Debunking the Myth That Lockdown Was Justified Because 'We Didn't Know'

This article was produced by the Brownstone Institute and is reproduced by kind permission.

The claim is now everywhere: we had to lock down because we just didn’t know about this virus. It was all very confusing and we had to play it safe. We had no other option because we just had no clarity about what we were dealing with. The precautionary principle dictated the unprecedented actions.

Actually, the precautionary principle goes both directions. It also dictates that we not enact policies that we know for sure would wreck lives and liberties. They did it anyway, without sufficient knowledge that the measures would achieve any positive good.

We approach the third year and people have forgotten that all the harms of lockdowns were strongly warned about by many voices in many venues. In addition, the virus was much better understood back then and openly discussed. We knew for certain that the panic and fear were being wildly overblown.

Below follows resources assembled by the ‘Robber Baron‘ and many others who write for the Brownstone Institute. These citations from newspapers, magazines, academic journals and interviews, with many respected voices, show that we certainly knew tremendous amounts in the early days. All the warnings and information were readily available to anyone paying attention.

We certainly live in an age of short attention span but many of these signs and warnings came weeks or months before the world locked down and they chronicled the damage as it was happening. Why all this came to be completely ignored remains the burning question.