We already know that lockdowns were the worst public health policy failure since, well, ever. Or at least in the past couple of centuries or so. The pro-lockdown narrative has been completely laid waste long ago, and can never be even remotely rehabilitated by even the most intellectually dishonest cranks and intellectual poseurs in the future. History will NOT be kind to the lockdown zealots at all!
And just when you thought we have already seen the most unflattering studies of all, a new one comes along that makes lockdowns look even worse still. This new study looked at differences in all-cause death rates among various pairs of neighboring US states in which one state imposed a mandatory stay-at-home order in the spring of 2020 and the other did not. (For completeness, the authors also looked at lockdown states that did not share a border with non-lockdown states as well.) In using all-cause mortality data, they sidestep the biggest possible source of bias, namely differences in how Covid deaths are counted, and also capture at least some of the collateral damage of lockdowns as well. There were in fact a total of ten non-lockdown states, so that gives us plenty of comparisons for how lockdowns or lack thereof worked in practice in an American context.
After adjusting for a host of potential health and demographic confounders, the results were more likely to favor the non-lockdown states. That is, on average, the lockdown states actually had higher death rates than the ten non-lockdown states. Thus, one can firmly conclude that the lockdowns did more harm than good, effectively killing more people than they saved. Read that again, let it sink in, and remember that deaths are just the tip of a very large iceberg of collateral damage.
Oh, and by the way, the authors found that this was true regardless of whether they restricted their analysis to 1) the first Covid wave only, 2) the lockdown period only, or 3) the entire period from March 2020 up to and including January 2022.
As William Farr (of Farr's Law fame) famously said, "the death rate is a fact, anything beyond this is an inference". And the inferences we can draw from this study about these worse-than-useless policies are quite damning indeed. The lockdown zealots really have blood on their hands, it seems, likely to the tune of 110,000 excess deaths according to this study.
And that's just for the lockdowns proper. How about masks? Well, there's that pesky Foegen Effect, impaired gas exchange, microplastic fibers, bacteria and mold growth, and of course the killing of our oceans when billions of them are disposed of. Plus, they don't really work. School closures? Also more harm than good, at least in the long run. Forced business closures? Self-explanatory, and self-evidently more harm than good (and also subsumed under lockdowns as well). Forced restrictions of healthcare? Again, also self-explanatory, and self-evidently more harm than good. "Flattening the curve" is literally nothing more than prolonging the worst of the pandemic, any way you slice it.
And the jabs? Well, those on balance also seem to be worse than useless as well for most people, and especially for kids. Locking down and otherwise imposing restrictions while we waited for them to arrive was clearly NOT worth it at all. And while we may never know exactly how many excess deaths were due to exactly which cause, be it the virus, the lockdowns and NPIs, or adverse reactions to the jabs, the latter are highly unlikely to be trivial either.
On that fateful day in March 2020, the hard-won wisdom of the ages, based on over a century of research, was summarily thrown out the window like so much garbage by people who really should have known better. The official pandemic playbooks of several countries such as the USA, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, among other countries, and even the WHO as recently as 2019, not only did NOT promote the use of mass quarantines, let alone full lockdowns, but actually advised against doing so. And while such time-tested advice was mainly geared toward influenza pandemics, at least some of the national playbooks (especially for the UK) explicitly applied this same reasoning to a potential "SARS-like coronavirus" pandemic as well. Thus, this can be considered a classic example of a Chesterton's Fence: before you remove a fence, be sure you know why it was put up in the first place. Second-order thinking was clearly NOT being done here at all, it seems.
And even that is being charitable, assuming that the lockdown zealots were simply good people who made bad decisions because they panicked, when clearly some if not most of them had less-than-lofty ulterior motives that later became readily apparent once the initial "fog of war" had largely lifted.
The biggest question now is, will future generations ever forgive us? Because that will be a pretty tall order for them indeed, as the regrettable consequences of the past two and a half years will continue to reverberate for decades to come. And those who pushed for these worse-than-useless policies, doubling down and refusing to listen to reason, have an indelible stain on their honor.
UPDATE: See the latest analysis from the ever-insightful Joel Smalley here as well. It seems that the jabs are also responsible for a good chunk of both Covid and non-Covid excess deaths as well, particularly among younger folks. After all, jab deaths and virus deaths are not mutually exclusive, as negative efficacy and host compromising can represent a collision of both factors together.
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