Over the last five years, the difference between a “conspiracy theory” and “news” has become a mere matter of time. Even more notably, the difference between “dangerous misinformation” and “The Science™” has narrowed to just a few months.
Just a few months ago, it was “The Science™” that Covid vaccines stopped people spreading the virus. Our Sole Sources of Truth told us so. Any claim to the contrary was “dangerous misinformation”.
Yet, now it’s just the news that the vaccines never did any such thing — and their makers knew it.
When I first started reporting for The BFD, in the early months of the pandemic, that lockdowns were ineffective and even counter-productive, I was frequently denounced as a conspiracy theorist, “Covidiot”, and “misinformation” spreader. Now?
Now, it’s mainstream news.
Were lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) effective tools in reducing the fatality rate of COVID? Second, did the consequences of those interventions usurp any alleged benefits?
You could have found the answers to those questions (“no”, and “no”) from The BFD as early as April, 2020. But, hey, it was just “disinformation” back then.
Not anymore.
With regards to the first question, thankfully, because different countries and states took different approaches to NPIs, we are able to compare different fatality rates from different regions.
For lockdowns to have been genuinely effective, regions that refused to take such measures would need to have experienced far higher excess deaths and COVID-related deaths. Perhaps counterintuitively, in many cases, the opposite occurred — with some regions that locked down instead experiencing more excess deaths. The most obvious (but certainly not only) example was oft-criticised Sweden […]
Sweden suffered fewer excess deaths than many other countries that undertook lengthy lockdowns, including Peru, Italy, the US, Spain, Chile, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and France. Sweden even recorded fewer relative excess deaths than Hong Kong, which still, almost three years into the pandemic, requires returning residents to quarantine for three days.
Sweden is far from the only example. Thanks to its federal system, the US provided a perfect laboratory for analysing the (in-)effectiveness of lockdowns. Within just a few months scholars like Wilfred Reilly were crunching the data and discovering the plain facts that the politicians and mainstream media condemned as “dangerous misinformation”.
South Dakota in the US provides another useful case study, having refused to impose any genuine interventions. It ended up down in 22nd spot out of 50 US states for relative COVID deaths (read the data here, when filtered by deaths per million). North Dakota, which also refused to lockdown residents, was in 33rd spot. Even Florida, which undertook limited restrictions after May 2020, ended up with a lower relative death rate than New Jersey.
It gets worse, though. Lockdowns didn’t just not work, they made things worse. Much worse: Victoria, Australia, one of the most locked-down places on Earth, at the same time had more Covid deaths than all the other Australian states combined.
The Fault Lines report provided an interesting study, showing an often negative correlation between the stringency of COVID measures and excess COVID deaths: Greece, Chile and Italy, all of which imposed stringent measures, had far higher excess deaths than the far less strict Sweden and Iceland.
Border closures, so beloved of New Zealand’s Dear Leader, were just as useless in the long term.
Border closures coupled with strict movement restrictions appeared to work well in the short term for island states like New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and Japan. But COVID rates would dramatically increase when the virus mutated into a form that even border closures couldn’t prevent.
The damning cost of lockdown fanaticism is mostly borne by the young.
Recent US NEAP test scores revealed that “the average reading score fell by five points, the largest drop since 1990. In math, scores dropped seven points, the first decline of any kind in the 50-year history of the test. Based on these results, the pandemic wiped out 20 years of student gains in both subjects” […]
A high-profile (and apolitical) recent article by The Lancet noted “[…] this generation of children could potentially lose an estimated $10 trillion globally in their life earnings.”
Why were politicians and bureaucrats so fanatically dedicated to lockdowns? Part of it is due simply to herd mentality, but another vital clue is here:
Extraordinarily, 90% of police activity during lockdowns in NSW related to enforcing pandemic rules […]
As The Lancet noted, “the epidemic response of many governments has been led by political considerations and hospital-system administrators rather than by public health considerations and specialists”.
Crikey
Lockdowns were copied wholesale from communist China, for the same reasons the CCP instituted them: control.
That’s the real reason politicians were so determined to control the narrative and attack anyone telling the truth. “Your sole source of truth” lied through its teeth and tore your country apart, and damned your children to an impoverished future.
Never, ever, forget.