Free Republic

A study by economists from the University of Southern California and the RAND Corporation examined the effectiveness of pandemic lockdowns and concluded that the measures taken to try to stop the spread of COVID did not save lives. In fact, every week these policies were in place an extra 2.7 deaths per 100,000 persons was recorded. The mechanisms by which the added fatalities were enabled included increased unemployment and poverty, increased stress and anxiety leading to increased drug use and suicides, increased child abuse and domestic violence, and reduced access to medical care for other serious diseases. Countries and US...

In a new paper, economists from the University of Southern California and the RAND Corporation examined the effectiveness of pandemic lockdowns, using data from 43 countries and all 50 U.S. states.... The Rand Corporation and economists from the University of Southern California have released a new study examining the effectiveness of pandemic lockdowns, using data from 43 countries and all 50 US states. “We fail to find that shelter-in-place policies saved lives,” the authors report. In the weeks following the implementation of these policies, excess mortality actually increases—even though it had typically been declining before the orders took effect. And...

Health Secretary caught kissing mistress at a time when Brits were told they shouldn’t shake hands.. Yet another architect of the UK’s lockdown has been caught violating it as photos revealed Health Secretary Matt Hancock passionately kissing his mistress at a time when Brits were being told they shouldn’t even shake hands. “Health Secretary Matt Hancock has been having a secret affair with his closest aide,” reports the Sun. “He cheated on his wife with Gina Coladangelo, 43, who he hired last year with taxpayers’ money, as Covid gripped Britain.” The photos were taken on May 6, when restrictions that...

Social distancing measures costing some businesses over 40 per cent of their normal turnover.. England is set to drop all face mask rules on July 19th after it was revealed that keeping such restrictions in place is costing the economy billions and will force many businesses to close. “The requirement to wear facemasks on public transport and in shops will be replaced with guidance advising people to wear masks in certain circumstances, rather than compelling them,” reports the Times. The decision follows the findings of an internal economic impact assessment produced by the government’s Events Research Programme which detailed the...

A new study finds that lockdown orders didn’t reduce overall mortality, and may have even increased it. ife under lockdown was hard for all of us. From economic destruction to social isolation, the costs of restrictive government policies intended to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have been steep. But now, yet another study suggests that the benefits wrought by our collective sacrifice were negligible at best—and that stay-at-home orders may even have increased overall mortality. In a new paper, economists from the University of Southern California and the RAND Corporation examined the effectiveness of “shelter-in-place” (SIP) mandates, aka stay-at-home orders,...

'In Canada, you cannot speak against the regime. It's like in China. I was in jail for eight hours a day – they handcuffed me, put me in jail and for a non-crime … it was a political repression,' Maxime Bernier told Carlson on Wednesday. A well-known anti-lockdown Canadian political leader told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that his recent arrest for breaking COVID-19 rules was a form of “political repression,” and not because he broke health rules. “In Canada, you cannot speak against the regime. It's like in China. I was in jail for eight hours a day – they...

Dr. Anthony Fauci denied that he deliberately suppressed the idea that the coronavirus could have leaked from the Wuhan lab that was experimenting on ways to enhance a bat virus to make it a more deadly pathogen that could be used to infect humans. “I would say my actions were more intuitively driven than consciously deliberate,” he contended. “If the Wuhan lab leak was revealed as the source of the pandemic I felt it would do irreparable harm to the scientific community. So, I came out strongly in favor of the natural mutation theory.” Fauci went on to point out...

The picture painted is one of working-class destruction.. Founding father and the second president of the United States John Adams once said that “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” What he meant was that objective, raw numbers don’t lie—and this remains true hundreds of years later. We just got yet another example. A new data analysis from Harvard University, Brown University, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation calculates how different employment levels have been impacted during the pandemic...

Traitor!.. A video clip shows BBC political editor Nicholas Watt being chased down and confronted by anti-lockdown protesters outside Downing Street. Protests are once again growing after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced yet another delay to the lifting of the UK’s lockdown restrictions. As we highlighted yesterday, the public was already being prepared for an extension to the extension before the first extension was even announced. Demonstrators are once again gathering around Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament in London to express their fury. BBC Newsnight editor Nicholas Watt was caught in the crossfire of their ire as he...

This horrifying reality is yet another unintended consequences of sweeping government pandemic lockdowns.. From mental health to drug overdoses, some of the most apparent unintended consequences from COVID-19 lockdowns and pandemic restrictions have finally garnered mainstream attention. However, the global fallout from lockdown orders on the world’s poorest has flown somewhat under the radar—and will make the aforementioned dire consequences look mild in comparison. A research organization dedicated to documenting the consequences of government pandemic interventions, Collateral Global, released a May analysis reviewing the research on how lockdowns will affect childrens’ prospects. The results are astounding. “The COVID-19 pandemic and...

One of the most iconic musicians of the century speaks about his experience during the past 18 months.

COVID shutdowns championed by U.S. governors and D.C. bureaucrats are responsible for destroying nearly 40% of small businesses since the virus was unleashed on the world—and we know now that it was for little to no damned good reason. A study by the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences revealed recently that shutdown orders made little to no difference in COVID’s impact. ... While bureaucrats gave Walmart, Costco, Lowe’s, and other big-box stores “essential” status, allowing them to stay open during the COVID pandemic, 38.9% of America’s small businesses, the providers of most of the country’s jobs, were forced...

This is a fantastic in depth look into Covid and how Ron DeSantis handled it, including the backlash he faced on a daily basis.... I lost my father back in 1993, but my mother died in 2020, I fully admit she did not die from Covid, but she was isolated from me and my bother and she could not handle it and eventually gave up, she live in Alabama but she went from March of 2020 to May 2020 without seeing a family member and went downhill really fast and died... The way this country handled Covid is maybe the...

Every single poor person on the face of the earth has faced some harm, sometimes catastrophic harm, from this lockdown policy.” Stanford University professor of medicine Jay Bhattacharya says that in years to come lockdowns will be looked back upon as the most catastrophically harmful policy in “all of history”. Speaking on The London Telegraph podcast ‘Planet Normal’, Bhattacharya noted that government scientific advisors “remain attached” to the policy of lockdown in spite of the total “failure of this strategy”. “I do think that future historians will look back on this and say this was the single biggest public health...

I do not know how many people are killed by lockdowns in the leftist police state of Victoria in Australia. But I know that lockdowns are causing deaths. Lockdowns rob people of freedom and social connection thus causing despair. I know two young people in Victoria with friends who have suicided because of this despair. I know of one octogenarian and a nonagenarian who stopped eating out of grief when the people they knew and who loved them were no longer able to visit. Both died. A senior health professional has told me that these are not isolated incidents. Lockdown...

If it just saves one life! Lockdown to continue in UK despite plummeting deaths & hospitalizations? Oh but if it just saves one life! What are you even saving at this point? Self-isolation, loneliness, atomization, an anaemic, vacuous existence. That’s not life!

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — The state Supreme Court ruled Monday that there is no constitutional or statutory requirement to compensate businesses for financial losses due to emergency public health orders during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ruling in favor of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham scuttles about 20 lawsuits against her administration. The original plaintiffs argued that aggressive health restrictions from the administration constituted a regulatory taking much like the taking of land for public works projects. The governor urged the Supreme Court to block the lawsuits. In a unanimous opinion from Justice Shannon Bacon, the court said that current public...

First of all, Wuhan is a place and not a race, and to identify the coronavirus by its place of origin, like naming the Ebola Virus for a river in Zaire, is not racist or xenophobic — it's merely accurate. There is no racism or xenophobia in labeling an infection "Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever" or calling something "Lyme Disease" after a nearby town in Connecticut. What calling this latest virus the Wuhan Virus is is a reminder of the multiple contagions China has spawned and released on an unsuspecting world. Nor is connecting some very big, ugly, and obvious dots...

The question Americans should ask is not just what else may emerge from this cover-up, but what are we prepared to do about what we now know.The past several weeks have witnessed an unraveling of the COVID-19 narrative potentially indicating a massive cover-up of the virus’s origin. Two distinguished researchers released a study that refutes claims by the World Health Organization (WHO) that the virus had a natural origin.The study, to be published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, indicates the virus that causes COVID-19 was man-made — engineered in a lab by creating unique spike proteins and attaching...

Lies upon lies, poetic injustice, arrogance, and an agenda that harmed millions of people. A novelist couldn’t have written him better.A trove of thousands of emails released as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request show that, since the beginning of COVID-19, Anthony Fauci has been just as mendacious as some of his worst critics have alleged. On Jan. 1, 2020, Fauci received a credible warning from a professor at the Scripps Research Institute, Kristian Anderson, that some of SARS-COV-2’s features “(potentially) look engineered” and that she and her colleagues “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from...