Covid Tyrants Were Perpetrators, Not Victims: The Covid ‘experts’ chose the unscientific tyranny of lockdowns, mandates, and petty, ineffective, legalistic rules, and they didn’t have to; COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. A key lesson of the pandemic, and other C-Virus related stories

Covid Tyrants Were Perpetrators, Not Victims:

The Covid ‘experts’ chose the unscientific tyranny of lockdowns, mandates, and petty, ineffective, legalistic rules, and they didn’t have to.

Five years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is no shortage of analysis personifying the virus as the villain. In a sense, it’s understandable: SARS-CoV-2 was the catalyst and the killer that drove much of the pandemic destruction. But painting public health leaders as innocent bystanders and Covid as the boogeyman who made people sick and locked down the economy, destroyed businesses, shuttered schools, censored speech, masked children, and suspended constitutional rights and sacred rituals is deceitful historical revisionism.

On Thursday, a Washington Post headline asserted that “Covid shut schools five years ago. Anxiety, learning loss and more linger.” On Monday, a PBS FRONTLINE headline heralded “A Look Back at How the COVID-19 Pandemic Disrupted the World.” Last week David Wallace-Wells wrote about “How Covid Remade America” in The New York Times. According to Wallace-Wells, “It” — that is, Covid — “broke our faith in public health,” “shackled the U.S. with debt,” “scarred children,” and “turned us into hyperindividualists.”

In other words, when the media, public health “experts,” and government officials aren’t blaming the woes of the pandemic on Trump’s “unscientific” response, the unmasked, or vaccine skeptics, they’re blaming Covid, as if the virus were the only entity with any real agency during the pandemic years.

But Covid didn’t order lockdowns and issue stay-at-home orders. Covid didn’t mandate masks and vaccines. Covid didn’t close schools. Government officials did that, and, yes, they actually had agency and alternatives to Covid tyranny.

As Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean noted in Intelligencer, “there was never any science behind lockdowns — not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic.” They went on to cite 50 studies indicating that the lockdowns did little to reduce Covid mortality. An examination of state Covid orders by two Princeton professors does not show a correlation between stay-at-home order duration and Covid deaths. Sweden’s no-lockdown approach led to an excess mortality rate of 4.4 percent during peak pandemic years, data shows — the rate in the United States was more than double that number. As Nocera and McLean observe, “It is not unreasonable to conclude from the available data that the lockdowns led to more overall deaths in the U.S. than a policy that resembled Sweden’s would have.”

Furthermore, the decision leaders made to put the nation under house arrest wasn’t just ineffective and anti-constitutional; “shelter-in-place” orders had devastating societal consequences. To summarize briefly, lockdowns “increased poverty and wealth disparities, spurred a dramatic rise in adolescent anxiety and depression, contributed to a surge in fatal drug overdoses, and led to devastating learning losses in schoolchildren, who have yet to recover, according to scientific studies,” according to reporting by the Boston Globe. “As of last spring, the average American student remained half a grade behind pre-pandemic levels in both math and reading.” —>READ MORE HERE

COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. A key lesson of the pandemic.:

On April 8, 2020, the Chinese government lifted its lockdown of Wuhan. It had lasted 76 days — two and a half months during which no one was allowed to leave this industrial city of 11 million people, or even leave their homes. Until the Chinese government deployed this tactic, a strict batten-down-the-hatches approach had never been used before to combat a pandemic. Yes, for centuries infected people had been quarantined in their homes, where they would either recover or die. But that was very different from locking down an entire city; the World Health Organization called it “unprecedented in public health history.”

The word the citizens of Wuhan used to describe their situation was fengcheng — “sealed city.” But the English-language media was soon using the word lockdown instead — and reacting with horror. “That the Chinese government can lock millions of people into cities with almost no advance notice should not be considered anything other than terrifying,” a China human rights expert told The Guardian. Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the Washington Post that “these kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.”

The Chinese government, however, was committed to this “zero-COVID” strategy, as it was called. In mid-March 2020, by which time some 50 million people had been forced into lockdowns, China recorded its first day since January with no domestic transmissions — which it offered as proof that its approach was working. For their part, Chinese citizens viewed being confined to their homes as their patriotic duty.

For the next two years, harsh lockdowns remained China’s default response whenever there was an outbreak anywhere in the country. But by March 2022, when the government decided to lock down much of Shanghai after a rise in cases in that city, there was no more talk of patriotism. People reacted with fury, screaming from their balconies, writing bitter denunciations on social media, and, in some cases, committing suicide. When a fire broke out in an apartment building, residents died because the police had locked their doors from the outside. And when the Chinese government finally abandoned lockdowns — an implicit admission that they had not been successful in eliminating the pandemic — there was a wave of COVID-19 cases as bad as anywhere in the world. (To be fair, this was partly because China did such a poor job of vaccinating its citizens.)

One of the great mysteries of the pandemic is why so many countries followed China’s example. In the U.S. and the U.K. especially, lockdowns went from being regarded as something that only an authoritarian government would attempt to an example of “following the science.” But there was never any science behind lockdowns — not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. When you got right down to it, lockdowns were little more than a giant experiment.

Despite the lack of scientific evidence, lockdowns didn’t come out of nowhere, at least not in the U.S. They had been discussed — and argued over — by scientists since 2005, when (as the story goes) President George W. Bush read John M. Barry’s book The Great Influenza, about the 1918 pandemic. “This happens every hundred years,” Bush is supposed to have said after finishing the book. “We need a national strategy.”

In fact, there were people thinking about pandemic mitigation long before Bush read Barry’s book. The leader of this ad hoc group was D.A. Henderson, perhaps the most renowned epidemiologist of the 20th century — the man who, decades earlier, had led the team that eradicated smallpox. Richard Preston, the author of The Hot Zone, would later describe this feat as “arguably the greatest life-saving achievement in the history of medicine.”

By the time Bush began pushing his administration to come up with a pandemic plan, Henderson was 78 years old. Ten years earlier, he had sat in on a series of top-secret briefings where he listened to a Russian defector describe how he had led a team that was trying to adapt the smallpox virus for bioweapons. Henderson became so concerned that he started a small center focused on biodefense — which meant, in effect, defending against a pandemic. He and his colleagues at the center had spent years trying to persuade government officials to take pandemics seriously — without much success. When the Bush administration began debating what its pandemic strategy should include, it was only natural that Henderson be involved.

The men Bush chose to lead the effort believed that lockdowns could be an important component of a mitigation plan. They were heavily influenced by a model developed by Laura Glass, a 14-year-old high-school student from Albuquerque (aided by her scientist father), that purported to show that keeping people away from one another was as effective as a vaccine. (This story is told, overexcitedly, in Michael Lewis’s book The Premonition.)

Henderson vehemently disagreed. For one thing, he didn’t trust computer models, which churned out estimates based on hypotheticals. Just as important, they couldn’t possibly anticipate the complexity of human behavior. “There is simply too little experience to predict how a 21st-century population would respond, for example, to the closure of all schools for periods of many weeks to months, or the cancellation of all gatherings of more than 1,000 people,” he said.

In addition, he felt that the worst thing officials could do was overreact, which could create a panic. In 2006, as the debate inside the Bush administration was nearing its conclusion, he co-authored a paper in a final effort to change the minds of those devising the strategy. The paper concluded: “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen as less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move towards catastrophe.” —>READ MORE HERE

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