The Final Word on Lockdowns

Blanket lockdowns were a disaster. The economy was wrecked, people lost their businesses, their jobs, and their livelihood. Societal ills, real problems that those in power ignore, were exacerbated. Kids, safest from the virus, were the most vulnerable to the lockdowns. Pediatric hospitals and schools around the West reported the damage being done to the youth and pleaded for the unfair policies to stop. While we suffered, Big Tech gorged on our isolation. Wealth surged upwards into the hands of pro-lockdown billionaires. All of this sacrifice at the hands of our overlords for no noticeable effect on the virus. Quarantining the healthy doesn’t work. Thank God for the ever rebellious South, who lifted their lockdowns early despite the furious experts and their models. They were right.

Stay at home orders meant more screen time and more deliveries, the perfect environment for Big Tech companies. While small businesses closed their doors and went into debt, Amazon’s stock soared. While small businesses were forced to fire their employees, Amazon hired hundreds of thousands. In 2020, the combined fortune of the ten wealthiest people grew by $540b and Forbes added 660 people to their billionaires list, 205 new billionaires from China and 98 from the US. No wonder Bezos’s Washington Post took a pro-lockdown stance.

Lockdowns will have a deep affect on our kids, who did not need protection from the virus. Being grounded as a 13 year old was devastating, now imagine being told that your school is closed and you’ll have to isolate yourself indefinitely at that age. Lockdowns disrupted important early childhood development, wrought havoc on mental health, and set back learning. This generation will likely be defined as pandemic-era kids. The isolation has led to an increase in screen time, less physical activity, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicide attempts. Parents around the country have watched their once cheery kids unravel. Mental health related ER visits went up 24% and 31% for kids ages 5-11 and 12-17, respectively in 2020. A Brookings Institute study found the math scores of 4.4 million students in grades 3-8 fell by 5-10 points in 2020. According to the CDC, during February and March 2021, suicide attempts were 50.6% higher among girls ages 12–17 than during the same period in 2019. Hospitals around the West are reporting an influx of child mental health emergency department visits. In an April 2021 a letter to the Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, the Canadian Pediatric Society spoke out for Ontario children saying “instead of viruses, our clinics and hospitals have been overrun with families seeking care for children and youth in distress - eating disorders, anxiety, maltreatment and more.”

Disruptions to early childhood education have dangerous ripple effects,  “including poorer performance on intelligence, cognitive skills, and standardized tests; higher incidences of teen pregnancy and illicit drug use; lower graduation rates; lower employment rates and lower annual median earnings; higher arrest rates; and higher incidences of hypertension, diabetes, and depression.”

Fatal drug overdoses broke 100,000 for the first time in a 12 month period ending in April 2021. 29% higher than the previous year and 100% higher than five years ago. US homicides increased 30% from 2019 to 2020. Domestic violence, alcohol abuse, and many other societal ills multiplied. In many ways we are sicker than before.

The response to Covid consumed the attention of the medical world. People, under state sanctioned quarantine and fear, left their medical problems untreated rather than go to the doctor. We’ll see a large increase in avoidable cancer deaths because of this. Even thousands of clinical trials were put on hold.

Compare countries that had no lockdowns to their analogous, neighboring countries that did, and you will find that lockdowns had no noticeable effect on the virus. These control groups are the errant thread that unravels the whole sweater. “Belarus, which imposed no legal lockdown at all throughout the entire pandemic, has released COVID mortality figures which are broadly in line with other nearby countries, which imposed draconian lockdowns,” reports Summit.news. Sweden, Florida, and South Dakota share a similar story. A study done on 24 European countries based on the severity of lockdowns found “no clear association between lockdown policies and mortality development.”

Lockdowns were imposed despite many voices in the medical field decrying them. In May 2020 a letter signed by over 500 doctors was sent to President Trump warning him of the damage lockdowns were causing, calling it a “mass casualty incident.” The author explains that “the millions of casualties of a continued shutdown will be hiding in plain sight, but they will be called alcoholism, homelessness, suicide, heart attack, stroke, or kidney failure. In youths it will be called financial instability, unemployment, despair, drug addiction, unplanned pregnancies, poverty, and abuse.” The Great Barrington Declaration signed by 800,000 citizens, 15,000 medical & public health scientists, and 44,500 medical practitioners states that “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health… with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.”

Finally, I present to you the COVID hypocrisy map, 91 incidences of officials breaking the COVID policies that they’ve imposed on you. The nimrods from New York are my favorite offenders: Bill De Blasio, so pro-lockdown that he implemented a snitch line for citizens to report their fellow citizen offenders, and Andrew Cuomo, who wrote a book on and received an Emmy because of his COVID response. If that doesn’t make you doubt the legitimacy of lockdowns, you’re just straight up retarded.