We Need to Stop This Madness

“We need to stop this madness.”
 
These are the prophetic words of Gigi Foster, a professor with the School of Economics at the University of NSW. She wrote a brilliant article recently for the Sydney Morning Herald titled “Stop this human sacrifice: the case against lockdowns”.
 
NSW recently followed Victoria’s lead with premier Gladys Berejiklian plunging much of the state into yet another lockdown. Queensland has done the same, and South Australia and Western Australia have enforced varying restrictions. Parts of the Northern Territory were also been placed into a snap lockdown.
 
Gigi explains that these policies come at an enormous cost. “These costs include the loss of happiness due to loneliness from social isolation, the crowded-out healthcare for problems other than COVID, the long-term costs to our children and university students of disrupting their education, and the economic losses that have shuttered businesses, damaged whole sectors, increased equality, and will depress our spending on everything from roads to hospitals for years to come. Deaths from causes other than COVID may well result.”
 
And result they have. In an article titled “Self-harm alarm”, Susie O’Brien explains that “data from Kids Helpline shows 16 per cent of calls from children aged 5 to 12 are related to suicide concerns and self-harm and 26 per cent of calls from those aged 13-18. The national service received 13,000 suicide-related contacts in 2020, with 1150 callers presenting with an immediate suicide issue. More than one-third of contacts requiring intervention from emergency services involved suicide.”
 
Kids Helpline virtual services manager Tony Fitzgerald said that “calls in all categories had soared during Covid-19, and the demand had continued this year. There are long-term effects from last year, even with our youngest kids who are struggling to cope with their anxiety on top of everyday pressures.”
 
The government are putting the lives of our children at risk for a virus that has claimed one life in 2021. This is an absolute disgrace.
 
A National Bureau of Economic Research paper explains that “it is possible that SIP (shelter-in-place) policies increased deaths of despair due to economic and social isolation effects of SIP policies”. This includes deaths due to drug overdoses, homicides and unintentional injuries.
 
The paper states that “existing studies suggest that SIP policies led to a reduction in non-COVID-19 health care, which might have contributed to an increase in non-COVID-19 deaths. For example, one study in the United Kingdom predicts that there will be approximately an additional 3,000 deaths within five years due to a delay in diagnostics because of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
 
Further to this, “it is possible that SIP policies do not slow COVID-19 transmission” and “prior studies find only a modest effect of SIP policies on mobility”. The paper also claims that it is “unclear whether modest reductions in mobility could slow the spread of an airborne pathogen”. This last point is one worth noting.
 
According to the authors, the only countries in which they observed a fall in the trajectory of excess deaths were Australia, New Zealand and Malta. All are island nations, which have geographical advantages. “In every other country, we observe either no visual change in excess deaths or increases in excess deaths.”
 
Gigi Foster explains that “lockdowns also carry immediate costs of suffering (such as declines in mental health due to loneliness) and long-run costs in many dimensions, which a cost-benefit analysis would reveal”.
 
“Our government owes its people a transparent reading on all excess deaths during SIP orders – that is, lockdowns – and a full costing of its lockdown policies that counts both deaths and suffering.”
 
The government are still yet to provide a cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns more than 15 months into the pandemic. This is information should be made public. As citizens, we have the right to know how our elected officials can make such drastic decisions that have enormous consequences for all of us.
 
An open letter written to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) highlights the disproportionate response in relation to lockdowns. The authors state that “not only are lockdowns historically unprecedented in response to any previous epidemic or pandemic in American history, but they are not so much as mentioned in recent guidance offered by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention”.
 
The authors continue by saying that “given the gravity of the decisions being made, we cannot ignore the possibility that the entire “science” of COVID-19 lockdowns has been a fraud of unprecedented proportion, deliberately promulgated by the Chinese Communist Party and its collaborators to impoverish the nations who implemented it”.
 
China was the first country to enforce draconian lockdowns in Wuhan in January 2020. They never existed prior to this.
 
Donald Henderson, who is widely accredited for eradicating smallpox, explains that “experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted”.
 
After nearly 18 months, it is clear that lockdowns do more harm than good. Gigi Foster sums it up this way.
 
“What is going on here is not the fight of our lives against a fearsome pestilence. It is politicians willingly sacrificing their people’s welfare, hoping the people see their actions as a sufficient offering. It’s the modern analogue of killing virgins in the hope of getting a good harvest.”
 
“We need to stop this madness. Right now, we need to focus our attention and protection on the people in our population who are actually vulnerable to serious effects of this virus. We need to buy medicines and establish treatment protocols that work to reduce the severity of COVID symptoms, while offering vaccinations to anyone in vulnerable groups who wants them – with no compulsion, and no tethering of population vaccination rates to border openings.”
 
“The good news is that much of the world seems to be waking up to the fact that shelter-in-place directives are tantamount to a ritualistic human sacrifice. They’re losing their religion, slowly but surely.”
 
This sounds like a common-sense approach, yet common sense is not so common these days.
 
Lockdowns don’t work. If they did, there would be no need to continually lock down. They only cause harm. People should not be denied the right to see family and friends, earn a living, run a business, access health care, go to school and travel. These are basic human rights. We have the right to decide how much risk we take on, not the government.
 
How many more lives will be lost as a result of lockdowns?
 
We need to stop this madness.

---