“Marketed as life-saving public health measures, lockdowns triggered death and economic devastation on a global scale while doing little to slow the spread of Covid-19. Now, they’re back with a vengeance.”
With “COVID-19 cases rising in Europe, several countries are implementing lockdowns all over again, often with clearly punitive motivations.”
“This November, Austria’s government announced that police would enforce a lockdown exclusively against unvaccinated citizens. Following days of massive protests, the policy was extended to everyone, with steep fines and even prison sentences to be imposed on those who refuse to comply, and a compulsory vaccination requirement tacked on for good measure.”
“Next door in Germany, where a new lockdown was announced this December for unvaccinated people, barring them from almost all public places except for pharmacies and supermarkets, Berlin is also weighing a vaccination mandate for all. One German constitutional lawyer has even proposed that refusers of the jab “be brought before the vaccinator by the police.””
“Though statewide lockdowns have eased in Australia, the country is constructing internment camps for those who test positive for Covid, along with their Covid-negative “close contacts.” Harley Hodgson, an Australian held for 14 days in one such camp despite repeatedly testing negative for Covid, [talked about] her experience“.
“While much of the public accepted such restrictions during the early days of the pandemic, they are now met with increasing resistance by citizens around the world who have suffered from economic devastation, homelessness, suicidal ideation, social isolation, domestic violence, addiction and the cancellation of routine medical procedures as a result of lockdowns.”
“The public health justification for these non-pharmaceutical interventions has not only been discredited in the eyes of millions across the globe, but by an array of scientific studies and data demonstrating that they likely caused more deaths than they prevented.”
“The lethal impact of lockdowns was particularly pernicious in the Global South, where hundreds of millions of the world’s most vulnerable people were driven into a cascading humanitarian crisis. As the World Food Program warned in 2020, “135 million people on earth are marching towards the brink of starvation” as a result of their economies shutting down to supposedly inhibit the spread of COVID-19.”
“In his book, The Covid Consensus, professor of African history at King’s College Toby Green chronicled the misery, migration outflow and mass death spawned by lockdowns imposed on populations from Africa to Latin America.”
“For most people on the planet, the economic and psychological harm experienced during the past 19 months was not the result of the pandemic per se, but of emergency-order restrictions governments imposed on them and justified as public health measures. In the Global North, such costly efforts did little more than delay the inevitable spread of COVID-19 while transferring wealth into the hands of Big Tech oligarchs who constitute the pandemic’s real “winners.””
“Though public health scholars and some officials warned that lockdowns would do possibly irreparable damage to the global economy while only deepening the public health crisis, the politics of the Trump era enabled supporters of harsh restrictions to caricature critics as dangerous right-wing extremists.”
““Discussion of the inevitable harm of lockdowns has been almost totally forbidden by most of the mainstream media and academia, while the left followed the lead of the Democratic Party, doing all it could to marginalize any discussion of the collateral damage of these measures,” Christian Parenti, professor of economics at the City University of New York and author of several books about policing and mass surveillance, commented to The Grayzone. “Any questioning of lockdown measures was cast as right wing, even fascist. But mostly the left just ignored the emerging facts, particularly regarding the carnage caused in the Global South.””
“One of the most outspoken among the public health scholars sounding the alarm about the social cost of sweeping restrictions was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. As a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated a strategy of focused protection instead of hard lockdown, Bhattacharya and his colleagues were subjected to social media censorship and mainstream media attacks.”
The “initial inspiration for locking down the UK and parts of the US derived from a bunk model of projected fatalities that has since been discredited.”
“In the United States, lockdowns and various rolling restrictions triggered an economic catastrophe for working and poor people across the country, pushing those already on the financial precipice over the brink.”
“In the US in 2020, 40 percent of people making under $40,000 annually lost work, and almost three million women were driven out of the workforce due to an inability to balance work and caregiving and virtual learning obligations for children who could no longer attend in-person school or daycare. Dozens of airlines failed, and at least 200,000 small-businesses were shuttered.”
“As lockdowns drove inequality in the US, millions skipped routine medical care such as childhood vaccinations and cancer screenings, because the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommended that hospitals suspend non-essential and elective procedures. In May 2021, almost ten million routine screenings were missed in the United States, while other preventative health visits declined on a mass scale due to elective procedure suspensions, which may also lead to worsening public health problems in the long-term.”
“While average Americans paid a heavy price for the restrictions, Big Tech oligarchs quickly emerged as the pandemic’s winners. In 2020, billionaires increased their wealth by 54 percent. In fact, the top 1% of U.S. households now officially control more money than the entire middle class, or the middle 60 percent of households by income, in the US.”
“As lockdowns took their psychological toll on the US population, opioid-related deaths surged to record levels – up 30% from the previous year across the country and up 40% in 10 states. The sharpest rise in deaths occurred in Black Americans, along with those aged 35 to 44.”
“Lockdowns and excessive closures have also contributed to an international rise in domestic violence.”
“The impact of restrictions on young people, adolescents and babies who are at very little risk of illness with serious COVID-19, with a one in 50,000 chance of hospitalization and a two in one million chance of death for children, cannot be overstated. Babies and young infants, after all, require regular socialization and interaction for healthy development.”
“For many among the urban laptop class, including a large swath of the hyper-online Western left which still clamors for national school closures and demands lockdowns in the face of a handful of new cases (while crudely painting critics of official Covid policy as Nazis), quarantine orders merely enforced an already sedentary lifestyle that revolves around Zoom meetings, ordered food and Amazon deliveries.”
“With surging unemployment, reduced incomes, and fewer social services, the populations of poor countries in the Global South have experienced massive increases in hunger.”
“In all, about 2.37 billion people – or about 30 percent of the world population and 320 million more people than in the previous year – did not have access to adequate food at some point during 2020.”
“For governments across the world, Covid provided an opportunity to pummel their most vulnerable residents, as well as those who dissented from the official order. As Amnesty International’s European bureau stated in a detailed but under-acknowledged June 2020 report, “The police enforcement of lockdowns disproportionately impacted poorer areas, which often have a higher proportion of residents from minority ethnic groups.””
“Across the globe, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor and working class, have been arrested for violating quarantine and been locked up in crowded unsanitary jails where Covid infections run rampant.”
“School-aged children and students around the world also suffered enormously under the weight of closures, particularly those in impoverished communities. [For example,] The New York Times reported this November that Uganda’s ongoing school closures have consigned the county’s youth to possibly lifelong poverty.”
“Despite the mass job loss, economic destruction, and increased hunger that non-pharmaceutical interventions have inflicted on the global population, the effectiveness of efforts such as lockdowns, curfews, school closures, and the constant PCR testing of healthy people are dubious at best.”
“Many credited lockdowns in China, Greece, Vietnam, and Australia with early COVID successes, contributing to a widespread perception that lockdowns are vital to saving lives, and, therefore, a compassionate choice. Such reasoning has led governments internationally to proceed with lengthy closures of daily life.”
“Despite the tendency to resort to them when cases rise, the evidence of lockdowns’ effectiveness in inhibiting the spread of coronavirus is threadbare.”
“Peru, which boasts the world’s highest COVID-19 death rate despite imposing hard lockdowns, was a case in point. Meanwhile, Greece locked down in November 2020 at around 2,500-3,000 cases daily, only to open again for tourism six months later with similar case numbers. Then there was Belarus, a country of over 9 million which did not lock down or introduce a mask mandate, and boasted one of Europe’s lowest COVID death rates all the way up to the Delta surge in Eastern Europe.”
“Despite their widespread utilization as a non-pharmaceutical intervention against COVID-19, the shaky evidence for lockdowns does not end with anecdotes and country-specific strategies: dozens of academic and scientific studies call into question their efficacy or otherwise argue that the social, economic, and health related harms they pose significantly outweigh the risks.”
“While they may not be effective at limiting the spread of coronavirus, lockdowns are effective at destroying the economy, people’s livelihoods, and perhaps the social fabric itself as individuals grow used to remaining distant from friends, coworkers, family and community.”
“And while income and education losses, extensive isolation, and other COVID-related disruptions are devastating in the short-term, they also can inflict long-term adverse impacts on the length and quality of life, even decades later.”
“Even the WHO has appealed against lockdowns, acknowledging the strain lockdowns place on the disadvantaged. “We really do appeal to all world leaders, stop using lockdown as your primary method of control,” WHO COVID-19 envoy Dr. David Nabarro told British broadcaster Andrew Neil. “Lockdowns have just one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.””
“As the logic behind “stopping the spread” through indefinite lockdowns is questioned even by top public health authorities, the policy has reappeared with a vengeance in Europe, where it has been weaponized against non-compliant populations and to intimidate citizens into line with government policy.”
In “Portugal, which has run out of people to vaccinate due to the country’s near-total uptake, infections are also surging, prompting the government to declare a state of emergency and impose a new bevy of restrictions. And in Gibraltar, officially the most jabbed place on the planet, with a 99% vaccination rate, authorities cancelled official Christmas festivities following a surge of COVID-19 cases. The news confirmed a November 2021 study from the US CDC that found that vaccinated people are “no less infectious” than those who are unvaccinated.”
“Just as the failure of vaccines to prevent the spread of COVID-19 became apparent, international media began filling up with panicked headlines about a terrifying new variant. Labeled “Omicron” by the World Health Organization on November 26, 2021, the variant reportedly originated in southern Africa. The doctor who discovered the variant has said all cases tend to be mild so far.”
“Among the first prominent public health pundits to hype the supposed danger of Omicron was Tom Peacock, a virologist from the Imperial College of London’s department of infectious diseases – a wing of the same Bill Gates-sponsored institution responsible for the discredited models that influenced the UK and US government’s first lockdowns by grossly overestimating the death toll from COVID-19.”
“Even before the threat from the so-called Omicron variant is known, the US and EU have enacted new restrictions which are certain to ravage the already weathered economies of southern Africa.”
“For millions at the mercy of the new wave of restrictions, a dark winter has just begun.”
Related: Hidden cost of COVID: How millions of Europeans with cancer are being impacted by the pandemic
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