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By TBL staff,
“You know all those lockdowns you were doing? You know, the ones that caused all that harm and suffering? Well, relax – we’ve changed our minds …”
(Please note we don’t subscribe to the propagandistic ‘Chinese Communist Party’ virus mantra. The issue of virus origins is much more complicated than that.)
The WHO could already see what was happening as a result of the lockdowns globally. Poverty-as-a-result-of-lockdown (not to mention the destruction of our civil liberties) has been evident for several months. Independent economists like Prof. Michel Chossudovsky have been saying this for some time. Why wait until now?
We remind readers of a similar piece we published last Friday titled Did The WHO Just (Accidentally) Confirm COVID Is No More Dangerous Than Flu? Their own statistics confirm that the IFR (infection fatality rate) is no different to that of an average flu season. You just have to wade through a lot of fear mongering, self’-justifying blah blah to find this information and then do your own calculations. Obfuscation by design.
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WHO Flip-Flops: Urges World Leaders To Stop Using Lockdowns To Fight COVID Contagion
In a stunning rebuke of the “science” and the “doctors” and leftist politicians and career bureaucrats in the US and across much of The West, The Epoch Times’ Evan Pentchoukov reports that The World Health Organization’s special envoy on COVID-19 has urged world leaders to stop using lockdowns as the primary control method against the spread of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.
“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” David Nabarro told The Spectator in an interview aired on Oct. 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.”
[ZH: How long before this video is removed by Twitter?]
Nabarro pointed to the collateral damage that lockdowns are having worldwide, especially among poorer populations.
“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry, for example in the Caribbean or in the Pacific, because people aren’t taking their holidays. Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world because their markets have got dented. Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. Seems that we may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents, in poor families, are not able to afford it,” Nabarro said.
“This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe actually,” he added. “And so we really do appeal to all world leaders: Stop using lockdown as your primary control method, develop better systems for doing it, work together and learn from each other, but remember – lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.”
WATCH: Dr David Nabarro, the WHO's Special Envoy on Covid-19, tells Andrew Neil: 'We really do appeal to all world leaders: stop using lockdown as your primary control method'. Watch the full interview here: https://t.co/XLdaedsKVS #SpectatorTV @afneil | @davidnabarro pic.twitter.com/1M4xf3VnXQ
— The Spectator (@spectator) October 9, 2020
Nabarro isn’t the only scientist opposing lockdowns.
A number of medical or public health scientists and medical practitioners have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which states that “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”
The signatories include: “Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University and a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.”
“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk,” the declaration states.
With few exceptions, world leaders followed in the footsteps of the Chinese communist regime when responding to the outbreak of the virus, imposing unprecedented lockdowns. Sweden, which did not impose a lockdown, did not experience an adverse outcome compared to some locales and nations that did. (ER: Neither did Belarus, famously.)
In the United States, President Donald Trump delegated the decisions on lockdown measures to the governors of individual states, but has pushed for the economy to be reopened, and lockdowns lifted.
As William Anderson recently wrote for The Mises Institute, lockdowns only serve the progressive political class…
We have to understand that the political classes and their media have a vested interest in the lockdown status quo, and that includes regular provision of what only can be called disinformation. The mainstream media this past summer dutifully reported a highly questionable (I use that term charitably) report that the Sturgis Bike Rally in South Dakota led to more than a quarter million covid infections and more than $12 billion of medical costs. It should have been obvious on its face that the report was deeply flawed, yet in their desire to fuel the covid-is-killing-us narrative, journalists took this too-good-to-be-true story and ran with it.
As for politicians, the covid crisis has been a godsend for those governmental executives and bureaucrats who see constitutional restrictions that limit their authority as mere obstacles to be easily swept away. Governors such as Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Andrew Cuomo of New York, Gavin Newsom of California, and Tom Wolfe of Pennsylvania have received adoring coverage in the media for seizing and employing dictatorial powers, Whitmer even unilaterally deciding that the sale of garden seeds in stores was illegal. Cuomo’s decision to force the housing of covid-19 patients in nursing homes led to the deaths of thousands of people, yet his national media coverage is uniformly positive.
Contrast the affirmative news coverage of Cuomo with the barrage of media attacks on Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Noem has emphasized personal responsibility and did not attempt mass closures of schools and businesses in the state, and the mainstream media erupted with fury. That South Dakota has come through this pandemic relatively well does not matter with the media, as the only acceptable action (to mainstream and elite journalists) in response to covid is for governors to single-handedly seize power and lock down their citizens.
Keep in mind that the real losses that Americans suffered because of the heavy-handed governmental response to the covid outbreak are permanent. As Robert Higgs so eloquently pointed out in Crisis and Leviathan, governments often create crises or, at the very least, they manipulate events such as natural disasters and use them as opportunities to expand governmental powers. Even after the crises end, governments keep some of their newly self-granted powers—and most people raise little or no concern even when government has curtailed more of their freedoms.
Presumably, this means Joe Biden will now be pushing for lockdowns to be lifted across all blue states?… because he is “listening to the scientists”?
“I would shut it down. I would listen to the scientists.”
Joe Biden tells @DavidMuir in an exclusive interview that as president, he would shut the country down to stop the spread of COVID-19 if the move was recommended by scientists. https://t.co/2A9r07d7EC pic.twitter.com/Ib99cshlSI
— ABC News (@ABC) August 21, 2020
We wonder how long it will be before WHO also urges the end of mask-wearing?
In the end, as Anderson concluded, the only way that the political classes can “make us safe” is for us to do what is necessary to make ourselves safe, or as relatively safe as possible. When a virus is afoot—as is the case most of the time—we do what we can to avoid it and do what we can to treat it. In other words, we appeal to real medical science, not what the political and media classes have cooked up for us.
Original article
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Coronavirus: WHO backflips on virus stance by condemning lockdowns
Lockdowns have been used to control the coronavirus around the world, plunging millions of lives into chaos. Now the WHO has changed its mind.
ALEX TURNER COHEN
The World Health Organisation has backflipped on its original COVID-19 stance after calling for world leaders to stop locking down their countries and economies.
Dr. David Nabarro from the WHO appealed to world leaders yesterday, telling them to stop “using lockdowns as your primary control method” of the coronavirus.
He also claimed that the only thing lockdowns achieved was poverty – with no mention of the potential lives saved.
“Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer,” he said.
Dr. David Nabarro from the WHO appealed to world leaders yesterday, telling them to stop “using lockdowns as your primary control method”. Source:Twitter
“We in the World Health Organisation do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Dr Nabarro told The Spectator.
“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
Dr Nabarro’s main criticism of lockdowns involved the global impact, explaining how poorer economies that had been indirectly affected.
“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry in the Caribbean, for example, or in the Pacific because people aren’t taking their holidays,” he said.
“Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. … Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.”
Melbourne’s lockdown has been hailed as one of the strictest and longest in the world. In Spain’s lockdown in March, people weren’t allowed to leave the house unless it was to walk their pet. In China, authorities welded doors shut to stop people from leaving their homes. The WHO thinks these steps were largely unnecessary.
Instead, Dr Nabarro is advocating for a new approach to containing the virus.
“And so, we really do appeal to all world leaders: stop using lockdown as your primary control method. Develop better systems for doing it. Work together and learn from each other.”
The WHO’s criticism of lockdowns involved the global impact, explaining how poorer economies that had been indirectly affected. Picture: Christopher Black/AFPSource:AFP
His message is timely. In a world first, a number of health experts from all over the world came together calling for an end to coronavirus lockdowns earlier this week.
They created a petition, called the Great Barrington Declaration, which said that lockdowns were doing “irreparable damage.”
“As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection,” read the petition.
“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”
The petition has had 12,000 signatures so far.
It was authored by Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University.
When asked about the petition, Dr Nabarro had only good things to say. “Really important point by Professor Gupta,” he said.
Original article
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Published to The Liberty Beacon from EuropeReloaded.com
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Many people want to rely on “science” as if it cannot be manipulated to align with an end result.
They have been paying off scientists and manipulating science for a long time.
My first question is why would anyone Trust the WHO or the UN?
Who would trust the FDA, the CDC or any other 3 letter agency ?
Not me…
They never showed us any science to even back up their bogus claims that Masks work, Lock downs work Or even social distancing works but many will fight, attack and do anything to make other comply just like they do.
Its truly sad how easily people will give up their rights based on fear.
That’s how they do it folks, remember 9/11?
We are still living with the patriot act because its for our own safety.
Thank you for this post, Edward! Here’s the math, done by the WHO:
“The global population is roughly 7.8 billion people; if 10% have been infected, that is 780 million cases. The global death toll currently attributed to Sars-Cov-2 infections is 1,061,539”.
That’s an infection fatality rate of roughly or 0.14%. Right in line with seasonal flu and the predictions of many experts from all around the world. 0.14% is over 24 times LOWER than the WHO’s “provisional figure” of 3.4% back in March. This figure was used in the models which were used to justify lockdowns and other draconian policies.
The WHO math and decisions based on that math seem to be in sync with the math of Pierre Capel, a Dutch emeritus professor, who explains:
(Quote) “The World Health Organisation WHO has taken two steps and the first step was to change the pandemic definition in such a way that you use a calculation model, without too much difficulty, to claim something that could lead to a pandemic. That’s not very convenient, well, let’s see…..
But the biggest mistake is that in the days when they knew very little about COVID or Corona, other than that it was very infectious, they put it on List A. What is List A? List A are diseases that someone who gets it, has a 50 to 80% chance of dying. That’s like the plague, smallpox, Ebola, anthrax. And there among these heavy guys they put Corona, which has an extraordinarily low death rate and which was not even known at the time.
But because of that combination of being the most deadly virus of all time, plus the easing of the pandemic, that’s been declared a pandemic.
And what they have done is, also with the regulations, where the one and a half meters, in one country it is 1 meter, in the other it is 2 meters, we have chosen the middle of the road nicely, with one and a half, the lockdown and everything. Now let’s go see what’s really going on. So we only have measures but what are they based on? What I wanted to talk about today is the one and a half meters, the infectiousness, the droplets and the aerosols. What do we see?
What it says is that the WHO based its findings on research from the 1930s, by William Wells, and it has emerged that that one and a half metres, i.e. the infection via coughed-out large droplets that this is the source of infection and that if only distance was kept, with one and a half metres, then that was fine.
They have adopted and used this in a blatant way, but the real article says exactly the opposite. So the WHO based that one and a half meters on something that claims exactly the opposite. Here’s the cover from 1955 and here’s a text, and I’m going to look at it for a moment, that influenza virus, they did it with that, but also with tuberculosis, if it was inhaled as fine nuclei or aerosols, that was many, many times more infectious, than the big droplets” (end of quote Pierre Capel)
Here’s the link to his presentation. The English transcript is left in 2 comments of mine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plCeaKuJxq0
I don’t know if it makes a difference when push comes to shove, but at least, Dr David Nabarro, has a more friendly vibe about him, compared to some others who are working within the WHO. Although his face shows a pained expression, at times.
The Netherlands is in almost lockdown again, after the number of cases is rising alarmingly. The new rules, since Oct. 13, will apply for 2 weeks. The death rate is low, but positive diagnoses are soaring since testing has intensified. ( is it any wonder?)
Restaurants and cafe’s had to close at 22 pm last night, it may mean permanent closure to a number of them. Most shops and all public places request wearing facemasks. Shop owners wear facemasks all working hours. Food markets are allowed, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Sport activity is allowed with a minimum of 4 participants.
Today I walked through the centre of town, to see how the new rules affect it. The mood felt apprehensive, and many people wore facemasks while walking outdoors. Many showed a kind of “guilty schoolkids with hunched shoulders” body language and several passers-by were making more efforts to keep 1,5 meters distance.
There’s more surveillance now, by personnel in luminous yellow or orange costumes, walking around in pairs. Plus police-cars driving through neighbourhoods, keeping an eye on everything.
The government mentioned, yesterday evening, that the Dutch population ignored the safety measures, that were proposed as recommendations. The most populated areas, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Utrecht show scenes of crowded places where social distancing is neglected. In the Dutch government, there seems to be an attitude of “laisser faire” allowing citizens the freedom to exercise their right to freedom.
For example, in Utrecht, around June last summer, a large group of football-supporters announced a protest mars through the centre of town. The town-council gave permission and told all shopkeepers to close their shops for the entire afternoon, that day of protest. Hooligans could possibly start with gang-destruction. Do you see the insanity of this lenient attitude? (and I expected the use of typical Dutch common sense, during my 5 years in Britain, ha!)
The elderly in their care homes will be isolated for a while, as much as those living alone in their homes. In the meantime, we’ve managed to set up telephone lines, and there are many initiatives of people, who start cooking in their private kitchen, offering a dinner-service for neighbours and elderly who are alone at home,
I’ve had great conversations with 2 shopowners today, about this subject, who have seen a few things in their lives, and who look a little deeper in what life reveals to them.
As long as quarantine isn’t in the picture, I’ll be okay with the freedom to walk and cycle.