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--- lockdowns_as_public_health_policy [2022/08/16 00:34]
pamela
+++ lockdowns_as_public_health_policy [2022/10/29 16:59] (current)
pamela [Lockdowns: The Great Gaslighting]
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 "The timing of such measures is crucial," say the Sage minutes. "Delaying until 2022 would greatly reduce the effectiveness of such interventions and make it less likely that these would prevent considerable pressure on health and care settings." ((https://web.archive.org/web/20211218001357/https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59707252))
+==== Lockdowns: The Great Gaslighting ====
+{{ ::lockdown_playground.png?400|}}
+The lockdowns of 2020 were very real. And few opposed them.
+Substack - The New Normal - Michael P Senger - October 28, 2022
+More than two years since the lockdowns of 2020, the political mainstream, particularly on the left, is just beginning to realize that the response to Covid was an unprecedented catastrophe.
+But that realization hasn’t taken the form of a mea culpa. Far from it. On the contrary, in order to see that reality is starting to dawn on the mainstream left, one must read between the lines of how their narrative on the response to Covid has evolved over the past two years.
+The narrative now goes something like this; Lockdowns never really happened, because governments never actually locked people in their homes; but if there were lockdowns, then they saved millions of lives and would have saved even more if only they’d been stricter; but if there were any collateral damage, then that damage was an inevitable consequence of the fear from the virus independent of the lockdowns; and even when things were shut down, the rules weren’t very strict; but even when the rules were strict, we didn’t really support them.
+Put simply, the prevailing narrative of the mainstream left is that any upside from the response to Covid is attributable to the state-ordered closures and mandates that they supported, while any downside was an inevitable consequence of the virus independent of any state-ordered closures and mandates which never happened and which anyway they never supported. Got it? Good.
+As former UN Assistant Secretary-General [[:Ramesh Thakur]] has documented in meticulous detail, the harms that lockdowns would cause were all well-known and reported when they were first adopted as policy in early 2020. These included accurate estimates of deaths due to delayed medical operations, a mental health crisis, drug overdoses, an economic recession, global poverty and hunger. In March 2020, the Dutch government commissioned a cost-benefit analysis concluding that the health damage from lockdowns—let alone the economic damage—would be six times greater than the benefit.
+Yet regardless, for reasons we’re still only beginning to understand, key officials, media entities, billionaires and international organizations advocated the broad imposition of these unprecedented, devastating policies from the earliest possible date. The resulting scenes were horrific and dystopian.((https://michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/lockdowns-the-great-gaslighting))