Friday, October 16, 2020

The Carnage And Aftermath Of Lockdowns:


The Coronavirus Experts Were Wrong, Now They Need Scapegoats

 Daniel Greenfield



The problem isn’t just the China Virus. It’s that we adopted the China Model to fight it.

Public health experts adopted China’s draconian lockdowns without knowing how well they really worked and in a country that, fortunately, lacks the power to truly enforce them.

China’s deceptiveness and lack of transparency meant that we did not know how well anything that the Communist dictatorship did to battle the virus that it spawned actually worked. Despite that, our public health experts, and those of most free countries, adopted the China Model.

We don’t know how well the China Model worked for the People’s Republic of China, but it failed in every free country that tried it. Lockdowns eventually gave way to reopenings and new waves of infection. This was always going to happen because not even the more socialist European countries have the police state or the compliant populations of a Communist dictatorship.

Desperate, the public health experts adopted China’s compulsive mask wearing, a cultural practice that predates the virus, as if wearing a few flimsy scraps of fiber would fix everything.

It hadn’t and it didn’t.

But by then the public health experts and the media that had touted them were moving fully into the scapegoat portion of the crisis. The China Model had failed, all that was left was shifting the blame to more conservative and traditional populations, and away from the cultural elites.

In New York City that meant falsely blaming Chassidic Jews for the second wave. From Maine to San Francisco, Democrat leaders and their media blamed conservative Christian gatherings. Their national counterparts loudly blamed President Trump for not wearing a mask all the time.

A New York Times headline captured the cynical broad spectrum cultural scapegoating with, “N.Y.C. Threatens Orthodox Jewish Areas on Virus, but Trump’s Impact Is Seen.”

The uncomfortable truth was that the lockdowns had failed economically, socially, and medically.

Even blue states and cities were no longer able to carry the impossible economic burden much longer. The Black Lives Matter riots and the onset of summer broke the #StayHome taboos, and medically, the lockdowns had been useless efforts to meet a fake crisis of hospital overflows.

America, like too many other countries, put the experts in charge and they failed. Miserably.


Democrats claimed that they were superior because they were “listening to the science”. They weren’t listening to the science, which is not an oracle and does not give interviews. Instead, they were obeying a class of officials, some of them whom weren’t even medical professionals, who impressed elected officials and the public with statistical sleight of hand. And little else.

The entire lockdown to testing to reopening pipeline that we adopted wholesale was a typical bureaucratic and corporate exercise, complete with the illusion of metrics and goals, that suffered from all the typical problems of bureaucracy, academia, and corporate culture.

The system that determines reopenings and closings is an echo chamber that measures its own functioning while having little to do with the real world. Testing has become a cargo cult exercise that confuses the map with the world, and the virus with the spreadsheet. It gamifies fighting the pandemic while dragging entire countries into an imaginary world based on its invented rules.

When the media reports a rise or decrease in positive tests, it’s treated as if it’s an assessment of the virus, rather than an incomplete data point that measures its own measurements.

The daily coronavirus reports have become the equivalent of Soviet harvest reports. They sound impressive, mean absolutely nothing, and are the pet obsession of a bureaucracy that not only has no understanding of the problem, but its grip on power has made it the problem.


The smarter medical professionals understand that the theories have failed, while the administrators who put the theories into practice confused their system with science. The politicians listen to the administrators and when they tell us to trust the science, they mean the bureaucracy. The medical professionals can’t and won’t backtrack now. It’s too late.

The best and brightest spent the worst part of a year shuffling rationales like a gambler’s trick deck, wrecked the economy, and sent tens of thousands of infected patients into nursing homes to infect the residents, accounting for at least a third of the national coronavirus death toll.

Like most national leadership disasters, it was a combination of misjudgement, understandable mistakes, tragic errors, and acts of incomprehensible stupidity or unmitigated evil.







By Michael Haynes



Dr. Scott Atlas, a recently appointed advisor to President Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, said the architects of the COVID-19 lockdowns “should be held accountable for what they did.”

In a Fox News interview yesterday, Atlas outlined the enormous detriments to public health that result from lockdowns. He criticized those who were advocating for more lockdowns to help prevent the spread of the virus, saying they were “simply out of touch with average Americans.”

“Prolonged lockdowns are a complete disaster,” said Atlas. “People have been killed by people who want prolonged lockdowns.”

Atlas pointed to data regarding the hidden effect of lockdowns upon people’s health.

“Forty-six percent of the most common types of cancers were not diagnosed during the lockdown,” he observed. This means that as a result, “people will present with much later, more widespread disease.”

Out of those scheduled for chemotherapy, only half appeared for their appointments, meaning that “650,000 Americans” missed crucial treatment. The reason for this, Atlas said, is purely “out of the fear instilled by our so-called public health experts.”

Atlas referred to the effect the lockdowns were having on children and young adults. Just as a result of closing the schools, the number of child abuse cases has increased dramatically, with “more than 200,000 cases of child abuse not reported during the two months of spring school closures.”

CDC report showed that “one out of four young college-aged Americans have contemplated killing themselves during the month of June,” Atlas said. “This is completely off the rails.”

But he was even more scathing with regard to the proponents of lockdowns, whom he accused of having committed crimes against humanity.

“History will record the faces of the public health expertise as some of the most sinful, egregious, epic failures in the history of public policy,” Atlas stated.

“They have killed people with their lack of understanding and their lack of caring about not just the impact of cases of COVID-19, a virus that the overwhelming majority of people do well in.”

The White House advisor distinguished between COVID-19 policies and their actual outcomes. “They never cared to considered the impact of the policy itself,” he said, “and the policy itself has been a complete epic failure, and honestly some people say a crime against humanity — these people should be held accountable for what they did.”










When governments across the US forced businesses to close down in response to the coronavirus pandemic, everybody assumed the layoffs would be temporary. Despite the huge surge in unemployment, the expectation was people would quickly return to work once the crisis passed and the economy opened up again. But as the pandemic stretches into its eighth month, millions of Americans remain out of work and economists say many of those “temporary” job losses have become permanent.

Millions of Americans have returned to work as expected. The unemployment rate has nearly halved to 7.9% since April. But nearly 13 million Americans remain out of work. That’s about 7 million more than pre-pandemic levels.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of job losses categorized as permanent grew by 345,000 to 3.8 million people in September. In other words, nearly 4 million unemployed Americans have no prospects of returning to work.



The number of long-term unemployed – people out of work for a period exceeding six months – has ballooned. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 2.4 million Americans were unemployed for 27 weeks or more in September, up 781,000 from the previous month. The last time we saw this kind of jump in long-term unemployment was during the Great Recession.

Economists crunching the numbers say the trend shows that some layoffs once thought temporary have become permanent. To make matters worse, companies have begun initiating layoffs on a trajectory similar to a traditional recession, according to an article published by CNBC

Meanwhile, months since the lockdowns were generally lifted, hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to apply for unemployment for the first time every week. Last week, more than 800,000 people filed first-time unemployment claims. That compares with 188,000 first time claims during the same period in 2019.

And tens of thousands of people will get pink slips in the coming weeks as the long-term economic damage caused by government lockdowns in response to the coronavirus pandemic begin to ripple through the economy. Regal Cinemas closed all of its locations last week with no timetable for reopening. Disney announced it would lay off 28,000 workers. US airlines are shedding jobs at a dizzying pace.

“We’re still at a high level of layoffs in the economy,” Susan Houseman, VP and research director at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, told CNBC. “The new job losses will, by and large, be perceived as permanent.”

In a recent podcast, Peter Schiff said he thinks a lot of the people who have gone back to work in recent weeks will eventually find themselves in the unemployment line again.





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