Let’s Not Enshrine the Covid Debacle in a Treaty

by Andy Caldwell

President Biden is considering signing a “pandemic treaty” that will violate the sovereignty of all Americans. According to the Heritage Foundation, the treaty would empower the World Health Organization (WHO) to, among other things, require nations to battle “misinformation” and “disinformation” relating to pandemics. Specifically, parties to the treaty must “combat false, misleading, disinformation or misinformation, including through effective international collaboration.” The treaty would also seek to insure, in the name of equity, that so-called rich countries could not “hoard” effective treatments.

Regardless, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP), issued a report (based on peer-reviewed studies) 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 highlighted the failures of the covid emergency protocols which was exacerbated by WHO, which was and still is controlled by China.  Accordingly, the CTUP report would be declared illegal, by any such pandemic treaty, because it exposes wrongdoing and junk science (see #7 below!). 

The first three lessons learned in the retrospect were highlighted in my column last week. They included the first three lessons: Leaders should calm public fears, not stoke them; lockdowns do not work to substantially reduce deaths or stop viral circulation; and lockdowns and social isolation have negative consequences that far outweigh benefits.

Lesson #4)

Government should not pay people more than their regular income not to work.  Congress authorized $600 per week unemployment bonuses early in the pandemic, despite warnings that the consequences would be substantial and prolonged unemployment and associated economic under performance.  Another example? California doled out upwards of $30 billion in unemployment benefits to people who did not qualify to receive them.

Lesson #5)

Shutting down schools was a major policy mistake with tragic effects on children, especially the poor. The harms to children of closing in-person schooling are dramatic and irrefutable. The shutdowns caused serious harm to children, including poor learning, school drop-out, social isolation, mental illness, drug abuse, suicidal ideation, and 300,000 cases of child abuse unreported in spring 2020.  The original round of global school closures is estimated by the United Nations to result in $17 trillion in lost lifetime earnings for students, equal to about 14 percent of current world GDP.

Lesson #6)

Masks were of little or no value and possibly harmful. There was no high-quality evidence in support of community masking for respiratory viruses in spring 2020 and in fact, the randomized clinical trials regarding masking for influenza were found to be ineffective for protecting the wearer and preventing spread. Mask mandates only served to amplify fear by creating the irrational belief that an unmasked face prevented a threat, causing conflict and division among citizens, and giving high-risk people the mistaken impression that masks were protective, potentially resulting in some people risking exposure who otherwise may not have.

Lesson #7)

Government should not suppress dissent or police the boundaries of science. A poisonous interplay between America’s media, big tech, and the academic science and public health community has severely harmed the public. Along with censorship and character smears of voices that dissented from the accepted covid narrative, the fact remains the National Institutes of Health failed to run high-quality trials of repurposed drugs and non-pharmaceutical interventions.

Lesson #8 and #9)

Hospitals were underutilized during covid, and we failed to focus our protection efforts on the most vulnerable. This has to do with the canceling of important medical procedures for serious conditions by both providers and patients.

The conclusion? Lockdowns, school closures, and mandates were catastrophic errors, pushed with remarkable fervor by public health authorities at all levels thereby creating lost faith by the public in our health institutions. Let’s not make that mistake again.

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