This is the first of a three-part series on the lockdowns.

Part 1 looks at the setup for them and what happened in 2020-2021

Part 2 looks at the aftermath through 2022-2023, including the damage they caused to healthcare, education and the economy.

Part 3 will be an ongoing documentation of studies of lockdowns. Short version: almost everybody now agrees that they didn’t even work while causing a lot of harm.

=========================

Before looking at anything else, here’s the New Zealand Ministry of Health’s official Flu Pandemic Plan, compiled from myriad other plans in 2010 and updated as recently as 2017. Nowhere in its 193 pages will you find the word “Lockdown” or a description of anything like it. In this the FPP was the same as those of other public health authorities around the world, including the WHO.

Download it before Michael Baker and his Otago comrades get to re-write it.

THE SETUP

The concept of lockdown came from China. You’d think that the last thing the West would copy would be yet another stupid idea from Communists but because this involved a giant health emergency and the chance for more power and control for politicians and bureaucrats, you’d be wrong. But the strategy was premised on one goal and one “fact”.

The “fact” shouted from the rooftops was that C-19 was a far worse killer than the ordinary flu. In fact, as early as mid-2020 places like NIAID and the CDC were reporting that while it was a bigger killer of old people (70+) it wasn’t very lethal for the rest of the unvaccinated populations – a fact not helped by NIAID confusing the C-19 CFR (Case Fatality Rate) of 1% with the Flu’s IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) of 0.1% when they testified to Congress that C-19 was ten times more lethal, something this August 2020 article from The National Library of Medicine goes into detail about, Public Health Lessons Learned From Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation.

More facts arrived in 2022, from none other than the CEO of one the C-19 vaccine companies. Moderna:

“I think it’s going to be like the flu. If you’re a 25-year-old, do you need an annual booster every year if you’re healthy? “You might want to… but I think it’s going to be similar to flu where it’s going to be people at high-risk, people above 50 years of age, people with comorbidities, people with cancer and other conditions, people with transplants.”

Which tracks with what the writer of the article containing that quote said in 2020:

The death rate is mostly confined to the older population with already existing health issues, like the flu.

This early conclusion was later confirmed again and again in the months that followed. From September 2020, for example, in citing CDC data I wrote:

The Wuhan virus killed you only if you had an average of slightly less than three serious chronic health conditions. And generally you had to be elderly, with the average age of death 78 years old. Otherwise, just like the flu you might have been sick for a few days, but you would have recovered and been able to go on with your life as normal.

The goal of the Chinese Lockdowns was Zero Covid and although most Western nations talked instead of two weeks to flatten the curve (e.g. save the healthcare system from being overrun) Zero Covid was adopted in a few other nations, like New Zealand in 2020. But it was an insane goal that was always doomed to fail because of the high mutation rates of Coronaviruses. In China it was always a lie:

Like any global, historically significant false narrative worth its salt, Zero Covid has not been monolithic in its claims. Rather, it has been modulated by the Chinese propaganda apparatus, with, of course, the witting or unwitting collaboration of Western media that has been essential to its success. The most recent manifestation of the Zero Covid false narrative is one that speaks to its daring and sophistication — the idea that, in response to criticism and pressure, the Chinese government came to terms with the fact that it could not cope with the swell of Omicron cases and so needed to ease restrictions.
…
This new inflection in the Zero Covid narrative, which claimed that Omicron reveals the “limits” of China’s approach, merely served to reinforce the idea that China had successfully contained Covid had up that point.

If that sounds familiar it should because that was the same bullshit pushed here. We believed the Chinese, including even their ridiculously low death toll figures. We also thought it had worked here with the first lockdown and C-19 Alpha version, and thus tried it again in 2021 against the Delta and Omicron versions, where it failed.

And yet, not only have we all believed China’s claims about its Covid “success”, specifically Zero Covid, we’ve built an entire political theory around it. This theory states that while China’s authoritarian system of government certainly has its downsides (human rights and civil liberties and all that), the big upside is that it’s effective. With the pandemic, this reasoning goes, China was naturally somewhat draconian, but ultimately successful. Authoritarianism saves lives, you see.

If it weren’t for the fact that China’s false mortality data was presented in Google search results; or that Twitter-verified members of China’s State-Sponsored Media could post without being flagged; or, most glaringly and egregiously, that the legacy press actively spread the mistruths and openly celebrated them, the narrative could never have been built.

The article points out how crucial the Western MSM were to China’s lie. And here in the West they were a key part of this insanity:

After advocating in January 2020 that we should shut our borders, I made my stance on lockdowns quite clear with these posts in 2020: I opposed them:

A picture is worth a thousand graphs
Visible Death vs. Invisible Death
Lockdowns don’t work. What does?

2020-2022

Lockdowns required the basic infringement on Civil Liberties, which showed up in things like this Canadian Pastor being arrested by the police for holding services in his church during that nation’s lockdowns. As it happened he was Polish immigrant who grew up under communism:

“We were warning Americans and Canadians – Westerners – about what is coming. We could smell it from many years. People were laughing at us. ‘Oh, you’re just making this stuff up. You’re blowing this out of proportion. You conspiracy theorist.’ However, it’s here. It’s here and you cannot come and worship God without the interference of the Gestapo.”

Incredibly things were often just as bad south of the border in The Land Of The Free: worse in some ways, as New York Governor Andre Cuomo was lauded across the MSM and his Democrat Party even as he did this:

“Does the #DemConvention know @NYGovCuomo forced nursing homes across NY to take in COVID positive patients and planted the seeds of infection that killed thousands of grandmothers and grandfathers?” Caputo wrote shortly after Cuomo spoke on the first night of the Democratic National Convention.

Cuomo’s little empire eventually did collapse as the facts came out (which they tried to hide precisely because of fears of a Federal investigation), but because of allegations of sexual harrassment, not because of the terrible things he did during Covid:

His office caught in a wringer, Andrew Cuomo didn’t come clean about cooking the books on nursing home Covid deaths. Nor did he apologize. Instead, he admitted to merely creating an information “void” which his enemies filled in.

But he didn’t do anything that other Democrat Governors didn’t also do:

  • Michigan:
    Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued an executive order which dictated that a “long-term care facility must not prohibit admission or readmission of a resident based on COVID-19 testing requirements or results” and told hospitals to discharge coronavirus patients back to the homes they had come from.
  • California
    On March 30th, Governor Newsom’s administration warned skilled nursing facilities that they “shall not refuse to admit or readmit a resident based on their status as a suspected or confirmed COVID-19 case.”
  • New Jersey
    On March 31st, New Jersey Commissioner of Health Judith Persichilli issued an order stating that in order to achieve “the expedited receipt of patients/residents discharging from hospitals”, “no patient/resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the post-acute care setting solely based on a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19.” It was a virtual copy of the earlier New York State order.
  • Pennsylvania
    Governor Tom Wolf … had ordered Pennsylvania nursing homes to accept “readmissions for current residents who have been discharged from the hospital” in order to “alleviate the increasing burden in the acute care settings” including “patients who have had the COVID-19 virus.” Wolf’s Secretary of Health, Dr. Richard (Rachel) Levine, had transferred his own mother out of a nursing home and to a hotel.

All of this was also being pushed by Anthony Fauci as the face of the Federal government’s C-19 policies, and in the case of the schools, by the loathsome head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten (She called attempts to reopen schools in the fall of 2020 “Reckless, callous, cruel”)

The wreckage had became obvious by 2021, starting with the USA:

COVID shutdowns championed by U.S. governors and D.C. bureaucrats are responsible for destroying nearly 40% of small businesses since the virus was unleashed on the world… Small businesses –- those with fewer than 500 employees -– are 98% of the businesses in America. They are responsible for 62% of all U.S. jobs. Fully 89% of these small businesses employ 20 or fewer employees.

While the developing nations of the Southern Hemisphere really got hammered, Lockdowns are killers in the global south:

Research has long shown that life expectancy and GDP are closely connected in poor countries: a slight increase in GDP can greatly increase life expectancy, whereas a decrease in GDP will also decrease it. The cause of the near-5 million increase in India’s excess deaths last year is thus not mainly Covid-19, but the economic, medical, and social consequences of the lockdowns implemented in spring 2020 and the panic that followed.

These findings tally with events elsewhere. In Peru, 2020 all-cause mortality increased by 96% over the running 3-year average — dwarfing increases elsewhere in Latin America. In early June, the Peruvian authorities attributed much of this mortality to Covid, reversing earlier attribution to non-Covid causes. This move more than doubled the death toll from the virus, making Peru’s per capita mortality rate almost twice that of the next worst-affected country.

Yet Peru has also had one of the world’s strictest lockdowns.

But as this British Sunday Times journalist describes it, a lot of people (including himself) actually enjoyed lockdowns, Was I just a mug?:

I had been entirely in support of that first lockdown, in every measure of its severity, craven before the little Hitlers who sprang up to lecture you about keeping a safe distance outside the supermarket, masked-up and with chapped hands from the constant washing, and with the perpetual acrid, alcoholic reek of hand sanitiser in my nostrils. OK, I began having grave doubts later that summer, with the bizarre non-sequiturs about where we were allowed to go and what we were allowed to do — drinks down the pub, fine; visit your dying grandmother, banned etc. But for three months at least, I was a happy, supine, strangely unquestioning camper. My wife remarked to me, in March 2020: “It’s all shite, all of it. None of it will make a difference. It’s about control. And it will go on for ages.” Nonsense, my dear — it will all be over by September, and this is simply a case of ensuring the frailest of us survive, I assured her.

What a terrible thing it is to have to admit, in a national newspaper, that one’s wife was absolutely right, on all counts, and that I was wrong.
…
In retrospect, good for them. I suppose we can console ourselves that at least we weren’t as gullible as the New Zealanders — but it’s thin gruel, isn’t it? The best we can do is address Boris and — especially — Sage directly, now: “Another lockdown? Not on your life. Or mine. They don’t work.” 

I haven’t encountered many people like that here in New Zealand, either online or in real life.

Lockdowns were eventually lifted everywhere, although only in NZ was this done as a mark of triumph (remember “I did a little dance”) and then only the one time. Everywhere else they were lifted as nations slowly realised that they weren’t stopping the virus, let alone eliminating it. But that didn’t stop the worst offenders from repeating the exercise again in 2021: Britain, New Zealand and in Australia, the states of NSW and especially The Peoples Republic of Victoria. Luckily for these fanatics the vaccines had arrived in late 2020 and could be used as the needed excuse for dumping lockdowns – rather than the obvious fact that were not working and – aside from the one example of NZ in 2020 against the Alpha version – never had worked.