Mark Woodhouse lockdowns were a terrible mistake
Wed 1:44 pm +01:00, 26 Aug 2020We’ll see if any American so-called experts admit their mistake — there’s certainly no media pressure forcing them to, that’s for sure — but here’s what just happened in the UK.
Mark Woolhouse is a professor of infectious disease epidemiology and a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviors that advises the government.
And he’s now saying the lockdowns were a terrible mistake.
“At the time I agreed with lockdown as a short-term emergency response because we couldn’t think of anything better to do,” he confesses. It was a “panic measure.”
He now calls it a “monumental mistake”:
“I believe history will say trying to control COVID-19 through lockdown was a monumental mistake on a global scale. The cure was worse than the disease.” He added: “I suspect right now more people are being harmed by the collateral effects of lockdown than by Covid-19.”
This is why we can’t listen exclusively to “public health officials,” none of whom evaluate tradeoffs. They are convinced that whatever happens to be their primary or exclusive concern at the time should also be everyone else’s primary or exclusive concern, and they set policy as if this is simply uncontroversial.
(It’s not even clear whether the policies they advocate even help in the first place, but for the sake of argument we’ll leave that aside.)
But there are significant side effects to the massive social engineering that the white coats and clipboards have imposed on society, whether those white coats deign to acknowledge them or not.
“This,” says Woolhouse, “is why we need a broader range of people on the government advisory board SAGE [Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies] with equal input from economists to assess the damage to incomes, jobs and livelihoods, educationalists to assess the damage to children and mental health specialists to assess levels of depression and anxiety especially among younger adults, as well as psychologists to assess the effects of not being able to go to the theatre or a football match.”
And here’s what he thinks about the strategy of some American governors: “I would not dignify waiting for a vaccine with the term ‘strategy.'”
And then, finally:
“I never want to see national lockdown again. It was always a temporary measure that simply delayed the stage of the epidemic we see now. It was never going to change anything fundamentally, however low we drove down the number of cases, and now we know more about the virus and how to track it we should not be in this position again.
“We absolutely should never return to a position where children cannot play or go to school.
“I believe the harm lockdown is doing to our education, health care access, and broader aspects of our economy and society will turn out to be at least as great as the harm done by COVID-19.”
Now that’s an admission.
He adds that there was never any good reason to close the schools. I agree with that from a public health standpoint, but from an ideological standpoint it’s in the schools where the naive confidence in the Establishnment and its crazy demands and policies is born.
Most people leave the government’s schools with a serious case of what I call educational malpractice.
If this is you, and you’d like to learn the history and economics they didn’t teach you, well, my dashboard university is just the thing:
http://www.LibertyClassroom.com
Tom Woods
