Shared from nominister.wordpress.com https://nominister.wordpress.com/2021/10/06/lockdowns-a-nightmare-of-imagination/

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the twin towers in the USA in 2001, various experts tried to imagine what form future terrorist attacks might take, and one of the obvious ones was bio-warfare; the introduction of a lethal disease like Ebola. Even then they were a little behind, in that Tom Clancy had already played out that scenario in his 1996 book Executive Orders:

One of the outcomes of this thinking was– the lockdown of the entire society.

Drs. Hatchett and Mecher had proposed that Americans in some places might have to turn back to an approach, self-isolation, first widely employed in the Middle Ages.

How that idea — born out of a request by President George W. Bush to ensure the nation was better prepared for the next contagious disease outbreak — became the heart of the national playbook for responding to a pandemic is one of the untold stories of the coronavirus crisis.

Dr Mecher was an intensive care doctor with no previous expertise in pandemics and DR Hatchett an oncologist (cancer specialist). You’ll love the help they got – from a 14 year old girl:

Laura, with some guidance from her dad, devised a computer simulation that showed how people – family members, co-workers, students in schools, people in social situations – interact. What she discovered was that school kids come in contact with about 140 people a day, more than any other group. Based on that finding, her program showed that in a hypothetical town of 10,000 people, 5,000 would be infected during a pandemic if no measures were taken, but only 500 would be infected if the schools were closed.

She got her name on the CDC (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention) 2006 paper, Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza, which is very cool, but the primary authors were not experts in immunology or epidemiology. 

This was quickly followed by a 2007 CDC paper, Community Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Mitigation in the United States.

Actual epidemiologists (specialists in diseases)  were appalled. None more so than Donald Henderson, a US epidemiologist who had capped his career by training for two years at the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the Communicable Disease Center, before moving to Geneva to head the WHO’s smallpox division. In short, he was one of the world’s leading experts in this area. Together with co-authors  Thomas V.Inglesby, epidemiologist Jennifer B. Nuzzo, and physician Tara O’Toole he produced a paper: Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza. You can read the full version at the link, but here’s the key summary:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.

Lockdown was not even a real-world epidemiological idea in the first place and showed no actual knowledge of viruses and disease mitigation.

It was originally the combination of Bush-era security experts and a high-school computer-based model that had nothing at all to do with real life, real science, or real medicine. So how is that people like Henderson and other highly trained and experienced experts on epidemics did not prevail in the argument.

The [Bush] administration ultimately sided with the proponents of social distancing and shutdowns — though their victory was little noticed outside of public health circles. Their policy would become the basis for government planning and would be used extensively in simulations used to prepare for pandemics, and in a limited way in 2009 during an outbreak of the influenza called H1N1. Then the coronavirus came, and the plan was put to work across the country for the first time.

Some years later, a reporter would track down one of the authors of the 2007 paper, Rajeev Venkayya, who made the incredible response that, “lockdowns and shelter-in-place were not part of the recommendations.”

Even in 2020, there was fightback from expert epidemiologists, starting with John Ioannidis at Stanford Medical School, who published an article, “A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data.”, in which he argued that while a short-term lockdown might make sense, extended lockdowns could prove worse than the disease, and scientists needed to do more intensive testing to determine the risk.

Another Stanford expert, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, joined with Ioannidis on research and papers and in March this year said that:

“I stand behind my comment that the lockdowns are the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years. We will be counting the catastrophic health and psychological harms, imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth, for a generation… At the same time, they have not served to control the epidemic in the places where they have been most vigorously imposed. In the US, they have – at best – protected the “non-essential” class from COVID, while exposing the essential working class to the disease. The lockdowns are trickle down epidemiology.”

But incredibly these experts were no longer just overruled. They were viciously attacked, as were many others, as this article notes:

[The Ioannidis 2020] article offered common-sense advice from one of the world’s most frequently cited authorities on the credibility of medical research, but it provoked a furious backlash on Twitter from scientists and journalists.
…
“Scientists whom I respect started acting like warriors who had to subvert the enemy,” he says. “Every paper I’ve written has errors—I’m a scientist, not the pope—but the main conclusions of this one were correct and have withstood the criticism.”
…

Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins with 350 publications to his name, submitted a critique of lockdowns to more than ten journals and finally gave up—“the first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere,”

Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard, had a similar experience with his article, early in the pandemic, arguing that resources should be focused on protecting the elderly…. It was a tragically accurate prophecy from one of the leading experts on infectious disease, but Kulldorff couldn’t find a scientific journal or media outlet to accept the article, so he ended up posting it on his own LinkedIn page. “There’s always a certain amount of herd thinking in science,” Kulldorff says, “but I’ve never seen it reach this level. Most of the epidemiologists and other scientists I’ve spoken to in private are against lockdowns, but they’re afraid to speak up.”

Perhaps all these people are fringe nutters? Kulldorff would eventually join with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford to produce the Great Barrington Declaration. In it they urged officials to shield the elderly by doing more tests of the staff at nursing homes and hospitals, while reopening business and schools for younger people, which would ultimately protect the vulnerable as herd immunity grew among the low-risk population.

They managed to attract attention but not the kind they hoped for. Though tens of thousands of other scientists and doctors went on to sign the declaration, the press caricatured it as a deadly “let it rip” strategy and an “ethical nightmare” from “Covid deniers” and “agents of misinformation.” Google initially shadow-banned it so that the first page of search results for “Great Barrington Declaration” showed only criticism of it (like an article calling it “the work of a climate denial network”) but not the declaration itself. Facebook shut down the scientists’ page for a week for violating unspecified “community standards.”

The traditional strategy for dealing with pandemics was to isolate the infected and protect the most vulnerable, just as Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists recommended. The CDC’s pre-pandemic planning scenarios didn’t recommend extended school closures or any shutdown of businesses even during a plague as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu.

You can read an extensive list of studies on the failure of lockdowns around the world as of April 21, 2021, here. The Spiked site has a list of nations, lockdowns and their failures. New Zealand is not there yet, but as recent decisions have shown, what happened here in 2020 with the L4 lockdown reducing cases to zero, can only be described as a fluke, and it has failed at its second attempt, just like everywhere else.

As the pandemic fades and the years pass, the arguments over lockdowns will be lengthy and intense, as they should be. But this method should never be used again.