The Great Reset, page 13
The study concluded: “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.”20
Remember, this paper, which foresaw all of the many woes of mandatory social distancing, lockdowns, and mask mandates, was published in 2006.
Fast-forward to 2020. The COVID lockdowns dragged on for weeks, then months, and then what threatened to be years (with no end in sight), but their full impact could take years to see.
Business Live reported that South African experts called for an end to the lockdown, which they labeled “a humanitarian disaster to dwarf Covid-19.” Mitigation, they said, should “focus on isolating the elderly and allowing children to go back to school, while ensuring the economy restarts so that lives can be saved,” the South African analysts explained.
“The lockdown will lead to 29 times more lives lost than the harm it seeks to prevent from Covid-19 in SA [South Africa], according to a conservative estimate contained in a new model developed by local actuaries.
“The model, which will be made public today for debate, was developed by a consortium calling itself Panda (Pandemic ~ Data Analysis), which includes four actuaries, an economist and a doctor, while the work was checked by lawyers and mathematicians.”
The South African experts pointed out that “the effects of poverty in terms of death and sickness are well known—so well that they are even modeled by insurance companies when they set their premiums… hunger causes long-term illnesses, retards development and condemns children to lives of misery and dependence.”21
We’re the Guinea Pigs
“In case it’s confusing, it is not Sweden that is an ‘experiment.’ It is the rest of the western world that has abandoned long-established, evidence-based scientific policies & has been experimenting w/catastrophic lockdowns/restrictions at the cost of human lives & mass suffering.” —Kulvinder Kaur, president & cofounder of Concerned Ontario Doctors, lauding Sweden for bucking the lockdown trends of the rest of the world22
The South African group deployed a model comparing “years of lives lost” from COVID-19 to “years of lives lost” from the lockdown. Their data revealed that “the impact of the virus on the vast majority of the population, particularly the economically active and schoolchildren, has been massively overstated.”
They urged, “We should not incarcerate the masses in their homes, limiting their hard-earned freedoms and decimating the economic system that furnishes their livelihoods. We should be doing everything we possibly can to allow businesses to operate.”23
A 2020 UK government study estimated the ratio of higher deaths from lockdown impacts versus COVID-19 deaths would be four to one. “Experts from the Department of Health, the Office of National Statistics (ONS), the government’s Actuary Department, and the Home Office forecast the collateral damage from delays to healthcare and the effects of recession arising from the pandemic response,” noted Ricardo Bordin at Medium.
Hospital Déjà Vu
Justin Hart collected reports of overwhelmed hospitals—from the 2018 flu season.
“We had to treat patients in places where we normally wouldn’t, like in recovery rooms,” states Dr. Bernard Camins, associate professor of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “The emergency room was very crowded… with sick patients who needed to be admitted.’ ”
And in California, “several hospitals have set up large ‘surge tents’ outside their emergency departments to accommodate and treat… patients. Even then, the LA Times reported this week, emergency departments had standing-room only, and some patients had to be treated in hallways.”
And in news from Fenton, Missouri, “SSM Health St. Clare Hospital has opened its emergency overflow wing, as well as all outpatient centers and surgical holding centers, to make more beds available to patients who need them. Nurses are being ‘pulled from all floors to care for them.’… ‘It’s making their pre-existing conditions worse.’… ‘More and more patients are needing mechanical ventilation due to respiratory failure.’ ”
In another report, “Dr. Anthony Marinelli says they’ve seen a major spike in… cases. It’s so overwhelmed the community hospital that they’ve gone on bypass at times—that means they tell ambulances to bypass this ER and find another.”
Hart commented: “I mean nothing like this has ever happened to our hospitals before?! Except these are all quotes from the 2018 flu season. Healthcare workers are amazing. I know they can do their jobs without the rest of us having to forfeit our lives. No more lockdowns. Get the kids back to school. We got this.”24
The report noted that many Brits were delaying seeking diagnoses and pausing surgeries, and it pointed out that postponing treatment was a “ticking time bomb” that would have unintended consequences.25
Investigative journalist Justin Hart of the website Rational Ground summed upnumerous studies available in 2021 documenting the negative consequences of COVID lockdowns. Here is the summary in his words:
1.4 million additional tuberculosis deaths due to lockdown disruptions
500,000 additional deaths related to HIV
Malaria deaths could double to 770,000 total per year
65 percent decrease in all cancer screenings
Breast cancer screenings dropped 89 percent
Colorectal screenings dropped 85 percent…
Increase in cardiac arrests but decrease in EMS calls for them
38% decrease in heart disease–related treatments26
Unintended Consequences
Chief Swedish epidemiologist Anders Tegnell noted of the lockdowns, “They may have had an effect in the short term, but when you look at it throughout the pandemic, you become more and more doubtful.” For his opposition to lockdowns, Tegnell has “received both death threats and flowers as a token of appreciation.”27
Other data painted the same grim picture of the lockdowns. The UK government’s statistical agency reported that in Britain “for every three COVID-19 deaths, lockdowns may have caused another two.”
“The national lockdown may have indirectly caused 16,000 excess deaths in two months, according to government analysts,” Sky News reported. “The estimates, made by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and analysts from several government departments, suggest there were 38,500 excess deaths in England connected to COVID-19 between March and 1 May. However, the report concludes 41% of those deaths were the result of missed medical care rather than the virus itself.”28
“The disruption in healthcare services caused by Covid-19 may have led to an estimated 239,000 maternal and child deaths in South Asia, according to a new UN report,” a BBC article stated.29
The lockdowns also caused a massive redistribution of wealth to the elite classes, which was too much for the even World Health Organization to let go unnoticed by the end of 2020.
David Nabarro, the World Health Organization’s special envoy for COVID-19, called the lockdowns “a terrible, ghastly, global catastrophe” in an interview with the UK magagzine The Spectator.
“Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents, in poor families, are not able to afford it,” Nabarro said.30
The lockdowns imposed in the early days of COVID were so devoid of sanity that they seem hard to believe. In April 2020 National Public Radio reported on just how dystopian they were in an article titled “In Spain, Pandemic Restrictions Mean Children Aren’t Allowed Outside Their Homes.” NPR explained that “millions of children in Spain live in apartments without outdoor space; others live in cramped spaces with large families. All these children haven’t been outdoors since mid-March.”
“Various regional governments in Spain have introduced local laws that would allow children to go outside—as long as they’re accompanied by an adult, wear a face mask (if they’re over 3 years old) and leave their homes during permitted times. But these measures must first be approved by the central government in Madrid.”31
UNICEF (the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) warned that lockdowns could kill more children than COVID-19—based on a model predicting “1.2 million child deaths.” As the subhead of the The Telegraph’s report on the UN Agency’s advice said, “ ‘Indiscriminate Lockdowns’ Are an Ineffective Way to Control Covid and Could Contribute to a 45 Per Cent Rise in Child Mortality.”32
Mask mandates could also pose a health threat to children. A 2020 study published in the journal Aesthetic Plastic Surgery found that the mask’s “elastics cause constant compression on the skin and, consequently, on the cartilage of the auricle, leading to erythematous and painful lesions of the retroauricular skin when the masks are used for many hours a day. Pre-adolescent children have undeveloped auricular cartilage with less resistance to deformation; prolonged pressure from the elastic loops of the mask at the hollow or, even worse, at the anthelix level can influence the correct growth and angulation of the outer ear.”33
David Wallace-Wells explained in the New Yorker that threat of COVID to kids was minuscule. “Statistically speaking, if a kid who comes down with a coronavirus infection is facing a threat to her life equivalent to the flu—perhaps significantly less—a 90-year-old who does so is treading in the neighborhood of anthrax, the bubonic plague, and certain lighter outbreaks of Ebola,” Wallace-Wells wrote in an 2021 article titled “The Kids Are Alright.”
“And the risk of children is dramatically smaller still than that CDC baseline; according to one, much-cited paper, the infection fatality rate for those aged 5 to 9 is less than 0.001 percent, about one-tenth the risk of flu for that age group,” Wallace-Wells wrote. “It may sound strange, given a year of panic over school closures and reopenings, a year of masking toddlers and closing playgrounds and huddling in pandemic pods, that among children the mortality risk from COVID-19 is actually lower than from the flu.”34
In contrast to their low risk from COVID-19, kids were at risk from horrible government policies. A 2021 study titled “Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Early Child Cognitive Development” found lockdowns did major damage to children. “We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic,” the study by Sean C. L. Deoni, Jennifer Beauchemin, Alexandra Volpe, Viren D’Sa, and the RESONANCE Consortium found. “Moreover, we find that males and children in lower socioeconomic families have been most affected,” the authors added.35
By February 2022, a full two years into the pandemic, even mainstream news outlets were forced to admit that masks were useless against a respiratory virus.
In an article titled “Mask Mandates Didn’t Make Much of a Difference Anyway,” Bloomberg opinion columnist Faye Flam wrote that “masks have been the most visible part of America’s pandemic response, but one of the least consequential.”
“There’s no avoiding it: The benefits of universal masking have been difficult to quantify,” Flam, who also hosts the podcast Follow the Science, wrote. “States with mask mandates haven’t fared significantly better than the 35 states that didn’t impose them during the omicron wave.”36
“Children to Die Because of What We Did to the Economy”
HBO’s Bill Maher opposed lockdowns vociferously: “It’s almost about what in the long run is going to cause more death…. The head of the U.N. said a couple of weeks ago he expects hundreds of thousands of children to die because of what we did to the economy. I know they’re not all Americans so they don’t count as much to Americans, but I think that matters somewhat.”37
Let’s note once again that it was not COVID-19 that caused this humanitarian disaster; it was the ill-advised lockdowns prescribed to combat the virus and the relentless fear porn peddled by government officials and the media.
As the Colorado Sun reported, “The number of people in Denver who died of cardiac arrests at home in the two weeks following the statewide stay-at-home order was greater than the total number of people who died of COVID-19 in the city during that time.”38
In the United Kingdom, “The number of deaths due to the disruption of cancer services is likely to outweigh the number of deaths from the coronavirus itself over the next five years,” reported The Times of London.39
Free Funerals
COVID-19 lockdowns kill, but don’t worry—the government will pay the funeral expenses.
“I thought this was a myth, but no: the government will pay up to $9,000 for a funeral for someone who dies of #Covid. Which is $9,000 more than it will pay for the funeral of anyone else,” former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson wrote. “That’s not an incentive to report a death as Covid-related AT ALL.”40 The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) states that in order to get the $9000, applicants need to provide “an official death certificate that attributes the death directly or indirectly to COVID-19 and shows that the death occurred in the United States.”41
The Atlantic surprised many when it reported on a new study in 2021 revealing that “almost half of those hospitalized with COVID-19 have mild or asymptomatic cases.” David Zweig reported that “the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.”
The title of the article at RealClearPolitics was “Are Pandemic Hospitalization Numbers Misleading Us?” The study was conducted by “researchers from Harvard Medical School, Tufts Medical Center, and the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System.”42
Suicides and Overdoses
National Public Radio reported the ill effects of lockdowns bluntly. “U.S. Sees Deadly Drug Overdose Spike During Pandemic,” read NPR’s headline.
“During the pandemic, basically everything is pointed in the wrong direction,” said a federal health official quoted by NPR. The official added that the intersection of COVID-19 lockdowns and America’s addiction crisis was a nightmare.
As New York substance-abuse counselor Jennifer Austin explained, “The longer people had to isolate it was relapse, relapse, overdose, relapse, overdose.” She added, “I’ve had people who I’ve never worked with before reach out to me and say, ‘Jen, what do I do?’ ”
The addiction counselor explained, “We tell people not to isolate, that’s bad, it’s a red flag” for people struggling with substance abuse. But then “the pandemic comes and we’re literally told that we’re supposed to be isolating, like, stay away from people.”43
Overdoses “More than Double” Coronavirus Deaths
“More people died from overdoses than from the coronavirus in San Francisco last year,” reported the New York Times in April 2021. Deaths from drug overdoses “skyrocketed, claiming 713 lives last year, more than double the 257 people here who died of the virus in 2020.”44
In Britain, antidepressant consumption raced to record-high levels during the COVID lockdowns. “Calls to mental health helplines and prescriptions for antidepressants have reached an all-time high, while access to potentially life-saving talking therapies has plunged during the coronavirus pandemic,” a 2021 investigation by The Guardian newspaper discovered. “More than 6 million people in England received antidepressants in the three months [leading up] to September, part of a wider trend and the highest figure on record.”
“People are going to their GPs with symptoms of mental illness and being sent away with a bag of medication, having been put on an 18-month waiting list,” noted mental health advocate Natasha Devon.
Dr. Esther Cohen-Tovée of the British Psychological Society declared, “I’m shocked and extremely concerned about the massive extent of the reduction in referrals for psychological help during a time of huge anxiety, stress, and distress for the whole population. This is even more concerning when there has been a huge increase in the prescription of antidepressants.”45
UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Neil Hamilton summed up the situation. Referring to the record use of antidepressants, Hamilton said, “Locking people in their homes, destroying their livelihoods and preventing them from seeing friends & family will do that.”46
Flashback to the Holocaust
Researchers whose work was published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in 2021 interviewed 127 Jews who were born before 1945, including nearly one hundred Holocaust survivors, and found that “lockdowns bring back unpleasant memories for Holocaust survivors,” according an article on the website Study Finds. “Researchers from Bar-Ilan University say pandemic-related health policy guidelines remind them of conditions that existed during the Holocaust. This includes long periods of isolation and separation from family members.”
The article goes on to say, “Rates of loneliness, depression, and suicidal thoughts have increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the CDC, four in 10 U.S. adults reported struggling with mental health and substance abuse issues.”47
Lefty Celebrities Take Notice
“The next time we have a worldwide pandemic, we have to come up with a better solution than ‘everyone becomes Howie Mandel,’ ” Bill Maher said, referring to a fellow comedian. “[Howie is] the world’s most famous germaphobe who was social distancing before it was cool,” Maher explained.
“Howie would be the first to tell you he has a disease, OCD, that fucks up your life. He can’t touch a doorknob or wear shoes with laces because they might touch the ground. When he excuses himself to go to the bathroom, it’s to clean it,” Maher said.48
