by Rhoda Wilson, Expose News:
The Covid-inspired forced lockdowns on business and school closures are and have been counterproductive, not sustainable and are, quite frankly, meritless and unscientific. They have been disastrous and just plain wrong! There has been no good reason for this.
These unparalleled public health actions were enacted for a virus with an infection mortality rate (“IFR”) roughly similar – or likely lower once all infection data are collected – to seasonal influenza.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
The above are the words of Dr. Paul Alexander in an essay, written together with other independent scientists, published by the American Institute for Economic Research (“AEIR”) in January 2021.
Countries and territories around the world enforced lockdowns of varying stringency in response to covid. Beginning with the first lockdown in China’s Hubei province and nationwide in Italy in March 2020, lockdowns continued to be implemented in many countries throughout 2020 and 2021.
Schools, universities and colleges closed either on a nationwide or local basis in 63 countries, affecting approximately 47 per cent of the world’s student population. The city of Toronto, Ontario is considered to have the longest continuous covid lockdown of any major city in the world.
Read more: Covid-19 lockdowns by country, Wikipedia via Encycloreader
In May 2023, the USA finally lifted the last of the restrictions on travel, allowing unvaccinated passengers to enter the country, and China, who had instigated the draconian unscientific measures, still prohibited its citizens from travelling abroad and the country was still largely closed off to tourists and other foreign visitors. Brazil also had some restrictions still in place and a handful of other countries still had some rules in place.
In September 2023, GAVI – which notably has the mythical slogan “Vaccines Work” – published an article claiming “new data indicates that non-pharmaceutical interventions were effective in cutting cases.” The article goes on to detail, perhaps rather gleefully, that “as the northern hemisphere moves towards winter and new variants of SARS-CoV-2 continue to evolve, talk of mask mandates and even lockdowns have been surfacing again.”
Governments, their chosen advisors and public health bodies imposed these destructive lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical measures on populations despite knowing that these measures would never work to stop or slow the spread of a virus as they publicly claimed.
The following is Dr. Alexander’s essay published in January 2021 which demonstrates what scientists knew but relatively few at the time had the integrity and courage to say out loud: Lockdowns do not save lives but will cost lives. Although the essay in the main discussed the effects in the USA, the effects apply to all countries that imposed lockdowns on their citizens.
Dr. Alexander noted that some researchers estimate a projected 3.0% rise in the mortality rate and a 0.5% reduction in life expectancy over the next 10 to 15 years for the overall American population due to the lockdowns. This will result in an approximate 1 million additional deaths in the USA during the next 15 years.
The Catastrophic Impact of Covid Forced Societal Lockdowns
By Dr. Paul Alexander, published by AEIR on 30 January 2021
The present Covid-inspired forced lockdowns on business and school closures are and have been counterproductive, not sustainable and are, quite frankly, meritless and unscientific. They have been disastrous and just plain wrong! There has been no good reason for this. These unparalleled public health actions have been enacted for a virus with an infection mortality rate (“IFR”) roughly similar (or likely lower once all infection data are collected) to seasonal influenza. Stanford’s John P.A. Ioannidis identified 36 studies (43 estimates) along with an additional 7 preliminary national estimates (50 pieces of data) and concluded that among people <70 years old across the world, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.57% with a median of 0.05% across the different global locations (with a corrected median of 0.04%). Let me write this again, 0.05%. Can one even imagine the implementation of such draconian regulations for the annual flu? Of course not! Not satisfied with the current and well-documented failures of lockdowns, our leaders are inexplicably doubling and tripling down and introducing or even hardening punitive lockdowns and constraints. They are locking us down “harder.” Indeed, an illustration of the spurious need for these ill-informed actions is that they are being done in the face of clear scientific evidence showing that during strict prior societal lockdowns, school lockdowns, mask mandates, and additional societal restrictions, the number of positive cases went up! No one can point to any instance where lockdowns have worked in this Covid pandemic.
It is also noteworthy that these irrational and unreasonable restrictive actions are not limited to any one jurisdiction such as the US, but shockingly have occurred across the globe. It is stupefying as to why governments, whose primary roles are to protect their citizens, are taking these punitive actions despite the compelling evidence that these policies are misdirected and very harmful; causing palpable harm to human welfare on so many levels. It’s tantamount to insanity what governments have done to their populations and largely based on no scientific basis. None! In this, we have lost our civil liberties and essential rights, all based on spurious “science” or worse, opinion, and this erosion of fundamental freedoms and democracy is being championed by government leaders who are disregarding the Constitutional (USA) and Charter (Canada) limits to their right to make and enact policy. These unconstitutional and unprecedented restrictions have taken a staggering toll on our health and well-being and also target the very precepts of democracy; particularly given the fact that this viral pandemic is no different in overall impact on society than any previous pandemics. There is simply no defensible rationale to treat this pandemic any differently.
There is absolutely no reason to lock down, constrain and harm ordinarily healthy, well, and younger or middle-aged members of the population irreparably; the very people who will be expected to help extricate us from this factitious nightmare and to help us survive the damages caused by possibly the greatest self-inflicted public health fiasco ever promulgated on societies. There is no reason to continue this illogical policy that is doing far greater harm than good. Never in human history have we done this and employed such overtly oppressive restrictions with no basis. A fundamental tenet of public health medicine is that those with actual disease or who are at great risk of contracting disease are quarantined, not people with low disease risk; not the well! This seems to have been ignored by an embarrassingly large number of health experts upon whom our politicians rely for advice. Rather we should be using a more “targeted” (population-specific age and risk) approach in relation to the implementation of public health measures as opposed to the inelegant and shotgun tactics being forced upon us now. Optimally, the key elements for modern public health include refraining from causing societal disruption (or at most, minimally) and to ensure freedom is maintained in the advent of pathogen emergence while concurrently protecting overall health and well-being. We also understand that at the outset of the pandemic, there was little to no reliable information regarding SARS-CoV-2. Indeed, initial case fatality rate (“CFR”) reports were staggeringly high and so it made sense, earlier, to impose strict lockdowns and other measures until such a time as the danger passed or we understood more clearly the nature of this virus, the data, and how it might be managed. But why would we continue this way and for so long once the factual characteristics of this virus became evident and as alluded to above, we finally realised that its infection fatality rate (“IFR”) which is a more accurate and realistic reflection of mortality than CFR, was really no worse than annual influenza? Governments and medical experts continuing to cite CFR are deeply deceitful and erroneous and meant to scare populations with an exaggerated risk of death. The prevailing opinion of our experts and politicians seems to be to “stop Covid at all costs.” If so, this is a highly destructive, illogical, and unsound policy and flies in the face of all accepted concepts related to modern public health medicine. Unfortunately, it seems that our political leadership is still bound to following the now debunked and discredited models of pandemic progression, the most injurious and impactful model having been released upon the world in the form of the Imperial College Neil Ferguson model that was based on untested fictional projections and assumptions that have been flat wrong. These models used inaccurate input and were fatally flawed.
How Did We Get Here?
Let us start with a core position that just because there is an emergency situation, if we cannot stop it, this does not provide a rationale for instituting strategies that have no effect or are even worse. We have to fight the concept that if there’s truly nothing we can do to alter the course of a situation (e.g., disease), we still have to do something even if it’s ineffective! Moreover, we do not implement a public health policy that is catastrophic and not working, and then continue its implementation knowing it is disastrous. Let us also start with the basic fact that the government bureaucrats and their medical experts deceived the public by failing to explain in the beginning that everyone is not at equal risk of severe outcomes if infected. This is a key Covid omission and this omission has been used tacitly and wordlessly to drive hysteria and fear. Indeed, the public still does not understand this critically important distinction. The vast majority of people are at little if any risk of severe illness and yet these very people are needlessly cowering in fear because of misinformation and, sadly, disinformation. Yet, lockdowns did nothing to change the trajectory of this pandemic, anywhere! Indeed, it’s highly probable that if lockdowns did anything at all to change the course of the pandemic, they extended our time of suffering.
What are The Effects of Lockdowns on the General Population?
On the basis of actuarial and real-time data, we know that there are tremendous harms caused by these unprecedented lockdowns and school closures.
