Dr. Anthony Fauci recently said that the United States doesn’t need another lockdown. What he didn’t say is that we never needed the first one to begin with, as the wide-scale lockdown was an untried strategy driven by politics and not science and is, it has now become clear, an unmitigated failure.
Attorney Stacey Rudin makes this point in a Saturday RealClear Politics piece titled “The Myth That Lockdowns Stop Pandemics.” Rudin opens discussing how man’s acceptance of superstition is due to a tendency to confuse cause and effect. For example, rain dances to remedy droughts would always be followed by precipitation, eventually, “vindicating” a tribal leader’s judgment.
Rudin mentions that thanks to science, we now know such superstition is nonsense. Yet today we have something similar: COVID ritual. It involves behaviors such as “social distancing,” prescribing a magical “six feet” of space between people. Never mind that the prescribed distance is 4.92 feet in Germany and three in Sweden (perhaps the virus behaves differently under the metric system).
COVID ritual also involves having whole populations wear masks in indoor public places and outdoor crowds. Never mind that there’s a difference between a trained physician wearing the ideal mask, fitted, disinfected, and used properly and having the average Joe wear what may become a Petri dish on his face.
The ritual also entails the scientific obscurantist notion that slowing the virus’s spread — prolonging the process of herd immunity, in other words — is a good thing. But whatever the ritual involves, decreased virus-induced mortality and pathogen spread will, like the rain, eventually become reality, and politicians can take credit for it as long as people remain confused about cause and effect.
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I’ve often cited studies showing that not only don’t lockdowns save lives, but that they can actually cause more death than the COVID-19 pandemic would. Rudin provides more interesting information in this regard, writing:
When China first deployed lockdown in January to “defeat COVID-19,” The Washington Post approvingly quoted a Georgetown University professor as saying, “The truth is those kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.”…
In March, Imperial College London’s dire projections influenced the White House, but a careful reading of the advice contained in the Imperial College report reveals that its authors knew lockdown alone could not eliminate any infections, only delay them: “The more successful a strategy is at temporary suppression,” it stated, “the larger the later epidemic is predicted to be in the absence of vaccination, due to lesser build-up of herd immunity.”
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pandemic planning documents state non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing are ineffective once a disease infects 1% of a region’s population. Literature on this subject is unanimous worldwide. According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control:
“There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to slow the spread.”
In this vein, note what the Illinois Department of Public Health stated in their emergency plans for dealing with contagious diseases such as influenza, published in 2015: “Quarantine (a period of isolation to prevent disease spread) is not effective in controlling multiple influenza outbreaks in large, immunologically naïve populations, because the disease spreads too rapidly to identify and to control chains of transmission.”
“Even if quarantine were somewhat effective in controlling influenza in large populations, it would not be feasible to implement and enforce with available resources, and would damage the economy by reducing the workforce,” the department continued. “Most people will voluntarily quarantine themselves in their home.”
You can probably find enough such statements, from health authorities the world over, to fill a book. And Rudin provides anecdotes aligning with this truth, but more compelling is what she relates about Sweden, whose coronavirus management I’ve often cited myself.
“Publicly available data shows no causal relationship between government orders and COVID-19 mortality outcomes,” Rudin writes. “Sweden’s all-cause, per-capita mortality for 2020 is approximately 290 per million above the prior five-year average, while lockdown-loving New Jersey’s is almost 1,900 per million above the prior five-year average, and Michigan’s is over 700 per million. (In case you suspect Sweden ‘naturally’ locked down on its own, mobility data reveals it didn’t.)”
Rudin points out that the mainstream media won’t mention Sweden, except to misrepresent and impugn its efforts. But for the same reason there’s another place unmentioned: South Dakota.
The MsM wouldn’t want you to know that despite the state never locking down — and not ravaging its economy — and having no mask mandate, it has “seen only fifteen deaths and around 500 new cases,” wrote PJ Media’s Megan Fox Tuesday. In fact, this chart shows that South Dakota has fewer deaths relative to population than most other states.
The data are definitive: Lockdowns are pointless, bull-in-a-china-shop measures that do not save lives, but destroy them. Citizens should not tolerate talk of their reinstitution or perpetuation, and politicians responsible for visiting them upon us — one of American history’s greatest blunders — should be ousted from office and never work in public service again.
For as Rudin concludes on Twitter, our pandemic response “was always all about politics.” And while it may (or may not) help defeat President Trump, one thing is certain: Destroying your nation for power is evil.
Of course, people can engage in COVID ritual privately, on their own dime and time, if they wish. Fauci can even lead them in a COVID dance, which is fitting because he dances around issues as well as anyone. But the rest of us should look at the science and let these moral primitives indulge their superstition alone.
Image: Maridav/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
