“[A] cost-benefit analysis of the response to COVID-19 finds that lockdowns are far more harmful to public health than COVID-19 can be.”
That is the conclusion by Dr. Ari Joffe, MD, published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health in 2021. Dr Joffe’s research revealed that lockdowns resulted from ‘groupthink’ rather than science.
As I wrote previously:
“Groupthink is defined as ‘the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility’. It leads to dumb decisions ….”
Dr Joffe is not alone in acknowledging that his previous advocacy of lockdowns was erroneous. Public health expert Dr. Kevin Bass, PhD, does as well, “I was wrong about lockdowns and mandates. I was wrong and the reason I was wrong was my tribalism, my emotions, and my distorted understanding of human nature and of the virus. It doesn’t matter much, but I wanted to apologize for being wrong.”
While Bass, and Joffe, acknowledge their own professional failings in having supported the measures imposed during the pandemic, others who now acknowledge their error try to justify themselves with excuses. An NYU professor who advocated for lockdowns and vaccines states that “we were all operating with imperfect information, and we were doing our best”… and are now asking for forgiveness.
Really …?? ‘Experts’ who advocated mandates helped to ruin the careers of medical professionals who questioned COVID policies; caused the firing of people from their jobs who didn’t want to take an experimental vaccine; destroyed businesses with lockdowns… and we’re still learning about how much damage was done to kids because of school closings and mask mandates.
Now they are asking forgiveness.
Many of us without their so-called expertise suspected at the time the “experts” were wrong – and said so. We were called “science deniers” — and worse.
What do we now know about those vaccines the experts proclaimed we must inject ourselves with? From Dr Joseph Lapado of the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine, and Dr Harvey Risch of the Yale School of Public Health in a Wall Street Journal editorial:
“The large clustering of certain adverse events immediately after vaccination is concerning, and the silence around these potential signals of harm reflects the politics surrounding COVID-19 vaccines. Stigmatizing such concerns is bad for scientific integrity and could harm patients…”
Or this from the December 2022 issue of the Virology Journal reporting on a study of the effects of COVID vaccines on immune responses:
“The study showed that immune function among vaccinated individuals 8 months after the administration of two doses of COVID-19 vaccine was lower than that among the unvaccinated individuals. According to European Medicines Agency recommendations, frequent COVID-19 booster shots could adversely affect the immune response and may not be feasible.”
The vaccines were not only ineffective, they have harmful side effects.
As for “mask mandates”… COVID-19 morbidity, mortality and mask usage data was compiled from 35 European countries. From Cureus.com:
“The findings indicate that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage.” But what’s worse, one study also revealed “universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences.”
The experts ‘doing their best’ apparently included those in the CDC who intentionally manipulated statistics to support mask mandates. When the CDC masking studies were subsequently replicated and expanded by “incorporating a larger sample and longer period” there was NO “significant relationship between mask mandates and case rates.” Turns out the CDC studies were too narrow and “prone to bias caused by selection and omitted variables”.
And, like the vaccines, the masks were not only useless — they were harmful. From the journal Medicine, February 18, 2022.
“A parallelization analysis based on county-level data showed that in Kansas, counties with mask mandates had significantly higher case fatality rates than counties without mask mandates, with a risk ratio of 1.85 (95% confidence interval [95% CI]… for COVID-19-related deaths… The cause of this trend is explained herein using the ‘Foegen effect’ theory; that is, deep re-inhalation of hypercondensed droplets or pure virions, caught in facemasks as droplets, can worsen prognosis and might be linked to long-term effects of COVID-19 infection…”
So… mandated vaccines don’t work as well (if at all) as we were told by the ‘experts’ – and appear to have side effects we weren’t warned about. Studies about the benefits of masks were manipulated by the ‘experts’ to support mask mandates. Mandated school closings have had adverse effects on children, the full impact of which is still being revealed. And now ‘experts’ are admitting public lockdowns were a mistake.
Let’s not forget the ‘experts’ who told us the origin of COVID was from a market in China — not the Chinese virology research lab partially funded by American taxpayers. That was wrong too.
Did the ‘experts’ get anything right about COVID? The answer appears to be a resounding ‘NO’. Not only were they wrong, the government censored anyone who questioned them.
Just last week we learned from newly released emails between Biden administration officials and Twitter, the extent of censorship of anyone who questioned the official version of the “science” which allegedly supported the mandates.
What has yet to be fully understood is the long term societal impact of the mandates, which further divided our citizens. We all remember that people who complied with mandates most stridently were the same ones who ostracized and shunned those who didn’t.
That behavior appears to be a variant of what was observed in the Stanford University ‘prison experiment’, where participating students were divided into guards and inmates. Some ‘guards’ when given power became overzealous — in part because of the ‘authoritarian’ way the experiment was conducted.
During the pandemic, experts and government officials (amplified by the media) proclaimed it a civic duty to comply with mandates – that it was the morally right thing to do. Some people assumed that mantle of moral superiority as bestowing them with power over others. The epitome of that sort of assumption were those who said I deserved to die for declining to take the vaccine.
I believe the mandates were authoritarian abuse by unaccountable bureaucrats and politicians seeking to expand their own power — and that a disturbingly large segment of our population willingly complied with that abuse. That’s a recipe for a dysfunctional society akin to the fictionalized Brave New World envisioned by Aldous Huxley…
Gary Beatty lives between Florida and Pagosa Springs. He retired after 30 years as a prosecutor for the State of Florida, has a doctorate in law, is Board Certified in Criminal Trial law by the Florida Supreme Court, and is now a law professor.