We at The BFD have been reporting it for over a year, now – and finally, the mainstream media are beginning, ever so slowly, to catch on.
What I’m talking about is the now-undeniable evidence that lockdowns do not work.
New Zealand’s ‘COVID Queen’ might like to boast that a “hard and early” lockdown “saved” New Zealand from the Wuhan plague, but that’s an utter falsehood. Leave aside the reality that Jacinda Ardern dithered for weeks before plunging the country into a brutal, damaging lockdown. In fact, Ardern hung on until just days before a planned mass memorial service in Christchurch, before apparently deciding that COVID Queenery was a bigger vote-winner than another hijab photo-op.
The truth is that countries like Australia and New Zealand – low population, remote islands – were never going to be at any great risk of COVID. New Zealand’s lack of significant mass transit systems, one of the biggest vectors for transmission, made it even less so. In fact, only one action by both governments probably made any significant contribution: restricting international travel, especially from the epicentre of the pandemic, China.
One of the world’s top scientists has questioned the benefits of lockdowns, suggesting shutting the international border — and a lack of COVID-19 in the first place — were better explanations for Australia’s success than mandatory social distancing.
Stanford University professor John Ioannidis, among the world’s top epidemiologists, also said he couldn’t rule out SARS-Cov2 having escaped from the Chinese virology lab in Wuhan, where the virus first emerged.
Remember when we were pooh-poohed as crazy conspiracists for suggesting the same (increasingly likely) possibility?
His comments come soon after a third lockdown in Perth and confirmation by Scott Morrison that Australia’s border will remain shut “indefinitely” as the nation pursues what has become a highly popular “zero COVID” strategy.
Professor Ioannidis, whose 2005 research paper Why Most Published Research Findings are False is among the most-read academic articles in history, also urged Australia to “push for vaccination very fast (given) you have very few people infected”.
“Otherwise I don’t see another way out. You will get your wave sooner or later,” he added.
“Zero COVID” is yet another political myth. Unless politicians want to seal off our countries indefinitely, the virus will continue to emerge. As we have seen in both New Zealand and Australia, even with a quarantine, the virus sporadically leaks into the community.
Meanwhile, politicians and bureaucrats continue with their Big Lie: lockdowns.
“What’s common to Australia and New Zealand and Taiwan, for instance, isn’t lockdowns but probably a much lower seeding of the virus to begin with, and the ability to close international borders easily and promptly,” he said.
“Almost all the countries that did lockdown did very badly. Lockdown is not the common theme for the success stories.”
His latest research with Sydney University statistician Sally Cripps, looking at 11 European countries, found lockdowns had “little or no benefit” as they were typically introduced after the “r rate”, or the reproduction number, had already started declining.
Unfortunately, people who live on a spoon-fed diet of mainstream media don’t seem to be inclined to critical thinking. Politicians, even less so.
Lockdown enthusiasts are victims of a classic failure of logical thinking: the Post Hoc fallacy. Basically, the mistake is to assume that, just because Y followed X, X must have caused Y.
An example might be that, because the rooster crowed just before the sunrise, therefore the rooster must have caused the sunrise.
Professor Ioannidis said: “It’s very likely these extra lockdowns (in Australia) are not helpful, but the problem is once something seems to have worked as a package, people don’t want to remove any of the components.”
The Australian
To compound the error, not only are politicians clearly deficient in the critical thinking department, there’s another reason they love lockdowns: Power. COVID panic has suddenly gifted politicians and bureaucrats almost unchallenged power to lock down a meekly-compliant population at will.
And there’s nothing a politician or a bureaucrat loves quite like the taste of untrammelled power.
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