(John Ransom, Headline USA) A new study by John Hopkins University that reviewed all the published research on COVID lockdowns shows that the lockdown measures failed to staunch the spread of the virus and may have helped strengthen the disease by concentrating the virus in smaller spaces, like homes.
“In the early stages of a pandemic,” said the study’s conclusions about policy implications “before the arrival of vaccines and new treatments, a society can respond in two ways: mandated behavioral changes or voluntary behavioral changes.”
“Our study fails to demonstrate significant positive effects of mandated behavioral changes (lockdowns),” the study concluded.
John Hopkins meta study determines that lockdowns had “little to no effect on COVID mortality”. Mandates and shutdowns did not save lives but created substantial harm. This is what many public health experts in academia and private sector had been saying over the past 2 years.
— James Gallagher (@J_GallagherAD3) February 1, 2022
In fact, the study found that lockdowns only accounted for 0.2 percent of mortality reduction in Europe and the US.
The study consisted of a common literature review of the research on COVID lockdowns “that employed a systematic search and screening procedure in which 18,590 studies” were screened and 34 selected for analysis, said the study’s authors.
The studies selected met the criteria for looking at shelter-in-place, stringent lockdowns and limiting movement policies that closed schools and businesses and banned international travel.
“While lockdowns had little to no public-health benefits, they imposed enormous economic and social costs. Job losses in March and April 2020 exceeded 22 million and have not yet been fully recovered,” said Joel Zinberg, M.D., an associate clinical professor of surgery at the Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, according to the New York Post.
“Children lost years of educational and social development that will affect them for the rest of their lives,” added Zinberg.
The study is just one in a long line that have questioned the effectiveness of draconian lockdown policies that have been instituted to fight the spread of COVID.
One such study, also a review of literature, conducted in April 2021 by economist Douglas Allen of Canada’s Simon Fraser University, also found that lockdowns were ineffective.
“Lockdown jurisdictions were not able to prevent noncompliance,” said Allen, “and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary changes in behavior that mimicked lockdowns” making it impossible to tell the difference between the two statistically.
Most importantly, said Allen and the authors of the John Hopkins study, is that we don’t again impose the social and economic costs of the forced isolation that lockdowns engender.
“While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects,” the John Hopkins report concluded, “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.”
