Jeffrey Tucker at the American Institute for Economic Research supplemented data engineer Ivor Cummins’ list of academic studies into the question of lockdowns’ effect on controlling SARS-CoV-2. The result is a list of (so far) 35 studies.
Tucker writes, before listing each with its key finding, about this deadly and costly “science experiment in real time, with most of the human population used as lab rats”:
The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Based on the following studies, the answer is no and for a variety of reasons: bad data, no correlations, no causal demonstration, anomalous exceptions, and so on. There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control.
Perhaps this is a shocking revelation, given that universal social and economic controls are becoming the new orthodoxy. In a saner world, the burden of proof really should belong to the lockdowners, since it is they who overthrew 100 years of public-health wisdom and replaced it with an untested, top-down imposition on freedom and human rights. They never accepted that burden. They took it as axiomatic that a virus could be intimidated and frightened by credentials, edicts, speeches, and masked gendarmes.
The pro-lockdown evidence is shockingly thin, and based largely on comparing real-world outcomes against dire computer-generated forecasts derived from empirically untested models, and then merely positing that stringencies and “nonpharmaceutical interventions” account for the difference between the fictionalized vs. the real outcome. The anti-lockdown studies, on the other hand, are evidence-based, robust, and thorough, grappling with the data we have (with all its flaws) and looking at the results in light of controls on the population.
So there’s no evidence on the supposed benefits. That leaves only the costs, which are evident, devastating, and deadly not only now but for years to come.
And still Gov. Roy Cooper keeps his business and personal restrictions in place, despite mounting evidence against them and nothing more than his gormless “because I said so” in their favor. Which, sadly, suffices for most of our political media.
