Criticism of lockdowns

Medical Prof Explains Devastating Effects Of Lockdown For A Virus With A '99.95%' Survival Rate

HAFJanuary 3, 2021

https://humansarefree.com/2021/01/medical-prof-explains-devastating-effects-of-lockdown-for-a-virus-with-a-99-95-survival-rate.html


by Arjun Walia

It's quite clear to see for anybody who is doing deep research into the COVID pandemic that there is a big split within the scientific/ medical community as to whether or not the measures being taken by governments around the world, like lockdowns, masking and social distancing are appropriate, effective and necessary.

If watching mainstream media and only obtaining information via the television screen, radio and newspaper is ones only exposure to news regarding the pandemic, this wouldn't seem to be the case, and it would seem that these measures are indeed necessary and appropriate because it seems to be the dominant viewpoint that's constantly presented and beamed out to the masses.

It's quite a concern to many that doctors and scientists who oppose the views and perception being given to us by mainstream media about the pandemic are largely ignored and censored.

Somebody like Dr. Anthony Fauci, for example, can receive instant virality yet thousands of scientists and experts in the field who disagree seem to be ignored, censored and never really given the light of day to share their research, data, and opinions.

The truth is, lockdown measures may not only be unnecessary and useless for combating COVID, but they are also having other detrimental consequences that could be worse than the virus itself.

This was recently expressed by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, from the Stanford University School of Medicine in an article written for The Hill titled "Facts, not fear, will stop the pandemic."

In that article he expresses that the case fatality rate from the virus has dropped sharply since March, and that it's now 99.95 percent for people under the age of 70 and 95 percent for people over the age of 70.

He also recently expressed this fact on a JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) Network conversation alongside Mark Lipsitch, DPhil and Dr. Howard Bauchner, who interviews leading researchers and thinkers in health care about their JAMA articles.

Bhattacharya cited this study published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, along with approximately 50 others as expressed in the video interview.

In the article he wrote for The Hill, he points out a number of facts regarding the implications of lockdown measures.

The media have paid scant attention to the enormous medical and psychological harms from the lockdowns in use to slow the pandemic. Despite the enormous collateral damage lockdowns have caused, England, France, Germany, Spain and other European countries are all intensifying their lockdowns once again.

By lockdowns, we mean the all-too-familiar shuttered schools and universities, closed playgrounds and parks, silent churches and bankrupt stores and businesses that have become emblematic of American civic life these past months.

The relative dearth of reporting on the harms caused by lockdowns is odd, since lives lost from lockdown are no less important than lives lost from COVID infection. But they've received much less media attention.

The harms from lockdown have been catastrophic. Consider the psychological harm. Reader, since you're reading this in lockdown, you can undoubtedly relate to the isolation and loneliness that these policies can cause by shutting down typical channels for social interaction.

In June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that one in four young adults had seriously considered suicide. Opioid and other drug related deaths are on a sharp and unsurprising upswing.

The burden of these policies falls disproportionately on some of the most vulnerable. For example, isolation led to a 20 percent increase in dementia-related deaths among our elderly population. Moreover, retrospective analysis of the lockdown in the United States shows that patients skipped cancer screenings, childhood immunizations, diabetes management visits and even treatment for heart attacks.

Internationally, the lockdowns have placed 130 million people on the brink of starvation, 80 million children at risk for diphtheria, measles and polio, and 1.8 million patients at risk of death from tuberculosis.

The lockdowns in developed countries have devastated the poor in poor countries. The World Economic Forum estimates that the lockdowns will cause an additional 150 million people to fall into extreme poverty, 125 times as many people as have died from COVID.

Stanford Professor Of Medicine: COVID-19 Has A 99.95% Survival Rate For People Under 70

Criticism of lockdowns has been a common theme. Early on during the first wave of the pandemic, a report published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ)  titled Covid-19: "Staggering number" of extra deaths in community is not explained by covid-19″  has suggested that quarantine measures in the United Kingdom as a result of the new coronavirus may have already killed more UK seniors than the coronavirus has during the months of April and May.

A response by Professor David Paton, Professor of Economics at the University of Nottingham and Professor Ellen Townsend, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Nottingham School of Medicine, to an article  published in the the BMJ in November titled "Screening the healthy population for covid-19 is of unknown value, but is being introduced worldwide" states,

Taken together, the data are clear both that national lockdowns are not a necessary condition for Covid-19 infections to decrease and that the Prime Minister was incorrect to suggest to MPs that infections were increasing rapidly in England prior to lockdown and that without national measures, the NHS would be overwhelmed…

Lockdowns have never previously been used in response to a pandemic. They have significant and serious consequences for health (including mental health), livelihoods and the economy.

Around 21,000 excess deaths during the first UK lockdown were not Covid-19 deaths. These are people who would have lived had there not been a lockdown.

It is well established that the first lockdown had an enormously negative effect on mental health in young people as compared to adults.

The more we lockdown, the more we risk the mental health of young people, the greater the likelihood the economy will be destroyed, the greater the ultimate impact on our future health and mental health.

Sadly, we know that global economic recession is associated with increased poor mental health and suicide rates.

According to a recent study published in Pediatrics, lockdown and social distancing measures are strongly correlated with an increase in suicidal thoughts, attempts and behaviour.

According to Dr. John Lee, a former Professor of Pathology and NHS consultant pathologist,

Lockdowns cannot eradicate the disease or protect the public…They lead to only economic meltdown, social despair and direct harms to health from other causes…Scientifically, medically and morally lockdowns have no justification in dealing with Covid.

These facts and many others are what inspired Bhattacharya, along with Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology to create The Great Barrington Declaration.

The declaration strongly opposes lockdown measures that are being and have been put in place by various governments around the globe. The declaration has an impressive list of co-signers from renowned doctors and professors in the field from around the world, and now has nearly 50,000 signatures from doctors and scientists. The declaration also has approximately 660,000 signatures from concerned citizens.

Scrolling through the twitter feed of The Great Barrington Declaration, I came across a post from the American Institute For Economic Research (AIER) titled "Lockdowns Do Not Control The Coronavirus: The Evidence."

In the article they argue that, "In a saner world, the burden of proof really should belong to the lockdowners, since it is they who overthrew 100 years of public-health wisdom and replaced it with an untested, top-down imposition on freedom and human rights. They never accepted that burden. They took it as axiomatic that a virus could be intimidated and frightened by credentials, edicts, speeches, and masked gendarmes."

According to the AIER,

The pro-lockdown evidence is shockingly thin, and based largely on comparing real-world outcomes against dire computer-generated forecasts derived from empirically untested models, and then merely positing that stringencies and "nonpharmaceutical interventions" account for the difference between the fictionalized vs. the real outcome. The anti-lockdown studies, on the other hand, are evidence-based, robust, and thorough, grappling with the data we have (with all its flaws) and looking at the results in light of controls on the population.

AIER gathered data that was put together by engineer Ivor Cummins Ivor Cummins but has also added its own in the summary they posted, which you can see below.

The studies are focused only on lockdown measures and they "do not get into the myriad of associated issues that have vexed the world such as mask mandates, PCR-testing issues, death misclassification problem, or any particular issues associated with travel restrictions, restaurant closures, and hundreds of other particulars about which whole libraries will be written in the future."

You can access those studies posted by the AIER here.

Other concerns with regards to lockdowns are the fact that they are based on "positive" results from a PCR test. Just because a person, especially an asymptomatic person, tests positive does not mean they have COVID. We seem to be forgetting this.

For example, 22 researchers have put out a paper explaining why, according to them, it's quite clear that the PCR test is not effective in identifying COVID-19 cases. As a result we may be seeing a significant amount of false positives.

The Deputy Medical Officer of Ontario, Canada, Dr. Barbara Yaffe recently stated that COVID-19 testing may yield at least 50 percent false positives. This means that people who test positive for COVID may not actually have it.

In July, professor Carl Heneghan, director for the centre of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University and outspoken critic of the current UK response to the pandemic, wrote a piece titled "How many Covid diagnoses are false positives?" He has argued that the proportion of positive tests that are false in the UK could also be as high as 50%.

There are many examples, the list goes on and on and you can read more about that specifically here.

Although deaths are currently running at normal levels, fear is being driven by inflation of Covid "ases" caused by inappropriate use of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test. This test is hypersensitive and highly susceptible to contamination, particularly when not processed with utmost rigour by properly trained staff. Case inflation also occurs from use of excessive number number of rounds of amplification cycles (termed CT) which amplifies non-infectious viral fragments and cross-reacting nucleotides from non-Covid coronaviruses/other respiratory viruses. These become mis-labelled as Covid.

Even Dr. Fauci confirms that a positive result using CT above 34 is invalid. An obvious improvement is to immediately halt any use of CTs above 34 and ensure that or CTs between 25 and 34, two consecutive positive results are required before confirming a case as Covid positive. – Eshani M King, Evidence Based Research in Immunology and Health, Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, UK. (Source, BMJ)

Many concerns have also been raised about the death count, with various public health authorities admitting to counting deaths as COVID when they're not actually a result of COVID. For example, Ontario (Canada) public health clearly states that deaths will be marked as COVID deaths whether or not it's clear if COVID was the cause or contributed to the death. This means that those who did not die as a result of COVID are included in the death count. You can read more about that and see many more examples, here.

The ease to which people could be terrorised into surrendering basic freedoms which are fundamental to our existence..came as a shock to me…History will look back on measures – as a monument of collective hysteria & government folly." – Jonathan Sumption, former British supreme court justice. (source)

The Takeaway

Implementation of the current draconian measures that so extremely restrict fundamental rights can only be justified if there is reason to fear that a truly, exceptionally dangerous virus is threatening us. Do any scientifically sound data exist to support this contention for COVID-19? I assert that the answer is simply, no. –Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, a specialist in microbiology and one of the most cited research scientists in German history.

Why is there so much suppression of science and scientists who oppose the narrative and information being put out by the World Health Organization?

Over the last few months, I have seen academic articles and op-eds by professors retracted or labeled "fake news" by social media platforms. Often, no explanation is provided. I am concerned about this heavy-handedness and, at times, outright censorship. – Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH (source)

Why is there a digital fact-checker going around the internet censoring information?

Should people not have the right to examine information, publications and evidence transparently, openly and determine for themselves what they wish to believe?

Why are government health authorities not consulting with independent scientific organizations to determine the right course of action during this pandemic?

Why do tens of thousands of doctors and scientists oppose the measures being taken by our governments?

Why have other treatments been ridiculed and not even considered?

Why has a vaccine been made out to be the only solution here, and why did the World Health Organization recently change their definition of herd immunity?

Do we really want to give these entities so much power that they can basically do whatever they choose against the will of so many people? Do governments even represent the will of the people and have our best interests at heart or is something else going on here? Why do we as a society fail to have proper discussions about controversial topics? Why are controversial stances that go against the grain always labelled as a "conspiracy theory" and ridiculed by mainstream media no matter how strong the evidence is behind them?


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