Well, here we go again. One more time for the slow kids still gawping at the Sole Source of Truth (although, let’s be honest, if they haven’t figured it out for themselves by now, they never will)…
Lockdowns made things worse.
Don’t take my word for it, either.
As BFD readers, smart bunch that they are, will recall I’ve been trying to get this truth across for over two years, from the first time scholars like Wilfred Reilly crunched the numbers and spotted the glaringly obvious. Since then, the evidence has only deepened: there is no correlation between the raft of restrictions imposed by panicked governments and power-drunk public health bureaucrats and Covid cases and deaths. Worse, there is a direct and catastrophic correlation between restrictions and other health and economic outcomes.
Whenever anyone tried to point this out, of course, the lackey media screeched, “How dare you put economics before morals!” But this ignores the fact that economics is, at heart, moral philosophy. Economic decisions are basically moral decisions: how to distribute scarce resources for maximum benefit. Every decision, therefore, is a trade-off.
The University of Melbourne’s Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell observed in relation to Covid (on September 19, 2020) that, ‘Decision-makers must consider the role of [quality-adjusted life year (QALY)]. In simple terms, it assumes that a life near its end, whether because of disease or advanced age, is empirically different to a healthy life closer to its beginning.’
For all their self-righteous moralising, this is exactly the trade-off that the lockdown brigade made. They decided that the value of saving a few extra weeks of life for the very, very old and very, very sick outweighed every other consideration. For all their pontificating about “save lives!”, they quite clearly decided that lives at their extreme end (the median age of Covid deaths is older than the median life-span) were worth more than any others.
We know for a fact that lockdowns and the resultant losses of business and employment led directly to suicides. So, there’s lives that the Covidians didn’t care to save. We were warned very early on – warnings which have been borne out – that cancelling routine checkups, scans and elective surgeries would lead to a spike in deaths from cancers and other causes. That’s more lives that the Covidians didn’t care to save.
Specialists are warning that the “Covid generation” have been cursed with long-term cognitive and social damage. The Covidians cared more about people at the very ends of the lives than they did about a generation just beginning theirs.
Alongside QALY, Professor Paul Fritjers has coined “wellbeing year” (WELLBY). Which is exactly the sort of thing that one might think would be at the centre of Jacinda Ardern’s moral calculus.
A WELLBY captures the kinds of harms to human wellbeing (such as lost relationships, heightened anxiety, or lost motivation) that are difficult to capture in traditional ways. WELLBYs are capable of being converted into QALYs.
Thus, we have the tools today to evaluate the impact of lockdowns, border closures and mandatory masks on the overall wellbeing of people, not just their impact on any Covid deaths reduced.
So, how do Australia and New Zealand’s Covid policies measure up on this sort of broad-spectrum analysis? Professor Gigi Foster of the University of New South Wales first analysed Victoria’s lockdowns. Now, she has broadened it to the whole of Australia.
Its highlights are:
1. The government has lied about the magnitude of the Covid pandemic, which is 50-500 times less lethal than the Spanish flu. Once we consider the fact that Covid kills mainly the elderly, its effective lethality is even less.
2. Lockdowns have prevented a maximum of around 10,000 Covid deaths during 2020-21 in Australia, not the 40,000 lives Mr Morrison claims to have saved.
3. There were at least 7,940 additional non-Covid deaths from lockdowns in the first two years of the pandemic (in fact, there were more: ABS data shows over 3,000 excess cancer deaths just in 2021 of people so terrorised by the lockdowns and hysteria in 2020 that they did not get their cancer identified and treated in time).
4. Every policy-driven harm that reduces our lifespan or earning power, every harm to our children and every harm through reduced capacity of the government to buy wellbeing is added up in the CBA. Gigi Foster estimates that the harms from lockdowns exceed any benefits by at least 36 times.
This [cost-benefit analysis] estimate is not an outlier. It is consistent with innumerable CBAs that have by now been published across the world which show similar (or even greater) orders of magnitude of harm from lockdowns.
Spectator Australia
Its applicability to New Zealand is obvious, given the closeness of our two nations. In fact, the harm from New Zealand’s lockdowns is almost certainly worse: with its small population and extreme geographic isolation, New Zealand was always at very little risk from Covid.
So, we know that Covid restrictions were appalling policy. All we need to know now is whether those responsible for this catastrophic stupidity will ever be held to account.
Wait, I think we know that one, too.