David Crowe

by David Crowe FILE PHOTO: A sign assures people that the bar is open during the coronavirus outbreak, outside a pub in Stockholm, Sweden March 26, 2020. REUTERS/Colm Fulton/File Photo Sweden has been a political football in the argument over whether lockdowns work. Lockdown enthusiasts point to the higher death rate than in other Scandinavian countries while skeptics point out that the rate is lower than Italy, Spain and the UK. But the more important question is why the death rate is in the middle. The answer is because Sweden actually did lock down, in the most important way. Before I defend this counter-intuitive position it is important to note that the term “COVID-19 lockdown” is not well defined. In several countries people were confined to their homes, but in other places, such as in my province of Alberta, Canada, people could go out, although they would find that all restaurants, bars, playgrounds, concert halls, swimming pools and shopping malls were closed. In reality every country’s lockdown (and in places like the United States and Canada, every state, province and even city) was different. In Alberta, Canada, when hair salons were opened, massages were still banned, but in Ontario, hair salons were banned but massages were allowed. Sweden only chose two dishes from the lockdown menu: banning large group events...

by David Crowe Masks are being widely recommended as protection against the COVID-19 virus, both to protect the wearer from infection and to protect others from those who do not know that they are infected. The trouble is that most of the scientific evidence and recommendations are against the use of masks by the general public, and some harms from wearing masks have been documented. Despite this, they are increasingly mandated. In some places you can’t walk around outside without a mask, and in others you can’t go inside a public space without a mask. Workers are often mandated to wear them – and now airline passengers, no matter the length of their flight. Evidence for the use of masks The strongest evidence for the use of masks is a Cochrane Collaboration review entitled “

David Crowe, a Canadian independent researcher of infectious disease models and the host of a weekly radio show in Canada called The Infectious Myth, has analysed 33 of the PCR tests approved by the Food and Drug Administration and concluded they all have serious limitations, producing both false positives and false negatives.