COVID-19 lockdowns caused more deaths instead of reducing them, RAND study finds

By: Michael McKenna,   Washington Times,:  June 30, 2021

COVID-19 lockdowns caused more deaths instead of reducing them, study finds

Those who pushed ‘shelter in place’ policies share the blame, but everyone feels the consequences

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

As we begin to pick through the rubble of the early days of the coronavirus that started in Wuhan in an effort to determine with some specificity the origins of COVID-19, and whether it was accidentally or purposefully released from a Chinese lab, it is important, too, that we assess the wisdom of our public health approaches to the disease.

Chief among those approaches was the institution of lockdowns across a broad range of populations.

The pathologies of the lockdowns are clear and have been both predicted and recorded. They include increased risk of preventable deaths from cancer, heart disease, etc., as well as psychological trauma, resulting in increased homicides, accidents and suicidal ideations, caused by long periods of isolation.

What is less clear is whether the lockdowns served any useful medical purpose.

Fortunately, two researchers at the RAND Corporation and two researchers from the University of Southern California have done an analysis of the medical value of the lockdowns (which they refer to as “sheltering in place,” or SIP, policies). They looked at 43 countries and all of the states in the union, and published their assessment in June as a working paper of the National Bureau for Economic Research.

Shelter-in-place orders didn’t save lives during the pandemic, research paper concludes

You may have missed the report. It has not received much coverage from the media, who must be busy with some incredibly important and hard-hitting story about Dr. Anthony Fauci or the first lady.

Let’s remedy that oversight.

The RAND/USC team is unsparingly direct: “[W]e fail to find that SIP policies saved lives. To the contrary, we find a positive association between SIP policies and excess deaths. We find that following the implementation of SIP policies, excess mortality increases.”

So, the lockdowns didn’t reduce the number of deaths, failed to prevent any excess deaths, and in fact resulted in increased deaths.

Additionally, countries that locked their citizens in their homes were experiencing declining — not increasing — excess mortality prior to lockdowns. In other words, lockdowns probably made the situation worse.

The researchers were again direct. “If SIP were implemented when excess deaths were rising then the results … would be biased towards finding that SIP policies lead to excess deaths. However, we find the opposite: countries that implemented SIP policies experienced a decline in excess mortality prior to implementation compared to countries that did not implement SIP policies.”

Moreover, unless you lived on an island, it did not seem to make any difference when the lockdowns were implemented. They were ineffectual at best and led to increased mortality at worst.

From the study: “It is also possible that the average effects in our event studies might hide heterogeneity (differences) in the impact of policies across countries and U.S. states. For example, SIP policies might be more effective when implemented early in the pandemic or SIP policies might work better when community transmission is high. … Overall, we find little evidence of heterogenous effects except that SIP policies seem to be more effective in island nations or … Hawaii.”

Finally, there was no advantage to locking down early or staying locked down longer. The researchers noted: “We failed to find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier, and in which SIP policies had longer to operate, had lower excess deaths than countries/U.S. states that were slower to implement SIP policies.”

So, the duration of the lockdowns made no difference.

The simple fact is that COVID-19 was and is a highly infectious respiratory disease to which everyone is eventually going be exposed either naturally or through vaccines. The disease tends to kill older people and those with preexisting respiratory challenges or who are obese.

The RAND/USC study makes it clear that all the lockdowns accomplished was to add personal, psychological and economic devastation to the terrible personal and societal toll of illness and death.

Everyone involved — from President Trump and his public health advisers who initiated the first lockdown (remember “15 days to slow the spread”), right on through to those who continue to insist that isolation for everyone, even those not at risk, is the correct course of action — share the blame.

But all of us share the consequences.

July 4, 2021 | 2 Comments »

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  1. So, thousands of fake vaccines. You just can’t be cynical enough to keep up with these Pharma companies. I have said that India is the most interesting country to watch regarding this virus and vaccine rollout. Is this happening everywhere or in India only? I can readily think of three motives for this fake vaccine scam.
    1. Phama can’t produce the volume of vaccines as contracted.
    2. They are trying to limit the # of cases of adverse reactions – fake vaccines – no adverse reaction.
    3. Fake vaccines will not be protective and will cause “break-through” variants which will stimulate a need for the development of new vaccines or multiple dosages, meaning the cash cow continues.

    Thousands Given Fake COVID-19 Vaccines Filled With Saline in India: Officials
    By Jack Phillips
    July 5, 2021 Updated: July 5, 2021
    biggersmaller Print

    At least 14 people were arrested and an Indian private hospital was cordoned off by police amid an investigation into an alleged vaccination scam that may have affected thousands of people.

    “They were using saline water and injecting it,” said Vishal Thakur, a senior official of the Mumbai police department, according to CNN. He was referring to the alleged scam.

    “Every fake vaccination camp that they held, they were doing this.”

    He said that about 2,500 people received fake COVID-19 vaccines in 12 sites near Mumbai. Reports indicated that the organizers included medical professionals, and they charged between $10 and $17 per COVID-19 shot.

    “We have arrested doctors,” Thakur told CNN. “They were using a hospital which was producing the fake certificates, vials, syringes.”

    Vishwas Nangre Patil, Mumbai’s joint commissioner of police, said in a news conference that more people could be arrested during the investigation, while he noted that many of “the accused have confessed” to using saline.

    One resident in a “housing society,” or a housing cooperative, that administered the fake vaccines told News18: “None of our members got any symptoms and also we had to pay in cash. … At that point of time, we doubted it.”

    Another member of the cooperative told News18: “We really want to know what has been injected in our bodies. Six members in my family have taken a shot. What if something happens to all of us? Who is responsible?”

    In June, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a vaccine drive to distribute millions of doses to states for free. About 4.5 percent of the country’s population of more than 1 billion have been vaccinated so far, according to data provided by Johns Hopkins University.

    India, meanwhile, has reported more than 400,000 deaths from COVID-19, according to the university. COVID-19 is the illness caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, otherwise known as the coronavirus.

    Separately, trials of a vaccine made by India’s Bharat Biotech showed it was 93.4 percent effective against severe symptomatic COVID-19, according to the company (pdf) in a July 3 statement.

    The data demonstrated 65.2 percent protection against the so-called Delta variant, first identified in India, that led to a surge in infections in April and May, and the world’s highest daily death tolls.

    India has been administering the AstraZeneca vaccine, made domestically by the Serum Institute of India, which stated last month that it planned to step up monthly production in July to nearly 100 million doses.

    Bharat Biotech now estimates it will make 23 million doses a month.

  2. Very interesting review of where we are and how we should proceed relating to Covid and vaccines by Dr. Malone, the inventor or mRNA vaccines, whose recent comment have led him to join the ranks of the millions of voices silenced via state run censors. I have attached about a third of his article, but his comments should be read in full on the link below.

    Bioethics of Experimental COVID Vaccine Deployment under EUA: It’s time we stop and look at what’s going down.
    TrialSite Staff May 30, 2021

    Bioethics of Experimental COVID Vaccine Deployment under EUA It’s time we stop and look at what’s going down.

    Robert W Malone, MD, MS1

    I provide this brief essay for the TrialSite community because you are involved or at least interested in human subject clinical research. By way of background, please understand that I am a vaccine specialist and advocate, as well as the original inventor of the mRNA vaccine (and DNA vaccine) core platform technology. But I also have extensive training in bioethics from the University of Maryland, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and Harvard Medical School, and advanced clinical development and regulatory affairs are core competencies for me.

    Before examining the bioethical foundations of current policy and practice which underpin experimental COVID vaccine deployment in many in many western nations, allow me to begin by sharing some “real world” first-hand evidence.

    I was on a call with a Canadian primary care physician last week for a couple of hours. He related the story of the six (in his mind) highly unusual clinical cases of post-vaccination adverse events that he has personally observed in his practice involving vaccination of his patients with the Pfizer mRNA vaccine product. Keep in mind that it was Canadian physicians – acting of their own accord – who filed the FOIA to gain access to the Pfizer vaccine IND (see https://trialsitenews.com/did-pfizer-fail-to-perform-industry-standard-animal-testing-prior-to-initiation-of-mrna-clinical-trials/).

    What was most alarming to me was that my clinical primary practice physician colleague told me that each of these cases were reported as per the proper channels in Canada, and each was summarily determined to not be vaccine related by the authorities without significant investigation. Furthermore, he reported to me that any practicing physician in Canada who goes public with concerns about vaccine safety is subjected to a storm of derision from academic physicians and potential termination of employment (state-controlled socialized medicine) and loss of license to practice.

    This is one face of censorship in the time of COVID (see https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embr.202051420). But what are official public health leaders afraid of? Why is it necessary to suppress discussion and full disclosure of information concerning mRNA reactogenicity and safety risks? Let’s analyze the vaccine-related adverse event data rigorously. Is there information or patterns that can be found, such as the recent finding of the cardiomyopathy signals, or the latent virus reactivation signals? We should be enlisting the best biostatistics and machine learning experts to examine these data, and the results should- no must- be made available to the public promptly. Please follow along and take a moment to examine the underlying bioethics of this situation with me.

    I believe that adult citizens must be allowed free will, the freedom to choose. This is particularly true in the case of clinical research. These mRNA and recombinant adenovirus vaccine products remain experimental at this time. Furthermore, we are supposed to be doing rigorous, fact-based science and medicine. If rigorous and transparent evaluation of vaccine reactogenicity and treatment-emergent post-vaccination adverse events is not done, we (the public health, clinical research and vaccine developer communities) play right into the hands of anti-vaxxer memes and validate many of their arguments.

    https://trialsitenews.com/bioethics-of-experimental-covid-vaccine-deployment-under-eua-its-time-we-stop-and-look-at-whats-going-down/