"Johns Hopkins: Lockdowns Failed"
by Brian Maher
"We have it on excellent authority - the Johns Hopkins University - that “lockdowns” have proven grim failures of public policy. These jailings failed to “stop the spread.” They failed to preserve lives. They did… however… knock down economies. Based on exhaustive probing of 34 existing studies, Johns Hopkins crackerjacks concluded: We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality… More specifically… studies find that lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average."
That is, studies find that lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by two-tenths of one percent on average. The United States Centers for Disease Control reports the devil virus claimed 385,000 American lives in 2020 - the high season of lockdowns.
Assume for the moment the butcher’s bill is accurate. The virus claimed 385,000 American lives in 2020. Our rudimentary calculations reveal lockdowns thus preserved 770 lives… on average… from a population of 330 million.
Each human being is an individual treasure, fashioned in the image of the Almighty. Each death represents a private tragedy. And if we were among the unfortunate 770, of this you could be certain: We would file an extremely sharp post-mortem tort against the public health authorities. Yet does prudent public policy trample the most basic civil liberties… and wreck economies wholesale… to reduce mortality by two-tenths of one percent - on average? To ask the question is to answer the question. We can locate nothing in law or equity to defend these vicious policies.
And so we ask: What about those who perished because hospitals suspended treatments for other life-imperiling maladies?
What about those who succumbed to substance abuse and related “deaths of despair”?
What about the desperate self-killed who were deprived of their livelihoods?
Between May 2020 and April 2021, the United States recorded 100,306 fatal overdosings. That represents a 28.5% increase over the previous 12 months’ 78,056. They are not listed among the COVID dead. They are dead nonetheless - casualties of indirect fire. How many of the excess 22,250 overdosings resulted from lockups? We have no answer. Yet we hazard the number is handsome. Johns Hopkins: "These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best… While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded…"
But you ask: “Didn’t lockups prevent the virus from spreading? If you’re inside, how are you going to catch it?” To which the Johns Hopkins men respond: "[Shelter-in-place orders] may isolate an infected person at home with his/her family where he/she risks infecting family members with a higher viral load, causing more severe illness. But often, lockdowns have limited peoples’ access to safe (outdoor) places such as beaches, parks and zoos, or included outdoor mask mandates or strict outdoor gathering restrictions, pushing people to meet at less safe (indoor) places."
We await Dr. Fauci’s rebuttal - if he can muster one. Researchers conclude: Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: Lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument."
It is our sincere belief that lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument. Alas, we believe it likely that lockdowns will not be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument. After all, they are the handiwork of bureaucrats. And a bureaucrat is a bureaucrat…is a bureaucrat… forever and ever.
Below, Jeffrey Tucker shows you why it’s now time for the “ruling class” to resign. Read on."
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"Time for the Ruling Class to Resign"
by Jeffrey Tucker
"If there is a historical precedent for the truckers’ revolt in Canada and the populist protests in so many other parts of the world, I would like to know what it is. It surely sets the record for convoy size, and it is historic for Canada. But there is much more going on here, something more fundamental. The two-year imposition of bio-fascist rule by diktat seems ever less tenable - the consent of the governed is being withdrawn - but what comes next seems unclear.
We now have two of the most restrictive “leaders” in the developed world (Justin Trudeau of Canada and Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand) hiding in undisclosed locations, citing the need to quarantine following COVID exposure. Streets globally have filled up with people demanding an end to mandates and lockdowns, calling for accountability, pushing for resignations, denouncing privileged corporations and crying out for a recognition of basic freedoms and rights.
Note too that these movements are spontaneous and from “below.” They are populated mostly by the very workers whom governments shoved to face the pathogen two years ago, while the ruling class hid behind their laptops in their living rooms. It was the lockdowns that sharply divided the classes and the mandates that are imposing segregation. Now we are facing a modern allegory to the Peasants’ Revolt in the Middle Ages.
For a long time, the workers complied bravely but have been forced to accept medical shots they neither wanted nor believed they needed. And many are still being denied freedoms they took for granted only two years ago: their schools non-operational, businesses wrecked, places of entertainment closed or severely restricted.
People turn on the radios and televisions to listen to lectures by ruling-class elites who claim to be channeling the science that always ends in the same theme: The rulers are in charge and everyone else must comply, no matter what is asked of them. But then it became screamingly obvious to the world that none of it worked.
It was a gigantic flop and the sky-high cases of late 2021 in most parts of the world put a fine point on it. The leaders failed. It was all for naught. This clearly cannot continue. Something has to give. Something has to change, and this change probably will not wait for the next scheduled elections. What happens in the meantime? Where is this going?
We’ve seen what revolutions look like against monarchies (18th and 19th centuries), against colonial occupation, against totalitarian one-party states (1989–90) and against banana-republic strongmen (20th century). But what does revolution look like in developed democracies ruled by entrenched administrative states in which elected politicians serve as little more than veneer for bureaucracies?
In theory, the problem of government overreach in democracy is solved by elections. The argument made for such a system is that it allows for peaceful change of a ruling elite, and this is far less socially costly than war and revolution. There are many problems with matching theory and reality, among which that the people with the real power in the 21st century are not the people we elect but those who have gained their privileges through bureaucratic maneuvering and longevity.
There are many strange features of the last two years but one of them that stands out to me is how utterly undemocratic the trajectory of events has been. When they locked us down, for example, it was the decision of elected autocrats as advised by credentialled experts that were somehow sure that this path would make the virus go away (or something like that). When they imposed vaccination mandates, it was because they were sure that this was the right path for public health.
There were no polls. There was little if any input from legislatures at any level. Citizens weren’t asked. The wishes of small-business people were not solicited. It was as if everyone suddenly presumed that the whole country would operate on an administrative/dictatorship model and that the guidelines of health bureaucracies (with plans for lockdowns and that hardly anyone even knew existed) trumped all tradition, constitutions, restrictions on state power and public opinion generally. We all became their servants. This happened all over the world.
It suddenly became obvious to many people in the world that the systems of government we thought we had - responsive to the public, deferential to rights, controlled by courts - were no longer in place. The media acted like this is just the way things are supposed to be.
Lockdowns and mandates gave the unelected bureaucrats full power, not only over the one or two sectors they previously ruled but the whole of society and all of its functioning. They even controlled how many people we could have in our homes, whether our businesses could be open, whether we could worship with others and what precisely we were supposed to do with our own bodies.
Whatever happened to limits on power? The people who put together the systems of government in the 18th century that led to the most prosperous societies in the history of the world knew that restricting government was the key to a stable social order and growing economy. They gave us constitutions and the lists of rights and the courts enforced them.
But at some point in history, the ruling class figured out certain workarounds to these restrictions. The administrative state with permanent bureaucrats could achieve things that legislatures could not, so they were gradually unleashed under various pretexts (war, depression, terror threats, pandemics). Moreover, governments gradually learned to outsource their hegemonic ambitions to the biggest businesses in the private sector, who themselves benefit from increasing the costs of compliance.
The circle has been completed by enlisting Big Media into the mix, to broadcast the official line of the day and hurl insults at any dissidents within the population (“fringe,” etc.). This has created what we see in the 21st century: A toxic combination of Big Tech, Big Government, Big Media, all backed by various other industrial interests who benefit more from systems of control than they would from a free and competitive economy. Further, this cabal leveled a radical attack on civil society itself, closing churches, concerts, and civic groups.
We’ve been assured that government rule is untenable when it loses the consent of the governed. But what precisely is the mechanism by which the overlords in our time are effectively overthrown?
We’ve seen this in totalitarian states, in states with one-man rule, in states with unelected monarchies. But unless I’m missing something, we’ve not seen this in a developed democracy with an administrative state that holds the real power. We have scheduled elections but those are unhelpful when 1) elected leaders are not the real source of power, and 2) when the elections are too far in the distant future to deal with a present emergency.
One very easy and obvious path away from the current crisis is for the ruling class to admit error, repeal the mandates, and simply allow for common freedoms and rights for everyone. As easy as that sounds, this solution hits a hard wall when faced with ruling-class arrogance, trepidation, and the unwillingness to admit past errors for fear of what that will mean for their political legacies. For this reason, absolutely no one expects the likes of Trudeau, Ardern, or Biden to humbly apologize, admit that they were wrong, and beg the people’s forgiveness. On the contrary, everyone expects them to continue the game of pretend so long as they can get away with it.
What is the next step? My instincts tell me that we are about to discover the answer. Electoral realignment seems inevitable but what happens before then? The obvious answer to the current instability is mass resignations within the administrative state, among the class of politicians that gives it cover, as well as heads of media organs that have propagandized for them. In the name of peace, human rights, and the renewal of prosperity and trust, this needs to happen today. Bury the pride and do what’s right. Do it now while there is still time for the revolution to be velvet."
