Free Republic

Spain’s top court has ruled that the country’s national COVID-19 lockdown was unconstitutional following a lawsuit filed by the populist Vox party. “While leaving intact most of the state of emergency’s terms, the court said that the key articles ordering the population off the streets except for shorts trips for shopping and unavoidable commutes for work and other official business were unconstitutional,” reports the Associated Press. “According to TVE, the ruling said that the limitations on movement violated citizens´ basic rights and therefore the state of emergency was insufficient to give them constitutional backing. The six magistrates said that a...

Lockdown proponents across the media are smugly patting themselves on the back, proclaiming that stay-at-home policies didn’t harm the economy. Try telling that to the millions of small-business owners who were irreparably damaged by prolonged and irrational restrictions. With many big corporations deemed “essential,” ... small businesses struggle to survive. Nearly two-thirds of them are hitting only half or less of their pre-lockdown monthly revenue levels, ... Then there are the businesses that never recovered at all. ... Small business forms the US economy’s backbone, accounting for more than 99 percent of all business entities, and before 2020, around half...

<p>In Charles Dickens’ novel, Oliver Twist, we find the oft-quoted phrase: the law is an ass.</p><p>In his view, the law no longer served the purpose of promoting justice and fairness but became corrupted by arbitrariness so that it served the interests of the few and not the many.</p>

Beth Palmer was 17 and dreaming of becoming a singer in March 2020 when the United Kingdom went into lockdown because of the coronavirus. One month later, she was dead. "She was a wonderful, wonderful daughter. She was just funny, she lit up the room.," said Mike Palmer, Beth’s father. "She was so affectionate and loving as well. She basically had the world at her feet. She had everything, everything to live for.” Palmer didn’t die of the coronavirus. She took her own life. An aspiring singer and vocal student at the Access Creative College in Manchester, Palmer crumbled in...

In the end, we didn’t crush the virus, but we did crush a lot of ordinary people.Did lockdowns take more lives than they saved? It’s an important question. Earlier this month, the Rand Corporation and the University of Southern California, working on behalf of the National Bureau of Economic Research, released a working paper to ascertain just that.Most casual news consumers might not have heard about it, and that’s not surprising because here’s what they found:We find that following the implementation of shelter-in-place policies, excess mortality increases. … We failed to find that countries or U.S. states that implemented [shelter...

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...