Free Republic

The toll lockdowns have taken on human life and human rights has been incalculable. Increases in child abuse, suicide, and even heart attacks, all appear to be a feature of mandatory stay-at-home orders issued by politicians who now rule by decree without any legislative or democratic due process. And then, of course, there is the economic toll on employment, and which will feed negative impacts into the longer term. The economic burden has fallen the most on the young, and on working class families where earners are least able to work from home. These measures also have made a mockery...

More and more voices are now speaking out on the lockdowns, widespread testing, and other policies associated with the COVID-19 response. Now a professor from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, Ronald B.Brown, Ph.D., is questioning how mortality data was presented to Congress early in the pandemic. This hearing was held on March 11, 2020, in front of the House Oversight Committee. During the questioning, Dr. Anthony Fauci asserted that the mortality rate for COVID-19 was 3%. He then extrapolated to claim that if you added in the mildly symptomatic cases, it would probably be about 1%, which is...

Draconian enforcement of COVID-19 lockdown accelerates. Yet another shock video out of Australia shows police enforcing coronavirus rules by arresting an elderly woman sitting on a park bench for not wearing a mask. “This is unlawful, on what grounds am I under arrest?” asks the woman. An officer then walks around the back of the bench and snatches her friend’s phone away, preventing her from filming the encounter. The woman is told that she is being arrested for failing to provide her name and address. ... Once a person has been targeted for not wearing a mask or violating any...

In defiance of California's statewide ban on indoor hair cuts, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) made an appointment to get a cut, shampoo, and blow out at her favorite salon. When word backed up by video evidence got out that she had done this despite her constant, obnoxious prattling about how others are obligated to obey the COVID-inspired social distancing, mask wearing, and shutdowns of nonessential businesses, she was rightfully mocked by nearly everyone. This prompted her to claim that "I did nothing wrong. I was set up and am owed an apology for being humiliated by a nobody who...

Were lockdowns a mistake? To that nagging question, the answer increasingly seems to be yes. Certainly, they were a novelty. As novelist Lionel Shriver writes, “We’ve never before responded to a contagion by closing down whole countries.” As I’ve noted, the 1957-58 Asian flu killed between 70,000 and 116,000 Americans, between 0.04 percent and 0.07 percent of the nation’s population. The 1968-70 Hong Kong flu killed about 100,000, 0.05 percent of the population. The US coronavirus death toll of 186,000 is 0.055 percent of the current population. It will go higher, but it’s about the same magnitude as those two...

Angry San Francisco salon customers protested outside Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home Thursday by hanging blow driers and curlers from nearby trees. ... Pelosi was busted this week violating state and local coronavirus lockdown restrictions in San Francisco.. to get her hair done – and she wasn’t wearing a mask. She forced a local salon to open up just for her, and then when caught, claimed she was “set-up” by the salon owner. The salon owner steadfastly denies it was a set-up. ... San Francisco requires residents to stay 6 feet apart and wear a mask to cover the mouth and...

Since they were first implemented in March and April, mandatory lockdown orders and nationwide quarantines have had little to no effect in curbing the spread of COVID-19 and in fact “correlated with a greater spread of the virus,” according to an analysis in the Wall Street Journal. The research: On top of straining the economy and leading to long-term health consequences, lockdowns have also proven to be “a large policy error,” claims Donald L. Luskin, the Chief Investment Officer for Trend Macrolytics, a consulting firm that focuses on macroeconomic analysis which conducted the new research into the impact of lockdowns....

New data suggest that social distancing and reopening haven’t determined the spread. two large-scale experiments in public health—first, in March and April, the lockdown of the economy to arrest the spread of the virus, and second, since mid-April, the reopening of the economy. The results are in. Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn’t contain the disease’s spread and reopening it didn’t unleash a second wave of infections. Considering that lockdowns are economically costly and create...

The Antifa street theater thugs keep bringing guillotines like the French Revolution out to scare their enemies. Meanwhile it’s their main ally who’s parading around like Queen Marie Antoinette. ... Nancy Pelosi visited a San Francisco hair salon on Monday afternoon for a wash and blow-out, despite local ordinances keeping salons closed ... Pelosi broke the law. She must want grannies besides herself to die! That’s how this works, right? Obviously the virus is very smart. It knows whether you’re protesting (good), or whether you’re going to church (bad) or trying to make a living (also bad). ... seen walking...

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has repeatedly told residents his administration’s response to COVID-19 has been driven entirely by science and data. But Illinoisans just saw a glaring example of the politics of pandemic, with one area of the state being treated one way for hitting an 8% positive test rate and another area being treated much differently – twice. On Aug. 18 Pritzker imposed new restrictions in the Metro East region as Bond, Clinton, Madison, Monroe, Randolph, St. Clair and Washington counties exceeded an 8% positive test result rate for three days running. Indoor dining and bar service were still...

They are already calling the current pandemic-induced economic crisis, “The Great Depression of 2020.” The paradigm is, of course, the Great Depression of 1929 that substantially changed the world’s model of development, signaling the onset of State intervention in the economy (the welfare state). Analysts are also calling it “The Great Jump Backwards,” because it will push the world back in time by canceling three decades of economic development. International agencies estimate the contraction in GNP worldwide at -5.2%. The Eurozone with be the hardest hit with -9.1%. “It is the worst economic recession since 1870, a devastating blow for...

In mid-March, as the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold in Europe and the United States, New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern presented her country with a choice. They could let coronavirus creep into the community and brace for an onslaught, as other countries around the world had done. Or they could "go hard" by closing the border -- even if that initially hurt the island nation's hugely tourism-dependant economy. Ardern opted for the second path. When New Zealand had only reported 28 cases, Ardern closed borders to foreigners, and when there were 102 cases, she announced a nationwide lockdown....

With the summer drawing to a close, the big question for nearly 60 million U.S. school-age children is whether they can return to school for in-person learning, or must remain at home limited to virtual education. States and municipalities differ widely on whether and how to re-open schools based on differing assessments of the risks of COVID-19 to children if they are in direct contact with each other and with teachers. Teachers’ unions are resisting school re-opening with political demands that have nothing to do with teaching, such as defunding the police, passage of Medicare-for-All, and elimination of competing charter...

A long-suspected fear of the Covid-19 lockdowns is starting to come to light. In many parts of the world doctors are pointing to a very real probability that lockdown orders are leading to people dying from other serious maladies as a result of avoiding hospitals. Heart attacks in particular are now looked at as a cause of death greater than the coronavirus itself. Almost from the beginning of our pandemic lockdowns there have been questions raised over both the wisdom behind the decisions and the broad application of the quarantine orders. Recall early on that Americans were lectured about the...

Europe can combat the new coronavirus without full lockdowns now that authorities are better prepared and have gained knowledge about how to fight it in recent months, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday. “With the basic nationwide and additional targeted measures, we are in a much better position to stamp out these localized virus flare-ups,” the head of the WHO’s European branch, Hans Kluge, told reporters. “We can manage the virus and keep the economy running and an education system in operation,” he added. Europe has seen a steady rise in the number of cases for the past...

Online education just doesn't work for children with special needs. If we truly care about the marginalized in society, we have to open schools immediately. My son, now 11 years old, was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder when he was three. Since then, he has been in intensive behavioral intervention treatment almost continuously until the coronavirus lockdown closed our city in March.His treatment is two-pronged: at-home therapy focused on everyday functioning (paid through private insurance) and an individualized education program at his school to target academics and socialization. He receives speech and occupational therapy services as a part of his...

If you’re hoping the COVID-19 pandemic will go on forever, this post may disappoint you. And, I get it. We have gone frothing-at-the-mouth nuts over a slightly above-normal virulence virus, with a unique and obvious age-distribution pattern that should have made containment easy and panic completely unnecessary. And, if you’re living in the United States, like I am, you probably think my declaration that this pandemic is “over” to be somewhere between wishful thinking and incredibly premature, and I hear you, too, although forgive me if I’m not sure you’re the one thinking clearly, given some of the things I’ve...

In a national panic, Americans permitted executives to take power—to declare states of emergency and to implement lockdowns—and now those executives won’t give that power back. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia often noted that the primary safeguard of our constitutional liberties is the structure of our government. Every banana republic has a bill of rights, he once said, but the strength of the American system is the separation of powers. At the federal level, there are three separate, co-equal branches of government that must operate together for our representative republic to function properly, and this balance of power is mirrored...

Latest RedState Column explaining who Dr. Scott Atlas is and why Trump's announcement that he's now part of his COVID-19 team is such great news.

Tens of thousands of Germans marched through Berlin on Saturday, proclaiming a “Day of Freedom” and demanding an end to government-mandated face masks and “social distancing.” The UK and Netherlands also saw large protests against their governments’ tyrannical actions in response to the coronavirus outbreak. ... Europeans are realizing that their government-mandated lockdowns did little or nothing to protect them from the virus, while causing economic catastrophe ... Sweden, which never locked down its economy, rejected face masks, and kept its restaurants and other places of business open, did not fare any worse than the countries that have been turned...