Death, Despair, And Lockdowns
The old saying that the cure is deadlier than the disease is a worn-out cliche. But that doesn’t mean it can’t make a point. The pandemic lockdowns are a perfect example of a banality being absolutely true.
Over about two-and-one-half years COVID-19 has killed a little more than 1 million Americans and another 5.5 million in the rest of the world. It’s a grim toll. At least its deadly effects will decrease as it becomes endemic.
The same can’t be said for the lockdowns. Their poison will be killing victims for years.
A recent article from the London Telegraph posted in Yahoo News tells the story of “experts” believing “decisions taken by the government in the earliest stages of the pandemic may now be coming back to bite.”
“Policies that kept people indoors, scared them away from hospitals and deprived them of treatment and primary care are finally taking their toll,” said the Telegraph.
For more than three months, excess deaths in England and Wales have averaged around 1,000 a week, and none are due to COVID.
It’s not as if the decision-makers weren’t warned. Robert Dingwall, a Nottingham Trent University professor and a government adviser during the pandemic, told the Telegraph that “the picture seems very consistent with what some of us were suggesting from the beginning.”
On our side of the Atlantic, “from April 2020 through at least the end of 2021, Americans died from non-COVID causes at an average annual rate 97,000 in excess of previous trends,” says a National Bureau of Economic Research paper.
It further contends that “excess mortality continues into calendar year 2022,” though it’s safe to say they will persist well past that date.
The authors, one from the University of Chicago Economics Department, the other a partner from a data and investment research firm, say “it should be no surprise that a widespread disruption to patient circumstances would degrade health and even elevate mortality from chronic conditions. Nevertheless, early in the pandemic some experts mocked this perspective as a ‘pet theory about the fatal dangers of quarantine.’”
While the leading causes of excess fatalities were hypertension and heart disease, the paper also cited “deaths of despair or deaths of boredom,” which one author noted in a separate paper could be presumably caused by “social isolation.”
The lockdowns have not only been deadly, they brought economic catastrophe (which has its own lethality – economists even have a multiplier they use to calculate deaths due to unemployment); an agonizing mental health crisis; delayed child development; and possibly irreversible educational losses.
An example of just how uninterested the lockdown thugs are in the damage they inflicted is the shameless indifference shown by California Gov. Gavin Newsom. In announcing last week a $4.7 billion initiative to improve kids’ mental health, he never once acknowledged the Broken State’s school closure rules that Draco would have loved as the primary factor in depression and suicide among the young – or what the governor called “a stacking of stress the likes of which none of us could have conceived of.”
“The scope of human activity touched by lockdown is overwhelming,” Jay Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen wrote nearly a year ago. Elected and unelected government officials “closed schools and playgrounds, shuttered businesses, and barred international travel.” Children were told “they could not visit their friends,” masks were draped on toddlers, university students were chased from campuses, and the elderly were forced to die alone, their families prevented “from gathering to honor” their passing. The world’s poor, were denied “the ability of many to feed their families.”
Yet outside of a few local school board members being voted out of office, we can’t name a single person who has paid for the crime of locking down a free nation. Yes, that’s right, it was a crime, and if the guilty aren’t punished, they will surely offend again. That can’t be allowed to happen.
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