World Health Organization Urges Halt to Lockdowns

Well, what do you know? The World Health Organization has urged world leaders, including those in the United States, to stop using lockdowns as the primary control method against the spread of the China Virus, aka, the novel coronavirus or Covid-19.

This is a dramatic turnaround by the W.H.O. and I wonder how the mainstream media will cover it. I suspect it will not get much coverage because the organization’s new position on lockdowns does not comport with the media narrative.

But wait a minute. Don’t media mavens all say we must follow the science? Do what the medical experts tell us to do?

What’s going on?

What’s going on is that after watching one nation after another force citizens and businesses into lockdown mode, scientists are seeing that that strategy is having deleterious effects on the mental and physical well-being of people.

“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” David Nabarro, the WTO’s special envoy on COVID-19, said in an interview aired October 8. “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”

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Just what is “herd immunity?”

Herd immunity, or community immunity, is when a large part of the population of an area is immune to a specific disease. If enough people are resistant to the cause of a disease, such as a virus or bacteria, it has nowhere to go.

While not every single individual may be immune, the group as a whole has protection. This is because there are fewer high-risk people overall. The infection rates drop, and the disease peters out. Herd immunity protects at-risk populations. These include babies and those whose immune systems are weak and can’t get resistance on their own.

As the W.H.O. says, there are two ways for nations and societies to achieve herd immunity and resistance.

You can develop resistance naturally. When your body is exposed to a virus or bacteria, it makes antibodies to fight off the infection. When you recover, your body keeps these antibodies. Your body will defend against another infection. This is what stopped the Zika virus outbreak in Brazil. Two years after the outbreak began, 63% of the population had had exposure to the virus. Researchers think the community reached the right level for herd immunity.

Vaccines can also build resistance. They make your body think a virus or bacteria has infected it. You don’t get sick, but your immune system still makes protective antibodies. The next time your body meets that bacteria or virus, it’s ready to fight it off. This is what stopped polio in the United States.

Will the United States stop the lockdown madness and begin reopening?

I doubt it. Because once the lockdowns end and the country reopens there will be a spike in cases and that will cause politicians and others to panic and push for another lockdown instead of allowing the virus to die out by itself.

Experts say for that to happen in the United States, 50 to 67 percent of the population would need to be resistant before herd immunity kicks in and the infection rates drop.

To its credit, that’s what the W.H.O. now believes and that’s the strategy that sane nations like Sweden have adopted.

I’m not holding my breath that American politicians and health professionals will do the same.