“We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality.”
– Johns Hopkins University, in a recent overview of the impact of lockdowns in handling COVID-19. JH is not some sort of fringe group. Big cheese billionaires such as Michael Bloomberg give oodles of their money to the place. Its standing as a place for medical research is very high.
In the very early days of covid, when information was only starting to come out and when some of the figures looked horrible, lockdowns for a few weeks might have been defensible, much as how one reacts often swiftly to a threat and learns to dial down the reaction later as more data comes in. But that didn’t happen, and in part because of a dangerous inertia, a manipulation of sentiment, and even the idea in some minds that locking down whole populations for months on end might be a quite good thing in its own right. The trashing of the Swedish approach, the demonisation of the Great Barrington Declaration, are all part of this.
Apologies: Link now fixed.
For myself, I had suspicions that it was all bunk from the start, but the propaganda levels being switched up to max was what convinced me that this was just the proggies using a crisis as a means to ratchet up the level of control. The wholesale repudiation of the Great Barrington Declaration by the establishment was the final nail in the coffin.
There needs to be a politically neutral public enquiry about the entire matter from start-to-finish and the guilty MUST be held accountable for the deaths, otherwise this will all happen again next time their is any excuse for it.
It’s been a full dress rehearsal for Net Zero Carbon which will require large scale reduction in consumption and therefore production, socialising the economy so everyone is paid by the State (probably the same amount), large scale reduction in travel as electricity supply and grid infrastructure will not be able to replace energy currently provided by motor fuels, and it will require people staying at home, rarely going out, working from home, communicating almost entirely electronically, having necessities delivered and being entertained within the home.
This will not apply to the people running this global gulag, they will still enjoy their freedoms and pleasures as normal.
Hi guys – the link to John Hopkins University doesn’t work. Would someone be so kind as to have a look into it please?
Having had a (wine fuelled) argument with a very good friend of mine on Saturday night about the efficacy of lockdowns, I think that this might just be the scholarly type of article needed to allow me to thrust my groin in his face, flip him the double bird, and scream “IN YOUR FACE, LOSER”…
…metaphorically, at least!
Many Thanks.
They knew masks and lockdowns didn’t work for a coronavirus right from the outset, that’s why they dubbed it a novel coronavirus. No one remembers that now.
Overall the lockdowns will have COST lives – and they will cost more lives in the future via the economic collapse that is now unavoidable (yes it may have been very likely even before Covid – but now it is certain).
As for the idea that Western governments (officials and “experts”) had time to assess the lockdown policy of the People’s Republic of China (if China ever really followed that policy outside Wuhan), by March 2020 – that is clearly NONSENSE.
There is no way, no way, that an assessment of the Covid policies of the People’s Republic of China have been made and detailed regulations drawn up (with a massive publicity campaign in the media) by March 2020.
Johnathan Pearce – I know I have been banging on about this for a very long time, but does need to be investigated. The official “time line” just does not work. No investigation of the success of otherwise of the Covid Policy in China (assuming they really did follow a “lockdown” policy – no information from the China can be trusted) and detailed regulations drawn up, in the amount of time it is supposed to have happened.
The international policy have been in the works – before the events it was supposedly a “response” to took place. And the implications of that are horrific.
Face nappies were always just an outward sign of compliance and nothing more. It wasn’t about preventing COVID-19 spreading, it was always about subjugating the plebs.
As for those countries who allowed some Early Treatment of Covid 19 (rather than endlessly chanting TINET there-is-no-early-treatment) – well, for example, the very poor Dominican Republic was (the last time I checked) 120th in the world for Covid deaths relative to its population.
Non lockdown countries? All of them, all-of-them have a much lower Covid death rate than lockdown Britain and lockdown United States.
“Ah but Paul – a few of the States in the United States did not lockdown” – fair enough, Nebraska and the others do NOT have a Covid death rate that is higher than lockdown States.
In the United States lockdowns are called “shelter in place orders”.
Of course it was not just Sweden that did not lockdown – several countries did not. The largest example being Japan (the advisory instructions in various places in Japan were NOT a lockdown).
Yet the campaign of propaganda continues – even in Japan. Right now I am watching English language Japanese television (NHK) and it is denouncing the fact that only 2% (two per cent) of Japanese have had “boosters” – “we need a million people to be injected a day” says the Prime Minister of Japan (remember this has NOT happened in Japan).
How do they support such demands? They talk about “cases” – the vast numbers of Covid “cases” in Japan.
On and off I have watched NHK over the two years of the crises – they never talk about Covid DEATHS, it is always “cases”.
There is a reason for that – the Covid death rate is much LOWER in Japan than in lockdown Britain and lockdown United States.
Of course NHK could defend themselves.
They could say “we do not lie about the number of Covid deaths – we just do not mention them, because the number of deaths are too low to create the PANIC that we want” and “we do not pretend that the injections prevent Covid infections – we just chant GET-YOUR-BOOSTER we make no specific claim at all about what these “boosters” actually do”.
But I hope Johnathan Pearce will agree that a media outlet can be engaged in deception (which NHK clearly is) without formally lying.
Now Australia is “opening up” – as long as you are “fully vaccinated”.
The injections do not stop people getting the virus or spreading the virus – THE LYING MUST STOP.
“But Paul the Australian government is not formally lying – they do not formally say that the injections do prevent people getting the virus or spreading the virus”.
Again – someone can deceive without formally lying. The intention to deceive is what matters.
And international “governance” clearly (from the start) have had the intention to deceive – and they are still engaged in deception.
And the media refuses to expose these obvious deceptions – indeed much of the media (the vast majority of it) actively helps international “governance” in the campaign of deception.
They went for the modelled data of Neil Ferguson rather than the actual data of the Diamond Princess stranded off Japan, early 2020. They chose to scare us, our health was not the goal.
Ljh – yes. So the question is WHY did the forces of international “governance” do what they did? It is indeed clear that “saving lives” was NOT their objective – so what was their objective?
This the media should investigate – rather than just chanting “misinformation” or “paranoid conspiracy theorist”.
Back to Japan…
I just checked the figures – their Covid death rate (relative to the population) is about 150th in the world – so this “Get Your Boosters” “Only two per cent of the population has done so – we must have a million injections a day!” campaign is absurd (demented).
It is absurd (demented) IF the objective is “saving lives” – but as Ljh points out, it is very unlikely indeed that the objective of the international “governance” forces is “saving lives”.
Another trick I have noticed the media (including NHK) play is to talk about “new variants” and then (at once) talk about the “vaccinations” – the implication being that the injections will prevent the emergence of the “new variants”.
There is no evidence that the injections prevent the emergence of “new variants” – if anything the injections PROMOTE the emergence of “new variants”.
Again I can not say “they are formally lying” – because the words “the injections prevent the emergence of new variants” are NOT used.
But that is the IMPLICATION of the media (and government) campaign – the INTENT is clearly to deceive.
Does anyone know why home Covid testing kits are being handed out free outside my local supermarket?
“and even the idea, in certain minds, that the locking down of the population for months on end might be a good thing in-its-self”.
Yes Johnathan Pearce – this is it. Nothing to do with “saving lives” from Covid.
And this is what the media needs to expose.
The “Build Back Better”, “Great Reset”, “Agenda 2030” international totalitarian “governance” agenda.
That excerpt is pretty damming too.
With his partying, Boris Johnson has demonstrated that he knew that COVID-19, as the vector that was to kill us all was a fraud. The Labour party was no better, and they are all still sitting on Parliamentary benches wearing their f*****g masks.
The one accurate thing Ferguson said, was that we would be paying for 2020/2021/2022 for decades ( note the plural ).
“0.2%”, “2.9%”? Presumably these are within the margin of error. Certainly 0.2% is. So, the verbiage chosen by an honest statistician would not be that lockdowns had an 0.2% effect but that “lockdowns had no measurable effect on mortality”.
A really honest statistician would have said (assuming a 3% margin of error which I’m making up for purposes of this post) that lockdowns contributed between a 2.8% addition to mortality and a 3.2% reduction in mortality. And would use 95% confidence intervals for this statement.
But we can’t have math and stats getting in the way of policy now can we?
Here is link to the actual JHU Study:
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf
According to the JHU study:
Since these gene therapies are not steralizing treatments, how could they prevent emergence of new varients?
Why wouldn’t they promote new varients? The vaccine is still alive but presumably being pressured not to express the spike protein. That seems to be what the host immune system recognises.
Since the ‘vaccines’ (really gene therapy) only introduce one speciic characteristic of reengineered COVID, the spike protein. And all that it does is introduce the possibility that a variety of unusual autoimmune conditions be introduced into an otherwise healthy individual.
In actual fact, there is the possibility that the spike protein creating gene therapy might just prime the immune system to ( apart from attacking your own body ) put evolutionary pressure on the virus to not express the spike. Ta Da! Omicron, the mildest ‘varient’ yet.
That would only be, if you believed any of this shit about the most mutational variety of COVID, eva. Like everything else we’ve been ‘officially’ told this last three years ( ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’, Ha! ) the super mutant COVID-19 virus is probably bullshit too.
JP,
Yes. But not ONLY was the Great Barrington Declaration demonized, but also the Great Barrington Declaration was censored. Famously, for example, the Facebook group for the Great Barrington Declaration was removed from Facebook towards the beginning of the pandemic for simply advocating against the lockdowns. At the time of its removal from Facebook, the Great Barrington Declaration had 700k (yes 700,000) members.
Remember the Great Barrington Declaration was written and created by 3 top epidemiologists:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.
Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.
Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations.
Obviously total cranks. Thank G-d Big Tech protected us from their lies! And is still protecting us from their lies today….
At the time of its removal from Facebook, the Great Barrington Declaration Facebook group* had 700k (yes 700,000) members.
They love lockdowns for the same reason they love war. It mostly kills the peasants.
Facebook, may Zuckerberg burn in hell, took down all the vaccine injury self help groups too.
‘self help’, because the medical profession wouldn’t help them.
I really have no idea whether “lockdowns” have any effect, but it seems clear to me that people staying home prevents them getting infected, or if they are already infected prevents them infecting others. Maybe in some places lockdowns don’t result in people staying home. I don’t know.
Closing the border doesn’t do anything? If no infected people enter a country then it seems clear to me that the virus can’t find its way into that country. Perhaps closing the border doesn’t prevent people from entering some countries? I don’t know.
What I know is four years ago I was living in Russia and that country has (officially) had 329,000 COVID deaths (but it seems a reduction in population of 600,000 or more). Two years ago I was living in USA and that country has officially had 901,000 COVID deaths.
I decided it was maybe a good idea to go to New Zealand for reasons of geography, relatively sane government (by either party) and non-corrupt public service, and generally sensible no-nonsense population. I bought my ticket on Feb 23 2020 and flew on March 26 2020.
For whatever reason, there have officially been 53 COVID-related deaths: 22 in the initial Mar/Apr/May 2020 outbreak, 3 in an outbreak just in Auckland in Aug 2020, 1 in an outbreak just in Auckland in Feb 2021, and 27 in the Delta outbreak starting in Aug 2021.
NZ has lower population than Russia or USA but not 5600x or 17,000x lower. The actual ratios are about 30x and 65x.
So, to explain this huge difference, if not primarily an effective border “closure”?
(Not actually closed, but restricted and with a fairly rigorous quarantine for those who do enter)
Bruce Hoult,
I’m offended on behalf of a couple friends of mine whose lives were ruined by these onerous, unjustifiable, horrific, evil (YES EVIL) lockdowns.
Bruce repeat after me. Johns Hopkins University study HAS PROVEN WITH SCIENTIFIC DATA:
Read that again.
Seriously, read those three paragraphs again, Bruce.
And again.
Understand what they are saying, every fucking word.
A 15 year old boy made a TikTok video about getting myocarditis a week after he took the fake gene therapy injection. It was removed from TikTok on the grounds of “it could discourage people from getting the vaccine, and thus it goes against the science”.
These evil fucking cunts. They have no shame. To say they deserve chains is to be charitable.
These stories are EVERYWHERE, it’s way beyond unbelievable.
If you had told me 3 years ago that this would happen in the United States of America, I would have called you a crazy conspiracy theorist and told you to stop believing Alex Jones.
Well, I was wrong and Alex Jones was right (in fact, reality is even worse than Alex Jones predicted it would be).
John B writes
Which is remarkably similar to what’s suggested by Transport Scotland/Scot Gov in their latest so-called “consultation” :
All under the guise of reducing private car use.
Bruce Hoult (February 7, 2022 at 1:55 pm), in the first outbreak of the black death, Iceland experienced no deaths. Because it was far (by mediaeval standards) from everywhere it traded with, the disease never reached it (perhaps some explicit quarantine measures helped). In the second outbreak, the disease reached Iceland (whereupon the population suffered severely).
New Zealand produces more food than it consumes, is very distant from most places, so had the option of practicing lockdown in a way wholly unfeasible to the world at large. In the bulk of the western world, the very people who later adored lockdowns spent the first quarter of 2020 calling travel bans racist (US Dems), asking people to ‘hug a chinaman’ (Italy) and generally ensuring that lockdowns would start after any resemblance to the New Zealand way (were that even possible!) was foreclosed. Britain is not self-sufficient in food, and is close to the French coast (and does not well-control its borders from illegal immigrants anyway) so people did indeed enter the country despite ‘lockdown’.
People (and the virus) having therefore entered the country, let us consider your other point.
Almost all British gardens are not self-sufficient in food, so lockdowns do indeed not result in people staying home. As food travels from port to supermarket warehouse to shelf to shopper, many people do not stay home.
(And of course, it’s not just food that is causing this.)
It’s a bit like socialism, Bruce. There’s the theory, there is the practice of the rare (and usually brief) commune populated by like-minded enthusiasts, and there is the actual experience of the bulk of the world when subjected to a socialist economy by bureaucratic power.
Likewise, you can study Neil Ferguson’s theoretical models of how well lockdowns would work, you can study what happened in New Zealand for two years, or you can study what happened in the rest of the world – as the JHU researchers did.
It’s worth considering that the virus was already in the UK ( a similar maladay had afflicted the military games attendees – held in WuHan second half 2019 ) so those folk came back and distributed it within the UK.
Then there is the fact that there were a large number of Chinese students, living in all the University towns and cities all around the UK, all through 2019 and there is a good chance many of those went back and fro to China where they could have picked up the WuFlu and brought it back. That demographic ( youngsters ) are not prone to show serious symptoms. So they probably wouldn’t have even noticed, maybe thought they were suffering jet lag.
Finally, the French ( among others ) had analysed sewage and found indications of WuFlu in the waste water samples for various French cities for the latter quarter of 2019.
So closing the borders in the Spring of 2020 was pointless, COVID-19 was already well established in the West toward the end of 2019.
PS. First hand report of a friend who has got COVID-19 and got a positive pcr test, just a week or two ago, said it was like a bad flu. The worst was the coughing which caused her to strain a muscle in her back, aggravating her condition.
I’m on much the same page as John Galt. Initially I went along with the Government’s ‘3 weeks to flatten the curve’ because, naively with the benefit of hindsight, I believed them. However, it was obvious that the collateral damage was severe even then and once the initial restrictions were prolonged and deepened I knew the policy was mistaken. I wrote twice to my MP saying that the supposed cure was worse than the disease and that we needed a flourishing economy to provide a decent health service and I signed the GBD shortly after its publication.
It is a consolation of a sort that quite a number of people are coming round to the views I have held for so long but not much of one. The damage has been done. I view the prolonged and repeated restrictions and lockdowns as the most incompetent and appalling policy blunder of my now rather long life and, yes, we will indeed be paying the price for decades to come.
‘I view the prolonged and repeated restrictions and lockdowns as the most incompetent and appalling policy blunder of my now rather long life and, yes, we will indeed be paying the price for decades to come.’
Absolutely – the biggest public policy stuff up of anyone alive today. I too, though with a dose of the doubts, was prepared for ‘3 weeks’, but sensed it was a massive over-reaction driven by panic (amongst the policy-makers).
Paul Marks
There is no way, no way, that an assessment of the Covid policies of the People’s Republic of China have been made and detailed regulations drawn up (with a massive publicity campaign in the media) by March 2020.
This the media should investigate – rather than just chanting “misinformation” or “paranoid conspiracy theorist”.
You can as well expect Pravda to investigate whether all accused Trotskyite spies are really guilty and whether conditions in prisons and camps are really healthy and humane.
If someone does any investigation, it is anonymous paranoid conspiracy theorists.
See these excellent threads examining evidence how exactly back in early 2020 virus panic emerged.
Western elites revised their estimation of Corona in March. They had, for months, downplayed Corona as a minor, flu-like illness. By mid-month, they had decided it was one of the greatest threats facing mankind.
This will be a long thread about how that happened.
https://archive.is/20210106053347/https://twitter.com/eugyppius1/status/1345778126593388544
https://archive.is/20210106053354/https://twitter.com/eugyppius1/status/1346019063630327808
https://archive.is/20210106053605/https://twitter.com/eugyppius1/status/1346382835419115520
https://archive.is/20210303122826/https://twitter.com/eugyppius1/status/1346810217590386689
The international policy have been in the works – before the events it was supposedly a “response” to took place. And the implications of that are horrific.
Indeed.
This may well be of interest – James Lindsay talking to Glenn Beck
First part is your typical Lindsay dissection of CRT etc, but the discussion develops deeper into the thinking of the Great reset crowd
I found it very interesting and enlightening, even as a non novice on this stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5IVd4T3A1M
I do not for a second buy the argument that lockdowns were defensible at the start. I had long (and bitter) text and blog arguments with various people starting around the end of March 2020. Anyone who looked seriously at the data coming out of South Korea and several concentrated/isolated populations, the most famous of which was a cruise ship, would have realized by mid-April 2020 (at the latest) that Covid was only dangerous to a particular and well-identified segment of the population. Everyone should have considered that data carefully, to understand their personal risk if nothing else.
‘that’s why they dubbed it a novel coronavirus. No one remembers that now.’
They used that term for at least a year after it was no longer applicable.
‘They chose to scare us, our health was not the goal.’
Our health was in a sense one of the goals – but it wasn’t to make it better.
‘I’m offended on behalf of a couple friends of mine whose lives were ruined by these onerous, unjustifiable, horrific, evil (YES EVIL) lockdowns.’
Which is completely undeniable and therefore the question of whether lockdowns (or communism) work(s) or not is completely irrelevant.
Niall Kilmartin wrote:
As I said, it seemed clear to me by mid February 2020 that NZ (and Australia to nearly the same extent) was likely to be the place to be, for many reasons, so I moved there from San Francisco where I was living at the time. Of course not everyone could do that, and I am fortunate to have the right to live indefinitely in either country.
My main point is around the evident predictability of how things played out.
As for New Zealand, border closure was always part of the Pandemic Influenza Plan, precisely because of our geographical isolation, which makes it feasible. That’s about the only part of the plan they actually followed, of course. Lockdowns formed no part of it, nor did forcing people to wear masks already known to be useless. The plan can still be found here: https://www.health.govt.nz/system/files/documents/publications/influenza-pandemic-plan-framework-action-2nd-edn-aug17.pdf. My favourite bit is this (under Communications Objectives on page 104): “Key objectives are to…create a level of public awareness and a sense of urgency appropriate for the level of risk without creating alarm or panic.” Yeah, right.
The lockdowns clearly did nothing here , but closing the borders did – and it does mean that now covid is getting out, it’s a mild variant. So in a sense it worked, just not the way the government – with their elimination obsession – thought it would.
Consider that the “economic and social costs” are analogous to an iceberg, so far, we only seen the part above the surface. It’s not unreasonable to anticipate significant damage to young children in terms of their health, their social/emotional development, and their neuro cognitive development. This has to have been known to the “experts” in child development: pediatricians, educators, psychologists, literacy/dyslexia specialists. Where were the Departments of Education or Health? Why weren’t they defending the interests of the children? Why weren’t they making parents aware of ways to mitigate the damage? Why wasn’t this part of the public discussion?
“Large scale reduction in travel as electricity supply and grid infrastructure will not be able to replace energy currently provided by motor fuels”
This makes sober reading:
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2021/10/Montford-Smart-Homes-Energy-Rationing.pdf
another lurker – thank you.
However, the media is not totally controlled by the forces of evil.
For example, the New York Post in the United States, and the Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom have published things that do not present the international Collectivist establishment in a good light.
And Fox News (at least a few people there) and GB News have interviewed leading opponents of the agenda.
Flubber – yes James Lindsey is quite correct.
And Glenn Beck is correct in how the thing plays out.
A person quotes what the Marxists (who call themselves “liberals” or “Progressives”) have written in their own books and articles – and IN CONTEXT. Yet they reply that the person is a “paranoid conspiracy theorist” (for quoting their own words back to them) – and the media AGREES that the person is a “paranoid conspiracy theorist”, and backs the Marxists.
I think that it was officially estimated that between 200k and 500k people will die because of the lockdowns.
Which is the same thing as saying “we decided to kill at least 200k people directly” to save us from the virus. Of course, it was not presented that way but it does not make it any less true.
I never believed that the lockdown would accomplish anything but impoverishing us, not only via economic value not being created but also by it being actively destroyed: as an example, planes on tarmac being unused are an actual value destruction exercise. Now we are made to pay for it via inflation (which is actual government theft). The only good idea they had were the nightingale hospitals but we know how that went.
They should also have left the schools open, as kids were immune, and use the fact that it started at the end of March, going into spring and summer which was perfect for a seasonal virus.
I do hope that the truth proves indeed much slower than the next headline, but that eventually, the people responsible will line up the mall hanging from the lampposts.
Ever wondered what a ‘humanized mouse‘ might be?
Or how you might go about creating one?
That was the terror campaign all along, and an integeral part of the plan. If enough people didn’t die, then they’d have to be killed!
Alex Jones predicted it…
Take the time to follow this link to Heather Heying’s substack article. You will not regret this, the portraits from Ottawa are inspirational; 18 portraits of beautiful patriots. (Heather is an evolutionary biologist and partners with her husband on Darkhorse Podcast) Please pass it on.
https://naturalselections.substack.com/p/facesofprotest?r=h06wc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email