A study carried out by the Heartland Institute evaluated the efficacy of lockdown procedures, defined as government-imposed restrictions on activities such as shutdowns of schools and facilities, travel prohibitions and crowd control restrictions.
After poring over nearly 19,000 studies, they analyzed smaller groups of studies in three categories and found that lockdowns have had little to no effect when it comes to COVID-19 mortality. Moreover, they found that relative to similar methods of controlling the virus that were suggested but ultimately not imposed, severe lockdowns in the U.S. and Europe only reduced mortality by 0.2 percent.
The report concluded: “Lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”
Lockdowns are also unpopular with the public. Some of the states with the strongest COVID-19 measures will see their governors up for reelection this year, and some may be changing their attitudes in response to the shifts in public opinion about these limits. A poll carried out on January 31 by Monmouth University found that 70 percent of people surveyed agreed with the idea that “it’s time we accept that Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives.”
We’re seeing a huge turnaround when it comes to mask mandates, with several states, counties and towns scrapping mask laws recently and many others planning to do so in the near future. Several European countries are also dropping their masking requirements.
The news comes at a time when people in many areas had been told by their local authorities that masks would be needed for the foreseeable future. One big mask advocate, Dr. Leana Wen of CNN, has also done an about-face recently, going from supporting the idea of requiring people to wear N95-style masks at Christmastime to saying that schools should drop mask regulations.
She said: “Case counts are declining, also the science has changed,” while adding that vaccinating younger children has helped the situation, in her view.
Yet another study has shown that natural resistance outperforms the immunity to the virus conferred by COVID-19 vaccines. A paper published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that natural immunity to the virus is 2.8 times more useful when it comes to keeping people out of the hospital, and it’s between 3.3 and 4.7 percent more helpful in preventing reinfection than getting jabbed.
The study was printed in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published last month. Of course, even after finding that natural immunity was superior to vaccination, the authors still encouraged people to get the jab.
Pandemic Blunder author Joel Hirschhorn said: “The refusal by U.S. government public health agencies to formally give credit to people with natural immunity obtained from prior COVID infection made no sense. The only apparent motivation was to NOT give those people a way out of getting experimental COVID vaccines and to NOT give them a way out of obeying all kinds of mandates. It has nothing to do with ‘following the science.'”
In the early days of the pandemic, there was a lot of fear. Little was known about the disease, and some governments felt that an extreme and swift reaction may help get the virus under control. Now, however, we know that not only do vaccine and mask mandates and lockdowns not do as much to limit the spread of the disease as hoped, but they also come with some very serious physical and mental side effects. Although there are lots of political reasons for these mandates, one can only hope that there will be some major shifts in policies as the evidence that these measures are not worth the risks grows too strong to ignore.
Sources for this article include: