So, we were right all along. Lockdowns don’t work. In fact, they make things worse in almost every way.
Do we get a medal? An apology? A simple “You were right” over tea and biscuits would be nice. But I’m not holding my breath. We’ll just have to settle for, not a warm glow of smugness, but the cold, lingering fury that the bastards responsible are still not being held to account.
Despite concerted attacks, the author of a Johns Hopkins meta-analysis which demolishes the lockdown narrative are standing firm.
Lockdowns had “little to no effect” on saving lives during the pandemic — and “should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy,” according to a controversial meta-analysis of dozens of studies […] Instead, the meta-analysis concluded that lockdowns across the US and Europe had only “reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average.”
Worse, some of the studies even suggested that limiting gatherings in safe outdoor spots may have been “counterproductive and increased” the death rate, the authors noted in the non-peer-reviewed preprint
New York Post
Their final, published, peer-reviewed paper includes an appendix which specifically lambasts the politically-motivated attacks on the pre-published version.
There was, of course, a great deal of reportage about our working paper that appeared in the early February-April 2022 period. This material was highly repetitive, echoing material presented on February 3 in either the Science Media Centre press release or the Snopes report […]
The striking feature of the media flow is its unoriginality. Indeed, there is little evidence that the post-Science Media Centre press release authors even engaged in basic “primary” reading of our text, let alone any “critical” reading of the text.
A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality – II
As I continually remind readers: Always assume a “fact-checker” is trying to bullshit you.
And, just this week, both remaining contenders for the British prime ministership have attacked lockdowns. Former chancellor Rishi Sunak has written that the government gave too much power to scientists and bureaucrats, and was dishonest in not acknowledging “potential downsides” (which we now know were devastatingly real).
Sunak’s leadership rival, Liz Truss, agrees that the government went “too far”, particularly on keeping schools closed”.
The BFD was just one of the courageous few outlets to point to the evidence that lockdowns were a disaster, just months into the pandemic.
It was left to a few courageous journalists and scientists to take on the overwhelming force of the lockdown fanatics, with police fining people for sitting on park benches and neighbours eagerly shopping each other like this was some authoritarian country.
The brave few kept the flag of personal freedom alive. That really is no exaggeration. And they paid heavily for it. On social media the abuse was intense. You don’t care about lives! they snarled. You’re murderers! they claimed. And in the mainstream, things weren’t much better. You’re a “small, disproportionately influential faction,” moaned a Guardian Leader, that “denies the virulence of the virus”. Thanks for that.
Even here at The BFD, we had our regular critics, who’d go on the attack every time we reported the growing evidence of the abysmal failure of lockdowns.
Yes, it was lonely. But now the man who was responsible for running the nation’s finances belatedly tells us that we were not alone. He now tells us it was wrong to empower scientists to such a degree; wrong to allow Sage such sway over policy; wrong not to consider the long-term impact of lockdown on people’s health and wellbeing; wrong not to discuss the inevitable huge delays to cancer, heart disease and diabetes diagnoses; wrong to close schools; and wrong to instill such fear.
That’s what some of us have been saying all along, and copping a pile of abuse for our troubles. Sunak even tells us that he was prevented from discussing his doubts, and that when he tried to do so he was met with a brick wall of silence […]
Okay, it’s a relief to hear that someone in the heart of government had the guts to challenge the dangerous group-think. But it’s cold comfort to millions of children whose schooling was irreparably damaged along with their long-term prospects, and to patients who only discover now that they have cancer, diabetes or heart disease, and to those who were denied the chance simply to hug lonely, dying relatives.
The Telegraph
Don’t hold your breath waiting for an acknowledgement, much less an apology, from the likes of Jacinda Ardern, Ashley Bloomfield, Shaun Hendy or Siouxsie Wiles. Ardern may at least be held to account at the ballot box; the rest will just continue on their merry way, hoovering up the government grants and having their unearned egos stroked by their witless followers.
