Shout It From The Rooftops!

By Ajax the Great

(Originally posted on True Spirit of America Party blog)

FURTHER EVIDENCE THAT LOCKDOWNS, CLOSURES, MASKS, VACCINE MANDATES, AND NPIS WERE WORSE THAN USELESS 

Still more evidence just keeps on piling up, from New York to Taiwan to Australia to Cornell University, that lockdowns, closures, masks, vaccine mandates, and NPIs have been utterly useless or worse than useless, as the ever-insightful Ian Miller (author of Unmasked) has noted recently.   It is so bleeding obvious now that no sane person can possibly deny it any longer.  Of course, as the old adage goes, people tend to go mad in crowds, but only recover one by one.

And school closures turned out to be even worse than we thought, per the latest evidence from Brazil, a country that famously eschewed lockdowns and most types of NPIs for the most part, but bizarrely had some of the longest school closures in the world, making it possible to readily tease out the costs and benefits of this one particular NPI.  One new study, which dovetails nicely with other studies in both rich and poor countries around the world, found that remote learning resulted in truly MASSIVE learning losses and increased dropout rates compared to in-person education.  And yet another Brazilian study found that it was ultimately all for naught, as the overall Covid death rates in communities who reopened schools earlier were not significantly different from those in communities who kept schools closed longer.  This was notably true even for high schools, which were once thought to be so much riskier than middle and elementary schools in terms of spreading the virus that even Sweden felt the need to close them during most of the first wave and again briefly at the very height of the second wave.  Thus, we can conclude that school closures at any age or grade level were basically all pain and no gain overall, at least for prolonged closures, and that remote learning simply does not work well.

(And of course there is plenty of evidence from the USA, UK, and elsewhere that not only are school closures exceedingly harmful to children, but also opening them encumbered with worse-than-useless dystopian restrictions like antisocial distancing and mask mandates is really not that much better either.)

In other news, study finds that water is wet, and that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

UPDATE:  Oh yeah, and about those jabs?  Well, those on balance also seem to be worse than useless as well for most people, and especially for kids.  Wonder no more where all those formerly rare but now ubiquitous reinfections are coming from these days.  That's not us just saying that, that is actually taken straight from Pf*zer's very own clinical trial of children under age 5.  Looks like Sweden, who never forced them on anyone and currently refuses to give these jabs to children under 12, and Florida, who also never forced them and currently refuses to purchase it for children under 5, are vindicated yet again.

And if you think Long Covid is bad, just wait till you hear about Long Lockdown and Long Jab Injury!  The data are piling up and increasingly showing exactly which side of the debate is on the right side of history.

And once again, the ever-insightful Ian Miller thoroughly debunks, debones, slices, dices, and juliennes the pro-mask arguments, and lays waste to their utterly scorched remains for good.  And check out the latest new study from Josh Stevenson about masks for kids as well, likely the very best one yet.  Spoiler alert:  masks STILL don't work.

SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS!

LOCKDOWNS KILL.  We have always known from the get-go that collateral damage, up to and including excess deaths, would occur from lockdowns.  From delayed and denied medical treatment to missed cancer screenings to poverty and hunger to suicides to drug overdoses to violence to simply dying of loneliness and isolation, and so on, these brute-force blunt instruments are known to intrinsically inflict serious harm by design, and cannot ever be made "safe" in any meaningful sense no matter HOW many trillions of dollars (or pounds, euros, yuan, yen, rupees, bitcoin, etc.) you happen to throw at these problems.  Of course, poorer and/or more unequal societies generally experience the very worst outcomes of all, but even the very wealthiest and relatively equal societies still cannot be completely spared such consequences for very long either.

But now for the first time we can actually roughly quantify the magnitude of the short- and medium-term collateral deaths that occur.  In the USA, a new study the National Bureau of Economic Research found that lockdowns and related restrictions killed at LEAST a whopping 170,000 Americans, based on the number of non-Covid deaths among younger Americans in 2020-2021.  The Economist puts the number even higher at just under 200,000 deaths, and the NBER finds proportionally similar numbers in stricter European countries as well (but notably NOT Sweden, who famously eschewed lockdowns and most types of mandates).  And having already established long ago that lockdowns don't really save any significant number of lives in the long run, this makes lockdowns all pain and no gain.  And the zealots who pushed these tyrannical policies, especially those who did so persistently in the face of mounting harm, have a LOT of blood on their hands!

Of course, those excess deaths include an unknown number of jab injury deaths as well from 2021 onwards.  But either way, the numbers are NOT flattering to the lockdown zealots OR the jab zealots for that matter.  And longer-term effects still remain unclear, though they are most likely NOT good at all.

And just like the Covid zealots themselves luurrrve to remind us all ad nauseam, deaths are merely the tip of a very large iceberg of overall harm.

And keep in mind that even "soft" or "organic" lockdowns (and ubiquitous masking) via social pressure are far from harmless either, at least when they drag on long enough.  Just ask Japan.  Their suicide rate, after two decades of impressive progress in reducing it, unfortunately spiked once again in 2020 and remained elevated through 2021.  Looks like antisocial distancing is still, well, antisocial, even when it is not formally mandated by the state.  That said, Japan's all-cause excess death rate was still ultimately better on balance than nearly every single "hard" lockdown country in the world.

Seriously, this was all a grave mistake that must NEVER, EVER be repeated.  Like, ever.

UPDATE:  Now even the UN admits that lockdowns killed hundreds of thousands of children globally.  Yes, really.  Let that sink in.  Lockdowns clearly took far more lives (and especially life years) then they saved on balance.  And it goes way beyond deaths too, as children's education, mental health, physical fitness, and overall development have also deteriorated as well, with associated long-term consequences that we will all have to reckon with at some point.  All this to very temporarily delay the inevitable at best.  In other words, we effectively destroyed a generation for nothing.  Will that generation, and future generations, ever forgive us?

Oh, and just in case you thought that lockdowns were still needed to prevent hospitals from being overrun in the short term, not only is there no hard evidence of lockdowns having had any such benefit in that regard compared to the Swedish no-lockdown strategy, but we also see that artificial scarcity from state-imposed policies was the real problem all along.