New Study Belies Early Claims of ‘Silent Spreaders’ of COVID-19

The Lockdown Madness

On March 16, 2020, four days after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID‑19 to be global pandemic, Neil M. Ferguson and colleagues at Imperial College London, in collaboration with the WHO, published a modeling paper advocating strict “mitigation policies” ostensibly to limit the spread of SARS‑CoV‑2, the novel coronavirus that causes the disease.

That paper was highly influential and was cited by governments around the world, including the United Kingdom and the United States, as justification for implementation of authoritarian “lockdown” measures including business closures, school closures, stay-at-home orders, and mask mandates.

These lockdown measures were sold to the public based on the lie that they would be strictly temporary, just “two weeks to flatten the curve”—or, in White House parlance, “fifteen days to slow the spread”.

“Flattening the curve” meant to slow the spread enough to give hospitals time to ramp up capacity and obtain supplies so that they wouldn’t become overwhelmed with COVID‑19 patients. This concept was graphically explained to the public by the lockdown-loving New York Times with the following graph:

But it was all a lie. The lockdown measures were never intended to remain in place for only two weeks. This is obvious from the fact that the Imperial College modelers advocated maintaining lockdowns until a vaccine could be developed and essentially forced upon the population.

Indeed, coerced mass vaccination is precisely what occurred once the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency use authorization (EUA) for the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines.

The government systematically violated individuals’ right to informed consent by (a) deceiving people into willingly accept injection with these experimental pharmaceutical products and, failing success in that endeavor, (b) coercing people into getting vaccinated against their will.

The government lied to the public about practically everything, but, in particular, the vaccines were sold to the public on the basis of the lie that two doses would confer durable sterilizing immunity, thereby enabling “herd immunity” to be reached by stopping infection and transmission.

For those who weren’t deceived by false claims about the safety and effectiveness of these products, the government delivered the clear message that their freedom would remain curtailed and their ability to make a living threatened unless and until they got vaccinated—even if they had already acquired the superior immunity conferred by infection.

Policymakers implementing lockdown measures pretended to care about human lives, but we know they were really more concerned with exercising power and control over others because, just as their political calculations ignored natural immunity, they never factored the costs and predictable harms of the measures they were advocating into their thinking.

Indeed, the Imperial College modelers admitted that they “do not consider the ethical or economic implications” of the lockdown measures they advocated.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a top advisor to the president on the White House’s coronavirus task force, similarly admitted that he wasn’t considering the costs of the lockdowns. “I don’t give advice about economic things,” he said. “I don’t give advice about anything other than public health.”

Tellingly, the rationale for the lockdowns quickly shifted from being short-term measures to “flatten the curve” by spreading out the number of newinfections over time, with the areaunder bothhypothetical curves being the same, to being long-term measures supposedly capable of not merely delaying but stopping community transmission.

In other words, under the original rationale for the measures being temporary, the only deaths hypothetically prevented were those that would otherwise occur due to people being unable to get hospital care, whereas the new rationale for the measures persisting indefinitely was that this would reduce the total number of “cases”—the official counting of which was characterized by institutionalized scientific fraud.

There was no scientific basis for this shift in rationale whereby the lockdowns were maintained on the grounds that they would reduce total case numbers. Instead, it was a faith-based policy. Policymakers deliberately shut down the economy based on the hope that this would stop community transmission and the hope that the population could ultimately be saved by mass vaccination.

That the policies were based on “hope that the vaccines would work” the way that government officials falsely claimed they would has been acknowledged in Congressional testimony by Dr. Deborah Birx, the former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. (Birx later claimed that she had always known that the vaccines would not prevent transmission, which is enlightening given the fact that she was among the government officials claiming that they would stop infection and transmission.)

The fact that the policy was faith-based has also been admitted by then CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. Commenting on the vast disparity between what government officials told the public and how the vaccines actually performed, she attributed it to officials like her having “wanted to be hopeful”. (Far from accepting responsibility for having deceived the public, however, she went on to essentially blame the public for taking the government’s claims at face value.)

The promised benefits of the lockdowns, of course, never manifested in the data. This includes, as recently acknowledged by Anthony Fauci, the evidence-less claim that mandatory use of masks in public places would prevent community spread.

The harms caused by these authoritarian policies, on the other hand, have incontrovertibly been devastating, with the burden of harms being disproportionately borne by children, who happen to be at very low risk from COVID‑19.