COVID-19 Lockdowns: Liberty and Science (Part-1)

 

 

 This is a very long post which resumes almost everything about a year of Covid-19 so I have divided it into 2 parts. This is part 1.

COVID-19 Lockdowns: Liberty and Science by Ammo.com‘s lead writer, Sam Jacobs, originally appeared in Thought Grenades, the blog at LibertasBella.com.

COVID-19 Lockdowns: Liberty and Science

The Chinese Coronavirus (COVID-19) hit American shores — officially, anyway, there is significant evidence that it arrived earlier — in late January 2020. The American public was then told that a two-week shutdown of the economy would “flatten the curve,” relieving the pressure on hospital intensive care units and saving lives in the long run.

The average American, including conservatives, being people of good faith, complied, thinking that this was a common-sense measure that would save lives in the wake of a new and mysterious pandemic.

But two things quickly happened: First, the goalposts moved. No longer was it enough to “flatten the curve.” Now we were to be locked down until there was a cure.

No longer was it enough to “flatten the curve.” Now we were to be locked down until there was a cure.

Even the cure was not enough for some figures like the lionized-by-liberals Dr. Anthony Fauci — we would continue to be locked down even after a vaccine had been rammed through the approvals process with limited testing. When would we be allowed out by our masters? No one could answer this.

Second, there was an intensification of the authoritarian measures. Some states, aided by Big Tech, introduced “contact tracing” where people had to sign in with extensive personal information if they wanted to, for example, eat out at a restaurant. This was so that, in the event of infection with COVID-19, the state health department would be able to track and trace everyone you had contact with.

We should add that a third thing didn’t so much “happen” but was discovered: As it turns out unless you are old (over the age of 65), morbidly obese or suffer from a complicating disorder (such as diabetes or asthma), COVID-19 was little more than a bad cold or the flu.

What’s more, there was a financial incentive from the government to mark deaths as COVID-19 deaths when they were not. George Floyd, the man who died while being arrested by the Minneapolis Police Department, sparking riots over the summer of 2020, is officially a COVID-19 death because he died with COVID-19, despite not dying of COVID-19.

By the fall of 2020, the facts became clear: While COVID-19 was dangerous for select populations, it had an extremely low death rate among the young and healthy.

The generous or naive might say that the COVID-19 health measures are misguided attempts to protect the population. A more hard-nosed or cynical person likely thinks that these measures are a deliberate attempt to enact totalitarian measures leveraging public panic.

This, of course, would not be the first time the government and its toadies took advantage of such a panic, with the 9/11 attacks presenting a recent example of such.

We believe that COVID-19 measures are little more than a cynical power grab. We also believe that they have no basis in “the science” often breathlessly invoked by the toadies of this power grab.

In this article, we will make a compelling case that there is nothing scientific about this attack on the individual civil liberties of Americans. As Canadian Dr. Roger Hodkinson, a top pathologist, virologist, and CEO of a biotech company manufacturing COVID tests said, “this (COVID-19) is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.”

 

Who Is Hurt By Lockdowns… And Who Isn’t?

Before launching into specifics about “the science” of lockdowns, it is worth discussing who was impacted by lockdowns and who wasn’t. Despite the rhetoric from the political and media class about how “we are all in this together,” there is clearly no “we” and there are different impacts on different people.

First, let’s discuss the American and international media elites. These jobs are largely done remotely and, where they are not customarily performed so, can easily be transitioned to be done remotely. Then there is the small matter of the political class of bureaucrats who receive their paychecks whether they perform any ostensible “work” — to say nothing of obtaining results — or not.

Unsurprisingly, these are two groups heavily invested in both lockdowns and in policing the behavior of ordinary citizens. Compare with the working- and middle-class Americans who do not see a dime unless they actually show up to work, work which often cannot be done under the restrictive and arbitrary rules of the lockdowns.

While one can write clickbait articles about how anti-mask and anti-lockdown protesters are agents of white supremacy from the comfort of one’s own home, the same cannot be said for tasks like construction, manufacturing, many forms of retail sales or hospitality.

This isn’t just a matter of a few people missing out on a few weeks of work. CNBC host Jim Cramer has noted that the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic led to one of the biggest wealth transfers in all of American history. Wall Street cleaned up at the expense of Main Street.

Small businesses shuttered at an astonishing rate with restaurants and retailers hardest hit. All told, 60 percent of business closures were expected to be permanent, for a total of over 100,000 businesses.

While Main Street businesses were locked down, Amazon was making a killing — all while Jeff Bezos’ vanity blog, the Washington Post was pushing lockdown policies. Walmart, Lowe’s, and Target were likewise seeing booming profits.

This is emblematic of the massive transfer of wealth from small Main Street businesses to Big Tech and the financial sector. Indeed, the tale of the Chinese coronavirus in total might well be described as a massive upward consolidation of power.

The point of all this is to point out that there is a massive social and economic cost to the lockdowns that is borne entirely by the plebeians and not at all by the political and media elites who push the lockdowns hard.

People’s lives have been ruined by the lockdown. And while the projected increase in suicide rates has thus far failed to materialize, why does someone have to kill themselves for us to be concerned about how COVID-19 has impacted their lives?

Further, we have evidence that people die of “despair” — effectively giving up on life and failing to perform adequate self-care, overdosing on drugs or other similar types of deaths — at an alarming rate during the pandemic lockdowns.

Indeed, there is even a mathematical formula for this, whereby there is an expected 5,300 to 10,000 deaths for every 1 percent of unemployment.  Unemployment during COVID lockdowns peaked at 14.7 percent, which would be an expected excess death total of between 77,910 and 147,000.

The COVID lockdowns of Spring 2020 saw an uptick in a number of other serious conditions. Increased suicide was one, but also drug overdoses, alcohol-related illness, tuberculosis infections and on the non-lethal side of things, increased alcohol abuse generally as well as increased spousal and child abuse.

Delayed cancer screenings were another problem during the lockdowns. The United Kingdom, which has socialized medicine, believes that there are tens of thousands of deaths related to delayed treatment because of COVID alone.

Conservative news and opinion website Revolver has conducted an extensive study of just how impacted American quality of life has been by COVID lockdowns, in terms of actual months of life lost. They concluded that over 10 times as much life has been lost due to COVID lockdowns than due to the disease itself.

The Revolver study is largely based on “back of the envelope” type calculations, but is still worth reading to get a sense of the scope of how COVID-19 lockdowns have negatively impacted the lives of Americans significantly more than the disease itself.

The Great Barrington Declaration, signed by over 7,000 scientists, virologists, and infectious disease experts believes that lockdowns are destroying “at least seven times as much life” as the disease itself and that in the United States and the United Kingdom, there is “irreparable damage” being done.

The declaration notes clearly that “seven times as much damage” is the absolute minimum, putting a more realistic figure at 90 times.

There is another metric worth mentioning in our quest to quantify how bad the lockdown has been for non-sick people. Global debt has ballooned, growing by $20 trillion since the lockdowns began, according to the Institute of International Finance. This is thought to be the biggest increase in debt in the world’s history

Perhaps worst of all, none of this is ever explained to the public as being necessary. It is simply not acknowledged at all. It is an article of faith in the COVID cult that any measure that will prevent even a single death is worth it no matter what the social or economic consequences.