The Wages of Covid: Global Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions By Brian Simpson
The Children’s Health Defense.org has given another fine article joining up all of the dots in the present Covid plandemic. As I see it, the wide range of social control measures, enforced by the bully boys of the state, were, and still are, totally disproportional to the severity of the disease, one which mainly affects vulnerable people such as the elderly. It has given the ruling elites power that they had only anticipated before, bringing down Trump with corrupt mail-in voting and other scams, enriching Big Tech, and destroying small business. This disease has been globalism in action. It is significant that it came from the CCP lab in Wuhan, with financial support from the West, to dig its own grave.
“In early 2020, when authorities in China implemented — overnight — a draconian “lockdown” of 100 million citizens in response to reports of a new virus, the rest of the world little suspected that in short order, the same unprecedented home incarceration policy, along with a host of other “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs) would be coming soon to a locality near them.
Never before have so-called NPIs — which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also euphemistically refers to as “community mitigation strategies” — so aggressively taken center stage during a declared disease outbreak.
In the U.S., the five most adopted state-level COVID NPIs have been state-of-emergency orders, bans or limits on social gatherings, school closures, business restrictions (notably, restaurants) and stay-at-home orders.
The daunting list of “top-down … and bottom-up” NPI measures also includes travel bans, curfews, social distancing, masks, chemical hygiene and remote working — all adding up to the behavior change equivalent of shock doctrine financial austerity.
Early in 2020, shocked citizens and social scientists predicted the widespread imposition of these “extreme measures of unknown effectiveness” would prove to have horrible and costly human and economic trade-offs.
To reinforce the warnings, some pointed to Korea’s experience with Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2015, when thousands of school closures, widespread event cancellations and large-scale restrictions on freedom of movement cost the Asian nation $10 billion and an economically damaging 41% drop in tourism.
Noting the disproportionately harsh socioeconomic impact for an illness for which “the numbers of infections and deaths … were smaller than the numbers of those from tuberculosis or seasonal influenza,” a preventive medicine expert who chronicled the Korean fiasco observed, “the people who undertake the costs incurred by movement restriction are not the same people who benefit.”
A similar observation can be brought to bear on the prevailing COVID situation. Eighteen months in, most of the world is still being subjected to an endless Groundhog Day loop of dystopian restrictions (with a virus hardly even needed as justification anymore), while global elites widen the wealth gap to obscene levels and steadily consolidate technocratic controls.
At this juncture, there is little doubt the Cassandras who had the foresight to call out COVID-related NPIs as a “colossal public health calamity” and totalitarian threat are being vindicated — in spades.
“Lockdowners” have not only managed to replace a century of “public-health wisdom … with an untested, top-down imposition on freedom and human rights,” wrote the American Institute for Economic Research in December 2020, but are openly working to establish “universal social and economic controls” as the new “orthodoxy.”
‘Fundamentally altered the child health landscape’
From all corners of the globe, the data flooding in indicate NPI policies have been particularly disastrous for children.
Consider a bombshell COVID preprint study published in August, in which Brown University researchers provide “suggestive” — and alarming — evidence that NPIs have “fundamentally altered the child health landscape” and are “significantly and negatively affecting infant and child development.”
Calling attention to the extensive ramifications for children of closing businesses, daycares, schools and playgrounds, as well as parents’ increased stress and children’s “reduced interaction, stimulation and creative play with other children,” the researchers reported children born during the pandemic are displaying significantly lower cognitive performance (verbal, motor and overall) compared to children born pre-pandemic.
The researchers’ IQ testing of pandemic babies produced an average score of around 78, versus a mean IQ score that, over the past decade, hovered around 100.
The study’s lead author characterized the findings as “not subtle by any stretch.”
Comments