It’s some vindication, I guess, to get to say, “I told you so”. It was just a few months into the pandemic that The BFD first reported what no one in the mainstream media would: the growing evidence that lockdowns don’t work. Over the next few months and into 2021, the evidence just kept piling up and becoming more undeniable. You certainly didn’t read any of that in the New Zealand bought-and-paid-for media.
From very early on after “two weeks to flatten the curve” became “lockdowns forever”, scholars like Wilfred Reilly crunched the numbers and reported their conclusions: lockdowns didn’t make any difference. Now, a new meta-analysis of dozens of empirical studies has reached a damning conclusion:
Lockdowns have “had little to no effect on” reducing deaths from Covid-19 and should be “rejected out of hand” for dealing with the next pandemic, according to a new international study that comes amid falling confidence in public health authorities in the US.
Business closures and stay at home orders in the US and Europe reduced deaths by 0.2 per cent on average, according to a new analysis by American and Swedish researchers that questioned whether the novel health policy, pioneered by China in Wuhan in early 2020, would pass a cost-benefit analysis.
The “benefit”, therefore, is marginal to the point of irrelevance. The costs are devastating and will play out for years, if not decades.
“They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy.”
Then there is unquantifiable damage being done to a generation of children whose formative years have been blighted by panic and brutally oppressive measures imposed by governments and bureaucrats. One doesn’t need to be an expert to realise that taking children in their critical developmental years and locking them indoors, forbidding them from playing, forcing them to wear masks and teaching them that every person they meet might kill them is going to have a devastating effect.
Indeed, a Brown University study has already found that the children of the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance. By “significant”, they mean 22% lower — which has been likened to the notorious state-run orphanages of the brutal Ceausescu regime in Romania.
The big question, though, is: will those responsible be held to account? We know who they are, after all.
Governments imposed lockdowns of various severity and duration, including seven in Victoria totalling more than 260 days, from March 2020 onwards, after British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, who was advising the UK government, forecast that lockdowns would reduce deaths by “up to 98 per cent”.
Pandemic plans published prior to Covid-19 had either advised specifically against lockdowns, which until now had been a fringe, untried “nuclear option”.
NZ has its own guilty parties, of course.
Proponents of the radical policies have struggled to explain how jurisdictions that imposed no or few lockdowns, such as Scandinavian nations, Japan, or southern states of the US, have ended up with Covid-19 outcomes not greatly different or even better than other jurisdictions.
Lest anyone be foolish enough to try and defend the indefensible in New Zealand, the first thing to bear in mind is not to argue backwards, or to confuse correlation with causation. Claiming that “New Zealand’s track record proves lockdowns work!” does both.
“Island nations are birds of a different feather in more ways than one. In addition to Australia and New Zealand, Iceland, Japan, South Korea (a de facto island), Singapore and Taiwan have had very few Covid deaths. But some of them had very mild lockdowns, too.”
The Australian
Citing “modelling” as a counter-factual is no better: experience shows that models have been repeatedly, drastically wrong. When NSW premier Dominic Perrottet crows that real-world outcomes have exceeded even the best case scenarios of the models, what he’s really doing is proving that the models are worthless junk.
If the evidence disagrees with your theory, then your theory is wrong.
Anyone can be wrong, but when being wrong has such catastrophic outcomes as lockdowns have, then heads must roll. Australian politician Pauline Hanson is rightly calling for a Royal Commission into Australia’s pandemic response.
We’ll be lucky if we get a whitewash.
