This is the third 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.

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

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe. – Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza (2006).

THE LATEST

Evan back in 2021 there had been a study by the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences which revealed that shutdown orders made little to no difference in COVID’s impact. From the abstract of the study:

“Previous studies have claimed that shelter-in-place orders saved thousands of lives, but we reassess these analyses and show that they are not reliable. We find that shelter-in-place orders had no detectable health benefits, only modest effects on behavior, and small but adverse effects on the economy. To be clear, our study should not be interpreted as evidence that social distancing behaviors are not effective. Many people had already changed their behaviors before the introduction of shelter-in-place orders, and shelter-in-place orders appear to have been ineffective precisely because they did not meaningfully alter social distancing behavior.” [Emphasis added]

In late 2022 there had already been this reported by the WSJ:

A Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis of studies around the world concluded that lockdown and mask restrictions have had “little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.”

One of the SAGE (Strategic Advisory Group of Experts) modellers in Britain piped up in 2022:

“We knew from February [2020], never mind March, that the lockdown would not solve the problem. It would simply delay it,” Woolhouse says, a note of enduring disbelief in his voice. And yet in government, “there was no attention paid to that rather obvious drawback of the strategy”.

Instead, lockdowns – which “only made sense in the context of eradication” – became the tool of choice to control Covid. The die was cast in China, which instituted ultra-strict measures and, unforgivably in Woolhouse’s book, was praised by the World Health Organisation for its “bold approach”. “The WHO,” he suggests, “got the biggest calls completely wrong in 2020. The early global response to the pandemic was woefully inadequate.”

Mark Woolhouse OBE is Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, a post he has held for over twenty years. I think I’ll buy his book, The Year The World Went Mad.

Similar conclusions here by early 2022 about Sweden:

Two years later, Sweden’s COVID-19 death rate is 1,614 per million people — much lower than Britain (2,335) or the U.S. (2,836), which both had much more stringent lockdowns.
…
The hero of this story is Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist. He was Sweden’s Anthony Fauci, but unlike the now-widely discredited Fauci, Tegnell eschewed lockdowns. The international media pilloried him for not following “the science.” At first, it seemed the Swedish live-and-let-live strategy was a miserable failure. Death rates soared higher than in other European nations. But to their credit, the Swedes ignored the “mad modelers” such as Britain’s Imperial College team, which predicted multiple times that the number of deaths around the world would be more than actually occurred.

Sweden made some mistakes at the beginning. Like many states in the United States, the Swedes failed to protect elderly nursing home residents adequately, which was a significant reason that deaths in Sweden were higher than in neighboring Norway or Denmark. But Tegnell argued that the collateral damage of lockdowns would outweigh what good they do on a societywide basis. He was proven right.

And of course there were the other benefits:

What is clear today is that the Swedes saved their economy. This year, it’s projected to be 5% larger than before the pandemic, compared to a 2% gain for Germany and a 1% gain for Britain. Moreover, the extra debt Sweden has had to take on is a fraction of that of lockdown countries. So it will not have to spend decades paying for the costs of lockdowns.

Swedish schools stayed open with no face masks. Test scores are up, and there is no talk in Sweden about “lost” years of education.

But starting in 2023 the negative conclusions on lockdowns have come thick and fast. A Look Back at Lockdowns:

Two left-leaning authors, historian Toby Green and economist Thomas Fazi, have written a new book on the global response to the Covid pandemic, The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor? A Critique from the Left.
…
There is no debate. The authors’ answer is unambiguous, and no reader of this book will die wondering what they think. Not about how governments responded to the Covid-19 pandemic (barring a Sweden here or a Florida there). Nor about the authors’ own left-wing principles, both economic and political, and how they bear on recommendations for the future. The authors bring swathes of data and evidence to bear to argue that lockdowns were a public policy disaster of gargantuan proportions. They weaponized the police and flew in the face of data that was, in fact, available early on in the crisis.
…
They show that the biggest losers of the lockdown response to Covid-19—to be clear, not of the virus itself but of the governmental response to it—were the young, the poor, and the non-laptop class of workers. The lockdowns and other governmental responses amounted to a massive transfer of wealth (not to mention life opportunities) from the young to the old. Likewise, these policies shifted money from the poor to the rich. 

Something I don’t think the NZ Labour Party has yet realised even in the wake of its defeat here in NZ in late 2023, with devastating losses of huge majorities in electorate seats.

Still unrecognised was the near certainty that lockdowns would screw with other health outcomes, even as it saved people from dying of C-19. I made that point in my April 28, 2020 post, A picture is worth a thousand graphs and included the following graphic, the post itself was a followup to Visible Death vs. Invisible Death.

And yet none of these negative outcomes were allowed to be discussed at the time, even by Tory cabinet members:

Rishi Sunak has said the government gave too much power to scientists during Covid lockdowns – and was not honest about the potential downsides.

The Tory leadership contender and former chancellor told the Spectator ministers were banned from talking about the “trade-offs” involved… he said the negative impacts of lockdowns on society were “never part” of internal discussions, adding meetings were “literally me around that table, just fighting”. Ministers were also told not to discuss the potential downsides in interviews, he added.

“The script was not to ever acknowledge them. The script was: ‘Oh there’s no trade-off, because doing this for our health is good for the economy.’”

And so lockdowns may not even have saved lives! Green and Fazi again:

Actually, if you focus solely on Covid deaths, even that is not clear. Once you factor in all the other ways people can die—from missed cancer checks, obesity, mental health problems leading to suicides and alcoholism, missed operations, the list goes on and on—it’s not even close. Lockdowns led to loads more overall deaths.

For yet another source that is non-Right-Wing and very much part of the status quo consensus on State Power narratives (especially when the Democrats are in power – one of the authors is Joe Nocera, whom I last saw on TV sticking it to the GOP over the GFC disaster), here’s New York Magazine with an October 30, 2023 article, COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. The authors have an associated book, The Big Fail, and they first acknowledge that such a thing was new and radical in the world of epidemiology and pandemics:

Until the Chinese government deployed this tactic, a strict batten-down-the-hatches approach had never been used before to combat a pandemic. Yes, for centuries infected people had been quarantined in their homes, where they would either recover or die. But that was very different from locking down an entire city; the World Health Organization called it “unprecedented in public health history.”

And the real joke was that at this early stage many in the West, including medical people (“these kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.”), human rights folk and the MSM, were “reacting with horror” – before they all did a 180 both intellectually and emotionally.

And they also point out that there are some still fighting for the idea of lockdowns:

 Howard Markel, a doctor and medical historian at the University of Michigan, believes they succeeded. “The amount of lives saved was just incredible,” he says. Markel pointed to an August 2023 study by the Royal Society of London that concluded that “stay-at-home orders, physical distancing, and restrictions on gathering size were repeatedly found to be associated with significant reduction in SARS-CoV-2 transmission, with more stringent measures having greater effects.”

Michael Baker will be pleased. However, as the writers go on to soberly note against such individual opinions:

Still, the weight of the evidence seems to be with those who say that lockdowns did not save many lives. By our count, there are at least 50 studies that come to the same conclusion. After The Big Fail went to press, The Lancet published a study comparing the COVID infection rate and death rate in the 50 states. It concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 deaths disproportionately clustered in U.S. states with lower mean years of education, higher poverty rates, limited access to quality health care, and less interpersonal trust — the trust that people report having in one another.” These sociological factors appear to have made a bigger difference than lockdowns (which were “associated with a statistically significant and meaningfully large reduction in the cumulative infection rate, but not the cumulative death rate”).

They also make the same point is made about all the other deaths that occurred precisely because of lockdowns. And I was very pleased to see them reference where this shite got started in the USA, with fucking George W Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, something I wrote about back in October 2021 with Lockdowns: a nightmare of imagination. NYMag tells the same, sad story of the fightback that failed in 2005 even though it was led by one Donald Henderson:

… perhaps the most renowned epidemiologist of the 20th century — the man who, decades earlier, had led the team that eradicated smallpox. Richard Preston, the author of The Hot Zone, would later describe this feat as “arguably the greatest life-saving achievement in the history of medicine.”

Under the title of this post is the key summary conclusion of the paper that resulted but you can see a synopsis of the main points of the article at my old post. Henderson died in 2016, but given his influence it should hardly be a surprise that during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa, another famous American medical expert said that he was opposed to “draconian” quarantines that could have “unintended consequences”.

The rest of that lengthy article has some juicy quotes:

One of the leaders of the [Bush] effort, a government scientist named Richard Hatchett, would later tell Lewis what he really believed: “One thing that’s inarguably true is that if you got everyone and locked each of them in their own room and didn’t let them talk to anyone, you would not have any disease.”
…
As a disease modeler, [Neil Ferguson] believed the same thing Richard Hatchett believed: that if he could lock everyone in a room, the virus would go away. But he had long assumed attempting to do so was politically impossible.
…
For Ferguson, the purpose of the report wasn’t just to release their shocking estimates; it was also to push the American and British governments to commit to lockdowns for the long haul. 

The prick who evaded lockdowns for bonking with a history of OTT predictions via his fucking “model”.

Also described is how the initial, reasonable sounding “two weeks to flatten the curve” and mitigation of healthcare system impact turned into a dystopian nightmare of re-imposed lockdowns every time C-19 cases increased:

As David Nabarro, the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 envoy (and an eventual lockdown critic), put it, “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large we’d rather not do it.”

More quotes:

One New York emergency-room doctor recalls that after the steady stream of COVID patients during March and April of 2020, “our ER was basically empty.” He added, “Nobody was coming in because they were afraid of getting COVID — or they believed we were only handling COVID patients.”
…
The anti-lockdown scientist Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University recalls a photograph in the San Jose Mercury News during the early months of the pandemic. It showed two children, 7 or 8 years old, sitting with Google Chromebooks outside a Taco Bell. “They were on the sidewalk doing schoolwork because that was the only place they could get free Wi-Fi,” Bhattacharya said. “Their parents weren’t there because they had to go to work. I mean, that should have ended the lockdown right then and there. It should have at least ended school closures.”
…
One child psychiatrist, who works with underprivileged autistic kids, began the pandemic believing in the importance of lockdowns and other mitigation measures. But over time, she changed her mind.

“What really drove me was my clinical experience,” she said. “What happens to a child when every single support is removed from them? What’s the impact on the family and the siblings? What I was seeing was complete regression. It was devastating, and the downsides of lockdowns and school closings were not being openly discussed in the mainstream media. I was horrified. Why aren’t we talking about this?” She described the situation she saw as 2022 wore on as a “sickening mental-health crisis.”
…
In 2020, for instance, COVID-19 ranked below suicide, cancer, accidents, homicide, and even heart disease as a cause of death for children under the age of 15, according to CDC data. Yet public-health experts did not stress any of this — on the contrary, many of them emphasized instead that children could get COVID-19 without explaining how small the risk was. Is it any wonder, then, that COVID-19 seemed to be the only thing parents and teachers focused on?

There’s a lot of stuff in the article about the school closures and the refusal to re-open them, led by scumbag American teacher unions, as I described here in Part 2, with Randi Weingarten as the lead scumbag.

The last paragraph of that article is the perfect summary of all this, and not just the lockdowns but all the rest of our Covid responses:

What [Anthony Fauci] could never acknowledge was that “shutting things down” didn’t stop the virus, and that keeping schools closed didn’t save kids’ lives. Then again, to understand that, you had to be willing to follow the science.

I must admit that as I finish this, I am filled with a deep and abiding sense of anger towards those who imposed all this bullshit upon us, especially when they now claim that “things were moving fast” and “we didn’t know”. The following response to one of my early posts on lockdowns is the perfect summary of such people:

“Yet another item by Tom, telling us all that both the Australian and New Zealand governments are wrong in going for a lockdown.  – Wayne Mapp

He probably hasn’t changed his mind about lockdowns, or anything else, by one iota. In that respect he’s the perfect fit for Michael Baker, Ashley Bloomfield, Jacinda Ardern and countless others – including many NZ citizens.