That the illegal lockdowns have wrought massive damage to society, have destroyed the lives of millions, are killing hundreds of millions more, and caused untold suffering across the planet are incontestable facts. Only the ignorant or deluded could argue otherwise at this point. Yet some people, often because of their own political conditioning, still hold on to the lockdowns as if they’re effective. The last refuge these people have is that “the science” is on their side and that “the science” says the lockdowns have saved lives. Here I will endeavor to refute this last bastion of argument for the society wreckers and life destroyers who depend on science as a defense for policies that have done massive damage to society and wrote social, political, and economic chaos across the planet while not making society any safer.
Science On The Lockdowns
In 2006, then the Center for Biosecurity (now the Center for Health Security) published an article that evaluated the multiple ways of how governments could respond to future pandemics based on their effectiveness. The authors of the paper, titled Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza, (henceforth Disease Mitigation) is a virtual who’s-who of epidemiologists whose job it is to plan for and mitigate global pandemics, including one of the doctors who helped lead the worldwide elimination of smallpox. These are people who understand how diseases spread and how we can effectively fight them. Here is what they have to say about large scale lockdowns/quarantines:
There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to slow the spread of influenza. A World Health Organization (WHO) Writing Group, after reviewing the literature and considering contemporary international experience, concluded that “forced isolation and quarantine are ineffective and impractical.” Despite this recommendation by experts, mandatory large-scale quarantine continues to be considered as an option by some authorities and government officials.
The interest in quarantine reflects the views and conditions prevalent more than 50 years ago, when much less was known about the epidemiology of infectious diseases and when there was far less international and domestic travel in a less densely populated world. It is difficult to identify circumstances in the past half-century when large-scale quarantine has been effectively used in the control of any disease. The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.
Large scale lockdowns and quarantines do not reflect modern medical science, they reflect ideas more than half a century out of date when the world was a lot less connected and people knew a lot less about how diseases multiplied and spread. Lockdowns are based not on science. They’re based on fear. And anyone who cares about doing what scientific evidence says we should do would eliminate them from serious consideration. The paper also addresses having people locked down in their homes. After reviewing the uncertainties of how you could force people to be locked in their homes from a purely logistical perspective, the paper digs into the dangers of home lockdowns:
Even if home quarantine were generally acceptable to the community, individuals may not have the economic resources to stay at home. Few employers currently have provisions for paid absence unless the workers themselves are ill. For those who are hourly workers or who are self-employed, the potential loss of wages as a result of having to stay home simply because an individual had had contact with sick people might not be acceptable or feasible.
Home quarantine also raises ethical questions. Implementation of home quarantine could result in healthy, uninfected people being placed at risk of infection from sick household members. Practices to reduce the chance of transmission (hand-washing, maintaining a distance of 3 feet from infected people, etc.) could be recommended, but a policy imposing home quarantine would preclude, for example, sending healthy children to stay with relatives when a family member becomes ill. Such a policy would also be particularly hard on and dangerous to people living in close quarters, where the risk of infection would be heightened.
Notice how they recognize the economic impossibilities of it all. It isn’t feasible to expect people to stay home and lose all income and think that everything will magically be produced for them (by who no one knows) and nothing bad will happen. They end by warning that quarantining people together may actually backfire by exposing people who may not have otherwise got the virus to someone who does have it and now they can’t escape or leave. Lockdowns effectively turn homes into viral hot zones, ensuring everyone will catch the deadly disease. This is why the spread of the disease actually got worse in March and April of 2020, when the lockdowns were at their worst.
Analytics expert Donald Luskin recently wrote an article sharing the results of an analysis he did comparing the progress of Covid-19 to the severity of lockdown procedures. If lockdowns work as they’re supposed to then we would expect that the result would be a visible drop in the progress of the spread of the illness. Yet his work demonstrated the exact opposite happened. Not only did the spread of the illness not slowed down, but the places with the strictest lockdowns had the larges increases in cases. Luskin writes:
Measuring from the start of the year to each state’s point of maximum lockdown—which range from April 5 to April 18—it turns out that lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus. States with longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger Covid outbreaks. The five places with the harshest lockdowns—the District of Columbia, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts—had the heaviest caseloads.
This of course makes sense going back to the Disease Mitigation paper. By locking people up it increased the likelihood that everyone in the home would be exposed without recourse and made sure that everyone in a home where one person had it would get sick, leading to a drastic increase in the need for acute medical care. Luskin also notes that his “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.” Similar results have been demonstrated in the United kingdom where doctors have been able to “demonstrate that the United Kingdom’s lockdown was both superfluous and ineffective.” This all accords with the Disease Mitigation paper as it explains that quarantines didn’t affect the spread of the 1918 pandemic either:
A historical review of communities in the U.S. during the 1918 influenza pandemic identified only two that escaped serious mortality and morbidity. Both communities had completely cut themselves off for months from the outside world. One was a remote town in the Colorado mountains, and the other was a naval training station on an island in San Francisco Bay. Obviously, this is not a strategy of general utility. Other studies have suggested that, except in the most extreme applications, disease mitigation measures have not had a significant impact on altering the course of an influenza pandemic.
The alternative to the lockdowns is all playing out in real time in Sweden. Sweden didn’t lockdown their country, didn’t shutdown schools, didn’t even mandate masks. Instead it focused on getting care for the most endangered, encouraging people to social distance, and educating the public with real time, up to date information so they could make wise decisions for themselves. And while it had higher rates in the early months of the pandemic, its numbers have continued to fall and now it has one of the lowest death rates in Europe while many other countries are seeing numbers climb and are fearing a “second wave” of the virus. The “second wave” the other countries are facing isn’t really a second wave, it is the extended first wave, caused by the lockdowns dragging out the inevitable spread of the virus. Sweden though faced it wisely and head on. At worst the total deaths in Sweden from Covid-19 will be comparable to everywhere else, but Sweden, unlike the lockdown nations, won’t have people dying from the many cases of lockdown related suicide, drug abuse, spousal abuse, murder, the loss of needed medical care they were forbidden to have because of state lockdown orders, and many more (to say nothing of the millions who wouldn’t be threatened with starvation and death if the world had followed a plan similar to Sweden’s plan.) This study from Switzerland suggests many people could lose years off their life caused by negative reactions to the fear, anxiety, and depression caused by the lockdowns.
What Should Be Done?
This interview with Dr. Katherine Yih, an epidemiologist with the Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School who also specializes in doing epidemiological studies, offers some insights not only into the failures of lockdowns but also what are our other options that would be more effective and wouldn’t threaten to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
On the questions of the lockdowns themselves, Dr. Yih says that while she believes short lived lockdowns designed to give hospitals a chance to prepare for the rise in patients makes sense, the idea that lockdowns should be continued indefinitely or until their is a vaccine is unwise and unwarranted. She then explains the realities of the situation in terms of inevitable infection:
I have been struck by how this emphasis on keeping the numbers down at all costs has not evolved with time. There is a kind of simplistic goal of keeping people from getting infected, period. Now this may seem like a worthy goal, but with a highly contagious respiratory virus to which most of the world’s population is probably still not immune, people are going to get infected. The virus will spread, quickly or less so, until herd immunity is reached.
Instead of a medically oriented approach that focuses on the individual patient and seeks (unrealistically) to prevent new infections across the board, we need a public health–oriented approach that focuses on the population and seeks to use patterns, or epidemiologic features, of the disease to minimize the number of cases of severe disease and death over the long run, as herd immunity builds up.
Notice she says that the infection will spread, there is no stopping that. Instead of nations and states focusing on trying to prevent individual cases, trying to control micro cases form the macros level, they should be focusing on the population as a whole with a focus on building herd immunity (when the amount of a population has a natural immunity to a disease to such a degree that its ability to spread is extremely hampered). She points out that despite the way the term herd immunity has been used to terrify people in the media, that “it is a scientifically proven phenomenon just like gravity.” Regarding how to achieve herd immunity, Dr. Kulldorf explains that the highest at-risk populations can be protected by stricter measures until a vaccine is developed but that those at less risk should help build the population’s herd immunity by getting and overcoming the illness:
Herd immunity can be achieved by natural infection, effective vaccination, or a combination of the two. And the process of getting to herd immunity can be managed in such a way that the more vulnerable people are protected from infection while others help the population reach herd immunity, thereby minimizing the number of deaths.
Dr. Kulldorf also says that waiting for a vaccine is a bad idea because “we will have a vaccine sometime between three months from now and never.” He goes on to say that, “Children and young adults have minimal risk, and there is no scientific or public health rationale to close day care centers, schools, or colleges. …Kids have minimal risk from this virus, and it is sad that we are sacrificing our children instead of properly protecting the elderly and other high-risk groups.” Instead of locking down society while trying to prevent every person from getting the illness until the distant unknown time that a safe vaccine is developed, governments should be trying to manage who and how the illness spreads on a general level, with to goal of achieving mass immunity for the populace while having extra protections for specific at-risk populations. He explains that, “A universal lockdown can successfully postpone cases into the future, as it has done in some countries, but in doing so it also postpones the buildup of immunity.” In other words, lockdowns won’t prevent the illness spreading until immunity is achieved, the illness will begin spreading again as soon as the lockdowns are over.
Places like Florida, South Dakota, and Sweden are held up in the article as examples of places where governments eschewed lockdowns for better and more scientifically sound programs. On the issue of Sweden, Dr. Kulldorf notes that despite the near universal dismay over its policies which avoided lockdowns, Sweden is now doing better than the United States:
Except for the failure to protect nursing home residents in Stockholm, the country has done well without a lockdown. For example, day care centers and schools were never closed for children aged one to fifteen, with zero COVID-19 deaths as a result and only a few hospitalizations. Moreover, teachers faced the same risk as the average among other professions. COVID-19 mortality is now close to zero in Sweden, and the United States has now passed Sweden in terms of deaths per million inhabitants, despite Sweden having an older, more high-risk population.
It is also interesting to note that both of the doctors conclude that the lockdowns have had an (unintentionally?) racist outcome. Because a large percentage of the blue collar working population is made up of minority peoples the devastation the lockdowns have wrought to the job market has caused large percentages of minority peoples to lose their jobs and their ability to provide for themselves and their families. Dr. Yih, explains how lifting the lockdowns would negate these racist effects and help minority people:
If the lockdown in our communities is lifted responsibly, such that schools, colleges, stores, restaurants, museums, parks, beaches, and most other places where people congregate reopen, while the elderly and others at risk of severe disease and death are protected, infection rates will go up, but this will happen predominantly among younger, healthier people.
With this approach, life for most can go on somewhat normally, people who have been especially harmed by COVID-19 directly and by the lockdown — including black and Latinx urban workers and other exploited and marginalized groups — can rebuild their lives and livelihoods, and herd immunity will be reached more quickly than under lockdown, while minimizing the number of cases of severe COVID-19 disease and death.
And lest they be accused of being in support of the “anti-lockdown far right” they both note the irony and stupidity of how politicized the issue has become in the US. Dr. Yih notes that while the political Right has been able to adopt the anti-lockdown position and take political advantage of how it hurts everyone, the political Left’s “elites simply can’t see or can’t feel how this strategy continues to fail the working class and also small business owners.” Dr. Kulldorf notes that in Sweden he would be considered as being on the political Left, but here he is considered as being on the political Right since it has been the Republican governors of South Dakota and Florida which have come closest to implementing the strategies he promotes. Amused, he explains that his peers who agree with him are all Leftists themselves while the general public who support and follow him on Twitter are mostly on the Right. At the end of the day though he says that:
As a public health scientist, it is my duty to fight for public health independently of partisan politics. I hope that people from across the political divide can come together to end a lockdown that is so damaging to public health, and instead advocate for age-targeted counter measures that properly protect high-risk individuals. After all, we live in this world together, sharing both its beauties and its viruses.”
Finally, they suggest that Leftists need to reject their unquestioning support for lockdowns and need to allow society to open back up. They suggest paying scrupulous attention to those in high risk groups but allowing other to “go about their business.” Basic health pre-cautions such as handwashing, regular testing, and mask wearing for workers exposed frequently would allow for people to manage their health in a safe manner while also allow for the building of herd immunity. They also mention that the efforts by Leftists in places like California and New York to imprison people for going to parties should be stopped immediately and reference the works of Harvard epidemiologist Julia Markus as being persuasive explanations of why this needs to stop. If anything, Dr. Yih notes, parties by young people benefit society by building herd immunity and stopping them hurts society.
Final Thoughts
There are a lot of people out there who like to think they are on the side of “the science” and you hear a lot from Leftists that they follow “the science” and that “science” demands lockdowns. Well, we have seen here that nothing is farther from the truth. The science proves that that mass, general lockdowns are absolutely disastrous for society on an economic and medical level. If we truly want to follow more scientifically sound policies we need to open society back up, stop prosecuting people for living their lives, and need to focus our efforts on protecting those in high risk groups while allowing those who are not in serious danger to manage their health, be exposed to the illness, recover, and begin to build up the herd immunity in the general population that will increase the safety of those in at-risk groups by making it harder for the illness to spread. This is what science suggests is the best path toward a healthier and safer society. Anyone telling you otherwise is just parroting their political dogma instead of following true science based facts. In the words of Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, “This is how we have always managed viruses. Why is this so different? If we keep introducing restrictions and lockdowns while we wait for a vaccine it will be the young that suffer the most, particularly those from more deprived backgrounds. We can’t keep doing this – it would be an injustice.”