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Karen Harradine explains that lockdowns are the reverse of disease control [2]. A slice:
As a direct consequence, malaria mortality in Africa will exceed that of Covid-19 [3]. Children are at far greater risk of dying from malaria than Covid-19, and an additional 100,000 people are expected to die from this disease.
In 2019, 450,000 died of TB in Africa [4], far more than the 160,112 who have died from Covid-19 there [5]. Why did the WHO withdraw treatment [6] for this curable disease, especially from children? Despite Covid Cultists claiming that Covid-19 is the worst plague since the Black Death, TB is the leading infectious disease in the world, killing 1.4million per year prior to 2020 [7]. Last year, after lockdowns, the death toll for TB rose to more than 1.66million, including 230,000 children [4].
(DBx: Deaths from familiar causes make no news. To gather gruesome footage for airing on CNN, NBC, and the BBC, no one films the victims of flu, cancer, and automobile accidents. About the very real victims of these and other familiar causes of death, no headline news stories are written and few pundits pontificate. These deaths, no matter how painful and dismaying, are normal; they’re not news; they’re therefore invisible to the general public. But Covid-19, a disease caused by a novel coronavirus and that emerged just after social media had become a dominant means of communication, is focused on obsessively. Not only is every death from Covid counted, reported, and treated as a uniquely sad and avoidable event, so too is every death with Covid – and so too is every Covid case. Many otherwise-intelligent people lose all perspective. Many otherwise wise people, usually – and sensibly – among the first to loudly protest politicians and bureaucrats who dare to presume to claim the power to regulate the likes of financial markets, the Internet, and entry into the market for hair-braiders, utter not a peep when these same politicians and bureaucrats exercise unprecedented powers of lockdown and mask-mandates in the name of fighting Covid. The world goes mad. Freedom shrivels and decays. What David Hart calls “hygiene socialism” [8] advances. Civilization teeters.)
Canadians won’t be able to enter the U.S. until Aug. 21, though Canada recently said it will allow Americans to go north on Aug. 9. This isn’t neighborly American behavior, and it’s not consistent with what the Biden Administration likes to call “the science.”
Canada had a rocky start to its Covid vaccination program, largely due to supply problems. But it has rapidly picked up the pace and is now doing better than the U.S. at getting people to roll up their sleeves. Health Canada reported [10] this week that nearly 70% of its population has received at least one Covid-19 vaccine dose. More than 50% of Canadians are now fully vaccinated, while the U.S. rate is 48.6%.
If the vaccines provide protection from severe Covid, as the Biden Administration avers, then why continue the blockade against vaccinated Canadians entering the U.S.? And if Canadians can’t come here, why should Canada allow Americans to enter since there’s more vaccine resistance in the U.S.?
Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman writes [11]:
How devastating was the 2020 pandemic and how devastating was government’s reaction to the pandemic? It will likely take years to reach definitive conclusions, but the latest annual federal report on U.S. mortality is a start in discovering the answers. Along with the well-documented ravages of Covid, the government is reporting a stunning increase, especially among young people, in a broad category called “unintentional injuries” that demands further investigation.
Sally Beck reports from a recent Lockdown Summit [12]. Two slices:
Analysing measures that the government has used to keep us ‘free from fear’, Frank Furedi, professor of sociology from the University of Kent, said they had had the opposite effect. He asked: ‘Are people walking around saying “we feel safer”? We feel far more insecure and anxious than ever. Every time we give up our freedom for safety, the less safe we feel.’
Children and women vulnerable to domestic violence were on the agenda because during the first three weeks of lockdown, 14 women and two children were killed in their homes, while 400,000 children have sought help with their mental health.
Child and adolescent clinical psychologist Dr Zenobia Storah was unequivocal. She said: ‘We have totally failed children this year. It is totally obvious if you close schools it is going to cause a crisis. Children become invisible.
‘Special needs schools closed, respite closed, social workers stopped home visits. Child membership to criminal gangs has increased. It is like watching a slow car crash.’
…..
One country came in for praise – Sweden. They have been our control group since March 2020, focusing on building herd immunity in their population rather than locking down their population and removing their liberties.
Doom-mongers predicted that this ‘reckless’ action would end with 90,000 excess deaths. PANDA’s Nick Hudson explained: ‘By the end of the year, they had suffered no more than between zero and 7,000 excess deaths, depending on how you run the numbers. Sweden had an abnormally low death rate in 2019 so 2020’s figures included the build-up.’
David Paton, Professor of industrial economics at Nottingham University Business School, praised Sweden’s anti-lockdown strategy for saving their economy. He said: ‘The UK took a 10 per cent hit to its gross domestic product (GDP), while Sweden only suffered a 2.1 per cent hit.’
The last word should go to actuary and PANDA co-founder Peter Castleden who described the measures that increase your risk of a poor outcome if you contract Covid. He said: ‘Obesity and anxiety were the top predictors. So what did we do? We stopped people exercising and filled them with fear.’
Robert Fenwick Elliott reports from the deranged dystopia that was once the free country of Australia [13]. A slice:
South Australia, the state in which I reside, has gone into lockdown following five positive Covid-19 tests. The reports do not suggest that anybody is ill, let alone that that anyone has died. On the contrary, it would seem that the individuals in question would not even know that they are “cases” but for the results of their tests.
Chief Public Health Officer Nicola Spurrier has explained the rationale: “The virus doesn’t have legs: it moves around when people move around, so if people stay put we will be able to get on top of it.”
This is analysis more suitable for a preschool classroom than a serious public health response. Save for a few exceptions, people here now have to stay at home. Most shops are shut. Schools are shut. Construction sites are shut. Even Professor Spurrier’s husband has been required to stay home; she has told him that he can use the time to tidy up his sock drawer. The hospitals (where a good deal of the virus spreading has been going on) remain open, albeit that elective surgery has been banned, so that the legless virus will be able to continue to hop around in that environment
Also reporting from Australia – from what he describes as a country now ruled by the “Epidemiocracy” – is Thomas McKenna [14]. A slice:
As I write, New South Wales has seen cases increase by roughly 100 per day. Victoria recently announced 22 positive Covid tests; South Australia, just six. And yet the 16.5 million people who reside in these States, including myself, are locked indoors, with no guessing when restrictions will be lifted (Australia’s leaders make Boris Johnson look like the freedom-touting Churchillian he pretends to be). To put the issue into proportion: 1,400 people out of 25 million currently test positive for the virus.
This begs the question: why are so many people in lockdown when there are so few ‘cases’ and even fewer deaths? The answer is too complicated to be responded to with anything less than a book, but we can see clues littered throughout the pandemic.
Victoria’s first lockdown granted Premier Dan Andrews with a panic-stricken mandate. Much of the Victorian electorate quickly turned to the Premier to find comfort (as do so many people do when panicked), calling for hard and fast lockdowns and an elimination strategy. But even this was deemed controversial by the Federal Government at the time, which branded the elimination of Covid a ‘false hope’.
So you can imagine the bafflement of many when Victoria entered another strict lockdown, this time to nullify the virus after a week or two.
But what was intended to be a short lockdown lasted months, and what was meant to be a flattening of the infection curve did indeed turn into an elimination strategy. Victorians have been in five separate lockdowns since the start of this pandemic.
Gary Oliver decries Boris Johnson’s descent into Covid derangement [15]. A slice:
Despite his apparent reservations, at the end of October 2020 Johnson did of course succumb to the siren calls and issued a further stay-at-home order [16] – again enraging sceptics for whom lockdowns have been a dementedly disproportionate response and an unconscionable violation of our freedoms.
From the lockdown addicts, there is much confected shock and outrage that last autumn Johnson did not concentrate solely on the coronavirus casualties, but instead wanted to weigh the titanic trade-offs between lives, livelihoods and liberty. From those of us who deplore him being a stooge for scheming scientists and mendacious modellers, there is surprise that the Johnson of October 2020 seemingly was still capable of rational and independent thought, albeit he soon surrendered to the scaremongers.
Nine months on, this week’s pusillanimous performance by Johnson confirms that he has been completely captured by the public health partisans. On what was bogusly billed as ‘freedom day’, it was horrifying to hear the UK Prime Minister announce: ‘I would remind everybody that some of life’s most important pleasures and opportunities are likely to be increasingly dependent on vaccination.’
A chilling prospect, and a dystopia which Johnson warns might only be two months away: ‘By the end of September . . . we’re planning to make full vaccination a condition of entry to nightclubs and other venues where large crowds gather. Proof of a negative test will no longer be enough.’