The Cassandras Were Right: The ‘Cure’ for COVID — a Global Takedown of the 99% — Has Proven Far Worse Than the Disease

By  Children’s Health Defense Team

Early in 2020, shocked citizens and social scientists predicted the widespread imposition of extreme “non-pharmaceutical interventions” in response to COVID would prove to have horrible and costly human and economic trade-offs — turns out they were right.

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.

Crash-and-burn of jobs and small businesses

A November 2020 report by the University of Southern California (USC) that examined the impact of mandatory closures and “partial reopenings” found those two NPI variables were “the most influential factor in the economy’s decline.”

USC predicted the two drastic policy measures “could result in a 22% loss of U.S. GDP in just one year and an even greater loss … over two years” — amounting to as much as $4.8 trillion in lost GDP.

Job loss and unemployment are an obvious source of parental stress with direct and trickle-down effects on children.

Thanks to the NPI-facilitated COVID recession, job losses during COVID-19 have had the distinction of being the “deepest ever” and the “most abrupt” compared to past recessions, as well as hitting low-wage workers the hardest.

Although economists reported, as of August 2020, recovery of half of the lost jobs, the most economically vulnerable were far less likely to have regained employment — bad news for children and families already living on the edge.

Even with some job recovery, overall job losses remained in excess of the peak recorded during the 2007–2009 Great Recession.

Small businesses that have the well-deserved reputation of being the “backbone” or “lifeblood” of the American economy have suffered acutely under capricious NPIs. Under current or threatened lockdowns, one analysis of small business hardship concluded, “it is hard for small businesses to find certainty in their operations or finances.”

In the U.S., the impact on restaurants and minority-led businesses has been particularly ferocious.

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Hungry times

Public health researchers have long recognized that “food, nutrition, health and socio-economic outcomes are intimately inter-linked.”

In 2019, U.S. food insecurity (defined as “a lack of consistent access to enough food for every person in a household to live an active, healthy life”), though still a problem for many, was at its lowest level in more than 20 years.

However, the economic fallout from policymakers’ stay-at-home orders and closure of “non-essential” businesses and schools (including stalled school breakfast and lunch programs) has “upended” that trend.

The organization Feeding America estimates one in eight Americans — and one in six children, as well as one in five black Americans — could experience food insecurity in 2021.

An estimated one in five children went hungry in 2020. Malnutrition in early life can have long-lasting effects on health later in life.

[…]

Data on fatal and nonfatal drug overdoses are starting to reflect the downward mental health trend. For example:

Between May 2019 and May 2020, CDC reported “the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded in a 12-month period,” with the most deaths recorded between March and May 2020.In related CDC research on overdoses involving prescription benzodiazepines (prescribed for anxiety and insomnia) and illicit “benzos,” overdose deaths increased 21.8% and 519.6%, respectively.More than half (53.8%) of fatal overdoses from illicit benzos and nearly a third (30.7%) of deaths from prescription benzos were in youth aged 15-34 years.Almost all the deaths also involved opioids, and many involved illicitly manufactured fentanyls. Non-prescription fentanyl use increased by 35% from mid-March to mid-May 2020.

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Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/global-non-pharmaceutical-interventions-covid-human-economic-trade-offs/