Pandemic-era lockdown policies may “represent the biggest policy mistake in modern times.” At least, that’s the conclusion reached by one of the authors of a major new study examining many government restrictions inflicted upon the public throughout 2020 and 2021.
An updated, peer-reviewed meta analysis of lockdowns examining 22 relevant studies was just published by the Institute of Economic Affairs. In it, authors Lars Jonung, Jonas Herby, and Steve H. Hanke examined the lockdown policies enacted in the US, England, and Europe and compared them to the light-touch approach enacted in Sweden where minor government restrictions were paired with voluntary action driven by extensive public information and awareness campaigns.
They find that in the US, extensive restrictions ranging from stay-at-home orders to business closures all combined to only save approximately 4,000 lives. Some particular policies, like gathering limits, actually increased COVID mortality. (As it turns out, much of the COVID-19 spread occurred at home). This is a far cry from the projections used early in the pandemic to justify lockdowns that estimated 2 million American lives would be saved.
That's an academically rigorous study and what it found was pathetic. All that destruction through Western society and instead of saving 2 million lives, as the adamant lockdown proponents at the Imperial College of London confidently forecast, the vaunted lockdowns saved ... 4,000.
It's not nothing, but it's not what they claimed. They said 2 million in the U.S. alone and millions more elsewhere.
It may be callous, but “lives saved” is really a meaningless statistic, too.
If you “save” the life of an 80 year old, maybe that person will die of natural causes at 83 years old instead of COVID at 80. So you saved three “life-years.”
The “lives saved” were not of young people with their whole lives aheads of them, but of elderly people with little time left anyway (and I’m in the latter category).
If you saved the lives of 1,000 twenty-year-old people, you saved 55,000 life-years (assuming average life expectancy of 75 years — [75-20]*1,000).
If you saved the lives of 1,000 seventy-year-old people, you saved 5,000 life-years. But the measures taken to save those 1,000 seventy-year-olds ruined the lives of millions of young people.
What the power-mad maniacs did was utter insanity.
Many people called this out in 2020 and were excoriated and their lives and careers destroyed over it. Victor Hanson talks about what his colleague Dr. Scott Atlas went through for pointing this out.
And they plan on doing it again.
> lockdown policies may “represent the biggest policy mistake in modern times.”
My scale agreed. Took a while to lose the extra 20lb lockdown weight. I’m still working on getting my heart numbers moving in the right direction.
the take away: It’s nothing but a red herring. This study of studies shows conclusively that lockdowns were a disaster and because it was lockdowns, and not the disease, that wrought the havoc, someone needs to be held accountable. Society was shut down based on junk science and fear. Not only do incompetents and chiselers and power mongers need to be held accountable, laws need to be made to ensure that these bureaucrats and their allies never have this kind of power again.
This study is important for advancing that critical change.