As The BFD has been reporting for over year, now, lockdowns are wrong. Not just wrong: wrong. Morally wrong. Evil.
After all, the whole rationale for lockdowns was supposed to be “save lives”. But they haven’t. In fact, they’ve cost lives.
The evidence has been quite clear from very early on that lockdowns do not prevent the spread of the Chinese virus. Not only that, they caused increases in deaths from other causes, beside which COVID is the merest blip.
Worse, lockdowns have blighted the futures of a generation of young people, not just with massive debt, but a crushing mental health crisis.
As if the moral wickedness of lockdowns wasn’t thorough enough, they’ve also dealt a brutal economic and social blow to the world’s poorest.
“The wholesale abandonment of the global poor by policymakers, opinion formers in the liberal press and the global rich in general is one of the most repugnant features of the international response to the pandemic,” says Toby Green, a prize-winning author and professor of African history at King’s College London.
Despite their endless preening in daily propaganda broadcasts, the so-called “public health experts” have got almost every policy, from hotel quarantine to lockdowns, consistently wrong. “The science” has been anything but. On the other hand, even comedians have been able to clearly see what politicians and bureaucrats, not to mention the media, simply cannot or will not.
His new book, The Covid Consensus, is a meticulously referenced, shocking catalogue of Western hypocrisy and the destruction wrought by global lockdowns on the poorest nations – “worse than the threat of Covid-19 by several orders of magnitude”[…]
“The collateral damage has been so appalling that the lockdowns trialled in 2020 should never again be implemented,” Green says, taking aim at the “ultra nationalist” outlooks of nations such as Australia and New Zealand, which locked down “without caring what the global consequences might be”.
Reality directly contradicts the absurd self-regard of Jacinda Ardern, and the fawning adulation of the New Zealand media.
All up, the consequences have been grim. Last year an extra 71 million people were pushed into extreme poverty, living on less than $US1.90 a day, according to the World Bank. The number of people “marching towards starvation” jumped by 135 million, David Beasley, head of the World Food Program, said in December.
Remittances from workers in the rich countries, which make up around half of private income in poor countries, and tourism, which makes up more than 20 per cent of Gambia’s income, for instance, collapsed.
African lockdowns wrought particular havoc on their mainly cash economies dependent on physical interaction, where about 80 per cent of jobs are informal.
About 70 per cent of households lost income and half cut back meals, according to a University of California study of Africa, Asia and Latin America, where money printing isn’t practical to finance wage subsidies.
How “kind” does Ardern look, now?
It gets worse.
“Women and children first” took on a cruel twist in the global Covid response. An extra nine million children face child labour by the end of next year, according to the International Labour Organisation in a report released last month, thanks to the economic collapse in the developing world.
An extra 10,000 a month were already dying by July last year, according to the UN, and the cessation of vaccination programs for measles and polio in many developing countries – to meet social distancing rules – will ensure many more die in the future.
The closure of schools has been bad enough in rich countries, but in Africa, where the internet is slow or absent, it means no schooling at all for up to a year.
The posturing hasn’t been limited to lab-coated media tarts. Anyone who has voiced opposition to lockdown has been howled down by a social media peanut gallery screeching the asinine slogan of “lives versus the economy”. This is morally arrogant stupidity on stilts.
[A] functioning economy is critical not only to livelihoods but also lives for many poor people. Here lies the first great political puzzle of our time.
The left, once internationalist, a champion of the world’s poor, the young, workers and women, has insisted on policies that have supercharged inequality and have foisted shocking burdens on those groups, all in a quest to extend the lives of elderly rich people – most of whom, as even British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson admitted last year, might have died in the next year anyway.
The Australian
For eighteen months we’ve had to put up with the self-righteous preening of the lockdown fanatics. It’s time these hypocrites were held to account: it’s their policies that have inflicted death and suffering on a truly horrific scale on the poor and powerless.
They ought to be ashamed of themselves.
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