Owners of Superkhana International Yoshi Yamada, left, and Zeeshan Shah, inside their restaurant in Logan Square in March, 2021 photo. The restaurant operated takeout service because they’ve decided to refrain from indoor service until they think it’s safer to do so. Turns out their troubles didn’t do much to stop Covid-19. (Abel Uribe / Chicago Tribune)

Scientific study finds lockdowns and other mandates did almost nothing to fight Covid-19 pandemic.

For years now–yes, years–the left-wing/Democratic/liberal/media conglomerate has been issuing proclamations, edicts and wild-ass guesses about the wisdom of lockdowns. Guys such as Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker who imposed the lockdowns were hailed as heroes.

At the same time Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been labeled everything from an ignorant jerk to an evil moron for letting freedom reign in his home state.

Now comes a 61-page study that indicates that just the reverse is true. “A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality,” by Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke has concluded that lockdowns of all sorts are virtually useless. The study did not include the economic, psychological, learning and other costs but they considered them to be destructive. They wrote:

While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument…..

The evidence fails to confirm that lockdowns have a significant effect in reducing COVID-19 mortality. The effect is little to none.

Funny, these are the same things that I’ve been saying from the beginning of the lockdowns. Fox News too. Some health and medical experts, also. The same people that social media censors have and still shut down.

For some of my readers, my arguments, based on science, were countered with empty appeals to authority, claiming that the source of the information was always superior to the substance and actual findings. At the least, I was told, I had to ignore anything contrary to the given political wisdom. That’s not just the “end of democracy” it’s also the end of science.

Some headlines:

“58,000 Dead, and Depraved DeSantis Is Just Getting Started”
“Ron DeSantis, How Many Covid Deaths Are Enough?”
“Despite self-praise, giddy Gov. DeSantis isn’t right about anything COVID-19 in Florida”

Now these naysayers themselves are looking quite anti-science or ignorant. That goes for Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle and any other fan of lockdowns.

Included in the study’s definition of lockdown are such mandates as Chicago and Cook County’s mandates requiring diners to present proof of a vaccination to eat at a restaurant. Not just the cower-in-place (so-called shealter-in-place) mandates that virtually imprisoned everyone at home. The study defined lockdown thusly:

Lockdowns are defined as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI).

NPIs are any government mandate that directly restrict peoples’ possibilities, such as policies that limit internal movement, close schools and businesses, and ban international travel.

So include any school board member who had any part of ejecting children from their classrooms and subjected them to unprecedented and immoral learning, mental health, physical or other degradation. These people need to be “held accountable.”

Pritzker claims that “the science” has guided his handling of Covid-19, echoing the ignoramuses on CNN and MSNBC that blindly inserted politics into what is the real science.

So, let’s take a closer look at the study:

Early epidemiological studies predicted large effects of NPIs. An often cited model simulation study by researchers at the Imperial College London (Ferguson et al. (2020)) predicted that a suppression strategy based on a lockdown would reduce COVID-19 mortality by up to 98%.1 These predictions were questioned by many scholars….

Compared to other reviews such as Herby (2021) and Allen (2021), the main difference in this meta-analysis is that we carry out a systematic and comprehensive search strategy to identify all papers potentially relevant to answer the question we pose. We identify 34 eligible empirical studies that estimate the effect of mandatory lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality using a counterfactual difference-in-difference approach. We present our results in such a way that they can be systematically assessed, replicated, and used to derive overall meta-conclusions.5

Overall, our meta-analysis fails to confirm that lockdowns have had a large, significant effect on mortality rates. Studies examining the relationship between lockdown strictness (based on the OxCGRT stringency index) find that the average lockdown in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% compared to a COVID-19 policy based solely on recommendations. Shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs) were also ineffective. They only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 2.9%. [Emphasis added.]

Now, a reduction of 0.2 percent and 2.9 percent still means that several thousand lives were saved–not something that ought to be ignored. But then there’s this: Perhaps many more thousands of lives were lost because of the lockdowns. The toll on schoolchildren, the suicides, the years of instruction that have been lost forever. The businesses crushed and the jobs lost. The authors wrote:

The use of lockdowns is a unique feature of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns have not been used to such a large extent during any of the pandemics of the past century. However, lockdowns during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic have had devastating effects. They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best. Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.

The lockdown cabal will have a tough time labeling researchers Herby, Jonung and Hanke as just some crazy, stupid, wild-eyed outliers, suspected fans of Donald Trump and wacked-out dimwits. Their credentials, as described in their paper, are solid. But that won’t stop the jabbering wokesters like the Tony (Wrong Again) Fauci.

A prediction: The corporate media will ignore this real news. DeSantis detractors will continue to refer to him as scum of the earth, And my friends up in Chicago will continue to have their faces shoved into it by know-nothings.

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