God there's a Johns Hopkins study out now that says lockdowns in the US and Europe were largely ineffective at preventing covid deaths and only reduced them by around 3% while causing a huge economic burden and my first reaction was okay you're telling me the half assed lockdowns where workers still had to go to work every day and if you were lucky you maybe worked somewhere with a drive thru or outdoor seating but still came into close contact with your coworkers all the time didn't do shit in comparison to the actual lockdowns in countries that provided the means to actually shelter in place without leaving your home for 2-4 weeks and kept deaths to a minimum and got to more or less go back to normal after that until it started spreading again from Americans and Europeans? Big shock.
Then I looked at the report and the authors are all economics professors.
Not only are the authors all economics professors;
Oh, and BTW, that wasn’t even peer reviewed. Take a look:
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf
About the Series The Studies in Applied Economics series is under the general direction of Prof. Steve H. Hanke, Founder and Co-Director of The Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise ([email protected]). The views expressed in each working paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the institutions that the authors are affiliated with.
So Steve Hanke authored the paper and then published it where he is the editor.
The author of the paper is also the editor of the publication. It's pure propaganda.
A 3% reduction in deaths is hundreds of thousands of people. I am sure they are crying their eyes out that their survival disrupted the economy. In addition to the fact they are sacrificing human lives and wellbeing, they are also destroying the credibility of the academic establish in order to preserve the short term profitability of the wealthy.
Sure, people with the time and science literacy can tell the difference between this and an actual good faith study. But people without that background who have been told to "follow the science" aren't going to be able to tell at a glace why this study telling them to die so Panera bread makes it quarterly sales projections is full of shit while the one's indicating the importance of social distancing, vaccination, and wearing ppe aren't.
As an Australian, as a Melbournian, barely coming out of the longest lockdown in the world, this shit makes me SO angry.
We spent 2020 AND 2021 in near total lockdown, 18 solid months with only a tiny handful of reductions. And the entire time we were watching the US, and the UK, and many other places besides, in absolute horror.
Every day there was some new horrific news about the total catastrophe your governments were causing, the unimaginable toll it was taking. And we heard in particular Americans talking about “lockdown” as a thing that happened, as a thing that stopped... when at best all Trump could muster was the slightest pause.
It was utterly surreal in a city which ERADICATED covid. Literally we stayed locked in 2020 until every single last case was gone, and only then did we finally open the gates. And when the consistent embarrassment that is the Australian Federal government (vs the states who mostly responded reasonably and quickly with the exception of New South Wales) kept allowing cases to breach our quarantine, we locked down again.
And again.
And again.
6 times. 262 days.
And we eradicated it time and again, until Delta overwhelmed the system and we stayed locked down until nearly 100% of the population was vaccinated.
And you know what? Our economy did NOT collapse. Our lives did NOT end. We survived and we didn’t have large scale protests or anti-vax movement. 99% of people understood why we had to stay protected, and even after 18 months remained patient with the exhausting constant state of the world.
And when Omicron hit, just as we were finally recovering from Delta, the incompetent Federal government declared no more lockdowns, we had to get back to work for the economy. And the VAST majority of Australians told them to fuck off.
We went BACK into lockdown, without financial assistance, without orders, and without hesitation. Many of us are STILL in voluntary lockdown to this very day, to protect ourselves and our loved ones when the government refuses to. And in doing so, we saved our hospital system from being completely overrun, as case numbers soared into the tens of thousands a day.
And we’re still here, the economy still chugs along, and for the majority of us life continues as it has until now.
Understand that when they said they would sacrifice you for the sake of the economy, they meant profits. They meant millionaires and billionaires. They slaughtered MILLIONS of people so they wouldn’t lose any time exploiting and squeezing every last fucking cent they could out of the corpses. And they continue to do so as they allow Omicron to run rampant.
Fuck all of them. Fuck their systems. Fuck being politely murdered for the sake of their billions.
Fuck their economy.
