Against Lockdown By Chris Knight

     Closed borders? Really? Flights from Wuhan, ground zero of the Wuhan flu, continue to the US, which seemingly cannot shut its borders if its life depended upon it:
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8341681/New-Orleans-goes-3-days-without-coronavirus-deaths.html

“Flights are continuing to land in the US from Wuhan and the rest of China and Europe despite the travel ban put in place to stop the spread of coronavirus. According to Flight Tracker data, people are arriving into the US every day from the countries that have been blamed for sparking the outbreak across America, with flights even touching down from Wuhan where the global pandemic originated. This comes as warnings mount that passengers are not being screened properly for the deadly virus on arrival into the US and as questions are being raised over how - if at all - the mandatory 14-day quarantine for returning travellers is being enforced.
According to Flight Tracker, five flights had landed into New York airports JFK and Newark from London, UK, airports by 4:30p.m. ET since the start of the day Wednesday. More flights are also scheduled to land later into the evening and night.”

     Well, why bother locking down individual citizens when the globalist migration circus just keeps on coming?
  https://www.zerohedge.com/health/do-lockdowns-work-mounting-evidence-says-no
  https://mises.org/wire/do-lockdowns-work-mounting-evidence-says-no

“Suspending the rule of law and civil rights will have enormous consequences in terms of human life counted in suicides, drug overdoses, and other grave health problems resulting from unemployment, denial of "elective" medical care, and social isolation. None of that is being considered, however, since it is now fashionable to have governments determine whether or not people may open their businesses or leave their homes. So far, the strategy for dealing with the resulting economic collapse is no more sophisticated than record-breaking deficit spending, followed by debt monetization via money printing. In short, politicians, bureaucrats, and their supporters have insisted a single policy goal—ending the spread of a disease—be allowed to destroy all other values and considerations in society. Has it even worked? Mounting evidence says no. In The Lancet, Swedish infectious disease clinician (and World Health Organization (WHO) advisor) Johan Giesecke concluded: It has become clear that a hard lockdown does not protect old and frail people living in care homes—a population the lockdown was designed to protect. Neither does it decrease mortality from COVID-19, which is evident when comparing the UK's experience with that of other European countries. At best, lockdowns push cases into the future, they do not lower total deaths. Gieseck continues: Measures to flatten the curve might have an effect, but a lockdown only pushes the severe cases into the future—it will not prevent them. Admittedly, countries have managed to slow down spread so as not to overburden health-care systems, and, yes, effective drugs that save lives might soon be developed, but this pandemic is swift, and those drugs have to be developed, tested, and marketed quickly. Much hope is put in vaccines, but they will take time, and with the unclear protective immunological response to infection, it is not certain that vaccines will be very effective.

As a public policy measure, the lack of evidence that lockdowns work must be balanced with the fact that we have already observed that economic destruction is costly in terms of human life. Yet in the public debate, lockdown enthusiasts insist that any deviation from the lockdown will result in total deaths far exceeding those places where there are lockdowns. So far, there is no evidence of this. In a new study titled "Full Lockdown Policies in Western Europe Countries Have No Evident Impacts on the COVID-19 Epidemic," author Thomas Meunier writes, "total deaths numbers using pre-lockdown trends suggest that no lives were saved by this strategy, in comparison with pre-lockdown, less restrictive, social distancing policies." That is, the "full lockdown policies of France, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom haven't had the expected effects in the evolution of the COVID-19 epidemic."1 The premise here is not that voluntary "social distancing" has no effect. Rather, the question is to whether "police-enforced home containment" works to limit the spread of disease. Meunier concludes it does not. Meanwhile a study by polititical scientist Wilfred Reilly compared lockdown policies and COVID-19 fatalities among US states. Reilly writes: The question the model set out to ask was whether lockdown states experience fewer Covid-19 cases and deaths than social-distancing states, adjusted for all of the above variables. The answer? No. The impact of state-response strategy on both my cases and deaths measures was utterly insignificant. The "p-value" for the variable representing strategy was 0.94 when it was regressed against the deaths metric, which means there is a 94 per cent chance that any relationship between the different measures and Covid-19 deaths was the result of pure random chance.

Overall, however, the fact that good-sized regions from Utah to Sweden to much of East Asia have avoided harsh lockdowns without being overrun by Covid-19 is notable. Another study on lockdowns—again, we're talking about forced business closures and stay-at-home orders here—is this study by researcher Lyman Stone at the American Enterprise Institute. Stone notes that areas where lockdowns were imposed either had already experienced a downward trend in deaths before the lockdown could have possibly shown effects or showed the same trend as the year prior. In other words, lockdown advocates have been taking credit for trends that had already been observed before lockdowns were forced on the population. Stone writes: Here’s the thing: there’s no evidence of lockdowns working. If strict lockdowns actually saved lives, I would be all for them, even if they had large economic costs. But the scientific and medical case for strict lockdowns is paper-thin. Experience increasingly suggests that a more targeted approach is better for those who actually want to limit the spread of disease among the most vulnerable. The overwhelming majority—nearly 75 percent—of deaths from COVID-19 occur in patients over sixty-five years of age. Of those, approximately 90 percent have other underlying conditions. Thus, limiting the spread of COVID-19 is most critical among those who are already engaged with the healthcare system and are elderly. In the US and Europe, more than half of COVID-19 deaths are occurring in nursing homes and similar institutions.”

  https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31035-7/fulltext#%20

     These are all excellent points, but the king hit argument is that the lock-down strategy must be generalisable to deal with round 2, 3, … of the Covid-19 crisis, and with all other pandemics. As noted above, the economic, social and health costs are immense, and any more of this will pull down civilisation, and the sacred healthcare system with it. It will all be for nothing, in a smoking ruin.
  https://saltbushclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/unlock-australia.pdf

“This Lockdown Depression is giving us a taste of “Zero Emissions”. It is a bitter taste. It leads to unemployment and poverty with no proven benefits for nature or the climate. “Net Zero – Like Lockdown but Permanent”” -Vic Forbes