“Study: Lockdowns Save NO Lives. Are Politicians Destroying the Economy for NOTHING?” So wrote The New American (TNA) on April 23, 2020 — in the “pandemic’s” early days. It was one of many examples of TNA and other individuals and entities warning over and over again, early on, that the Covid lockdowns were ineffective at halting disease spread and actually deadly.
Yet the establishment “experts,” the same kind of people who last year said inflation was “transitory” and 20 years ago that the world would end in 12 years because of climate change, didn’t listen. They were following the science — the political science. Death and destruction ensued.
Addressing this matter on Friday was Dr. Scott Atlas, a Stanford University professor and a former Covid advisor to President Trump. Appearing on Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight, he was asked by host Carlson — who’d cited a relevant Johns Hopkins study — if our country endured all its lockdown-induced mass suffering for “no benefit at all.”
“Well, it’s worse than that,” Atlas responded, “there was a massive destruction.” This is why in 2006 “the pandemic literature already said that lockdowns were not to be used because they don’t work and they’re extremely destructive,” Atlas noted.
Quite true. Specific example: TNA reported, also in April 2020, on a 2015 Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) emergency plan pertaining to influenza, which like Covid is a communicable respiratory disease. As the agency stated, quarantine “is not effective.” Even if it were, however, “it would not be feasible to implement and enforce with available resources, and would damage the economy by reducing the workforce,” the IDPH warned. (Emphasis added.)
Atlas went on to emphasize that our lockdown results were true to form, as the data show that the measures “did not stop the spread of the infection [and] did not save lives, and, in fact, a lot of states that stayed open did better … than the states that had severe closure.”
TNA reported this fact in the April 23, 2020 article as well, writing that “‘free’ states fared better [than locked-down ones] even when adjusted for population.”
Providing some specificity, Atlas related that “South Dakota didn’t close any businesses; they ranked fifth best [in Covid outcomes]. Florida, sixth best.” The “bottom five are the states that did the severe lockdowns and closures…: New York; California; Washington, D.C.; New Jersey; Pennsylvania. That’s the 47 to 51 — the worst in the country.”
Atlas then made the important point that the pandemic-mitigation debate was “distorted,” with the media claiming “you’re choosing the economy over lives if you don’t lock down.” Yet “it’s the opposite, because for decades it was known in the economics literature that severe economic downturns kill people,” the doctor stated.
TNA made this point at least as early as April 5, 2020. This isn’t, “as critics may say, just about ‘money’ — because money isn’t just about ‘money,’” I wrote in a TNA op-ed.
“Money represents resources, people’s capacity to obtain food, shelter, clothing, health care, education, and everything else that preserves life and makes it worth living,” I continued. “Note here that poverty is associated with a host of negative health and health-related risks, such as a higher incidence of manifold diseases, depression, anxiety, stress-related disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, domestic violence, child abuse, and crime.”
Atlas further elaborated on the lockdown folly (all quotations his), pointing out:
- 200,000 American businesses were driven to closure.
- The poor were hurt most, as “low-income people selectively were destroyed.” Data show that “unemployment for low-income jobs is something like 23 to 28 percent, whereas for high-income jobs it’s about zero, maybe five percent.”
- Young people’s jobs were also disproportionately destroyed.
- More “than a hundred million people in the world were thrown into abject poverty.”
- There was an explosion of drug abuse and domestic violence against women, and a significant increase in teen self-harm and suicide attempts.
- Poor children’s educational outcomes suffered most, worldwide. One reason is that kids can’t focus on academics when poverty forces them to work to support the family.
Atlas’s appearance is below (relevant portion begins at 4:25).
Yet Atlas was hardly alone among experts in warning of “Fauci’s Folly.” On April 8, 2020, TNA reported on the counsel of epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski, whose sterling credentials include being former longtime head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at Rockefeller University in New York City. He’d warned in a long interview that lockdowns (and social distancing) not only wouldn’t be effective, but would prolong and exacerbate the pandemic.
Wittkowski, who, unlike the Fauci crew, wasn’t getting paid to offer advice, was rewarded with censorship: His interview was deleted by YouTube after capturing more than one million views. The interviewing entity, The Press & The Public Project, reported in May 2020 that all “we have been told so far is that ‘this video has been removed for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.’”
As for highlighting that TNA was reporting the truth early, the point isn’t just to give our site a well-deserved pat on the back. It’s also that if we — and many other honest layman sites and individuals — could easily discern lockdowns’ folly, doctors Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, Robert Redfield, and Rochelle Walensky had no excuse for issuing their disastrous prescriptions. So what explains their behavior?
Atlas reported last year after dealing with Fauci, Birx, and Redfield as a Covid advisor that the three “experts” at the China virus response’s nucleus lacked knowledge, didn’t know the data, didn’t care to, and exhibited a total lack of critical-thinking skills.
Yet even if we accept the most charitable explanation, that this was sincere incompetence, caring so little for Truth that you turn a blind eye to it is damnable malpractice. In a saner world, the three Branch Covidians would currently be up on charges. In a saner one still, they never in the first place would’ve been empowered to wreak havoc upon the world.
