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COVID Is Over — But Did We Learn Anything From It?

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7 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By PETER ROFF

 

The lockdowns instituted during the COVID pandemic were only supposed to last a few days. Remember “14 days to flatten the curve” was all that was needed to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed by patients infected with the rapidly spreading novel coronavirus.

Two weeks turned into three, then months. Schools were closedBusinesses were shut down. Commercial activity in the world’s most powerful nation ground almost to a halt, but the virus kept killing, mutating and spreading.

States like California and Kentucky enforced the lockdowns with ruthless efficiency. The free exercise of worship and assembly was crushed on the altar of public health and safety.

Was it worth it? The Committee to Unleash Prosperity’s report, “COVID Lessons Learned: A Retrospective After Four Years,” says no. Its authors, who include the Hoover Institution’s Dr. Scott Atlas (who served as an adviser to the White House Coronavirus Task Force), Johns Hopkins University economist Steve Hanke and the University of Chicago’s Casey Mulligan conclude, by using publicly available data and peer-reviewed studies, that the lockdowns cost more lives than they saved.

Atlas, Hanke, Mulligan and Phil Kerpen, president of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP) and the fourth and final co-author, conclude: “The ordered shutdown of our schools, churches, and businesses brought little health benefits while imposing multi-trillions of dollars of long-term societal costs.”

“We did not focus on theories or models. We looked at cold, hard facts,” Kerpen says. “The evidence is overwhelming. Lockdowns, school closures, and societal panic/disruption resulted in a staggering number of excess non-COVID deaths in the United States versus zero in non-lockdown Sweden.”

Kerpen estimates that the policies implemented during the lockdowns saved approximately 16,000 lives while causing about 400,000 extra deaths and imposing staggering economic costs, including the loss of 49 million jobs.

Other adverse consequences stemming from the lockdowns cited in the report include a $6 trillion increase in government debt, hundreds of thousands of business bankruptcies and hundreds of thousands of excess deaths from loneliness, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse and delayed hospital care in part due to the forced social isolation.

In the U.S., catastrophes like COVID are usually followed by the appointment of bi-partisan, blue-ribbon commissions to study everything and issue recommendations we’re told will prevent something similar from happening again.

That hasn’t been done this time, which reinforces the suspicion in some minds that COVID-era policymakers who are still in a position to influence the conversation are hiding something. Having made a hash of things, they just as soon allow it all to slide down the memory hole.

Even in China, where popular opinion doesn’t matter, the investigation into the origins of the virus hit a stonewall thanks to what news reports have called “bureaucratic infighting.”

Too many people think the lockdowns worked. They’re ignoring the data. The CTUP report shows them to be wrong. It’s a call for a further probe that searches for the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it might be. Without it, how can we be sure the public’s health and safety will be protected the next time, not to mention our civil liberties?

The CTUP report offers a few “lessons learned” that should inform policymakers’ decision-making in the next crisis. One is that “Leaders should calm public fears, not stoke them.”

“Conventional wisdom pre-COVID was that communities respond best to pandemics when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted,” the authors conclude. During the pandemic, responsible officials in the public eye “intentionally stoked and amplified fear, which overlaid enormous economic, social, educational, and health harms on top of the harms of the virus itself.”

As hard as it is to argue against that, it’s easy to suggest the crisis was used as a political club. What of it? Suppose public health officials, the media, and other policymakers deliberately ignored sound science and proven pandemic countermeasures to inflict political damage on a president they wished to see booted from office. Does that matter? The answer is yes, it does.

There’s more to be learned because there’s more to be studied. None of the nations that used lockdowns to prevent COVID from spreading can report that they worked as intended.

“The best-performing major country in the world was Sweden,” Kerpen says, “which did not employ mandatory lockdowns. Yet, to the extent that official and unofficial commissions in many countries have issued reports, they say the principal lesson to be learned from the pandemic is to lockdown harder and faster. The evidence doesn’t support that. It tells us that the lockdown policies must never be imposed again.”

If Kerpen is correct, and the evidence suggests he is, then policymakers are drawing the wrong conclusions. Lockdowns were a failure, not a success.

Other ways must be found to prevent a future outbreak from turning into a pandemic, hopefully, before the next crisis presents itself.

A former U.S. News & World Report columnist and United Press International senior political writer, Peter Roff is an acknowledged expert on U.S. politics and the policy process. His take on politics and policy appears frequently in print and on U.S. and international broadcasting outlets. Email him at RoffColumns AT gmail.com. Follow him on social media AT TheRoffDraft.

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COVID-19

Trudeau government only sought legal advice after Emergencies Act was invoked, records indicate

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Canada’s Freedom Convoy in Ottawa                                                                      Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The two-page Memorandum For The Attorney General was dated February 15, 2022, and was written by the deputy director of prosecutions. The date of the memorandum is significant, as it comes after Trudeau had invoked the EA on February 14.

A Conservative MP’s request for information has revealed that the cabinet of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau waited until after it had invoked the Emergencies Act (EA), which was done to take down the peaceful Freedom Convoy, to get legal advice from Canada’s Attorney General on whether its use was lawful. 

As noted in a recent Blacklocks’s Reporter article, Access To Information records obtained by Conservative MP Arnold Viersen from the office of the Attorney General confirm what many MPs have been suspicious of for years, that Trudeau’s use of the EA was not really warranted.  

“I filed an Access To Information request for the memorandum on the Emergencies Act sent to the Attorney General from the Public Prosecution Service,” MP Viersen said in a statement to the media. 

“What did they advise the Attorney General? We will never know because Justin Trudeau censored it.” 

The documents, despite being censored, do reveal that the two-page Memorandum For The Attorney General was dated February 15, 2022, and was written by the deputy director of prosecutions. The date of the memorandum is significant, as it comes after Trudeau had invoked the EA on February 14.

Trudeau’s Attorney General Arif Virani, during testimony on February 28, said that there was a legal opinion offered regarding whether the use of the EA would be justified, but that its contents had to remain confidential.

This claim of secret legal advice has never been substantiated.

In early 2022, the Freedom Convoy saw thousands of Canadians from coast to coast come to Ottawa to demand an end to COVID mandates in all forms. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Trudeau’s government enacted the EA on February 14, 2022. Trudeau revoked the EA on February 23.   

Earlier this year, Canada’s Federal Court announced that the use of the EA by the Trudeau government was a direct violation of the nation’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and thus was “not justified.”   

The Trudeau government has since appealed the court’s decision.   

I do not ‘believe for a second’ the ‘threshold’ was met to invoke EA  

Conservative MP Glen Motz told a February 28 hearing of the Special Joint Committee on the Declaration of Emergency that he did not believe for a “second” that the “broader interpretation even existed,” in terms of the legality of the EA’s use. 

“I still believe more strongly today than I did in 2022 that the circumstances to invoke the Emergencies Act were not met,” he said, noting that “The threshold was not met.” 

“I agree with Justice Mosley in his decision that it was in fact illegal and unconstitutional,” he said.  

The EA controversially allowed the government to freeze the bank accounts of protesters, conscript tow truck drivers, and arrest people for participating in assemblies the government deemed illegal.   

Before Mosley’s ruling, an investigation into the use of the EA, as per Canadian law, was launched by Trudeau. The investigation, titled the Public Order Emergency Commission, was headed by Liberal-leaning Judge Paul Rouleau. Unsurprisingly, the commission exonerated Trudeau’s use of the EA.   

During the clear-out of protesters after the EA was put in place, one protester, an elderly lady, was trampled by a police horse, and one conservative female reporter was beaten by police and shot with a tear gas canister.   

Last month, LifeSiteNews reported that Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu uncovered that the federal government of Trudeau spent $2.2 million in taxpayer money in a failed attempt to try and stop court challenges filed against it for enacting the EA to stop the peaceful Freedom Convoy.  

Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber have been in a ongoing legal battle with federal officials.   

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COVID-19

Japan’s most senior cancer doctor: COVID shots are ‘essentially murder’

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Dr. Masanori Fukushima

From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

The most senior medical oncologist in Japan recently slammed the COVID-19 mRNA shots as “the work of evil” that has caused “essentially murder.”

In an interview published April 19, Dr. Masanori Fukushima, who spearheaded the first cancer outpatient clinic at Kyoto University and launched the first course in pharmacoepidemiology there, listed a slew of problems with the COVID mRNA jabs, evidencing what he called an evil “abuse of science.”

He pointed out that “turbo cancers,” a kind “previously unseen by doctors” that progress extremely quickly and are typically in stage four by the time they are diagnosed, have started to appear after the jab rollouts. These “turbo cancers” are emerging along with excess mortality due to cancer in general, which Dr. Fukushima says cannot be explained only by lost opportunities for screenings or treatment during the COVID outbreak.

As a tragic example of the fatal danger of the COVID shots, the oncologist shared the story of a 28-year-old man who was found dead by his wife when she tried to wake him in the morning, five days after he received his second Pfizer shot.

“The doctor who did the autopsy said that when he tried to remove the heart, it was soft and had disintegrated,” Dr. Fukushima said. “And even just one case like this shows how dangerous this vaccine can be.”

He pointed out that these severe harms, including death, have been afflicting people — post-jab — who have a history of good health.

“It’s serious. It’s essentially murder. In the end, I want to state clearly that this is my view,” the doctor said.

He lamented that the media, including newspapers, generally have not reported on these harms, and that in fact those who question the safety of the COVID shots — just as with the flu shots — have been characterized as anti-science “heretics.” He described the attitude of those who shut down the voices COVID “vaccine” critics, however, as far from scientific, and “more akin to faith, hysteria or even cult behavior.”

He highlighted the fact that countries that most aggressively pushed the COVID shot, such as Israel, saw the highest rates of death and infection, as shown by studies comparing Middle Eastern countries, including Jordan, Syria and Egypt.

“Israel led in early and widespread vaccination but also had the highest death and infection rates. The less aggressively vaccinated areas saw less harm,” said Dr. Fukushima, noting that “Israel was quick to halt the vaccine.”

There were problems, moreover, with the very technology used to administer the mRNA — the lipid nanoparticles — that the doctor said result in “off-target effects” on various organs, including the ovaries, brain, liver, and bone marrow.

Worse, the spike proteins produced by the mRNA have been detected in the human body more than a year after the administration of the COVID shot, noted the oncologist, indicating “a severe problem.”

The doctor took aim at the World Health Organization (WHO) for “hastily” pushing the COVID shots without proper investigation, and moreover for trying to enforce a one-size-fits-all approach in countries with widely varying “medical circumstances, habits, and systems,” calling it “somewhat absurd.”

He argued that it is “crucial” that the WHO take responsibility for the harms of the COVID shots, which he called “an abuse, a misuse of science and an evil practice of science, to be frank.”

Dr. Fukushima pointed out that the WHO is “aware” of harms from the so-called vaccines because they are compensating for these damages in certain countries, and yet they are not properly addressing the COVID shot-induced death and injury through an investigation and report.

“Imagine finding your spouse dead in the morning. It’s no joke. A vaccine that causes such outcomes, even a single death, is unacceptable,” said Dr. Fukushima, adding that in Japan alone, the government has documented 2,134 deaths reported due to the COVID shot, which is likely a low estimate.

“There are tens of thousands of people who must see a doctor because of vaccine-related issues,” he continued, asserting that a big chunk of them — 30% — are “suffering from ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis) or chronic fatigue syndrome.”

This is just the beginning, according to Dr. Fukushima, because the rates of all sorts of diseases have been spiking since the COVID shot rollout, including “autoimmune disease, neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, and infections.”

“It’s as if we’ve opened Pandora’s box … We must take these damages seriously and address them earnestly. Any efforts to dismiss these damages as if they didn’t happen are frankly the work of evil. This is a quintessential example of the evil practice of science,” Dr. Fukushima said.

He called on scientific and medical institutions, led by the WHO, to directly confront these outcomes through research efforts in order to “shine the light of science” on the shots.

“We should never again use such vaccines,” he said. “This is a shame for humanity. It’s a disgrace that we did this.”

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