Dr. Paul Elias Alexander asks: "When will the Lunacy End? Whispers of More Lockdowns"; published in TrialSiteNews https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/when-will-the-lunacy-end-whispers-of-more-lockdowns-a0

The fact is that benefits of the societal lockdowns (which I have called ‘lockdown lunacy’) and restrictions have been totally exaggerated & accrued harms to our societies & children have been severe

SOURCE

‘The aim is to drive awareness, introduce transparency, and facilitate engagement among people all over the world, from pharmaceutical professionals and academic researchers to regulators and healthcare professionals along with a wide array of the consuming public.’

Dr. Paul Alexander, PhD

For over two years now we have gathered expansive evidence (Dr. Harvey Risch, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Paul Alexander, Dr. Marty Makary, Dr. Ramin Oskoui, Dr. Scott Atlas, Dr. Mike Yeadon, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Dr. Carl Heneghan, Dr. Howard Tenenbaum, Dr. Stephen Smith, Dr. Parvez Dara, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Dr. Roger Hodkinson, Mr. Jeffrey Tucker, Dr. Vinay Prasad, Dr. Naomi Wolf, Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, Dr. John Littell, Nick Hudson, Dr. John Ioannidis, Abir Ballan et al.) on the catastrophic failures of lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, business closures, shielding and all of the lockdown policies that have ended is far greater harms than the COVID virus itself.

The fact is that the benefits of the societal lockdowns (which I have called ‘lockdown lunacy’) and restrictions have been totally exaggerated and the accrued harms to our societies and children have been severe: the harms to children, the undiagnosed illness that will result in excess mortality in years to come, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation in our young people, drug overdoses and suicides due to the lockdown policies, the crushing isolation due to the lockdowns, psychological harms, domestic and child abuse, sexual abuse of children, loss of jobs and businesses and the devastating impact, and the massive numbers of deaths resulting from the lockdowns that will impact heavily on women and minorities. 

Now we have whispers that there could be new lockdowns in Fall 2022 in response to the Omicron variants that are indeed more infectious but less virulent and severe. The reality is that no control measure has worked, not one (no lockdown or school closure or business closure anywhere globally worked to curtail transmission or death), and thus where would the impetus come for any new measures now?

I felt that we could have justified the first 2 to 3 weeks of lockdown only and based on the precautionary principle. Yet we saw the evidence accumulating by mid-April 2020 of the devastating effects of lockdowns and that the US government (lockdowns initiated and recommended by Dr. Anthony Fauci (NIAID) and Dr. Deborah Birx) made the greatest public health disaster decision in history, seconded only by the highly ineffective and not properly safe COVID injections.

The fact is that the most vulnerable and marginal groups in the US, those who were least able to afford the lockdowns and school closures, have been devastated the most by the unscientific ineffective policies and have been hardest hit by Covid-19. The health of a nation is directly tied to the socioeconomic health of the nation, and the socioeconomic drivers that played a role in Covid-19’s severity cannot be ignored, particularly for the future burden of disease outcomes. A focused protection (based on age and background risk level) would have performed far better than lockdowns, which have actually enhanced the unequal impacts of severe outcomes of the virus.

In confronting this pandemic in February and March 2020 and certainly by the summer of 2020, we had in our arsenal (yet failed to capitalize upon) a combination of i) strongly protecting (double- and triple-down protection) the elderly high-risk persons in nursing homes and similar congregated settings ii) use of effective public service announcements on who is at risk and how to mitigate the risk iii) allowing the low-risk portion of the population to live daily lives with sensible reasonable precautions, allowing them to get infected naturally and harmlessly given their low risk of severe illness or death whereby they in turn would have provided protection to the vulnerable and iv) use of early outpatient drug treatment (sequenced antivirals, corticosteroids, and anti-clotting drugs) in high risk populations, younger persons with comorbid conditions, and obese persons. We also could have PSA the use of vitamin D 3 to support the immune response with strong evidence showing it’s clinical benefit in reducing risk of death if Covid infected.

Unfortunately, we chose to ignore the signals from the pandemic. The fact remains that age and excess body weight/obesity, have accounted for almost 80% of the hospitalizations, intubations/ventilation, severe sequelae and deaths in Covid-19. A large number of persons who have died in nations such as the US have been overweight with some level of obesity. 

The importance of educating the public on the risk factors and the need for such protective efforts can be enhanced by the people themselves. Had public health leaders used their platforms optimally, the geared messaging would have helped reduce the damage significantly. We could have cut deaths significantly had the options described above been used, especially early outpatient treatment. The real tragedy is that the hands of medical doctors were tied by the State Boards in the use of early treatment, with medical licenses threatened if doctors prescribed the effective treatments. This costed lives, thousands!

What do we know? How did we get this all so wrong? Well, over the last two years and counting, the body of evidence (based on comparative research studies and high-quality pieces of evidence and reporting judged to be relevant and trustworthy) shows that COVID-19 lockdowns, shelter-in-place policies, masks, school closures, and mask mandates have failed disastrously in their purpose of curbing transmission or reducing deaths (see here, and here, and here, and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). These restrictive policies were ineffective and devastating failures, causing immense harm especially to the poorer and vulnerable within societies who could least afford to ‘shield’. The lockdowns and school closures benefitted the café latte ‘zoom’ laptop class.

We in effect shifted the burden of morbidity and mortality onto the poorest members of our societies and especially those who had to continue to ‘front-face’ the pathogen in their lower paying jobs e.g. the women and children, and we locked down the ‘well’ and healthy in society (children, young persons, middle aged persons) while failing to protect the vulnerable high-risk and elderly persons. We disregarded the clear evidence that COVID was amenable to risk stratification and that baseline risk was prognostic on severity of outcome. That there was a steep age-risk stratification curve and that persons 70 to 75 years old and younger had a near 99.9% risk of survival with COVID. We locked down the healthy persons and still failed to protect the vulnerable.

The reality is that near all governments have attempted compulsory measures to control the virus (save Sweden), but no government can claim success. Not one! The research indicates that mask mandates, lockdowns, and school closures have had no discernible impact of virus trajectories. In fact, I can point to evidence where the lockdown policies drove the escalation of infection and death.

Bendavid reported “in the framework of this analysis, there is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (‘lockdowns’) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, or the United States in early 2020.” We’ve known this for a very long time now but governments continue to double down, causing misery upon people with ramifications that will likely take decades or more to repair. 

How did we get here? We knew that we could never eradicate this mutable virus (that has an animal reservoir) with lockdowns and that it would likely become endemic like other circulating common cold coronaviruses. We knew this but pretended otherwise. We had evidence of a 1,000-fold differential in risk of death between a child and an elderly person. We knew of the potency and success of early ambulatory outpatient treatment in reducing the risk of hospitalization and death in the vulnerable.

It was clear very early on that Task Forces and medical doctors and advisors and decision-makers were not reading the evidence, were not up to speed with the science or data, did not understand the evidence, did not ‘get’ the evidence, and were blinded to the science, often driven by their own prejudices, biases, arrogance, and ego. They remained ensconced in sheer ignorance, academic sloppiness, and laziness. It was clear that the response was not a public health one. It was a political one from day one in the Trump administration and continues today in the Biden administration. 

A recent study (pre-print) captures the essence and catastrophe of a lockdown society and the hollowing out of our children by looking at how children learn (3 months to 3 years old) and finding across all measures that “children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic.” Researchers also reported that “males and children in lower socioeconomic families have been most affected. Results highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness, the environmental changes associated with the COVID-19 pandemic is significantly and negatively affecting infant and child development.”

The British Columbia Center for Disease Control (BCCDC) issued a full report in September 2020 on the impact of school closures on children and found para “that i) children comprise a small proportion of diagnosed COVID-19 cases, have less severe illness, and mortality is rare ii) children do not appear to be a major source of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in households or schools, a finding which has been consistent globally iii) there are important differences between how influenza and SARS-CoV-2 are transmitted. School closures may be less effective as a prevention measure for COVID-19 iv) school closures can have severe and unintended consequences for children and youth v) school closures contribute to greater family stress, especially for female caregivers, while families balance child care and home learning with employment demands vi) family violence may be on the rise during the COVID pandemic, while the closure of schools and childcare centres may create a gap in the safety net for children who are at risk of abuse and neglect.”

Then places like Austria (November 2021) re-entered the world of lockdown lunacy only to be outmatched by Australia and China. Indeed, an illustration of the spurious need for these ill-informed actions is that they are being done in the face of clear scientific evidence showing that during strict prior societal lockdowns, school lockdowns, mask mandates, and additional societal restrictions, the number of positive cases went up!

There is no conclusive evidence supporting claims that any of these COVID lockdown lunatic restrictive measures worked to reduce viral transmission or deaths. Lockdowns were ineffective, school closures were ineffective, mask mandates were ineffective, and masks themselves were and are ineffective and harmful. Everything failed and it is time to re-open societies fully and it is time to end all of the mandates and underlying emergency powers.

Perhaps Donald Luskin of the Wall Street Journal best captures what we have stably witnessed since the start of these unscientific lockdowns and school closures: “Six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. has now carried out two large-scale experiments in public health—first, in March and April, the lockdown of the economy to arrest the spread of the virus, and second, since mid-April, the reopening of the economy. The results are in. Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn’t contain the disease’s spread and reopening it didn’t unleash a second wave of infections.”

Once can also argue that Jeff Tucker (Brownstone) best captures the societal decline due to the lockdown lunacy when he wrote about the recent uptick in mass shootings in the US and by young persons. His focus was on the isolation due to the restrictive policies and how it may have hollowed out the moral center and clarity in many young persons. I too have wondered about this myself and also wrote, tying the lockdowns and school closures to these devastating actions by young persons with depraved minds. We are not talking about young persons who are saints. But it seems that lockdowns did something to them, to their already deranged or troubled minds, and we must not as a society discount this. We have to be willing to have the discussion on what lockdowns did. My argument is that our greatest fears may have now materialized. The school closures, social dislocation, the two years of isolation, the lockdown psychosis, plus dehumanizing masking and the resulting anxiety, depression, and despair, may have unleashed and may have enhanced depraved and murderous behavior. 

Tucker writes in his treatise on “Lockdowns, Closures, and the Loss of Moral Clarity”, that “The results of compulsory closures and shutdowns are all around us. It’s not only about educational losses, falling optimism, declining health, inflation, weakened financials, empty shelves, and shortened lives. Above all else, it is about the decline of society’s moral sense. We saw public officials engaged in the unthinkable – locking people in their homes, closing schools and churches, shutting down venues for fun and therapy, excluding people from public accommodations based on vaccine status – and that sent a message to everyone else. We’ve been through more than two years of isolating, segregating, dividing, excluding, and dehumanizing. The message: there are no more rules based on equality and rights. Nothing that we thought matters really does matter. The replacement is not rationality but primitivism and the destructive mindset. 

Over two years, our friend networks have been shattered, our communities broken, small businesses beaten, and many of our leaders have been co-opted into a machinery of corruption, while the censorship of open dialogue about the causes and consequences is intensifying. The tools we thought would save us and lead us into the light – our laws and technologies – have betrayed our rights, privacy, and liberties”.  

Tucker further writes that “perpetual decline and fall is not inevitable. It is fixable but every powerful force out there, especially mainstream media, seems to stand against that. It is all designed to demoralize us and cause us to give up. We cannot accept this fate. There is still time, providing that we understand what is happening and the grave consequences of letting it all take place without a fight.” 

In closing, the lockdowns and school closures harmed us in unimaginable ways and it is likely that the ravages will last for 100 more years, socially, emotionally, and psychologically on top of economically. We have devastated our children. We destroyed economies and caused severe economic hardships. We hurt our children in monstrous ways with the lockdown and school closure lunacy. We must learn from what has happened and ensure that it never ever happens again and there must be no walking away! We absolutely must demand and achieve accountability by all involved, all COVID policy decision makers and based on proper judicial public inquiries.

To end, the lockdown lunacy, the mandates, and the state of emergency is not justified now, and it cannot be justified by fears of a hypothetical recurrence of some more severe infection at some unknown point in the future. If such a severe new variant were to occur – and it seems unlikely from omicron – then that would be the time to discuss a declaration of emergency. Americans (and other global peoples) have sacrificed enough of their human rights and of their livelihoods for over two years in the service of protecting the general public health. Omicron is circulating but it is not an emergency. The emergency is over. It is done. This is over! The current emergency declarations must be canceled. It is time. It is time to bring this COVID pandemic to a complete close and it is time to resume our normal lives as we seek accountability for all the wrongs that were imposed upon us! It is time we begin the healing that we all so desperately need.