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For months, I’ve been writing that lockdowns are a useless and destructive response to the Wuhan pandemic. At first, it was only a few contrarian scientists and academics who dared point out what the data were unequivocally showing: lockdowns do not work and cause more harm than they prevent.
But governments, obstinately determined to ‘do something’ (or at least, be seen to), refused to budge. Let alone admit that they were wrong.
Now even governments’ own advisors are starting to admit the scale of their mistake.
Lockdown will come to be seen as a “monumental mistake on a global scale” and must never happen again, a scientist who advises the Government on infectious diseases says.
Better late than never, I suppose.
From the UK to New Zealand, politicians dithered for weeks and then slammed an iron fist on the panic button.
Prof [Mark] Woolhouse OBE, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours that advises the Government, said: “Lockdown was a panic measure and I believe history will say trying to control Covid-19 through lockdown was a monumental mistake on a global scale, the cure was worse than the disease.
“I never want to see national lockdown again. It was always a temporary measure that simply delayed the stage of the epidemic we see now. It was never going to change anything fundamentally, however low we drove down the number of cases, and now we know more about the virus and how to track it we should not be in this position again.
“We absolutely should never return to a position where children cannot play or go to school.
“I believe the harm lockdown is doing to our education, health care access, and broader aspects of our economy and society will turn out to be at least as great as the harm done by Covid-19.”
A big part of the problem is that the government was choosing to be told what it wanted to hear, by a claque of lab-coated media tarts whose specialty was more often political toadying than science.
He said that Sage, the government’s advisory board on dealing with Covid, needed to have members from a wider range of fields[…]with equal input from economists to assess the damage to incomes, jobs and livelihoods, educationalists to assess the damage to children and mental health specialists to assess levels of depression and anxiety especially among younger adults, as well as psychologists to assess the effects of not being able to go to the theatre or a football match.”
I’d also suggest at least one Daryl Kerrigan should be advising the government, to tell ‘em to get stuffed.
Prof. Woolhouse also has an ominous warning for the likes of Jacinda Ardern.
Ardern’s strategy, insofar as she even appears to have one, is to keep throwing New Zealand into periodic lockdowns as infections inevitably re-emerge. In the meantime, the nation is all but cut off from the world, killing its big GDP earner, tourism.
All this is banked on the never-never faith that a vaccine will – eventually, somehow – be found.
“I would not dignify waiting for a vaccine with the term ‘strategy’. That’s a hope not a strategy. But we do need to get on with providing an alternative to lockdown”[…]
Ultimately he believed the only viable long term solution was testing, which had already paid dividends in the sporting world[…]
“People say cost is an issue with widespread testing but the cost of not doing it is absolutely enormous because without it we cannot unlock society.”
New Zealand’s testing rate remains far below Australia, Britain or even the United States.
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