Twelve Times The 'Lockdowners' Were Wrong | ZeroHedge
Twelve Times The 'Lockdowners' Were Wrong
Authored by Phillip Magness via The American Institute for Economic Research,
This
has been a year of astonishing policy failure. We are surrounded by
devastation conceived and cheered by intellectuals and their political
handmaidens...
The errors number in the thousands, so please
consider the following little more than a first draft, a mere guide to
what will surely be unearthed in the coming months and years. We trusted
these people with our lives and liberties and here is what they did
with that trust.
Anthony Fauci says lockdowns are not possible in the United States (January 24):
When asked about the mass quarantine containment efforts underway in Wuhan, China back in January, Fauci dismissed the prospect of lockdowns ever coming to the United States:
“That’s
something that I don’t think we could possibly do in the United States,
I can’t imagine shutting down New York or Los Angeles, but the
judgement on the part of the Chinese health authorities is that given
the fact that it’s spreading throughout the provinces… it’s their
judgement that this is something that in fact is going to help in
containing it. Whether or not it does or does not is really open to
question because historically when you shut things down it doesn’t have a
major effect.”
Less than two months later, 43 of 50 US states were under lockdown – a policy advocated by Fauci himself.
US government and WHO officials advise against mask use (February and March)
When
mask sales spiked due to widespread individual adoption in the early
weeks of the pandemic, numerous US government and WHO officials took to
the airwaves to describe masks as ineffective and discourage their use.
Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeted against masks on February 29. Anthony Fauci publicly discouraged mask use in a nationally broadcast 60 Minutes interview on March 7. At a March 30 World Health Organization briefing its Director-General supported mask use in medical settings but dissuaded the same in the general public.
By
mid-summer, all had reversed course and encouraged mask-wearing in the
general public as an essential tool for halting the pandemic. Fauci essentially conceded that
he lied to the public in order to prevent a shortage on masks, whereas
other health officials did an about-face on the scientific claims around
masking.
While mainstream epidemiology literature stressed the ambiguous nature of evidence surrounding masks as recently as 2019,
these scientists were suddenly certain that masks were something of a
magic bullet for Covid. It turns out that both positions are likely
wrong. Masks appear to have marginal effects at diminishing spread,
especially in highly infectious settings and around the vulnerable. But
their effectiveness at combating Covid has also been grossly
exaggerated, as illustrated by the fact that mask adoption reached near-universal levels in the US by the summer with little discernible effect on the course of the pandemic.
Anthony Fauci’s decimal error in estimating Covid’s fatality rates (March 11)
Fauci
testified before Congress in early March where he was asked to estimate
the severity of the disease in comparison to influenza. His testimony
that Covid was “10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu” stoked
widespread alarm and provided a major impetus for the decision to go
into lockdown.
The problem, as Ronald Brown documented in an epidemiology journal article,
is that Fauci based his estimates on a conflation of the Infection
Fatality Rate (IFR) and Case Fatality Rate (CFR) for influenza, leading
him to exaggerate the comparative danger of Covid by an order of
magnitude. Fauci’s error – which he further compounded in a late
February article for the New England Journal of Medicine –
helped to convince Congress of the need for drastic lockdown measures,
while also spreading panic in the media and general public. As of this
writing Fauci has not acknowledged the magnitude of his error, nor has
the journal corrected his article.
“Two weeks to flatten the curve” (March 16)
The
lockdowners settled on a catchy slogan in mid-March to justify their
unprecedented shuttering of economic and social life around the globe:
two weeks to flatten the curve. The White House Covid task force aggressively promoted this line, as did the news media and much of the epidemiology profession. The logic behind the slogan came from the ubiquitous graph showing
(1) a steep caseload that would overwhelm our hospital system, or (2) a
mitigated alternative that would spread the caseload out over several
weeks, making it manageable.
To get to graph #2, society would
need to buckle up for two weeks of shelter-in-place orders until the
capacity issue could be managed. Indeed, we were told that if we did not
accept this solution the hospital system would enter into catastrophic
failure in only 10 days, as former DHS pandemic adviser Tom Bossert claimed in a widely-circulated interview and Washington Post column on March 11.
Two
weeks came and went, then the rationale on which they were sold to the
public shifted. Hospitals were no longer on the verge of being
overwhelmed – indeed most hospitals nationwide remained well under
capacity, with only a tiny number of exceptions in the worst-hit
neighborhoods of New York City.
A US Navy hospital ship sent to relieve New York departed a month later after serving only 182 patients, and a pop-up hospital in the city’s Javits Convention Center sat mostly empty.
But the lockdowns remained in place, as did the emergency orders
justifying them. Two weeks became a month, which became two months,
which became almost a year. We were no longer “flattening the curve” – a
strategy premised on saving the hospital system from a threat than
never manifested – but instead refocused on using lockdowns as a general
suppression strategy against the disease itself. In short, the
epidemiology profession sold us a bill of goods.
Neil Ferguson predicts a “best case” US scenario of 1.1 million deaths (March 20)
The
name Neil Ferguson, the lead modeler and chief spokesman for Imperial
College London’s pandemic response team, has become synonymous with
lockdown alarmism for good reason. Ferguson has a long track record of
making grossly exaggerated predictions of catastrophic death tolls for almost every single disease that comes along, and urging aggressive policy responses to the same including lockdowns.
Covid was no different, and Ferguson assumed center stage when he released a highly influential model of
the virus’s death forecasts for the US and UK. Ferguson appeared with
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on March 16 to announce the shift toward
lockdowns (with no small irony, he was coming down with Covid himself
at the time and may have been the patient zero of a super-spreader event that ran through Downing Street and infected Johnson himself).
Across
the Atlantic, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx cited Ferguson’s model as a
direct justification for locking down the US. There was a problem
though: Ferguson had a bad habit of dramatically hyping his own
predictions to political leaders and the press. The Imperial College
paper modeled a broad range of scenarios including death tolls that
ranged from tens of thousands to over 2 million, but Ferguson’s public
statements only stressed the latter – even though the paper itself
conceded that such an extreme “worst case” scenario was highly
unrealistic. A telling example came on March 20th when the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof contacted
the Imperial College modeler to ask about the most likely scenario for
the United States. As Kristof related to his readers, “I asked Ferguson
for his best case. “About 1.1 million deaths,” he said.”
Researchers in Sweden use the Imperial College model to predict 95,000 deaths (April 10)
After
Neil Ferguson’s shocking death toll predictions for the US and UK
captivated policymaker attention and drove both governments into
lockdown, researchers in other countries began adapting the Imperial
College model to their own circumstances. Usually, these models sought
to reaffirm the decisions of each country to lock down. The government
of Sweden, however, had decided to buck the trend, setting the stage for
a natural experiment to test the Imperial model’s performance.
In
early April a team of researchers at Uppsala University adapted the
Imperial model to Sweden’s population and demographics and ran its
projections. Their result? If Sweden stayed the course and did not lock
down, it could expect a catastrophic 96,000 deaths by early summer. The
authors of the study recommended going into immediate lockdown, but
since Sweden lagged behind Europe in adopting such measures they also
predicted that this “best case” option would reduce deaths to “only”
30,000.
By early June when the 96,000 prediction was supposed to
come true, Sweden had recorded 4,600 deaths. Six months later, Sweden
has about 8,000 deaths – a severe pandemic to be sure, but an order of magnitude smaller than what the modelers predicted. Facing embarrassment from these results, Ferguson and Imperial College attempted to distance themselves from
the Swedish adaptation of their model in early May. Yet the Uppsala
team’s projections closely matched Imperial’s own UK and US predictions
when scaled to reflect their population sizes. In short, the Imperial
model catastrophically failed one of the few clear natural experiment
tests of its predictive ability.
Scientists suggest that ocean spray spreads Covid (April 2)
In
the second week of the lockdowns several newspapers in California
promoted a bizarre theory: Covid could spread by ocean spray (although
the paper later walked back the headline-grabbing claim, it is outlined here in the Los Angeles Times).
According to this theory – initially promoted by a group of biologists
who study bacterial infection connected to storm runoff – the Covid
virus washed down storm gutters and into the ocean, where the ocean
breeze would kick it up into the air and infect people on the nearby
beaches. As silly as this theory now sounds, it helped to inform
California’s initially draconian enforcement of lockdowns on its public
beaches.
The same week that this modern-day miasmic drift theory appeared, police in Malibu even arrested a lone paddleboarder for going into the ocean during the lockdown – all while citing the possibility that the ocean breeze carried Covid with it.
Neil Ferguson predicts catastrophic death tolls in US states that reopen (May 24)
Fresh
off of their exaggerated predictions from March, the Imperial College
team led by Neil Ferguson doubled down on alarmist modeling. As several
US states started to reopen in late April and May, Ferguson and his
colleagues published a new model predicting another catastrophic wave of
deaths by the mid-summer. Their model focused on 5 states with both
moderate and severe outbreaks during the first wave. If they reopened,
according to the Imperial team’s model, New York could face up to 3,000
deaths per day by July.
Florida could hit as high as 4,000, and
California could hit 5,000 daily deaths. Keeping in mind that these
projections were for each state alone, they exceed the daily death toll
peaks for the entire country in both the fall and spring. Showing just
how bad the Imperial model was, the actual death toll by mid-July in
several of the examined states even fell below the lower confidence boundary of its projected count.
While Covid remains a threat in all 5 states, the post-reopening
explosion of deaths predicted by Imperial College and used to argue for
keeping the lockdowns in place never happened.
Anthony Fauci credits lockdowns for beating the virus in Europe (July 31)
In late July Anthony Fauci offered additional testimony to
Congress. His message credited Europe’s heavy lockdowns with defeating
the virus, whereas he blamed the United States for reopening too early
and for insufficient aggressiveness in the initial lockdowns. As Fauci
stated at the time, “If you look at what happened in Europe, when they
shut down or locked down or went to shelter in place — however you want
to describe it — they really did it to the tune of about 95% plus of the
country did that.”
The message was clear: the United States
should have followed Europe, but failed to do so and got a summer wave
of Covid instead. Fauci’s entire argument however was based on a string of falsehoods and errors.
Mobility
data from the US clearly showed that most Americans were staying home
during the spring outbreak, with a recorded decline that matched
Germany, the Netherlands, and several other European countries. Contrary
to Fauci’s claim, the US was actually slower than most of Europe to
reopen. Furthermore, his praise of Europe collapsed in the early fall
when almost all of the lockdown countries in Europe experienced severe
second waves – just like the locked down regions of the United States.
New Zealand and Australia declare themselves Covid-free (August-present)
New
Zealand and Australia have thus far weathered the pandemic with
extremely low case counts, leading many epidemiologists and journalists
to conflate these results with evidence of their successful and
replicable mitigation policies. In reality, New Zealand and Australia
opted for the medieval ‘Prince Prospero’ strategy
of attempting to wall themselves from the world until the pandemic
passes – an approach that is highly dependent on their unique
geographies.
As island nations with comparatively lower
international travel than North America and Europe, both countries shut
down their borders before the as-of-yet undetected virus became
widespread and have remained closed ever since. It’s a costly strategy
in terms of its economic impact and personal displacement, but it kept
the virus out – mostly.
The problem with New Zealand and
Australia’s Prince Prospero strategy is that it’s inherently fragile.
All it takes to throw it into chaos is for the virus to slip past the
border – including by accident or human error. Then heavy-handed
lockdowns ensue, imposed with maximum disruption at the spur of the
moment in a frantic attempt to contain the breach.
The most
famous example happened on August 9 when New Zealand’s Prime Minister
Jacinda Ardern declared that New Zealand had reached 100 days of being Covid-free. Then just two days later a breach happened, sending Auckland into heavy lockdown. It’s a pattern that has repeated itself every few weeks in both countries.
In early December, we saw a similar flurry of stories from Australia announcing that the country had beaten Covid. Two weeks later, another breach occurred in the suburbs around Sydney, prompting a regional lockdown.
There have been embarrassing missteps as well. In November the entire
state of South Australia went into heavy lockdown over a single
misreported case of Covid that was mistakenly attributed to a pizza purchase that did not exist. While
both countries continue to celebrate their low fatality rates, they’ve
also incurred some of the harshest and most disruptive restrictions in
the world – all the result of premature declarations of being
“Covid-free” followed by an unexpected breach and another frantic
lockdown.
“Renewed lockdowns are just a strawman” (October)
In early October a group of scientists met at AIER where they drafted and signed the Great Barrington Declaration,
a statement calling attention to the severe social and economic harms
of lockdowns and urging the world to adopt alternative strategies for
ensuring the protection of the most vulnerable. Although the statement
quickly gathered tens of thousands of co-signers from health science and
medical professionals, it also left the lockdown supporters incensed.
They responded not by scientific debate over the merits of their
policies, but with a vilification campaign.
They answered by flooding the petition with hoax signatures and juvenile name-calling, and by peddling wildly false conspiracy theories about AIER’s funding (the primary instigator of both tactics, ironically, was a UK blogger known for promoting 9/11 Truther conspiracies). But the lockdowners also adopted another narrative: they began to deny that lockdowns were even on the table.
Nobody
was considering bringing back the lockdowns from the spring, they
insisted. Arguing against the politically unpopular shelter-in-place
orders in the fall only served the purpose of undermining public support
for narrower and more temperate restrictions. The Great Barrington
authors, we were told, were arguing with a “strawman” from the past.
Over the next several weeks in October a dozen or more prominent epidemiologists, public health experts, and journalists peddled the “lockdowns are a strawman” line. The “strawman” claim saw promotion in top outlets including the New York Times, and in an op-ed by two principle co-signers of
the John Snow Memorandum, a competing petition that lockdown supporters
drafted as a response to the Great Barrington Declaration.
The
message was clear: the GBD was sounding a false alarm against policies
from the past that the lockdowners “reluctantly” supported in the spring
as an emergency measure but had no intention of reviving. By early
November, the “strawman” of renewed lockdowns became a reality in dozens
of countries across the globe – often cheered on by the very same
people who used the “strawman” canard in October.
Several US
states followed suit including California, which imposed severe
restrictions on private gatherings up to and including meeting your own
family for Thanksgiving and Christmas. And a few weeks after that, some
of the very same epidemiologists who used the “strawman” line in October
revised their own positions after the fact. They started claiming they had supported a second lockdown all along, and began blaming the GBD for
impeding their efforts to impose them at an earlier date. In short, the
entire “lockdowns are a strawman” narrative was false. And it now
appears that more than a few of the scientists who used it were actively
lying about their own intentions in October.
Anthony Fauci touts New York as a model for Covid containment (June-December)
By
all indicators, New York state has suffered one of the worst
coronavirus outbreaks in the world. Its year-end mortality rate of
almost 1,900 deaths per million residents exceeds every single country in the world. The
state famously bungled its nursing home response when Governor Andrew
Cuomo forced these facilities to readmit Covid-positive patients as a
way to relieve strains on hospitals. The policy backfired as most
hospitals never reached capacity, but the readmissions introduced the
virus into vulnerable nursing home populations resulting in widespread
fatalities (to this day New York intentionally undercounts nursing
home fatalities by excluding residents who are moved to a hospital from
its reported numbers, further obscuring the true toll of Cuomo’s
order).
New York has also fared poorly during the fall “second
wave” despite reimposing harsh restrictions and regional lockdown
measures. By mid-December, its death rate shot far above the mostly-open
state of Florida, which has the closest comparable population size to
New York. All things considered, New York’s weathering of the pandemic
is an exemplar of what not to do.
Cuomo’s policies not only
failed to contain the virus – they likely made it far more deadly to
vulnerable populations. Enter Anthony Fauci, who has been asked multiple
times in the press what a model Covid response policy would look like.
He gave his first answer on July 20th: “We know that, when you do it properly, you bring down those cases. We have done it. We have done it in New York.”
Fauci
was operating under the assumption that New York, despite its bad run
in the spring, had successfully brought the pandemic under control
through its aggressive lockdowns and slow reopening. One might think
that the fall rebound in New York, despite locking down again, would
call this conclusion into question. Not so much for Dr. Fauci, who told
the Wall Street Journal on December 8:
“New York got hit really badly in the beginning” but they did “a really
good job of keeping things down, and still, their level is low compared
to the rest of the country.”
