Lockdowns were “a global policy failure of gigantic proportions”, driven by Government fear campaigns and “fantasy numbers” from dud models, a top international team of researchers has concluded. The Epoch Times has more.
The days of Covid lockdowns may be behind us for the time being, but a multinational academic team has conducted a broad analysis of government pandemic actions and found them to be “a global policy failure of gigantic proportions”, often driven by state and media-sponsored fear campaigns.
Their findings, published in a book titled ‘Did Lockdowns Work? The Verdict on Covid Restrictions‘, are based on a worldwide meta-analysis that screened nearly 20,000 studies to determine the benefits and harms from health diktats, including lockdowns, school closures and mask mandates. According to economist Steve Hanke, one of the co-authors, one of the things that drove countries into a state of panic and draconian policies was reliance on mortality models from sources like Imperial College London (ICL) that generated “fantasy numbers” showing that millions of deaths could be averted by instituting crippling society-wide lockdowns.
Prior to the Covid outbreak, “most countries did have a plan to deal with pandemics”, Hanke told the Epoch Times, “but after the Imperial College of London’s ‘numbers’ were published, those plans were, in a panic, thrown out the window.
“In each case, the same pattern was followed: flawed modelling, hair-raising predictions of disaster that missed the mark and no lessons learned,” he said. “The same mistakes were repeated over and over again and were never challenged.”
Hanke is an economics professor and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise. The other co-authors of the study are Jonas Herby, special adviser at the Centre for Political Studies in Copenhagen, and Lars Jonung, an economics professor at Lund University in Sweden.
While the meta-analysis surveyed thousands of studies, it found that only 22 of them contained useful data for the study. The report focused on mortality rates and lockdown policies during 2020.
“This study is the first all-encompassing evaluation of the research on the effectiveness of mandatory restrictions on mortality,” Jonung stated. “It demonstrates that lockdowns were a failed promise. They had negligible health effects but disastrous economic, social and political costs to society.”
According to Hanke, the ICL models predicted that lockdowns would prevent between 1.7 million and 2.2 million deaths in the United States. The meta-analysis, however, indicates that lockdowns prevented between 4,345 and 15,586 deaths in the United States. This fits a pattern of overstated predictions from the ICL, which health officials either didn’t know about or overlooked, he said.
“There is a long history of fantasy numbers generated by the epidemiological models used by the Imperial College of London,” Hanke said. “Its dreadful record started with the U.K. foot-and-mouth disease epidemic in 2001, during which the Imperial College models predicted that daily case incidences would peak at 420. But, at the time, the number of incidences had already peaked at just over 50 and was falling.”
In 2002, the ICL predicted that up to 150,000 people in the U.K. would die from mad cow disease; in 2019, the BBC reported that the number of U.K. deaths from mad cow disease was 177. In 2005, Neil Ferguson, who led the ICL [team], predicted up to 200 million deaths from the H5N1 bird flu, which had at that time killed 65 people in Asia; according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), between 2003 and 2023, 458 people died from H5N1 worldwide.
The ICL’s habit of ‘crying wolf’ did not prevent the BBC, once COVID-19 struck, from relying on its data to broadcast dire weekly warnings to its 468 million listeners, in 42 languages worldwide.
“Maybe the Imperial College models are ideal fear-generating machines for politicians and governments that crave more power,” Hanke said. “H.L. Mencken put his finger on this phenomenon long ago when he wrote that ‘the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins.’”
While there were some U.S. states that never issued lockdown orders, including Wyoming, Utah, South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Arkansas, Sweden was the rare national exception that refrained from forcing people into lockdowns. American governors who refused to lock down their states were harshly criticised in the media, which predicted that this would cause mass deaths.
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This was never about a virus!
It was never about the science either.
They got the memo too early!
Lol, if you don’t laugh at this…
Update: I soon descended into sobs.
It’s their country – let them have their own circus.
I expect the uptake is far higher than 10% in the major cities and I don’t think people are going to be checking out in the countryside. its kenya’s guardian reading class having a moral panic
That was my guess too, it will be the urban elite who have taken the vax.
Why should they care about the rural poor not having access to their bars, shops and restaurants?
Rather similar to the Soviet Nomenclatura having exclusive use of such places.
“Kill The Poor” as Jello Biafra would put it.
Might be a problem for their houseboys, cleaners, nannys and other domestic servants.
Might be a problem for their houseboys, cleaners, nannys and other domestic servants.
That’ll be a bonus to the NPD grauniad-reading classes.
Coherent with the general global strategy. Impose the new order on the gentry and the plebs will eventually follow.
At this point the well to do, urbanites are the only ones they care about. For now.
They’ve set up a good system of capture with the vax for travel rules.
Orwell foresaw this quite well in 1984. The regime cared mostly about the upper.echelons. The lower classes were.left to themselves.
That’s what the Kenya thing is about.
Going to be some very empty bars.
Winter surge, in Kenya, in December ???
My thoughts exactly.
Nairobi average temperatures in November and December are 19 – 20 degrees Celsius.
In Africa It’s just a little more obviously a shakedown exercise than about health.
Shit for brains, typical of them!
No longer news and no longer surprising.
Me thinks is about international donors to public health than any attempt to handle their epidemic. He who writes the checks writes the rules. Given a) the young age of the population b) expose to other viruses c) limited benefit in stopping infections from vaccine (trending to nil over time) and d) the larger issues facing Kenya, this rule makes about as much sense as requiring everyone to have their wisdom teeth pulled before entering. I’m not conspiracy theorist but have seen and read of international donors demanding odd thing of nations in return for grants in the best of times.
So, any intrepid investigative journalist want to tackle this? Because the answers could be very illuminating.
Jabbing at risk populations made sense. Jabbing everyone didn’t make sense when we still had high hopes for the vaccine. I wonder if Kenya will be required to jab it’s 5 year olds too?
I sure the Kenyans have the infrastructure in place to police this. Thought not, none story.
Africa skipped/leapfrogged land lines so there are a lot of internet connected mobile phones.
Again, a biased intro taking the official narrative as truth.
Kenya catches up with Agenda 30. Let the backhanders begin.
Didn’t Nigeria introduce a similar policy months ago, with an even lower uptake? Any news how that has worked out for them?
Sturgeon’s 70-page dossier finds no evidence for vaccine passports
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sturgeon-s-70-page-dossier-finds-no-evidence-for-vaccine-passports
Send to your MP, MSP or MS: https://www.writetothem.com/
Headline should read, ‘African nation bows to NGO’ s financial incentives…again’.
NGO colonialism.
Has Gates been talking to them recently?
Roll on the Kenyan riots.
UNcle Bill’s altruism is well understood in Africa….
https://lichtnahrung2015.wordpress.com/2020/09/06/un-forced-tothat-admit-that-gates-funded-vaccine-is-causing-polio-outbreak-in-africa/
Our healthcare system is about to experience a tsunami! Potential side effects of jabs include chronic inflammation, because the vaccine continuously stimulates the immune system to produce antibodies. Other concerns include the possible integration of plasmid DNA into the body’s host genome, resulting in mutations, problems with DNA replication, triggering of autoimmune responses, and activation of cancer-causing genes. Alternative COVID cures EXIST. Ivermectin is one of them. While Ivermectin is very effective curing COVID symptoms, it has also been shown to eliminate certain cancers. Do not get the poison jab. Get your Ivermectin today while you still can! https://ivmpharmacy.com
That’s right, play the game, you wouldn’t want to end up like that Tanzanian president, would you?
Well done Kenya. I should like to see how this works out. Thankfully it’s a warm country and so no one will be left out in the cold so to speak.
That reminds a little bit of “cargo cults” behavior… Just jab enough arms and the cargo will come. After all that’s what all the great white people are doing.
We all know countries are being paid a lot of money to do as they are told.
How did Kenya get the vaccine? Where did they pull the dollars from?