No, Lockdowns Didn’t Protect Older People from COVID-19!

The headline of a recent opinion piece in the New York Times declares that “Lockdowns Protected Older People. But at What Cost to the Health of Young Adults?” The question is certainly warranted, but the premise that lockdowns were effective at preventing COVID-19 deaths among the elderly is ludicrously untrue.

Tellingly, the author of the piece, Peter Coy, presents no evidence to support his contention that lockdowns protected older people. He appears to accept this as a matter of faith. The lockdowns were “meant to protect older people”, he writes. But that is not true, either.

The fact that the authoritarian “lockdown” policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were not designed to protect the elderly was famously observed in the Great Barrington Declaration, which proposed the alternative strategy of “focused protection” of the elderly.

“Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19”, the authors remarked, in response to the reality that indiscriminate lockdown measures were patently not focused on doing so.

It was the development of population immunity among those at lower risk, the authors correctly reasoned, that would best serve to protect those at high risk. By placing younger, healthy people under lockdown measures, the authors of the Declaration understood, policymakers would be inhibiting the development of population immunity and thereby prolonging the pandemic and increasing the risk to the elderly over the long-term.

The lockdowns were always primarily about power and control. The aim was to spread fear among the public and condition people to accept living under authoritarian governance. The endgame of the lockdown regime from the start was always to keep the population living in fear and under government repression until a vaccine could be developed and forced upon everyone.

This explains why, for example, “public health” officials for so long either completely ignored natural immunity, as though it did not exist, or lied that the immunity acquired from infection with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, is weak and short-lived.

The fact that their ultimate aim was to utilize coercion and deception to achieve a high vaccination rate is rendered transparent by their lie that natural immunity is inferior to the immunity induced by COVID-19 vaccines.

The true purpose of the lockdowns as a tool for population control as the end in itself is evident in how the government has attempted to coerce even people who are already naturally immune into getting vaccinated. As observed in this written statement to the United Nations Human Rights Council that I authored, COVID-19 vaccine mandates logically cannot be about public health.

Never forget how the vaccines were sold to the public based on the lies that natural immunity is weak and short-lived and that COVID-19 vaccines would confer superior protection. Remember that they were sold to the public based on the lie that they would induce durable sterilizing immunity, preventing infection and transmission and thereby conferring herd immunity that would bring the pandemic to an end. Never forget how advocates of mass vaccination argued for lockdown measures to be used as a tool to coerce the population into getting vaccinated as the ostensible means to regain their freedom from the government oppression.

Lockdown advocates may have truly believed that the policies they favored would reduce the death toll among the elderly, but that does not mean that this was the aim of the policies, and there was never any sound rationale for such a belief.

Regardless of intent, the fact that the lockdowns were utterly failing to protect those at highest risk was always right there in the data.

As I wrote on June 2, 2020 (prior to the publication of the Great Barrington Declaration, which was on October 4):

Furthermore, lockdown measures have utterly failed to prevent deaths among those at highest risk: elderly people living in nursing care homes.

According to a New York Times report on May 11, one-third of all COVID-19 deaths in the US have occurred in care home residents or workers.

According to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) current as of May 28, at least 43 percent of all deaths in the US have occurred in long-term care facilities. There are thirty-nine states that have reported such deaths. Among those states, there are twenty-six in which at least half of all deaths have occurred in care homes. The Foundation also features a map showing what mitigation policies were implemented in each state. Among the twenty-six states, only two—Nebraska and Utah—never issued executive “stay-at-home” orders. The other twenty-four states where 50 percent or more of all deaths occurred in elderly care homes were lockdown states.

A huge proportion of deaths in the US have occurred in New York City, where the count of confirmed and probable deaths is 21,602 as of June 1. That’s over 20 percent of all reported deaths in the US. It didn’t help that on March 25, the New York state government issued an order mandating nursing homes to take in patients discharged from hospitals who were confirmed or presumed to have COVID-19. The order wasn’t reversed until May 10, more than a month later and after the epidemic and death rate had already peaked in April.

. . . Sensible mitigation policies would have focused on protecting those at highest risk while allowing the rest of the population to continue making a living and go on with their lives in a socially responsible manner, which would have the consequence of also enabling the development of the population immunity required to reduce transmission, thereby ultimately reducing risk to frail elderly people so that they, too, could finally come out of isolation and enjoy the remaining time they have left with us.

The extreme and authoritarian lockdown measures implemented instead have essentially achieved the opposite.

As John Ioannidis observed in a study published on the preprint server medRxiv on June 8, 2020, “The high [infection fatality rate] values in New York are also not surprising, given the vast death toll witnessed. A very unfortunate decision of the governors in New York and New Jersey was to have COVID-19 patients sent to nursing homes.”

That is a stark illustration of how these policies were patently not aimed at protecting the elderly, and how they certainly failed to do so. As I reported again on June 26, 2020:

According to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation updated on June 18, 6,387 COVID-19-related deaths in New York have been among residents or staff of long-term care facilities, amounting to 21 percent of all deaths in the state. New York alone also represents more than a quarter of all deaths in the US.

Tragically, the proportion of deaths in nursing homes in many other states that are reporting such data is even higher, including twenty-seven states in which the proportion is 50 percent or more. This includes New Jersey. Indicating just how ineffective extreme lockdown measures have been at protecting those at highest risk, in 89 percent of these states, governors had issued executive “stay-at-home” orders. Lockdown states in which at least half of deaths occurred in nursing home deaths also comprise 51 percent of the forty-seven states reporting data.

 And on October 20, 2020, I reminded:

In fact, according to the Times’ own compiled data, about 40 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the US are linked to nursing homes.

In some states, such as New York and New Jersey, policymakers were so narrowly focused on opening up beds so that hospitals wouldn’t be overwhelmed that they ordered nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients discharged from hospitals.

According to data published by the Kaiser Family Foundation in mid-June, nursing home residents or staff represented 21 percent of COVID-19-related deaths. New York in turn represented more than a quarter of all deaths in the US. In New Jersey, as well as 23 other lockdown states, more than half of COVID-19-related deaths were among nursing home residents.

So, when you read mainstream media commentators declaring that lockdowns were effective at saving lives, such as the claim that “Lockdowns Protected Older People”, understand that these are statements of faith belied by the data.

On the other hand, the fact that lockdowns had disastrous consequences is indisputable—and the harms cannot be said to have been “unintended” since they were both foreseeable and foreseen by those of us opposing these criminal policies. The truth is that policymakers simply did not care that their policies would predictably result in massive societal harm. They inflicted this harm knowingly.

The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration began by expressing their “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts” of the lockdown measures, which were “producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health” and would lead to “greater excess mortality in years to come”.

“Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available”, they observed in response to the openly stated endgame of the lockdown measures, “will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”

Indeed, Peter Coy observes in his New York Times article that “the rate of death from all causes for younger adults has risen by a bigger percentage than has the rate of death from all causes for old people.”

He describes “the increase in deaths among younger adults” as “shocking”, observing that “the number of people ages 25 through 44 who died from all causes in the United States in 2021 was 52 percent higher than the number who died in an average year from 2015 to 2019.” He rightly describes that as “an enormous increase”.

This excess mortality is not due to COVID-19 but is instead attributable to “collateral damage” from the lockdown measures, according to a study Coy cites that was published this month on the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The study estimates the number of non-Covid excess deaths among young Americans in 2020 and 2021 to be over 170,000.

Coy quotes the study authors’ conclusion: “All of this suggests that large and sustained changes in living habits designed to avoid a single virus had not only ‘economic’ opportunity costs, but also cost a shockingly large number of young lives.”

Coy responds, “I’m not sure I agree with the authors’ seeming implication that the United States went overboard in trying to shut down Covid, but whether one agrees or not, it’s important to have the facts.” Notably, in making that statement, Coy does not appear to be questioning the study authors’ conclusion that the increased rate of death among younger adults is primarily a consequence of the lockdowns; he rather appears to be suggesting that the lockdowns might have been worth it despite the disastrous economic and health consequences for the young and the underprivileged.

His persistent faith in lockdowns as having a positive net effect on the human condition is evidently grounded in his erroneous belief that they actually worked to save the lives of elderly people. Given that his belief is false, it is very difficult indeed to make the case that the lockdown measures were worth the cost, which could be considered in terms of quality years of life lost. After all, which is the greater tragedy? For an elderly person beyond the average age of life expectancy to die from COVID-19, or for a young person with their whole life in front of them to die as a result of governmental policy responses to the pandemic?

Unfortunately, despite the abysmal failure of lockdowns to save lives, and despite the extraordinarily harmful consequences, the authoritarian mentality remains strong.

The government and mainstream media remain the greatest purveyors of misinformation and disinformation, while censorship of truths that don’t align with government policies like lockdowns or the policy goal of mass vaccination continues unabated. (I was recently suspended from LinkedIn, for example, for telling the truth that the CDC’s claim that natural immunity is inferior is a bald-faced lie contradicted by its own data.)

This dangerous authoritarian mentality must be confronted. We must do everything within our power to ensure that such disastrous policies can never be implemented again, for the sake of our prosperity, our health, and our freedom.