Lockdowns and masking heavily criticized in new COVID report

A new report has sharply criticized the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, writing that lockdowns, faculty closures and vaccine mandates have been “catastrophic errors” ensuing in many Americans dropping religion in public well being establishments. 

The report, printed this week by the non-profit Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP), paints a damning indictment of the federal government’s function in the disaster and affords ten classes that should be discovered, to keep away from the identical errors from being repeated.

Some of the steerage contains halting all binding agreements or pledges to the World Health Organization (WHO), time period limits for all senior well being company positions in addition to limiting the powers of well being companies to verify they’re strictly advisory and would not have the facility to set legal guidelines or mandates.

Then-President Donald J. Trump listens to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, talking with members of the coronavirus process drive throughout a briefing in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room on the White House on April 17, 2020, in Washington, D.C. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post by way of Getty Images)

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The paper, titled “COVID Lessons Learned A Retrospective After Four Years,” states that granting unprecedented powers to public well being companies, lots of which imposed strict limits on primary civil liberties, had little optimistic profit and as a substitute helped stoke concern among the many public. 

“Conventional wisdom pre-COVID was that communities respond best to pandemics when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted,” the authors wrote. “During COVID, the public health establishment followed the opposite principle: they intentionally stoked and amplified fear, which overlaid enormous economic, social, educational and health harms on top of the harms of the virus itself.”

The report was written by Scott Atlas, M.D., a senior fellow in well being coverage on the Hoover Institution and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Steve Hanke, Ph.D., a professor of utilized economics on the Johns Hopkins University, Philip Kerpen, the president of the Committee to Unleash and Casey B. Mulligan, Ph.D., a professor in economics on the University of Chicago. It attracts on numerous reviews and analysis papers that studied the pandemic. 

People in vehicles attend Easter Sunday companies on the Daytona Beach Drive-in Christian Church as a technique to follow social distancing in the course of the coronavirus pandemic. (Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket by way of Getty Images)

“SARS-CoV2 was a dangerous virus, but a calm, proportionate response would have applied the lessons from past influenza pandemics and used existing pandemic response plans. Instead, from the moment the virus was detected in America, the public health community and politicians spread an outsized message of fear and doom,” the paper reads.

The group wrote that lockdowns didn’t work to considerably cut back deaths or cease viral circulation, and though they have been timed to say credit score for declining waves of the virus, they “rarely had any discernable casual impact.” 

In actuality, one of many outcomes was that folks’s well being was negatively impacted as medical procedures have been canceled, stoking concern, they wrote.

For occasion, from April 2020 via the tip of 2021, there have been 171,000 non-COVID extra deaths, whereas there have been none in Sweden, a rustic that didn’t lock down regardless of being heavily pressured to take action.

People collect in assist of constant the college masks mandate exterior the Loudon County Government Center previous to a Board of Supervisors assembly on Tuesday, January 18, 2022, in Leesburg, VA. The report states that masking had little or no worth to battle the unfold of the illness. (Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post by way of Getty Images)

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“A much wiser strategy than issuing lockdown orders would have been to tell the American people the truth, stick to the facts, educate citizens about the balance of risks, and let individuals make their own decisions about whether to keep their businesses open, whether to socially isolate, attend church, send their children to school, and so on,” the authors wrote.

School shutdowns brought on dramatic and irrefutable injury to youngsters, they wrote, with reviews of poor studying, faculty dropouts, social isolation, psychological sickness, drug abuse, suicidal ideation and 300,000 circumstances of kid abuse unreported in the spring of 2020.

Masks additionally had little or no worth and have been presumably dangerous, they wrote, “amplifying fears by creating the irrational belief that an unmasked face presented a threat, causing conflict and division among citizens, and giving high-risk people the mistaken impression that masks were protective, potentially resulting in some people risking exposure who otherwise may not have.”

They blasted the CDC for persevering with to advise masks carrying “contrary to evidence . . . [and] undermining its credibility.”

On an financial stage, the lockdowns put over 49 million Americans out of labor, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) survey knowledge. Unemployment advantages permitted by Congress extended unemployment and related financial underperformance, too.

The report additionally criticized the media, Big Tech, the tutorial science and public well being neighborhood for stifling debate.

U.S. President Joe Biden receives his up to date COVID-19 booster in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus on October 25, 2022. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

“Anthony Fauci, the head of the largest federal grantmaking entity, created an environment in which it was very difficult for most medical experts to break with the dominant narratives on lockdowns, masks, or overwhelmed hospitals,” the report states. 

“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) became the principal advocate of lockdown policies, but failed to run high-quality trials of repurposed drugs and non-pharmaceutical interventions.”

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Elsewhere, the report praised the Project Warp Speed for getting efficient monoclonal antibody therapies and vaccines in report time, nevertheless it did not assess their security. The authors wrote that the mandates and related strain marketing campaign have been flawed and undermined knowledgeable consent.

The authors advocate that Congress and the states outline by legislation “public health emergency” with strict limitations on powers conferred to the executives and deadlines that require laws to be prolonged. 

“Crises are when checks and balances and well-functioning institutions are most needed – not when they should be discarded and decision-making outsourced to alleged experts like Francis Collins, who casually confessed to a completely incorrect decision calculus years later,” they wrote.