Register to attend a February 9th debate between Phil Magness and Jeremy Horpedahl on “Lockdowns and Liberty: How Should Government Respond to COVID-19?” Sponsored by the University of San Diego’s Center for Ethics, Economics and Public Policy, this debate will begin at 7:00pm Eastern Standard Time.
Christian Britschgi reports that California’s tyrannical lockdowns were a costly failure.
Ben Hawkins rightly decries the gambling by lockdown tyrants with the lives of innocent people. A slice:
But do we know that lockdowns actually have the effect that their proponents claim that they have? No, we do not. In fact, the American Institute for Economic Affairs has compiled a list of 29 scientific studies claiming to show lockdowns to be ineffective in reducing the Covid mortality rate. Whilst there may be other studies claiming that lockdowns do work, it is far from certain that they are in fact preventing deaths on the scale predicted.
Freddie Sayers reports on the Zero Covid campaign. A slice:
But even though this increasingly popular school of thought — which holds that we must not return to normal until the virus is completely eliminated within a country — wasn’t explicitly on the billing, its presence was made clear from the outset. In her introductory remarks, the moderator confirmed to the more than 600 registrants and speakers from across the world that “we are here to end Covid through ZeroCovid and CovidZero policies”. More often at the event, held over Zoom and organised by American scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam, speakers preferred to refer to ZeroCovid as an “elimination strategy”.
Yet the purpose of the event was clear: to share evidence and political advice to help campaigners lobby Western governments to abandon any notion of living alongside the virus, and instead to follow the lead of Asia-Pacific nations in aiming to eliminate the disease entirely within their borders. This group is crucially distinct from people who support ongoing lockdown measures to suppress the virus to a level where it is safe to reopen — for ZeroCovid believers, we cannot rest until that level is zero.
On paper, this approach may sound rather sensible. After all, surely we’d all rather live in a world without Covid? Yet having attended last week’s conference, I keep returning to a question that didn’t seem to particularly trouble the speakers: at what cost?
