Lockdowns were “a global policy failure of gigantic proportions”, driven by Government fear campaigns and “fantasy numbers” from dud models, a top international team of researchers has concluded. The Epoch Times has more.
The days of Covid lockdowns may be behind us for the time being, but a multinational academic team has conducted a broad analysis of government pandemic actions and found them to be “a global policy failure of gigantic proportions”, often driven by state and media-sponsored fear campaigns.
Their findings, published in a book titled ‘Did Lockdowns Work? The Verdict on Covid Restrictions‘, are based on a worldwide meta-analysis that screened nearly 20,000 studies to determine the benefits and harms from health diktats, including lockdowns, school closures and mask mandates. According to economist Steve Hanke, one of the co-authors, one of the things that drove countries into a state of panic and draconian policies was reliance on mortality models from sources like Imperial College London (ICL) that generated “fantasy numbers” showing that millions of deaths could be averted by instituting crippling society-wide lockdowns.
Prior to the Covid outbreak, “most countries did have a plan to deal with pandemics”, Hanke told the Epoch Times, “but after the Imperial College of London’s ‘numbers’ were published, those plans were, in a panic, thrown out the window.
“In each case, the same pattern was followed: flawed modelling, hair-raising predictions of disaster that missed the mark and no lessons learned,” he said. “The same mistakes were repeated over and over again and were never challenged.”
Hanke is an economics professor and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise. The other co-authors of the study are Jonas Herby, special adviser at the Centre for Political Studies in Copenhagen, and Lars Jonung, an economics professor at Lund University in Sweden.
While the meta-analysis surveyed thousands of studies, it found that only 22 of them contained useful data for the study. The report focused on mortality rates and lockdown policies during 2020.
“This study is the first all-encompassing evaluation of the research on the effectiveness of mandatory restrictions on mortality,” Jonung stated. “It demonstrates that lockdowns were a failed promise. They had negligible health effects but disastrous economic, social and political costs to society.”
According to Hanke, the ICL models predicted that lockdowns would prevent between 1.7 million and 2.2 million deaths in the United States. The meta-analysis, however, indicates that lockdowns prevented between 4,345 and 15,586 deaths in the United States. This fits a pattern of overstated predictions from the ICL, which health officials either didn’t know about or overlooked, he said.
Read More: Lockdowns a “Global Policy Failure of Gigantic Proportions”, Say Experts
