Paul Elias Alexander
brownstone.org
Dr. Paul Alexander is an epidemiologist focusing on clinical epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, and research methodology. He has a master’s in epidemiology from University of Toronto, and a master’s degree from Oxford University.
Warning
Long read. 1818 words.
In the last week, some of the top spokespeople for lockdowns, and all that is associated with that policy of pathogenic control, have come out to defend them plus threaten more now that we are seeing seasonal increases in cases.
It’s almost as if they have learned nothing.
They certainly haven’t admitted error – Bill Gates will never do that – despite all the carnage all around us. It includes not only destroyed businesses and educational losses but also inflation, goods shortages, weakened financial markets, broken supply chains, social and political conflict, and countless broken lives.
All of this traces to lockdowns, a policy advocated and enforced by specific people, mostly powerful and highly paid intellectuals, and amplified by the media.
They say that no one could have known. Not so. Drs. Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, Gupta, Atlas, Tenenbaum, Risch, McCullough, Urso, Dara, Wolf, Oskoui, Ladapo and other contrarians such as Jeffrey Tucker, Ivor Cummings, and Paul Joseph Watson, and many other writers at Brownstone, were right on the devastation and failures of COVID lockdowns.
We wrote nearly two years now clamouring against the devastation that would come from societal lockdowns and school closures. We wrote extensively on the ineffectiveness of masks (references 1, 2, 3, 4) and the accrued harms, especially for children, yet were ridiculed and dismissed by the media and the medical establishment. We reported on the catastrophic effects of COVID lockdowns on children, yet were dismissed and cancelled.
We felt that it was lockdown lunacy when we could have used an age-risk stratified ‘focused’ protection approach (Great Barrington Declaration), with strong protections of the vulnerable high-risk in our societies first, while allowing the rest of the lower-risk healthy and well in society (younger persons) to live largely normal lives with unfettered tampering by governments. We even added the need for vitamin D supplementation, body weight control, and the use of early outpatient treatment, but were scoffed at and dismissed as heretics. We were ridiculed, slandered, and smeared, despite evidence of the vicious societal costs from lockdowns and the near 500 studies and pieces of evidence that show the failures and harms from lockdowns and school closures.
It was stupefying to us sceptics and contrarians as to why governments, whose primary roles are to protect their citizens, were taking such draconian and punitive actions despite the compelling evidence (that was available and accumulated one month after the pandemic onset) that the restrictive policies were misdirected and very harmful; causing palpable harm to human welfare on so many levels. It was tantamount to insanity what governments did to their populations and largely based on no scientific footing.
In this, we lost our civil liberties and essential rights, all based on spurious ‘science’ or worse, opinion, and this erosion of fundamental freedoms and democracy was being championed by government leaders who were 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 targeted the very precepts of democracy; particularly given the fact that this viral pandemic was no different in overall impact on society than many previous pandemics.
There was simply no defensible rationale to treat this pandemic any differently. Societies lost three things during COVID: 1) lives due to the virus itself, principally among the high-risk aged vulnerable, 2) devastatingly, lives due to the lockdown and school closure policies as collateral damage, and 3) our liberties, freedoms, and rights.
Our dignity and humanity are abused when governments take our rights via emergency powers. We must fight this in the courts, peacefully, civilly, and legally, but fight we must to re-establish our rights and liberties.
There was no reason to lock down, constrain and harm ordinarily healthy, well, and younger or working-age members of the population irreparably; the very people who would be expected to and would have extricated us from this factitious nightmare and helped us survive the damages caused by possibly the greatest self-inflicted public health fiasco ever promulgated on societies.
There was no good reason, no sound science, no justification to have continued the illogical lockdown lunacy and school closure policy that did far greater harm than good. Why when we saw the failure of lockdowns did we harden them? 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 was ignored by an embarrassingly large number of health experts upon whom our politicians relied for advice.
These experts seemed academically sloppy and cognitively limited, unable to read the science or understand the data that was clear. We should have used 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 forced upon us that was so very devastating.
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 did none of that. We locked down the well and healthy and still failed to protect the high-risk vulnerable, all the while decimating our people societally and destroying economies.
What updated evidence do we have about the failure of lockdowns? Sweden has shown us that we were correct in our fight against the lockdown lunatics at CDC, NIH, and the Trump and Biden administrations. Sweden incurred far fewer deaths per capita than most of Europe even when they refused to enforce strict lockdown policies.
The harms and deaths from the lockdowns belong to Fauci and Birx. It was their lockdowns that POTUS Trump enacted, misguided as he was. He trusted their counsel and guidance, and they betrayed him and Americans for they were not acting on the prevailing science. Children committed suicide across America as a result.
I know, we had data coming up from the States but the media refused to make the exact suicides in children known to the public as it would have shown the benevolence and compassion and urgency in Trump’s calls to Fauci and Birx and the CDC and unions to open schools (and society). Children starved as for many of our children (especially minority children), the only daily meal was their lunch in the school setting.
The laptop, café latte, Zoom class of people did not wonder about that? As they Uber-ed out and remote worked? As they walked their dogs and caught up on some reading? As they tended to their gardens? We have been raising clarion calls for two years now and as we witness the recent lockdown lunacy on display in Shanghai and Beijing, China, we are left wondering, why? Why, when the evidence from Sweden confirmed our greatest fears and supports our prophetic warnings. Why does this portend to things to come in the US this fall?
More specifically, a literature review and meta-analysis on the impacts of lockdowns by Herby et al. found that “lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality. More specifically, stringency index studies find that lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average. SIPOs were also ineffective, only reducing COVID-19 mortality by 2.9% on average. Specific NPI studies also find no broad-based evidence of noticeable effects on COVID-19 mortality.”
They further reported that lockdowns have had near zero public health effects, and “they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”
Sweden specifically, got it almost right and showed the world that lockdowns did absolutely nothing to save lives, but rather caused catastrophic pain and deaths. We have found no evidence anywhere in this world, for the last two years, that any lockdown worked to curb transmission or deaths.
Sweden, which was slandered and attacked by COVID ‘experts’ and governments globally in the early stages of the pandemic for not imposing mandatory lockdown, ended up experiencing fewer deaths per capita than much of Europe. “In 2020 and 2021, the country had an average excess death rate of 56 per 100,000 – compared to 109 in the UK, 111 in Spain, 116 in Germany and 133 in Italy.”
The body of evidence shows that COVID-19 lockdowns, shelter-in-place policies, masks, school closures, and mask mandates have failed disastrously in their purpose of curbing transmission or reducing deaths. These restrictive policies were highly ineffective and devastating failures, causing immense harm especially to the poorer and vulnerable within societies.
Nearly all governments attempted compulsory measures to control the virus, but no government attained success. The research indicates that mask mandates, lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates have had no discernible impact of virus trajectories. The experiment ranks among the worst failures of public health and public policy in history.
Perhaps Bendavid captured it best in research that was seminal and reported “in the framework of this analysis, there is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (‘lockdowns’) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, or the United States in early 2020.”
The reality is that we did not need this robust research to tell us this. Chin and Ioannidis et al. echoed similarly in their findings, reporting that “inferences on effects of NPIs are non-robust and highly sensitive to model specification. Claimed benefits of lockdown appear grossly exaggerated.”
We have known this for a very long time now but lockdown lunatic governments continued to double down and harden and extend lockdowns, punishing their peoples as we are seeing in China today, and causing misery upon people with ramifications that will likely take decades or more to repair.
Despite the demand for more and for the retention of all powers, we must never allow our governments to have such emergency powers. Never again do we allow these lockdowners to cause so much harm and deaths by their unsound and specious actions. We must ensure we have proper legal public inquiries of all the health officials and government persons whose policies were enacted.
