerned that we will sacrifice fundamental rights in order to allegedly come to terms with the pandemic.
The essence of fundamental rights, however, is that they must apply in times of crisis. That is why they are called fundamental rights. They are the lighthouses that shine in democracy. It is fatal to believe that you can let it shine less for a while. But this attitude seems dominant to me when I look at current politics. I could never have imagined that we would experience such intense restrictions on our freedom.
Fundamental rights are not a larifari. In a democratic constitutional state, the power of hope resides in basic rights - even and especially in times of crisis. Because the Corona policy does not pay enough attention to fundamental rights, the hope for better times is not as great as it could be.
Testing Positive for COVID-Bootlicking (26/1-21): The COVID pandemic has shown how easy it is to make people hate anyone who is not as frightened as themselves. Since last March, politicians and health officials have fanned fears to commandeer far more control over Americans’ daily lives. And millions of Americans have been happy to condemn any violators of the endlessly changing rules.
“In some cities and counties, vigilantism has been encouraged by municipalities that have set up special phone numbers, apps or online forms to report violations.”
"But some Americans should heed the warning a British publication gave to its readers: “Is constantly monitoring COVID rulebreakers wrecking your mental health?”
Much of the rage against folks who do not obey the latest commands stems from blind faith in “science and data”—the endlessly recited slogan of politicians and bureaucrats dictating new restrictions. But the unrecognized storyline of the pandemic is that the “science” is continually changing and much of the data is crap. Revered experts flip-flopped on issues such as whether surfaces are deadly contagious or whether asymptomatic individuals are perilous threats. False positive tests and catch-all definitions of COVID fatalities have made a mockery of accurate record-keeping. These problems were compounded by the World Health Organization promulgating much a stricter standard for Covid diagnoses on the day Biden was inaugurated, ceasing to count as Covid vast numbers of cases that were previously labeled as such. The new standard paves the way for a speedy reduction in Covid cases thanks to Biden’s benevolent leadership.
But Pandemic Security Theater will continue to spur snitching by people who view other Americans’ freedom as the deadliest threat to their own health. That guy who blocked the door at my local Harris Teeter may never have been called a bootlicker before. Sadly, this is a title that millions of Americans have earned over the past year."
People are starving, dying, suffering depression, feeling suicidal, children are destitute, abused, deprived, isolated. The elderly are abandoned, human beings are craving touch, smiles, hugs. Reconnect with your human self before its too late. Powerful images:
It is a journalist’s duty to question lockdown (20/1-21): Much of the press is all too happy to toe the government line.
The witch-hunting of lockdown sceptics — The demonisation of dissenters has reached hysterical proportions. (19/1-21): «You want to talk about sin? Okay. It is a far greater sin to crush dissenting opinion than it is to say things about Covid-19 that later prove to be wrong. The destruction of free discussion harms society far more than incorrect opinion or predictions do, because it limits the space for critical interrogation of public policy and for entertaining the possibility that what we are doing is wrong. That is what spiked wants: the entertainment of possibilities, the cherishing of open and rigorous inquiry, and the flourishing of heresy. Time will tell if lockdown was wrong, but we know right now that the campaign of demonology is wrong.»
Is constantly monitoring Covid rulebreakers wrecking your mental health? (19/1-21): Rather than looking at what everyone else is doing, the best way forward is to focus on yourself. Put on those mental blinkers and remind yourself that what others are doing has no bearing on what you choose to do – are you staying safe and looking after yourself? ‘Consider safety behaviours for you and yours,’ says Claire. ‘Accept that not everyone’s needs and attitudes match your own.
The 2020 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset” — Global Research E-Book, Centre for Research on Globalization (17/1): Interesting summary of this whole clusterfuck in nine chapters.
Italian government is now backing down and suggesting lighter restrictions after many business and restaurants have opened in defiance of the law. Which proves governments will back down on these draconian measures if businesses fight back!!! As officials talk of tighter lockdown, Italian restaurants open their doors in protest (16/1-21)
In the article is also a link to a clip from one restaurant (which opened on 15th) when police arrives. Customers refuse to leave & shout in unison "Get out! Get out! Get out! … We pay your wages from our taxes, you work for us.. Get out! Get out! Get out!"
First Goes Law, Then Goes Democracy (15/1-21):
“Social conditioning takes time, and the same actors who initially pushed lockdowns — Shannon Tiezzi from The Diplomat suggests that Xi Jinping “senses an opportunity in the COVID-19 crisis (and the chaotic U.S. response) to strength China’s role as a global leader”— now state that they will need to continue “at least until 2022.” Oh, and we should never expect a return to normal, because “pandemics” and “climate change” prove that our “old normal” was “not sustainable.”
All of the entities pushing this narrative openly admit that a tech-focused future — driven by a public seeking to be “kept safe from germs” — will “better harmonize humanity with nature.” These words are also found where? In the U.N.’s longstanding 2030 Agenda for “Sustainable Development.” Now, circumstantial evidence is not conclusive proof, but the coincidences are mounting.
If this agenda is indeed to be forced on us by ruse, via the exploitation of a pandemic, one must wonder if its masterminds are remotely trustworthy. Why can’t they openly explain their intentions, if they are so wonderful? Today, they implement a covert replacement for the rule of law, one that subverts our will to theirs with no right of appeal. Tomorrow, they replace democracy.”
Pandemic Security Theater (15/1-21): «After ten months of lockdowns and shocking degrees of economic and social carnage, millions of Americans have decided that there surely must be some rationale for all the insanity and have signed on to become enforcers themselves, even and perhaps especially when the rules make no sense at all. The lockdowns have unleashed this mess. It is not easily cleaned up. It will likely take years before many people can think clearly and rationally again.»
Op-Ed: Public Schools Should (Almost Always) Stay Open — It does the least harm to kids and adults (12/1-21): Schools present a tradeoff. When they're open, society benefits from the essential services schools provide: education, child abuse reporting, hot meals, and socio-emotional development. Closing them may theoretically slow viral spread. How should a society decide?
«In short, for the reasons we summarize here, we are in favor of schools. We don't take this view because we are callous or indifferent to loss of life, we take this view because we believe in our hearts and minds that it will result in the least amount of human harm and suffering over the long haul. When it comes to pandemics, there are no winners. Opening schools means we lose less. Sometimes losing less is the best we can do.»
Did China promote ‘Coronavirus lockdowns’ to cripple world economy? Lawyers, activists, ex-US Brigadier general want UK, USA spies to investigate (15/1-21): Amidst the rising cases of the Wuhan Coronavirus, several sceptics have requested spies from the United States and the United Kingdom to investigate whether China deliberately promoted the idea of ‘lockdowns’ to cripple the world economy. In an 11000-worded letter, a US lawyer named Michael Senger has accused the Chinese regime of promoting national lockdowns to hurt rival economies. Hailing the lockdown policies as a ‘fraud’ of an unprecedented level, Senger and other co-signers requested the Intelligence agencies to initiate an investigation in this regard.
'LOCKDOWN FRAUD' — British and US spies urged to probe claims China ‘tricked the world into lockdown to trigger economic crash’ (13/1-21): BRITISH and US spies have been urged to probe wild claims that China purposefully tricked the world into lockdown to trigger an economic crash. An open letter appealing to the intelligence services has been signed off by a number of lockdown sceptics including lawyers, human rights activists, and a former US Air Force general.
The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Lockdown Fraudu, request for expedited federal investigation into scientific fraud in COVID‑19 public health policies (10/1-21) — full request (pdf), a letter by an international team of professionals, researchers and activists
Michael P. Senger (attorney) co-signed this request/letter:
«By corrupting global institutions, promoting hysterical data, publishing fraudulent science, and deploying propaganda on an unprecedented scale, Beijing transformed the snake oil of lockdowns into “science,” the greatest crime of the 21st century to date.»
«The struggle for civil rights was long, cruel, and legally convoluted, but history has settled on a childishly simple version in hindsight. One day, the story of Xi Jinping’s lockdowns engulfing the world will look equally simple. Where will you appear?»
«Bizarre how trust in China's data, science, and lockdown policies has become a virtue signal on the left. They decry CCP "reeducation" camps and claim to see no connection to lockdowns, when Xi has admitted they derive from the same philosophy of fangkong.»
«The dark secret every dictator knows: the cost and suffering the majority will inflict on others in order to feel "safe" is unlimited. The CCP tells us there's a novel super-virus, tells us lockdowns work—we just have to bankrupt our neighbors to survive. The majority comply.»
Canadian expert's research finds lockdown harms are 10 times greater than benefits (9/1-21): Dr. Ari Joffe is a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at University of Alberta. He has written a paper titled COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink (4/11-20) that finds the harms of lockdowns are 10 times greater than their benefits.
Estimated COVID19 excess life years lost: 14,911 (ages 0-84)
New Study Links Lockdowns to Potential Long-Term Increases In Excess Deaths (7/1-21): here is much-documented discussion about the immediate tradeoffs of lockdowns from short-term economic devastation, to mental health problems, and drug overdoses. The authors explain the significance of their study on long-term damage when they write,
“Overall, the economic literature has extensively analyzed the short-run trade-off between economic activity and the containment of the pandemic. We emphasize that an equally important long-run trade-off exists. It is worth clarifying that with this claim, we do not want to suggest that policymakers should refrain from ordering lockdowns, as necessary lifesaving measures, but rather that, if they decide to do so, they should provide alongside enhanced health and economic support for the most vulnerable portions of the population.”
The aforementioned economic support is necessary because contrary to the prevailing narrative, a bad economy kills too. Although many would be quick to dismiss the catastrophic economic damage that has been done to the country as a sort of inconvenience (like Dr. Fauci) the authors contend that this damage will also lead to excess deaths in the long term. They write,
“We estimate the size of the COVID-19-related unemployment to be between 2 and 5 times larger than the typical unemployment shock, depending on race/gender, resulting in a 3.0% increase in mortality rate and a 0.5% drop in life expectancy over the next 15 years for the overall American population. We also predict that the shock will disproportionately affect African-Americans and women, over a short horizon, while white men might suffer large consequences over longer horizons. These figures translate in a staggering 0.89 million additional deaths over the next 15 years.”
Catastrophe Is All Around Us (5/1-21): «As a naturally optimistic person, it vexes me that the word catastrophe has echoed in my mind since early March 2020. It’s the word the great smallpox eradicator Donald Henderson used in his 2006 prediction of the consequences of lockdown, a word that wasn’t around then. His masterful article addressed the idea of travel restrictions, forced human separation, business and school closings, mask mandates, limits on public gatherings, quarantines, and the entire litany of brutality to which we’ve been subjected for nearly a year, all summed up in the word lockdown.
Dr. Henderson warned against it all. This is not how you deal with disease, he said; at a minimum society needs to function so that medical professionals can do their work. Diseases are managed one person at a time, not with grand central plans.»
«At this late date, we’ve lost confidence in most of what we used to trust and think was normal. Despair is taking over. Many of those who were willing to fight in the spring and summer have given up, tired of writing, tired of protesting, tired of yelling. The attempt to demotivate the opposition is working. This is a huge error.
What, then, is the path to the future? We can stay on the present catastrophic course or we can reverse it. The sooner governments wise up and stop hurting everyone like this the sooner the healing can begin. It will take years, decades, but a version of the rule of medicine from the ancient days pertains: first stop doing harm.»
Assessing Mandatory Stay‐at‐Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID‐19 (5/1-21): «While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less restrictive interventions.»
Michael Yeadon twitted regarding it on 13/1: «MAJOR problem for authorities arguing for restrictive ‘measures’, as findings are they’re ineffective (unless the goal is destruction, in which case, they’re extremely effective). I’ve been sceptical because of lack of evidence. Now it’s worse than that.»
Newsweek's article about it (14/1-21)
The Long-Term Impact of the COVID-19 Unemployment Shock on Life Expectancy and Mortality Rates (Dec. '20): «We estimate the size of the COVID-19-related unemployment to be between 2 and 5 times larger than the typical unemployment shock, depending on race/gender, resulting in a 3.0% increase in mortality rate and a 0.5% drop in life expectancy over the next 15 years for the overall American population. We also predict that the shock will disproportionately affect African-Americans and women, over a short horizon, while white men might suffer large consequences over longer horizons. These figures translate in a staggering 890,000 additional deaths over the next 15 years.»
Covid “Mutation” Stories Show That The Lockdowns Are Designed To Last Forever (30/12-20): «For many months now I have been warning that the design behind the pandemic lockdowns is a perpetual one; meaning, the lockdowns are MEANT to last forever. We can see this in the very commentary of the establishment elites that are pushing for the mandates; their most frequent argument being that the pandemic restrictions are the “new normal”. This assertion is outlined by globalists like Gideon Lichfield of MIT in his article ‘We’re Not Going Back To Normal’. In it he states:
“Ultimately, however, I predict that we’ll restore the ability to socialize safely by developing more sophisticated ways to identify who is a disease risk and who isn’t, and discriminating—legally—against those who are.
…one can imagine a world in which, to get on a flight, perhaps you’ll have to be signed up to a service that tracks your movements via your phone. The airline wouldn’t be able to see where you’d gone, but it would get an alert if you’d been close to known infected people or disease hot spots. There’d be similar requirements at the entrance to large venues, government buildings, or public transport hubs. There would be temperature scanners everywhere, and your workplace might demand you wear a monitor that tracks your temperature or other vital signs. Where nightclubs ask for proof of age, in future they might ask for proof of immunity—an identity card or some kind of digital verification via your phone, showing you’ve already recovered from or been vaccinated against the latest virus strains.”
Ce qu'on ne vous dit pas sur la crise économique qui vient (30/12-20): Between a false stimulus plan, an unprecedented economic crisis and an explosion of inequalities, economist Gilles Raveaud paints a very dark future, much darker than what the government is willing to admit.
Very revealing interview of less than half an hour! Well, yes, concerning the situation in France but it concerns all those countries with lockdowns and harsh authoritarian mandates too.
New Study Shows Mask Mandates Had Zero Effect in Florida or Nationwide, But the Lie Continues (21/12-20): «Obviously, no amount of evidence, data, trends, facts, studies, or science will ever convince most ‘public health officials’ that masks aren’t doing squat to stop the spread of COVID-19. Cases and deaths continue to spike (yes, many of these are super-sensitive PCR test-driven numbers, but still) despite the fact that well over 90% of the country are complying with their absurd mandates. Yet, predictably, the virus keeps going right on virusing, as highly contagious respiratory viruses, unfortunately, tend to do, especially once cold weather hits.
Nevertheless, those of us who are mask skeptics have a difficult chore in front of us. Given that most of the country is under a mask mandate of some form or another, we can point to spikes all day AFTER these mandates were put in place only to have our opponents simply say, “Look how bad it would have been WITHOUT masks!”
It’s a tough argument to counter given the fact that our overlords have sold masking as a low-cost, easy “solution” that’s totally worth it even if they “save one life,” or something (nevermind the health risks - let’s censor docs who talk about those!). So, how DO we prove that things wouldn’t have been worse without masks? One way is to look at data from the few free states remaining.»
SARS-CoV-2 waves in Europe: A 2-stratum SEIRS model solution (20/12-20)
The Characteristics of Cults (19/12-20): People are becoming shadow versions of themselves and they don’t even realize it.
Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence (19/12-20): 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.
The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Based on the following studies, the answer is no and for a variety of reasons: bad data, no correlations, no causal demonstration, anomalous exceptions, and so on. There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control.
Perhaps this is a shocking revelation, given that universal social and economic controls are becoming the new orthodoxy. 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. They never accepted that burden. They took it as axiomatic that a virus could be intimidated and frightened by credentials, edicts, speeches, and masked gendarmes.
How Belarus Exposes the Lockdown Lie (19/12-20): Most European governments instituted the shutdown of economies, restrictions on freedom of movement and other policies known as lockdown. This was allegedly in response to the spread of Sars-Cov-2, a dangerous respiratory virus that originated in Wuhan, China.
Few countries rejected this approach; Sweden is the most well known of these. However, a more interesting case of dissent from the official narrative is Belarus and its leader Aleksandr Lukashenka.
This article will outline Lukashenka’s approach to the alleged pandemic, followed by an analysis of death figures and how the Belarussian case exposes the lies of lockdown advocates.
The Great Covid Class War (16/12-20): The pandemic has created the perfect pretext for enacting economically destructive policies.
“This is not an unforced error or a good policy idea implemented poorly. It is an economic agenda disguised as a health protocol.”
“Income is the main determinant of covid mortality.”
Remnants of the covid class war will touch every domain of life for decades. Officials have suggested that social distancing will need to continue even after mandatory vaccinations. Masks have become a potent symbol of both physical purity and mutual mistrust. Our fantasy of a sanitized and deathless society has created a world where the home is a prison and friends and family are a health hazard. In this world children are told they are killing their grandparents simply by existing. Right now we are still at the beginning of sweeping changes that may include social credit, immunity passports, a rent-only economy, AI and robotics expansion, financialization of natural resources, increased mass surveillance, the Uberization of everything, and rolling lockdowns for climate change or the flu. We have a limited window of time to reclaim the things that make life worth living: family, community, cultural heritage, the social sphere, public institutions, common spaces, and free movement. That window may be closing quickly, but it is not fully closed yet.
Covid and The Rise of Cage Keeper Democracy (15/12-20): «The 2020 pandemic showed what it takes to sway many Americans to accept absolute power: merely the endless recitation of the phrase “science and data.” It didn’t matter that the science continually changed or that the data was often worse than useless. Instead, people who cheered any policy portrayed as based on “science and data” proved that they were part of the intellectual elite – even if that meant simply having a B.S. degree in sociology from a fourth-tier college that has not rejected any student who applied for admission since the Reagan era.»
«An 1875 article in the American Law Review warned that the Civil War “left the average American politician with a powerful desire to acquire property from other people without paying for it.” In the same way, the Covid pandemic is fueling many politicians’ passion for destroying Americans’ freedom based on the flimsiest pretexts. Thus far, politicians have paid no price for their constitutional demolitions. The only certainty is that much of the media and legions of activists will cheer the next lockdown.»
Effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19: A Tale of Three Models (10/12-20): Inferences on effects of NPIs are non-robust and highly sensitive to model specification. Claimed benefits of lockdown appear grossly exaggerated.
“Every Store And School Should Be Open.” Confronting The Pandemic With Confidence (7/12-20), interview with David Redman who retired as executive director of the Alberta Emergency Management Agency in 2005.
Chairman of the FMF (Free Market Foundation) Rule of Law Board of Advisors and a former judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa, Rex van Schalkwyk, delivers opening remarks at an FMF round-table(2/12-20).
No shit?!? On political bullying, authoritarian dictatorship, The Great Reset and dystopian future where "we will own nothing, and we will be happy". Sounds familiar?!?
Lockdown 2: The New Totalitarianism
Lockdown 1: The Dark Side of History. Are we Doomed to Repeat it?
Confinement et santé mentale : 20% des Français auraient pensé au suicide (30/11-20): Après deux confinements, les statistiques ne sont pas très bonnes : la crise sanitaire aurait un impact réellement nocif sur la santé mentale des Français. Zoom sur ce phénomène.
Japan didn't even have a lockdown and the impact of Covid there is very minimal compared to other countries, but they still have an increase in the number of suicides. In October, more people died of suicide than of Covid!!! And women are increasingly taking their own lives as they lose work and take on the bulk of family responsibilities at home during this horrible mess.
That suggests other countries might see a similar or even bigger increase in the number of suicides in the future. Scary and alarming - we all read and hear of more and more people taking their life during this clustefuck all around!!!
What NO ONE is Saying About The Lockdowns (24/11-20):
"Now those advocating for lockdowns have seen the destruction and death that those policies have wrought this year and we are living through that right now. Not only are people being deprived of their livelihoods and forced into grinding poverty as a direct result of these shutdowns, but now the undeniable truth is that if you are advocating for lockdowns, you are advocating for some portion of the population to be consigned to death.
This is no longer debatable. It is even openly admitted—although months too late by the World Health Organization."
Children of Quarantine — What does a year of isolation and anxiety do to a developing brain? (24/11-20)
Não estou de acordo (23/11-20): "I do not agree with medieval methods to face a pandemic. If viruses have evolved, society's organization should also have evolved enough to fight them in another way. The curfew is typical of dark times and non-democratic societies. Prohibiting people from driving on the street stifles the economy and does not eliminate the pandemic."
Merci et bravo for this revealing vocabulary, Monsieur Lepage! Which made me sadder than ... UGH! A must-read, my friends!!! Vocabulaire de la domination, grammaire de la résignation (23/11-20):
"We have to let go of the idea that the state is concerned about our health. With a ruling class at the service of multinationals (and therefore of its interests), our bodies are objects of profit within a system in which care has become ... a commodity. The anxiety-inducing control of populations maintained by the media, their fear strategy, the disproportion between this global coercion and the comparative dangerousness of SARS COV 2, the suspension of fundamental rights, confinements, masks from six years old on, they are all preparing public opinions to new markets: such as compulsory vaccinations, in the same way that schools online prepare the global educational market. Our bodies and our people are the new gold rush of a capitalism that has no choice but to expand indefinitely the scope of its commodities."
"There is global governance of the Covid episode, identifiable by the simultaneity and similarity of responses from different governments around the world. Governance is the opposite of government and it is not the disappearance of the state but its making available to the interests of multinationals: deregulation, privatization of public services (health, education, transport, energy, etc.), bringing into line unions and opponents, and population control. This project, which was rejected in France in 2005, is the EU's program: to paralyze national political powers in order to give free rein to multinationals within the framework of international competition between capitalism. It is in all EU countries that beds have been eliminated in hospitals."
"In human history, the house arrest of an entire population is the great novelty and the great advance in capitalist exploitation. The issue of confinement is not sanitary. It is economical: it is the vaccination market which consists in selling a population to laboratories. We remember the millions of doses purchased by France for the H1 N1 virus (or more recently, the billion spent on Redemsivir from the Gilead laboratory a week before the WHO negative assessment of the effectiveness of this drug). But a population which, more than 50% (according to polls commissioned by the government), refuses the vaccine, does not represent a market worthy of the name. We were therefore warned. Short of a sufficient number of vaccinations, the epidemic will not be stopped, and the containment cannot be lifted. Therein lies the blackmail. The conspiratorial people of bad citizens will be responsible for blocking the economy and the freedom of docile citizens. Vaccination will be mandatory or will not be."
"But it works! The mask already divides the left like the veil before it!!! And as if it were not enough to ride for the Third Reich by questioning the management of this epidemic, those who risk it are given - by the virtuous left - the infamous term of conspirators, a newcomer in the semantic arsenal domination, and a new entry in the dictionary of morons."
This confinement is useless. An economic crisis is a health crisis (20/11-20) — Este confinamento não serve para nada. Uma crise económica é uma crise de saúde: O ex-presidente do Hospital de São João arrasa o governo de António Costa e diz que toda a gente sabia que a segunda vaga seria pior.
Zakaj je lockdown sploh potreben in kaj narediti, da tega “zdravila” nikoli več ne bi bilo treba uporabiti? (16/11-20): Why is lockdown necessary at all and what can be done to prevent the use of this “medicine” again?
COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink (4/11-20): The destruction of lives and livelihoods in the name of survival will haunt us for decades. The decisions we made entailed trade-offs that cannot be wished away. The most affected by the pandemic response are the poor, the marginalized, and the vulnerable, while we in high-income countries have shifted negative effect to places where they are less visible and presumably less serious. We must open up society to save many more lives than we can by attempting to avoid every case (or even most cases) of COVID-19. It is past time to take an effortful pause, calibrate our response to the true risk, make rational cost-benefit analyses of the trade-offs, and end the lockdown groupthink.
Covidicide [ koh-vid-uh-sahyd]: killing, death and destruction caused by or subsequent to COVID related measures, policies, rules, pronouncements, interventions and treatments. (3/11-20).
Association between living with children and outcomes from COVID-19: an OpenSAFELY cohort study of 12 million adults in England (2/11-20): Among 9,157,814 adults ≤65 years,
a) living with children 0-11 years was not associated with increased risks of recorded SARS-CoV-2 infection, COVID-19 related hospital or ICU admission but was associated with reduced risk of COVID-19 death (HR 0.75, 95%CI 0.62-0.92).
b) Living with children aged 12-18 years was associated with a small increased risk of recorded SARS-CoV-2 infection (HR 1.08, 95%CI 1.03-1.13), but not associated with other COVID-19 outcomes.
c) Living with children of any age was also associated with lower risk of dying from non-COVID-19 causes. Among 2,567,671 adults >65 years there was no association between living with children and outcomes related to SARS-CoV-2.
d) We observed no consistent changes in risk following school closure.
Tyranny and Eugenics through Public Health, Bioterrorism, and Vaccines Series: Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4 — Part 5 — Part 6 — Part 7
The Covidian Cult (13/10-20): «One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism is mass conformity to a psychotic official narrative. Not a regular official narrative, like the “Cold War” or the “War on Terror” narratives. A totally delusional official narrative that has little or no connection to reality and that is contradicted by a preponderance of facts.»
«The same techniques that most cult leaders use to control the minds of the members of their cults are used by totalitarian systems to control the minds of entire societies: Milieu Control, Loaded Language, Sacred Science, Demand for Purity, and other standard mind-control techniques.
It can happen to pretty much any society, just as anyone can fall prey to a cult, given the right set of circumstances.
It is happening to most of our societies right now. An official narrative is being implemented. A totalitarian official narrative. A totally psychotic official narrative, no less delusional than that of the Nazis, or the Manson family, or any other cult.»
«The global masses have been subjected to a constant stream of propaganda, manufactured hysteria, wild speculation, conflicting directives, exaggerations, lies, and tawdry theatrical effects. Lockdowns. Emergency field hospitals and morgues. The singing-dancing NHS staff. Death trucks. Overflowing ICUs. Dead Covid babies. Manipulated statistics. Goon squads. Masks. And all the rest of it.
Eight months later, here we are. The Head of the Health Emergencies Program at the WHO has basically confirmed an IFR of 0.14%, approximately the same as the seasonal flu.»
«I’m not going to go on debunking the narrative. The point is, the facts are all available. Not from “conspiracy theorist” websites. From mainstream outlets and medical experts. From the Center for Fucking Disease Control.
Which does not matter in the least, not to the members of the Covidian Cult. Facts do not matter to totalitarians and cult members. What matters is loyalty to the cult or the party.
Which means we have a serious problem, those of us to whom facts still matter, and who have been trying to use them to convince the Covidian cultists that they are wrong about the virus … for going on eight months at this point.»
Lockdown Reversal Shows That When Science Conflicts With Politics, WHO Chooses Politics (12/10-20): Odds are, the growing public opposition to the lockdowns, and news of a return to normal in places like Sweden, made WHO’s support for the measures untenable.
We’ve been played. When it was expedient, the WHO abandoned its own assessment of the science and plugged lockdowns. Now that it’s obvious the cost of the lockdowns swamps their benefits, WHO hopes to socially distance from these measures. The key lesson we should learn from all this is that when politics conflicts with science, and even their own scientific judgments, WHO opts for politics.
WHO warns against COVID-19 lockdowns due to economic damage (11/10-21): The World Health Organization has warned leaders against relying on COVID-19 lockdowns to tackle outbreaks — after previously saying countries should be careful how quickly they reopen. WHO envoy Dr. David Nabarro said such restrictive measures should only be treated as a last resort, the British magazine the Spectator reported in a video interview.
W.H.O. DOCTOR: “STOP USING LOCKDOWNS” — W.H.O.’s special envoy on COVID19, Dr. David Nabarro, sent shockwaves across the globe after repeating the same warning from countless other medical, legal and economic professionals, including The Great Barrington Declaration, by calling for an end to the use of lockdowns as a primary way to curb a pandemic, and reminding us all of the sobering reality lockdowns bring with them.
Lockdown is a terrible experiment (9/10-20)— Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff on the Great Barrington Declaration and why lockdown harms public health:
"It’s a unique experiment, and it’s a terrible experiment. I’m amazed – as are many of my colleagues – at the total focus on this disease. In a short time, we are throwing all the principles of public health out the window. Most countries in Europe had a pandemic-preparedness plan which did not recommend lockdowns, but instead proposed a risk-based strategy to protect those at high risk, which is actually the same as the focused protection we put forward in the Great Barrington Declaration. What we are proposing is, therefore, nothing revolutionary. Many people have been advocating for it throughout this pandemic, but they have not had much attention."
Effect of school closures on mortality from coronavirus disease 2019: old and new predictions (7/10-20):
“general social distancing was also projected to reduce the number of cases but increase the total number of deaths compared with social distancing of over 70 only”
“Strategies that minimise deaths involve the infected fraction primarily being in the low risk younger age groups—for example, focusing stricter social distancing measures on care homes where people are likely to die rather than schools where they are not.”
“results presented in the report suggested that the addition of interventions restricting younger people might actually increase the total number of deaths from covid-19”
Stats Hold a Surprise: Lockdowns May Have Had Little Effect on COVID-19 Spread (4/10-20): Data suggest mandatory lockdowns exacted a great cost, with a questionable effect on transmission.
PUBLIC HEALTH COSTLY MISTAKES – LOCKDOWNS AND LIES (1/10-20): «The true terror of Covid-19 is the destructive response from public health authorities. Costly mistakes which have hurt innocent lives. Public health is pulling the strings to create a nightmarish New Normal, and their only solution is a new vaccine. Don’t call them “LOCKDOWNS”, they are SOCIAL ISOLATION.»
Former White House official on Deadly Cost of Lockdown: With Europe and parts of the US headed for more Lockdowns, journalist and former White House official, Darren Beattie, has incredible insight into the impact of Covid lockdowns so far. Are we losing far more lives than we are saving? This story is too important to miss.
PERPETUAL LOCKDOWNS: The New Normal Public Health System? (24/9-20): The original lockdown plan went from “flatten the curve” to “reduce coronavirus deaths at all costs” based on a testing system.
This is so sad, unnecessary, cruel … INHUMAN …and it's happening all over the world!!! A Forgotten Generation: Our elderly have been under quarantine in America for close to six months. They are dying alone in hospitals & their families are denied proper funeral services. Stefani Reinold, MD, MPH, joins Del and Catharine Layton, COO of ICAN, who also lost her grandfather during the pandemic, in an emotional segment on the real toll lockdowns are having on our most vulnerable and forgotten population.
Lockdown Will Kill More Than Covid-19 Does (22/9-20): Germany’s Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, Gerd Muller, has warned that lockdown measures throughout the globe will end up killing more people than the Covid-19 itself.
Did COVID-19 infections decline before UK lockdown? (21/9-20): The currently most reliable data strongly suggest that the decline in infections in England and Wales began before full lockdown, and that community infections, unlike deaths, were probably at a low level well before lockdown was eased. Furthermore, such a scenario would be consistent with the infection profile in Sweden, which began its decline.
Covid-19: How does Belarus have one of the lowest death rates in Europe? (15/9-20): Belarus’s beleaguered government remains unfazed by covid-19. President Aleksander Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, has flatly denied the seriousness of the pandemic, refusing to impose a lockdown, close schools, or cancel mass events like the Belarusian football league or the Victory Day parade. Yet the country’s death rate is among the lowest in Europe—just over 700 in a population of 9.5 million with over 73 000 confirmed cases.
Modeling social distancing strategies to prevent SARS-CoV2 spread in Israel- A Cost-effectiveness analysis (10/9-20): “We show that [lockdown] is modestly superior in saving lives compared to [focused protection], but with tremendous costs to prevent one case of death. This might result in overwhelming economic effects that are expected to increase future death toll.”
Four Stylized Facts about COVID-19 (Aug. '20): We document four facts about the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide relevant for those studying the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on COVID-19 transmission.
First: across all countries and U.S. states that we study, the growth rates of daily deaths from COVID-19 fell from a wide range of initially high levels to levels close to zero within 20-30 days after each region experienced 25 cumulative deaths. Second: after this initial period, growth rates of daily deaths have hovered around zero or below everywhere in the world. Third: the cross section standard deviation of growth rates of daily deaths across locations fell very rapidly in the first 10 days of the epidemic and has remained at a relatively low level since then. Fourth: when interpreted through a range of epidemiological models, these first three facts about the growth rate of COVID deaths imply that both the effective reproduction numbers and transmission rates of COVID-19 fell from widely dispersed initial levels and the effective reproduction number has hovered around one after the first 30 days of the epidemic virtually everywhere in the world.
We argue that failing to account for these four stylized facts may result in overstating the importance of policy mandated NPIs for shaping the progression of this deadly pandemic.
Virus Threatens to Set Back Poor Nations by 10 Years, IMF Says (27/8-20): Low-income countries face long-term scarring that could undo gains in cutting poverty achieved over the past seven to 10 years because of damage from the Covid-19 pandemic, the International Monetary Fund said.
Professor Mark Woolhouse (26/8-20; UK): Lockdown will come to be seen as a «monumental mistake on a global scale« and must never happen again. The equivalent of 400 million jobs have been lost world-wide, 13 million in the U.S. alone.
The Tyranny of Coronaphobia (24/8-20): »I am concerned that the majority of people can be successfully terrorised into surrendering their individual freedoms», says Ramesh Thakur
Academic and former UN Assistant Secretary General Ramesh Thakur had suffered under the pressure, propaganda and manipulation that preceded the Iraq war of 2003. Seventeen years later, he sees history repeating itself with the coronavirus pandemic—especially with the imposition of quarantines. With arguments and data, albeit controversially, the Indian-born, Canadian-educated political scientist and international security expert—who worked around the globe, settled in Australia and reached the frontline of the UN—fears that “coronaphobia” is preventing us from seeing the whole picture.
Authoritarian Weaknesses and the Pandemic (11/8-20): «As the biggest governance test in recent memory—one that many authoritarians are failing—the pandemic and its ensuing economic devastation will turbocharge this underlying driver of global political change. Thus, despite the spike in repressive measures that the coronavirus has produced so far, the medium- to long-term prospects for many authoritarian governments are less certain today than they were before the pandemic hit.»
Invasion of the New Normals (10/8-20): “They’re here! No, not the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We’re not being colonized by giant alien fruit. I’m afraid it is a little more serious than that. People’s minds are being taken over by a much more destructive and less otherworldly force … a force that transforms them overnight into aggressively paranoid, order-following, propaganda-parroting totalitarians.”
The way that usually happens is, people tell themselves it isn’t happening, it can’t be happening, not to us. They tell themselves this as the totalitarian program is implemented, step by step, one seemingly harmless step at a time. They conform, because, at first, the stakes aren’t so high, and their conformity leads to more conformity, and the next thing they know they’re telling their grandchildren that they had no idea where the trains were going.
If you have made it through to the end of this essay, your mind hasn’t been taken over yet … the New Normals clicked off around paragraph 2.
What that means is that it is your responsibility to speak up, and to do whatever else you can, to stop the New Normal future from becoming a reality. You will not be rewarded for it. You will be ridiculed and castigated for it. Your New Normal friends will hate you for it. Your New Normal family will forsake you for it. The New Normal police might arrest you for it. It is your responsibility to do it anyway … as, of course, it is also mine.
Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison (6/8-20): Evidence does not suggest that lockdowns have significantly affected the development of mortality in Europe.
It has nevertheless wreaked economic havoc in most societies and may lead to a substantial number of additional deaths for other reasons. A British government report from April for example assessed that a limited lockdown could cause 185,000 excess deaths over the next years (DHSC, 2020).
Evaluated as a whole, at a first glance, the lockdown policies of the Spring of 2020 therefore appear to be substantial long-run government failures.
Seroprevalence of COVID-19 in Niger State (5/8-20): “This study shows that the virus is already here, and we must find ways of living with it such that it caused no or minimal human and socioeconomic losses in ... Nigeria as a whole…. going back to the lockdown should never again be entertained.”
A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes (21/7-20): The findings of this country level analysis on COVID-19 related health outcomes suggest that low levels of national preparedness, scale of testing, as well as population characteristics such as obesity, advanced age and higher per capita GDP are associated with increased national case load and mortality.
Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19 in Europe: A quasi-experimental study (17/7-20): Relaxing stay-at-home orders and allowing reopening of non-essential businesses appeared to be the lowest risk measures to relax as part of plans to carefully lift COVID-19 lockdown measures.
When Will the Madness End? (10/7-20): A thin, wise-looking bearded man with Freud-style glasses sat down across from me, having just left the studio. He was there to catch his breath following his interview but he looked deeply troubled.
“There is fear in the air,” I said, breaking the silence.
“Madness is all around us. The public is adopting a personality disorder I’ve been treating my whole career.”
“What is it that you do?” I asked.
“I’m a practicing psychiatrist who specializes in anxiety disorders, paranoid delusions, and irrational fear. I’ve been treating this in individuals as a specialist. It’s hard enough to contain these problems in normal times. What’s happening now is a spread of this serious medical condition to the whole population. It can happen with anything but here we see a primal fear of disease turning into mass panic. It seems almost deliberate. It is tragic. Once this starts, it could take years to repair the psychological damage.”
I sat there a bit stunned, partially because speaking in such apocalyptic terms was new in those days, and because of the certitude of his opinion. Underlying his brief comments were a presumption that there was nothing particularly unusual about this virus. We’ve evolved with them, and learned to treat them with calm and professionalism. What distinguished the current moment, he was suggesting, was not the virus but the unleashing of a kind of public madness.
Exploring inter-country coronavirus mortality (9/7-20): «We then examined lockdown stringency and WHO healthcare rankings, finding no relevance.»
Too Little of a Good Thing A Paradox of Moderate Infection Control (1/7-20): Epidemic theory dictates that a reduction in the force of infection by a pathogen is associated with an increase in the average age at which individuals are exposed. For those pathogens that cause more severe disease among hosts of an older age, interventions that limit transmission can paradoxically increase the burden of disease in a population.
Excess Deaths From COVID-19 and Other Causes, March-April 2020 (1/7-20):
“Restrictions imposed by the pandemic (eg, stay-at-home orders) could claim lives indirectly through delayed care for acute emergencies, exacerbation of chronic diseases, and psychological distress (eg, drug overdoses).”
“In 14 states, more than 50% of excess deaths were attributed to underlying causes other than COVID-19; these included California (55% of excess deaths) and Texas (64% of excess deaths)."
Was Germany’s Corona Lockdown Necessary? (23/6-20): In evaluating the necessity of NPIs during the corona crises, data quality is crucially important. Employing reported cases yields meaningless results because these data come with uncertain and variable lags that make it impossible to determine the path of the spread of the virus precisely. Using incident cases is highly preferable if such data are available. With known dates of the onset of symptoms, researches must only subtract an incubation period of 5 days to determine the true dynamics of infections.
Official data from Germany’s RKI agency suggest strongly that the spread of the corona virus in Germany receded autonomously, before any interventions become effective. Several reasons for such an autonomous decline have been suggested. One is that differences in host susceptibility and behavior can result in herd immunity at a relatively low prevalence level. Accounting for individual variation in susceptibility or exposure to the coronavirus yields a maximum of 17% to 20% of the population that needs to be infected to reach herd immunity, an estimate that is empirically supported by the cohort of the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Another reason is that seasonality may also play an important role in dissipation. Finally, the ineffectiveness of the NPIs is also supported by empirical studies that determine their effects directly. Recent studies have shown that children are less involved in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 than adults, suggesting that the closure of schools and kindergartens contributes little to curbing the spread of SARS-CoV-2. This finding is supported by studies of previous pandemics: A review of the effects of school closures regarding the spread of SARS-1 in China, Hong Kong, and Singapore in 2003 found only marginal effects. A more recent study that employs German county data is also fully consistent with our findings.
Study Led by D.A. Henderson — The Man Who Eradicated Smallpox — Found Draconian Lockdowns for Flu Pandemics Ineffective and Even Destructive (17/5-20): Draconian “lockdowns” for pandemic flus were rejected as ineffective and destructive, in a seminal 2006 paper, on infectious disease & socioeconomic grounds, by serious, experienced epidemiologists, led by D.A. Henderson, who eradicated smallpox: Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza
Commentary: Estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe (5/11-20): 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.
Trajectory of COVID-19 epidemic in Europe (28/9-20): The release of the modelling code and dataset used by Flaxman et al is a valuable contribution to transparent evaluation of infectious disease modelling. However once the unrealistic assumption of no individual variation in susceptibility or connectivity is relaxed, the model does not support their estimate that lockdown reduced the case reproduction number R by 81% or that more than three million deaths were averted by non-pharmaceutical interventions.
Did lockdowns really save 3 million COVID-19 deaths, as Flaxman et al. claim (20/6-20)
Estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe (8/6-20) by Flaxman et al.
Lockdowns failed to reduce deaths in the US (June '20)
Smart Thinking, Lockdown and COVID-19: Implications for Public Policy (26/5-20): “Current policy can be misdirected and can therefore have long and even short-term negative effects on human welfare and thus result in not actually minimizing death rates (incorporating externalities), especially in the long run.”
Full lockdown policies in Western Europe countries have no evident impacts on the COVID-19 epidemic (1/5-20): It should be pointed out that, since the full lockdown strategies are shown to have no impact on the epidemic’s slowdown, one should consider their potentially high inherent death toll as a net loss of human lives.
The end of exponential growth: The decline in the spread of coronavirus (19/4-20): A similar pattern – rapid increase in infections to a peak in the sixth week, and decline from the eighth week – is common everywhere, regardless of response policies.
In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, They Rejected Lockdowns (12/1-21): «The Asian flu of 1957-58 was a deadly pandemic with a broader reach for severe outcomes than Covid-19 of 2020. It killed between 1 and 4 million people worldwide, and 116,000 in the US in a time with half the population. It was a leading contributor to a year in which the US saw 62,000 excess deaths.
What’s striking is how public health officials handled the pandemic. It had a diametrically opposite response than policymakers pursued in 2020. One might assume that this was due to negligence and a lack of sophistication in understanding the need to lockdown. Surely they didn’t know 65 years ago what we know today!
Actually, this is completely false. Public health experts did in fact consider school closures, business closures, and a ban of public events but the entire ethos of the profession rejected them. There were two grounds for this rejection: lockdowns would be too disruptive, disabling the capacity of medical professionals to deal competently with the crisis, and also because such policies would be futile because the virus was already here and spreading.
Whereas lockdowns in the Covid-19 case might have contributed to a lengthening of the crisis by delaying herd immunity, the period in which the Asian flu had the most severe consequences was only three months. Newspapers barely covered it and most people did not notice it. Histories of the period hardly mention it whereas the early history of 2020 will talk primarily about the virus and the lockdowns. This is due not to the pandemic but to the brutal pandemic policy response.«
Hong Kong Flu Pandemic of 1968-69, No Lockdown, Woodstock Happened Instead (16/5-20): Did you know there was a huge flu pandemic in 1968 and 1969 with about 1 million deaths worldwide attributed to that flu? It was called the “Hong Kong flu”, or H3N2 influenza virus.
That flu pandemic also affected the elderly above 65 the most, with about 100,000 deaths in the US. Also note that the US population back then was 200 million instead of the current 328 million.
That’s a 0.05% of the population dead from H3N2, compared to now at 0.0255% of the population allegedly dead from COVID-19. Allegedly, because we know the numbers are inflated/padded. COVID-19 is half as deadly, so far, given the bogus numbers we have.
Did the world go into lockdown then?
No. The economy wasn’t tanked. People weren’t forced to not go to work. People weren’t forced into unemployment. The government has done that now though. They didn’t even do social distancing that is now being force upon us, with the coercive threat of theft in fins or assault in arrests.
Instead of social isolation, the opposite happened. Woodstock happened in 1969. Imagine that! A large gathering of people, in close contact, while a pandemic was taking place.
Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic (1/5-20): In my lifetime, there was another deadly flu epidemic in the United States. The flu spread from Hong Kong to the United States, arriving December 1968 and peaking a year later. It ultimately killed 100,000 people in the U.S., mostly over the age of 65, and one million worldwide.
Then & Now: How We Dealt With The Flu In '69 (24/12-20)
Waves Of Mutilation: Medical Tyranny And The Cashless Society (01/04-20): Back in 2014 during the Ebola scare in the US I published an article warning about how a global pandemic could be used by the elites as cover for the implementation of an economic collapse as well as martial law measures in western nations. My immediate concern was the way in which a viral outbreak could be engineered or exploited as a rationale for a level of social control that the public would never accept under normal circumstances. And this could be ANY viral outbreak, not just Ebola. The point is the creation of an “invisible enemy” that the populace cannot quantify and defend itself against without constant government oversight.
I noted specifically how the government refused to apply air travel restrictions in 2014 to nations where the outbreak had taken hold when they could have stopped the spread in its tracks. This is something that was done again in 2020 as the UN's WHO and governments including our government in the US refused to stop air travel from China, pretending as if it was not a hot zone and that the virus was nothing to worry about.
This attitude of nonchalance serves a purpose. The establishment NEEDS the pandemic to spread, because then they have a rationale for strict controls of pubic activities and movements. This is the end goal. They have no care whatsoever for public health or safety. The end game is to acquire power, not save lives. In fact, they might prefer a higher death count in the beginning as this would motivate the public to beg for more restrictions in the name of security.
Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza (2006): Michael Yeadon has mentioned and recommended this paper, written by a team of epidemiologists led by perhaps the most famous of them all, Don Henderson (credited with smallpox eradication).
They wrote it as a warning against precisely what’s happening right now. It’s worth reading as it carefully weighs up the evidence of effectiveness vs harms which, unaccountably, no analysis of NPIs against SARS-CoV-2 does. Their main conclusion is essential reading:
“Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”
In short, there was no need to "inventing hot water" last year, as we could describe implementation of authoritative technocratic mandates which are destroying people's lives, businesses and economy. That's not the only paper and knowledge source on the subject but it's definitely a really good and thorough one.
Yep, it was never about our health, it's all about their profit and control and whatever else will really follow. Whether you wish to see it or not.
The 2006 Origins of the Lockdown Idea (May 2020): Now begins the grand effort, on display in thousands of articles and news broadcasts daily, somehow to normalize the lockdown and all its destruction of the last two months. We didn’t lock down almost the entire country in 1968/69, 1957, or 1949-1952, or even during 1918. But in a terrifying few days in March 2020, it happened to all of us, causing an avalanche of social, cultural, and economic destruction that will ring through the ages.
There was nothing normal about it all. We’ll be trying to figure out what happened to us for decades hence.
How did a temporary plan to preserve hospital capacity turn into two-to-three months of near-universal house arrest that ended up causing worker furloughs at 256 hospitals, a stoppage of international travel, a 40% job loss among people earning less than $40K per year, devastation of every economic sector, mass confusion and demoralization, a complete ignoring of all fundamental rights and liberties, not to mention the mass confiscation of private property with forced closures of millions of businesses?
Whatever the answer, it’s got to be a bizarre tale.
One could find many real reasons for lockdowns in this Rancourt's report; and they have nothing to do with a “novel coronavirus”.
GEO-ECONOMICS AND GEO-POLITICS DRIVE SUCCESSIVE ERAS OF PREDATORY GLOBALIZATION AND SOCIAL ENGINEERING: Historical emergence of climate change, gender equity, and anti-racism as State doctrines (April 2019), e.g.
«The large acceleration and expansion of globalization occurring immediately after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union is not generally recognized as having been a USA response to the said fall, but it should be recognized as such. There was a large acceleration of globalization, both structural and in terms of extension and volume, and there can be little doubt that it was a response to the newly apparent geopolitical and ideological fracture.
At the same time, in express response to the end of the Cold War, the UN undertook an unprecedented flurry of highly mediatized world conferences. Most notably, the UN advanced new paradigms of global concern that can be categorized as “climate change”, “gender-equity”, and “anti-racism”; and put in place declarations and plans to institutionalize and legalize these new paradigms of global concern.
The said new paradigms of global concern are siloed and sanitized concerns, in-effect devoid of social-class, development-disparity, exploitation-structure and nation-sovereignty practical dimensions. They became global and state “religions” to pacify, hypnotize, and align populations for continued globalization, including the first steps towards a global carbon economy (with carbon traded in US dollars).
The government, scientific, academic, education, NGO, and media sectors embraced and promoted the new paradigms of global concern. All globally-controlled corporations greened and equified. There could never be enough climate change prevention, gender equity, or racial social justice; and all problems and risks were due to deficits in climate change prevention, gender equity, and racial social justice.»
«The only effective resistance against globalization in the West has become the recent electoral and demonstrative revolts related to the Brexit vote, the Trump electoral victory, and the Gilets jaunes movement, all newly understood as the class conflict between the deplorables and the bobos-and-elites, between the sedentary rural inhabitants (the “somewheres”) and the globalist urbanites (the “anywheres”).
Thus, it is no accident that the deplorables express their particular multi-faceted array of complaints from needed economic revitalization of the rural nation, to rejection of carbon taxation, to repudiation of the gender-equity and anti-racism programs, including censorship and political correctness.»
