Failure of lockdowns and school closures

The predominant findings after examining 403 pieces of evidence is that:

i) lockdowns and shelter-in-place polices were all failures and only caused immense harms to people, regardless of which setting and location we examined

ii) children were never and are not drivers of infections or sources to the adult or school teacher

iii) the school remains one of the safest placers for children (and teachers)

iv) children if infected got the virus from adults in the home

v) closing schools to stop transmission or deaths only caused harms to children and was a complete failure given vanishingly low spread child to child or child to adult (children also at low risk of transmission within the home)

vi) masks (blue surgical and white cloth/man-made face-coverings) are highly ineffective in reducing transmission or deaths

vii) mask mandates were all failures globally and within the US and

viii) masks are potentially toxic and very harmful, especially to the child.

The views expressed here are my own as I present the body of evidence with the aim of informing the reader. The readers can judge for themselves and come to their own conclusions. However, what is presented below shows definitively, being underpinned by the ‘gestalt’ body of evidence (comprised of comparative research studies and high-quality pieces of evidence and reporting judged to be relevant to this analysis), that COVID-19 lockdowns, shelter-in-place policies, masks, school closures, and mask mandates have all failed in their role to curb transmission or reduce deaths. These restrictive polices were ineffective and devastating failures on societies and especially the poorer and vulnerable within societies. These policies impacted and gutted rights and liberties and continue to do so in the current Biden administration. The examination also showed definitively that children are at a vanishingly low risk of acquiring the SARS-CoV-2 infection and transmitting, whether within the school setting or in the home setting. This latter point also a function of the tremendous potency and ‘beautiful gift’ of the innate immunity (innate antibodies and innate cellular component e.g. natural killer cells (NK) as the first line of defense, distinct from the naturally acquired or adaptive immunity) that children come with that is ready, non-specific, and primed to handle a host of pathogen they encounter (by neutralizing the virus and preventing infection as well as killing infected cells), including SARS-CoV-2 and its variants.

My view is simple. Never ever must we allow governments, never, no matter at what level, this kind of emergency power again! Ever! They violated our rights and liberties. Never do we allow them to lock societies down the way they did! Ever! With lockdown and school closure policies that have all failed! All, for they can point to no evidence of success. No government in the US, in UK, in Canada, in France, in Australia, the Caribbean, etc. Not one can claim success. When one examines the totality of the evidence, it is clear that mask mandates and lockdowns and school closures have had no discernible impact. They even cause harms as seen in this report by engineers out of Stanford: “But in filtering those particles, the mask also makes it harder to breathe…that’s significant, even for a healthy person. It can cause dizziness and lightheadedness. If you wear a mask long enough, it can damage the lungs. For a patient in respiratory distress, it can even be life threatening.”

Bendavid reported “in the framework of this analysis, there is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (‘lockdowns’) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain or the United States in early 2020.” They put on paper what we were witnessing very early on but the lockdown lunatic Task Forces and their governments just kept locking down harder.

The reality is that our structured societies and good governance have been maintained across time because they play crucial roles in how societies function optimally. When these structures, formalities, particulars, and institutions are suddenly changed and stopped, when they are bluntly ripped from under you, when they are gutted, then this can have catastrophic consequences for populations, and particularly the vulnerable persons in society e.g. our working women, children, and those vulnerable portions of society. Governments, their scientific advisors, and elites did just that to their societies with the illogical, unscientific, irrational, and punitive lockdowns and closures. The US (and globe’s) landscape is littered by the destruction left by Fauci and Birx’s lockdown and school closure policies. They visited misery upon people with ramifications that will likely take 100 years to reverse.

Let’s face it, the benefits of the societal lockdowns and restrictions have been totally exaggerated and the harms to our societies and children have been very severe (the harms to children, the undiagnosed illness that will result in excess mortality in years to come, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation in our young people, drug overdoses and suicides due to the lockdown policies, the crushing isolation due to the lockdowns, psychological harms, domestic and child abuse, sexual abuse of children, loss of jobs and businesses and the devastating impact, and the massive numbers of deaths that are coming from the lockdowns that will impact heavily on women and minorities. We will face the repercussions of these lockdowns for years to come.

The costs of lockdowns were too high and functioned to hollow out societies and Fauci and Birx are trying to rewrite history as to what their policies called for and the harms their lockdown policies caused. It is their COVID-19 policies that devastated the society, based on arbitrary unscientific rules. People died because of Fauci and Birx’s lockdowns and school closures and what was staggering was (is) their ego, hubris, and failure to recognize the catastrophic results. That you cannot impose restrictive policies on a society focusing only on the potential harms from the pathogen, while disregarding the accumulating crushing harms from the policy.

None of it ever made sense and now we have whispers again for the new Omicron variant that by my estimations will be likely infectious but not more lethal (Mueller’s ratchet) and the initial reporting says so. We have no data showing lethality in this emerging variant. Then why this insane off the rail reaction? At what point do these raving lockdown lunatic COVID Task Forces learn?

But how did we get here? How did we allow these insane policies to damage our children like this? Why did we cede to these lunatics with their daily unscientific drivel? How did we allow these ‘lockdown lunatics’ in our governments and COVID Task Forces (starting with the United States) to enact universal suppression policies that worked to devastate our economies, our societies, and our lives, while doing nothing about SARS-2/COVID-19? When we knew that we could have never eradicated this mutable virus (that has an animal reservoir) with lockdowns and that it would likely become endemic like other circulating common cold coronaviruses. When we knew an age-risk stratified approach was optimal (focused protection/GBD) and not carte blanche polices when we had evidence of a 1000-fold differential in risk of death between a child and an elderly person. When we could have used science as the basis to re-open society and respond. When we were seeing that treating COVID ‘at all costs’ and ‘zero-COVID’ was driving fear and panic in the society with a result that would only be catastrophic. When we knew of the potency and success of early ambulatory outpatient treatment in reducing the risk of hospitalization and death in the vulnerable.

Moreover, why did doctors stand by and not take leadership and act in saving lives, being brave and courageous in exercising their clinical discretion and decision-making? What happened to our doctors, to our academic scientists, to the academic peer-review process? To medical journal editors and publishers? The medical profession and evidence-based medicine (EBM) have inflicted a near fatal wound on itself. Why? How could they turn their backs on people when we needed them most? Their disgraceful and dishonourable actions will be recorded in history and will remain a blemish for years to come. Where do we begin with the utter mess and disaster visited upon populations by these illogical, irrational, nonsensical, specious, absurd, and dangerous COVID-19 restrictive lockdown and non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPIs) polices (lockdowns, masks, school closures, and mask mandates)?

It was clear very early on that these Task Forces and medical advisors and decision-makers were not reading the evidence, were not contemporary with the science or data, did not understand the evidence, did not ‘get’ the evidence and data, and were blinded to the science, often driven by their own prejudices, biases, arrogance, and ego. They remain ensconced in sheer academic sloppiness and laziness, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIAID who seems for the past 21 months grossly out-of-step with the data and has been flat wrong and questionable on near all COVID-19 positions he has stated. It was clear that the response was not a public health one. It was a political one from day one and continues today November 2021, 21 months into the Biden administration. We shifted from an emergency response led daily by a clown car under POTUS Trump to now a catastrophic one under POTUS Biden led by persons who led the failed 2009 H1NI response. They know they have no clue what they are doing so their response is to report near nothing. Just like the Obama administration did for H1N1 swine flu of 2009, even having CDC stop testing.

Lockdowns were an utter devastating failure and there is no way to sugar coat this and President Trump in my opinion and based on what I know from my time in the administration, was greatly misled and misinformed by the US COVID Task Force. Their Task Force role was to inform him with optimal, technical, scientific, trustworthy, high-quality sound information for his decision-making. They were all wrong (save for Dr. Brett Giroir’s efforts in my opinion to reverse the catastrophic failure by CDC in the initial roll-out of a botched flawed SARS-CoV-2 test that had the US flying blind for 5 weeks as the virus spread across the nation) and put us on this disastrous path that continues today in the Biden administration. I give Giroir praise. Make no mistake, the initial CDC coronavirus flawed test may have irreparably hobbled the COVID response, even to today.

Just consider the outrageous statements by this SAGE COVID advisor in the UK who calls for masks and lockdowns ‘forever’. This lockdown lunatic is a UK government pandemic advisor and epitomizes the ex-cathedra insanity we have lived for 21 months now. Clueless. Someone needs to inform this lunatic about the recent study report published in JAMA which indicated that wearing a mask can expose children to very dangerous levels of carbon dioxide in 3 minutes.

Yet in the US, as of June 2021, we see that the states with the longest and most draconian lockdowns fared worse as to economic impacts, with higher unemployment numbers being recorded. “With employment numbers (as of May 2021), we find a similar story. The states with the worst unemployment numbers are Hawaii, New Mexico, California, and New York. Once again, these are some of the states with the most strict covid regulations and lockdowns”. The landscape is littered with the reality that locations that indeed implemented the hardest lockdowns had similar or even far worse outcomes than the locations that had softer restrictive policies including those that allowed for voluntary behavioral adjustments. The data is clear that locations with mask mandates and heavy compliance had similar or even far greater infections than locations that had no mask mandates and where usage was low. This is the absurdity and angering aspect of all of this, in that the restrictive polices had no impact and only suffered populations with debilitating effects. Yet these lockdown lunatics hardened and did more and more, unfazed by the pain and suffering they caused, especially to the poor.

A recent study (pre-print) really captures the essence and catastrophe of a lockdown society and the hollowing out of our children by looking at how children learn (3 months to 3 years old) and finding across all measures that “children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic.” Researchers also reported that “males and children in lower socioeconomic families have been most affected. Results highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness, the environmental changes associated COVID-19 pandemic is significantly and negatively affecting infant and child development.”

These faceless bureaucrats, technocrats, and elites are and were far removed from the ramifications of their nonsensical, illogical, specious policies and edicts. Dictates that do and did not apply to them or their families or friends. The ‘laptop’, café latter affluent class could vacate, work remotely, walk their dogs and pets, catch up on reading their books, and do tasks they could not do had they been in the workplace daily. It is rather perverse if you think about what was done. They could hire extra teachers for their children etc. Remote working was a boon. The actions of our governments however, devastated and long-term hurt the poor in societies and terribly and perversely so, and many could not hold on and committed suicide. AIER’s Ethan Yang’s analysis showed that deaths of despair skyrocketed. Poor children, especially in richer western nations such as the US and Canada, self-harmed and ended their lives, not due to the pandemic virus, but due to the lockdowns and school closures. Many children took their own lives out of despair, depression, and hopelessness due to the lockdowns and school closures.

Perhaps Luskin of the Wall Street Journal captures best what we have stably witnessed since the start of these unscientific lockdowns and school closures: “Six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. has now carried out two large-scale experiments in public health—first, in March and April, the lockdown of the economy to arrest the spread of the virus, and second, since mid-April, the reopening of the economy. The results are in. Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn’t contain the disease’s spread and reopening it didn’t unleash a second wave of infections.”

Gartz writes further: “Before Covid, an American youth died by suicide every six hours. Suicide is a major public health threat and a leading cause of death for those aged under 25 — one far bigger than Covid. And it is something that we have only made worse as we, led by politicians and ‘the science,’ deprived our youngest members of society — who constitute one-third of the US population — of educational, emotional and social development without their permission or consent for over a year… the biggest increase in youth deaths occurred in the 15-24 age bracket — the age group most susceptible to committing suicide, and which constitutes 91% of youth suicides… such “deaths of despair” tend to be higher among youths, particularly for those about to graduate or enter the workforce. With economic shrinkage due to lockdowns and forced closures of universities, youths face both less economic opportunity and limited social support — which plays an important role in reporting and preventing self-harm — through social networks.”

In a similar light, the British Columbia Center for Disease Control (BCCDC) issued a full report in September 2020 on the impact of school closures on children and found para “that i) children comprise a small proportion of diagnosed COVID-19 cases, have less severe illness, and mortality is rare ii) children do not appear to be a major source of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in households or schools, a finding which has been consistent globally iii) there are important differences between how influenza and SARS-CoV-2 are transmitted. School closures may be less effective as a prevention measure for COVID-19 iv) school closures can have severe and unintended consequences for children and youth v) school closures contributes to greater family stress, especially for female caregivers, while families balance child care and home learning with employment demands vi) family violence may be on the rise during the COVID pandemic, while the closure of schools and childcare centres may create a gap in the safety net for children who are at risk of abuse and neglect.”

These lockdown lunatics were completely wrong on everything that mattered and they caused suffering and death to those least able to afford and shield, to our working women, our children and poor persons. Women already struggling on the edges were crushed. None of Fauci and Birx’s policies worked. It became clear very early on (one month in/April/May 2020) that these polices were devastating failures and these unparalleled public health actions were enacted for a virus with an infection mortality rate (IFR) roughly similar or lower than seasonal influenza. Stanford’s John P.A. Ioannidis identified 36 studies (43 estimates) along with an additional 7 preliminary national estimates (50 pieces of data) and concluded that among people <70 years old across the world, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.57% with a median of 0.05% across the different global locations (with a corrected median of 0.04%). Let me write this again, 0.05%. Can one even imagine the implementation of such draconian regulations for the annual flu? 

Moreover, when they were not satisfied with the well-documented failures of lockdowns or school closures or the mask mandates, our inept illogical leaders inexplicably doubled and tripled down and introduced even harder punitive lockdowns and constraints. They are and were locking us down ‘harder.’ Now places like Austria (November 2021) have re-entered the world of lockdown lunacy only to be outmatched by Australia. Indeed, an illustration of the spurious need for these ill-informed actions is that they are being done in the face of clear scientific evidence showing that during strict prior societal lockdowns, school lockdowns, mask mandates, and additional societal restrictions, the number of positive cases went up! No one can point to any instance where lockdowns or school closures have worked in this Covid pandemic. Not one!

Just because there is an emergency situation, if we cannot stop it, this does not provide a rationale for instituting strategies that have no effect or are even worse. We have to challenge the concept that if there is nothing we can do to alter the course of a situation (e.g., disease), we still have to do something even if it is ineffective! Moreover, we do not implement a public health policy that is devastating with crushing harms and not working, and then continue its implementation knowing it is catastrophic. Let us also start with the basic fact that the government bureaucrats and their faceless technocrats and medical experts deceived the public by failing to explain in the beginning that everyone is not at equal risk of severe outcome if infected. This was a key duplicitous assertion and a key Covid omission and this omission has been used tacitly and wordlessly to drive hysteria and fear. Indeed, a pandemic of propaganda and fear delivered daily by our specious incompetent governments and the complicit media. Indeed, the public still does not understand this critically important distinction. The vast majority of people are at little if any risk of severe illness and yet these very people are needlessly cowering in fear because of misinformation and, sadly, disinformation. Yet, lockdowns, school closures, and mask mandates did nothing to change the trajectory of this pandemic, anywhere!

The reality is that these restrictions worked together to hobble and essentially doom the pandemic response in the US (and as a consequence the global response) and I would argue very early in the Trump administration and continuing in the current Biden administration, the response moved from being a public health response to a political response. I believe strongly that President Trump was misled and misinformed by certain members of his COVID-19 Task Force. It is clear the intent was to create a daily impression of a nation ungovernable and unmanageable under President Trump and with the complicit media, this was effectively done. In working against the President, they emerged as highly inept and clueless and caused devastating harms.

The pandemic response today remains a purely political one in my opinion, and the current administration’s response is even more nonsensical and catastrophic than the prior’s, a feat I thought was impossible. For the Biden administration to still force our children to wear face masks when the science has been clear for 15 months now that children have near zero (statistical zero) risk and can be harmed by the masks, is reprehensible and dangerous. Importantly, there are no randomized studies (RCTs) that have shown masks in children to be effective. What exists is largely observational studies that are confounded and are of uneven quality (low certainty) with equivocal findings.