"Anyway, I know who many of the COVIDiots on FR are, and I don’t pay much attention to anything they have to say about anything, because they’re dangerously gullible morons."
Posted on 06/05/2026 6:03:57 AM PDT by Heartlander
The Covid lockdowns may not have been remotely effective, but at least they harmed millions of people and created long-lasting negative impacts that we’re still dealing with today.
That’s the conclusion of a massive new body of research into the nonsensical policies promoted by the public health “expert” class, promoted by their media partners, and enacted by incompetent, cowardly politicians.
Mask mandates had been thoroughly discouraged by decades of pre-Covid pandemic planning. There was no body of research supporting the closing of certain businesses at different hours of the day, as many jurisdictions demanded.
No studies were conducted on the reduction of infection rates resulting from placing directional arrows on the floors of grocery stores to direct people through aisles in predetermined patterns.
There were no randomized controlled trials on closing skate parks and beaches, arresting people surfing alone in the ocean, restricting capacity to random percentages based on inaccurate assumptions of community spread.
We had no idea whether closing schools would be effective or “save lives,” but we did it anyway. We didn’t know if vaccine passports would actually have a meaningful impact on community spread, yet we were encouraged to push that too.
All these “interventions” started with little-to-no evidence. That’s bad enough. What makes it much worse? That we implemented them all with zero consideration of possible side effects resulting from those policies.
Lockdowns were an unprecedented incursion on freedom and liberty. What would that do to society, the economy, mental health, and so on? It appeared that no one involved gave those considerations a second thought, and now we’re paying the price.
A massive new systematic review of over 130 studies of Covid policies was published recently in Health Affairs Scholar by writers from the Department of Health Policy, Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health in Indianapolis, synthesizing the research into ancillary outcomes from lockdowns, school closures, and other mandates. The goal of this systematic review was to find the “unintended health effects” resulting from those policies. Essentially, putting Covid aside, what were the results when it came to various important measures of health?
They write that while policymakers and public health authorities have produced years of reports and lectures on the importance of mandates and lockdowns in reducing viral transmission, there’s a large “gap in the literature” regarding what other impacts may have resulted from “shelter-in-place/stay-at-home orders, workplace closures, and school closures.”
While peer-review isn’t a guarantee of accuracy, all 132 studies included in the analysis were peer-reviewed. Those 132 studies resulted in finding over 450 unique outcomes. And spoiler alert, the overwhelming majority of those outcomes were negative.
What makes their results even more infuriating is that there was, as they explain, “very low quality” evidence that lockdowns would be effective, as well as a “lack of information on potential unintended downstream consequences.” Yet decision-makers plowed forward anyway, despite the “serious ethical, economic, health equity, and human rights concerns” resulting from such policies.
Not to mention that the researchers found that lockdowns had “little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality,” the most important stated goal of lockdowns. Stay home, save lives, the mantra went. Turns out, like so many other government messages, that this was completely and utterly incorrect.
So we’ve established that there was no reduction in Covid mortality from lockdowns, very low quality evidence supporting lockdowns in the first place, and an overwhelming majority of studies found negative side effects from those policies. All great news so far. But it gets even better when examining what those negative side effects actually were, and how widespread those results were.
What they found, from 132 peer-reviewed studies and 450 specific results, was that “over 90% of mental health, obesity-related, and health-related social need outcomes” were impacted by lockdowns. Of the 454 unique measurements from those studies, 75 percent were reported as “detrimental.”
After years of politicians and public health figures extolling the importance of mental health, mental health outcomes in this research were astonishingly bad. They found that 93 percent of mental health outcomes studied were “deemed detrimental.” And that wasn’t a small sample either, as the researchers found that it was the “most frequently studied category.”
If one only uses Google to search outcomes, lockdowns were associated with increased activity for terms like “boredom,” “loneliness,” “sadness,” and “worry.”
There was a significant rise in positive suicide screenings among adolescents and a consistent increase in mental health facility use for diagnoses like panic disorder and severe stress. Incredibly, they found that “quasi-experimental work found that increases in mental health facility use were more strongly associated with the presence of lockdown policies than with the pandemic or illness itself.” That suggests “policy restrictions exerted an independent effect on population well-being.”
Horrifying.
So the lockdowns led to increased suicidal ideation, a massive increase in mental health facility usage, rampant loneliness, panic disorder, and had no impact on mortality rates. But the good news doesn’t end there.
As we know, obesity is one of the most harmful physical conditions, resulting with any number of significant health issues. Well, lockdowns helped there too. Of the analyses studying the effect of lockdowns on obesity, outcomes were “overwhelmingly negative,” with “94.3% of analyses reporting detrimental effects.”
In one specific study, there was an astonishing “19-fold increase in obesity risk among children previously classified at normal weight prepandemic.” Another study found a remarkable “tenfold increase in BMI z-score gain among children during school closures.” Great work, “health” experts!
Thanks to delayed healthcare screenings, the review found substantially higher rates of late-stage lung cancer diagnoses. And the breakdown in social order led to increases in trauma-related admissions due to gun and knife violence.
That’s not a surprise, as lockdowns led to massive unemployment and stress over financial stability. Sure enough, when the researchers examined research on those side effects, they found that “100% of outcomes” related to employment, food access, and economic stability were detrimental.
Similarly, childhood development and education also had detrimental outcomes. In 96.6% of studies, there was significant learning loss and disrupted socialization among younger demographics – who were, of course, at essentially zero risk of significant impacts from Covid itself.
For a group who claims to care about “equity,” and trying to force equal outcomes across different racial and ethnic groups, public health experts somehow ignored the inequitable negative side effects from lockdowns.
Vulnerable demographic groups were significantly more likely to report negative outcomes, over 90 percent of the time, than more stable groups. One hundred percent of outcomes for those vulnerable groups were deemed detrimental regarding important health determinants like obesity, food access, and economic stability.
Nailed it again, health equity experts!
So to sum up, we had no evidence that lockdowns would be effective.
We had no research or consideration for the negative outcomes that would result from lockdowns and they had no impact on Covid mortality.
In postmortem research, the overwhelming majority of studied individual outcomes were negative or detrimental, in important categories like mental health, physical health, economic conditions, and obesity.
And for a group that claims to care about “equity,” public health policies overwhelmingly impacted already vulnerable demographic groups the most.
It’s hard to imagine a more comprehensive and thorough repudiation of the Anthony Fauci Covid doctrine.
Do whatever Fauci says, never consider the consequences, then demean and label any and all critics, never admit wrongdoing or take accountability for the damage you’ve caused.
“The Science” in a nutshell.
- Republished from the author’s Substack
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
All predictable .
“All these “interventions” started with little-to-no evidence”
By Jan 20, 2020 the “evidence” was that COVID targeted the elderly, it targeted those with certain co-morbidities. It targeted older Medical workers in frequent contact with those with COVID. It targeted those in hospitals, nursing homes exposed to others with COVID.
In GA Funeral Homes are licensed and regulated precisely because they are not to spread contagious disease of the dead. But in Albany GA funerals were held and that was the #1 cause of the spread of COVID. We could track it as it extended East and West, North and South along the highways from Albany, and from those who attended the funeral, which was the elderly who knew the elderly dead.
Another source of spread was Atlanta Marta Mobility and other small space public transportation. Those with co-morbidities were transported to the doctor’s appointment and caught COVID in that small bus.
Middle Aged and children were not statistically likely to be harmed by COVID unless they had co-morbidities that made them vulnerable. Often times it was the treatment and not the disease that made them vulnerable.
We knew all this by Jan 20. The data, the statistics, were clear.
Everyone in my condo assn is elderly, as in every IRS defined “Independent Living Facility”. It is interesting how some facilities had NO SERIOUS CASE OF COVID and some had many who died from COVID.
A large majority of those who died had co-morbidities. COVID brought death 1 month, 6 months or 1 year closer than it otherwise would have occurred.
Sounds like your store manager was a true believer. Where as mine was not.
Last week I was driving to work at 7:30 am. I stopped at a light and looked in my rear view mirror. The fifty something year old woman behind had a mask on in her car. With the windows rolled up. It was about 50 degrees out. She was all by herself too.
So, who was she protecting herself against?
THEY ARE STILL AMONG US !
I heard a commercial on a Boston radio station last weekend.
It was about having a “conversation” about whether there were any unsecured guns in the house when someone invites you are your children over for a visit.
It was on the The River which is a pretty hipster liberal radio station.
Sadly many seemed to be FReepers! To my shock and dismay. Also, most leadership at my church (although the rank and file were very solid)
Yes, though it was maybe a smaller percentage than the population at large (though still distressingly high). The “It’s just the flu, bro” threads were one of the few places of refuge back then.
Anyway, I know who many of the COVIDiots on FR are, and I don’t pay much attention to anything they have to say about anything, because they’re dangerously gullible morons.
100%!
The cops who let Henry Nowak bleed put just used a variant of that excuse.
Same here with the State Fair of Texas. No guns, or even pocket knives. Bye.
BUT it did prove how gullible and compliant liberals are when ordered by the government to do something.
I feel bad for kids. I still see some kids walking alone out of the local high school wearing masks. I even see people driving alone with masks.
"Anyway, I know who many of the COVIDiots on FR are, and I don’t pay much attention to anything they have to say about anything, because they’re dangerously gullible morons."
Covid gave us “mail in ballots”...aka voter fraud.
She was likely desperately coping with pollen. I know a few people who are tortured by their allergies. The masks don't offer much protection but they do offer some. Having the windows up is absolutely critical for them.
A business that opens its doors to the general public has rules that don't apply to a private business.
And the cops enforcing a ficticious health code is outright pfascist hypocrisy because the police themselves supported thousands of Democrat rioters and funeral attendees for St. George Floyd of Fentanyl. A cop had zero authority to enforce a mask rule when they were also violating them. The cop's job was to arrest the health department mask rule issuer for fraud.
There’s no reason why that has to be the case.
Is a grocery store private property; no it essential activity and should not be treated as private property.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.