The consensus against lockdowns is growing day by day, although the major new networks are trying to ignore it, as it does not fit their agenda. Cases are way up, deaths are down... but these facts do not seem to matter to some mayors and governors. There persist in imposing lockdowns.. which makes everything worse.
A petition has been signed by 15,000 scientists urging an end to pandemic lockdowns. The letter, named the Great Barrington Declaration after the
town in Massachusetts where it was written, was authored by University of Oxford epidemiology professor Dr Sunetra Gupta, Harvard University's
professor of medicine Dr Martin
Kulldorff and Stanford's Dr Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and epidemiologist, all saying lockdowns do more harm than good and called for a different
approach to dealing with the coronavirus other than the lockdown model. See this in the
Washington Times, October 8, 2020
and also reported by the BBC
and the NY Post:
The Great Barrington Declaration, which was released Tuesday and continues to gather signatures, was spearheaded by doctors from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford University.
"As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection," said the declaration.
A news story in mid-October 2020 regarding a WHO representative, Dr David Nabarro, the WHO's Special Envoy on Covid-19 pointing out that lockdowns should be used more carefully, and not as a primary means of controlling Coronavirus, has been controversial. Dr. Nabarro emphasized the consequences of lockdowns for increasing poverty. Nabarro said,
"We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus. The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we'd rather not do it... Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never, ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer. Look what's happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. Look what's happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year.We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition."
The Forbes article linked to above, downplay the claims that lockdowns don't work. But , many other studies and sources say lock-downs do not work.
In October 2020, a Stanford Professor, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Professor of Medicine said Lockdowns ares More Harmful Than COVID. Yet another Stanford professor, Dr. John Ioannidis, one of the world's most renowned epidemiologists, said in December that the coronavirus might be less dangerous than assumed and that News media were overhyping the disease. He said the greater risk lay not in COVID-19 but in overzealous lockdowns to prevent its spread.
"We' re falling into a trap of sensationalism,. We have gone into a complete panic state", the Stanford University medical professor said.
And a report about quarantine measures in the United Kingdom in the British Medical Journal has suggested that as a result of the new coronavirus may have already killed more UK seniors than the coronavirus has during the peak of the virus.
The best quote on the subject is from American Enterprise Institute: April 21, 2020,
The burden of proof is to show that they do work! If you're going to essentially cancel the civil liberties of the entire population for a few weeks, you should probably have evidence that the strategy will work. And there, lockdown advocates fail miserably, because they simply don't have evidence.
Lockdowns DON'T work, study claims:
Researchers say stay-at-home orders made no difference to coronavirus deaths around the world - but prior health levels DID.
First, substantiating what Dr. Nabarro said look at these sources: States with the tightest lockdowns have the worst economic recoveries.
May 19, 2020: More than 600 doctors signed onto a letter sent to President Trump urging him to end the lockdowns:
The letter outlines a variety of consequences that the doctors have observed resulting from the coronavirus shutdowns, including patients missing routine checkups that could detect things like heart problems or cancer, increases in substance and alcohol abuse, and increases in financial instability that could lead to "poverty and financial uncertainty," which "is closely linked to poor health."
Fullfact.org says:
Even so, some people are confident that lockdowns in general are a bad idea. They “cause more harm than good” in the opinion of Nigel Farage and Richard Tice. They would prefer a strategy of “focused protection” of high-risk individuals, as set out in the Great Barrington Declaration - although in the opinion of the government’s scientific advisors, and many experts in the field, this strategy would not work.
“[Lockdowns] don’t solve anything, they don’t break any circuits, they don’t break any fires,” the journalist and broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer said on Question Time on 10 December. “All they do is delay the problem.” Yet delaying the problem until a cure or a vaccine is ready for widespread use might be a good idea.
The point of lockdowns, we were repeatedly told, was to flatten the curve to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed at one time.
Dr. Mark McDonald, a California psychiatrist, said in a news story in May 2020;
"The very initial argument ... which sounded reasonable three months ago, is that in order to limit the overwhelmed patient flux into hospitals that would prevent adequate care, we needed to spread out the infections and thus the deaths in specific locales that could become hotspots, particularly New York City... It was a valid argument at the beginning based on the models that were given," McDonald said. "What we've seen now over the last three months is that no city -- none, zero -- outside of New York has even been significantly stressed."
McDonald is referring to the misconception that business closures and stay-at-home orders aimed at "flattening the curve" are meant to reduce the total number of people who will fall ill because of the coronavirus. Rather, these curve-flattening measures are meant largely to reduce the number of people who are sick at any given time, thus avoiding a surge in cases that overwhelms the health care system and causes otherwise preventable deaths because not all patients are able to access lifesaving critical care.
On Saturday, December 19, 2020, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told Breitbart News:
It' d be one thing if we were told you have to give up your liberty, you have to give up your freedom, we' re going to save your life. But what if you have to give up all your freedoms and they' re wrong on the science?
Every one of the mandates - and you look in country after country, state after state - you look at when the mask mandates went in - the incidents went up exponentially after the mandates. Restaurants, nobody can eat in a restaurant, there' s no science behind any of that.
Middle seat missing on the airplane, you really think you' re like 12 inches from the other guy instead of six inches, it really makes a difference? None of it really makes any sense, and there' s no epidemiological evidence. You know, it' s like, 'Wash your hands, stand six feet apart.'
There' s no evidence that that slowed down the [spread]. � The trajectory of the virus hasn' t been altered at all by any of these things. I think the vaccine will, and this is why I really despise people like the CNN Doctor [Sanjay] Gupta, who I think is committing television malpractice by saying, 'Oh, your mask is a much better thing than the vaccine.' Well, no, it isn' t. The masks aren' t working at all. The thing' s going through the roof and people are dying.
The evidence that lockdowns not only cause great economic harm, but also simply are not effective at stopping the spread of coronavirus has been mounting for months.
We URGE that this lockdowns be stopped. Those who are at risk (or perceive that they are at risk) should lock themselves down!
