To quote the unnamed fish from Spongebob Squarepants, “How many times do we have to teach you this lesson?”
For our political leaders and the fools who hang on their every utterance, obviously at least once more: Lockdowns do not work.
At The BFD, we’ve been trying to hammer home this lesson since the evidence first began to become clear — way back in April 2020. Unfortunately, politicians are slower-than-usual learners.
So, let’s take a deep breath and try and patiently get the point across to the slow kids in the Beehive.
Despite their popularity, there appears to be growing scepticism about the benefits of lockdowns and their significant costs. These include devastating educational impacts, widespread mental health issues, increased domestic violence, loss of basic freedoms and damaged relationships.
To an extent, some costs might be acceptable — if lockdowns actually worked. But they don’t. We’ve known that since mid-last year, when scholars like Wilfred Reilly and John Ioannidis began crunching the numbers and comparing lockdown and non-lockdown US states.
Lockdowns were never considered as a pandemic response, right up to the final months before the Wuhan virus escaped. Yet, as soon as a brutal communist dictatorship started welding its own citizens into their apartments, the rest of the world abandoned decades of planning and rushed to follow suit.
Why would they do that? And why are we doing it still?
While most of the world has come to its senses, Australia and New Zealand are not quite there yet.
For future pandemics, it is likely harsh lockdowns will tend to be used only by authoritarian regimes partly because they can and partly because it strengthens their control over the population.
Aaaaand… there it is.
Freedom of action has been destroyed, regardless of the foolishness of recent protests. Seeing Australian police deploy pepper spray and fire pepper ball rounds against protesters is chilling. Freedom of movement has been almost completely removed, with the Constitution largely disregarded by populist premiers.
So, we know the why: what about the how? Where did China first get the idea for lockdowns?
Lockdowns as an idea originated in the veterinary and livestock industry, which used strict interventions to curb outbreaks such as foot-and-mouth disease in Britain in 2001.
Remember that, the next time some pink-haired fright-bat sneers that “Ivermectin is a veterinary drug!” (It’s approved for human use.)
Let’s just hope the lockdown fanatics don’t get any more ideas from the livestock industry though.
Strategies used by the livestock sector are far stricter than even the harshest regime would adopt for humans. Infected herds are shot, burned and buried, even if only a single animal is ill. Ungulates, farmed and wild, that come into contact on a farm earn the same fate.
Better pray that Jacinda, Ashley or Dan don’t read that.
In return for little or no reward from lockdowns, the costs have been horrendous: whole industries devastated overnight, spiking mental health crises, a wave of suicides.
Worse, though, is that a sizeable percentage of the Western world has apparently been conditioned to view demanding our “certain unalienable Rights” as “selfish”. Freedom, according to the pandemic panickers, is death.
And our taxpayer-funded Human Rights troughers have been either missing in action or taken the side of the dictators.
This is a quote from the Australian Human Rights Commission: “Human rights are based on principles of dignity, equality and mutual respect, which are shared across cultures, religions and philosophies. They are about being treated fairly, treating others fairly and having the ability to make genuine choices in our daily lives.”
We need to ask ourselves: when do our basic human rights become secondary to a viral pandemic?
The Australian
According to the snitches who call the cops the instant they see a mask-less face, basic human rights don’t even come into the equation.
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