{"id":304279,"date":"2021-07-21T02:47:04","date_gmt":"2021-07-20T23:47:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/lockdown-hysteria-did-more-harm-than-covid-19\/"},"modified":"2021-07-21T02:47:04","modified_gmt":"2021-07-20T23:47:04","slug":"lockdown-hysteria-did-more-harm-than-covid-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/lockdown-hysteria-did-more-harm-than-covid-19\/","title":{"rendered":"#Lockdown hysteria did more harm than COVID-19"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Lockdown hysteria did more harm than COVID-19<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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The\u00a0United States suffered through two lethal waves of contagion in the past year and a half. The first was a viral pandemic that killed about 1 in 500 Americans \u2014 typically, a person over 75 suffering from other serious conditions. The second, and far more catastrophic, was a moral panic that swept the nation\u2019s institutions.<\/p>\n

Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom \u2014 and, worst of all, science<\/a>. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. We still have no convincing evidence that the lockdowns saved lives, but lots of evidence that they have already cost lives and will prove deadlier in the long run than the virus itself.<\/p>\n

A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness. In April 2020, John \u00adIoannidis, Jay Bhattacharya and other colleagues reported that the fatality rate among the \u00adinfected was considerably lower than the assumptions used to justify lockdowns.<\/p>\n

Merely by reporting data that didn\u2019t fit the official panic narrative, they became targets of unfair online attacks by other scientists and the press. Stanford University was so cowed by the \u00aduproar that it subjected the \u00adresearchers to a two-month fact-finding inquiry by an outside \u00adlegal firm. The inquiry found no evidence of wrongdoing, but the smear campaign sent a clear message to scientists: Don\u2019t question the lockdown narrative.<\/p>\n

Editors of research journals fell into line, too. Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins with 350 publications to his name, submitted a critique of lockdowns to more than 10 journals and finally gave up. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard, had a similar experience with his article, early in the pandemic, arguing that resources should be focused on protecting the elderly.<\/p>\n

\"Democrats
Democrats with their untested strategies caused more deaths among the elderly than COVID-19 ever could.
\n<\/figcaption>
AP Photo\/Yuki Iwamura, File<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kulldorff joined with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford to issue a plea for \u201cfocused protection,\u201d called the Great Barrington Declaration. They urged officials to divert more resources to shield the elderly while reopening business and schools for younger people. Though tens of thousands of other scientists and doctors went on to sign the declaration, the press caricatured it as a deadly \u201clet it rip\u201d strategy and an \u201cethical nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fortunately, a few leaders adopted the focused-protection strategy \u2014 most notably, in Florida. After locking down last spring, Gov. Ron DeSantis reopened businesses, schools and restaurants early and rejected mask mandates. If Florida had simply done no worse than the rest of the country during the pandemic, that would have been enough to discredit the lockdown strategy. But the outcome of this experiment was even more damning: Florida\u2019s age-adjusted COVID mortality rate is\u00a0lower<\/em>\u00a0than that of all but 10 other states.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was utterly immoral to conduct this society-wide intervention without the evidence to justify it,\u201d Bhattacharya says. But the lockdown proponents were undeterred by the numbers in Florida, or by similar results elsewhere, including a comparable natural experiment involving European countries with the least restrictive policies. Sweden, Finland and Norway rejected mask mandates and extended lockdowns, and they have each suffered significantly less excess mortality than most other European countries.<\/p>\n

Why did so many go so wrong for so long? The elite panic was due to two preexisting pathologies. The first is what I have called the Crisis Crisis, the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians. To keep audiences frightened around the clock, journalists seek out Cassandras with their own incentives for fearmongering: politicians, bureaucrats, activists, academics and assorted experts who gain publicity, prestige, funding and power during a crisis.<\/p>\n

The second pathology underlying the elite\u2019s COVID panic is the politicization of research \u2014 what I have termed the left\u2019s war on science, another long-standing problem that has gotten much worse. Just as the progressives a century ago yearned for a nation directed by \u201cexpert social<\/a> engineers,\u201d today\u2019s progressives want sweeping new powers for politicians and bureaucrats who \u201cbelieve in science,\u201d meaning that they use the left\u2019s version of science to justify their edicts.<\/p>\n

This experience should be a lesson in what not to do and whom not to trust. Don\u2019t count on mainstream journalists and their favorite doomsayers to put risks in perspective. Don\u2019t expect those who follow \u201cthe science\u201d to know what they\u2019re talking about. Science provides a descript<\/a>ion of the world, not a prescription for public policy, and specialists in one discipline don\u2019t have the knowledge or perspective to guide society.<\/p>\n

John Tierney is a contributing editor of City Journal, from which this column was adapted.<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Lockdown hysteria did more harm than COVID-19” The\u00a0United States suffered through two lethal waves of contagion in the past year and a half. The first was a viral pandemic that killed about 1 in 500 Americans \u2014 typically, a person over 75 suffering from other serious conditions. The second, and far more catastrophic, was a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":304280,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/07\/Lockdown.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[112278,1545,6642,5057,67243,71126,67907,5050,11719,70617],"class_list":["post-304279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-7-20-21","tag-coronavirus","tag-florida","tag-journalists","tag-lockdown","tag-politicians","tag-science","tag-scientists","tag-sweden","tag-the-left"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}