Covid “Cure” Really Was Worse Than the Disease

by Andy Caldwell

The world is being warned that the next pandemic will be 100 times more deadly that the corona virus. That begs the question, just how deadly was the corona virus as compared to the health impacts of the forced lockdown of our society and economy that accompanied the virus? Well, does anybody remember the “Keystone Kops”? They exemplified an individual or a group that appears extremely incompetent while exhibiting an uncommon amount of energy in the pursuit of failure. That is, as a few of us declared during the pandemic, the cure was worse than the disease.

Unfortunately, however, it is easier to fool someone than to convince them they have been fooled. Nonetheless, a comprehensive new retrospective on the virus lockdown has been published by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP), a renowned think tank whose mission is to educate policy makers and the public about government policies that have been proven, in practice, to maximize economic growth and equitable prosperity in America and around the world. The organization’s leaders are outstanding economists Steve Forbes, Art Laffer, and Stephen Moore. The report is authored by Dr. Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution, economist Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins University, Professor of Economics Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago, and Phil Kerpen, president of CTUP. 

The report is a comprehensive study of the academic evidence from dozens of peer-reviewed studies that conclude that the ordered shutdown of our schools, churches, and businesses brought little health benefit while imposing multi-trillions of dollars of long-term societal costs. These costs include a $6 trillion increase in government debt, hundreds of thousands of business bankruptcies, one to two years of lost schooling for young children, tens of millions of Americans out of work, and hundreds of thousands of excess deaths from loneliness, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, and delayed hospital care, in part, due to forced social isolation. These costs exceeded by multiple times any health benefits from mandates and lockdowns.

Moreover, in a comparison of death rates between various states in our union who varied in their degree of implementing lockdowns, along with Sweden that never did implement a lockdown, there was no difference in death rates, except that Sweden had the lowest rates of all-cause excess deaths. That is, there is a certain percentage of the world’s population that dies every year from various causes, including diseases and accidents. During the Covid lockdown, excess deaths (those deaths which exceed the normal death rate) skyrocketed in those countries that imposed the severest lockdowns.

Lessons Learned via the Retrospective

Lesson #1) Leaders should calm public fears, not stoke them. As I wrote at the time, we needed to stop yelling pandemic in a crowded theater. Non-Covid excess deaths from lockdowns and societal panic are estimated at about 100,000 per year in the United States and zero in Sweden. How could that be? Well, as I wrote during the lockdown, critical health care screenings, such as preventive cancer screenings, were cancelled or postponed, resulting in irreversible impacts, up to and including death.                                 

Lesson #2) Lockdowns do not work to substantially reduce deaths or stop viral circulation. This had to do with the fact that most of the lockdown measures were realized after the hospitalizations had peaked. They were timed to claim credit for declining waves, but rarely had any discernable causal impact. 

Lesson #3) The lockdowns and social isolation had negative consequences that far outweighed benefits. According to World Bank, “Mobility restrictions, lockdowns, and other public measures produced the largest global economic crisis in more than a century.” Another peer-reviewed study demonstrated that Sweden combined low excess death rates with relatively small economic costs because they trusted their population to take voluntary measures to reduce social interactions rather than inducing panic.

To be continued.