Why Lockdowns Don’t Work and Hurt the Most Vulnerable
- December 30, 2020
Story at-a-glance
- Lockdowns have wrought unimaginable hardship, suffering and death; 163,735 U.S. businesses had closed their doors as of August 31, 2020, and of those, 60% — a total of 97,966 businesses — were permanent closures. Meanwhile, the collective wealth of 651 billionaires in the U.S. rose by more than 36%
- An April 2020 report estimated 3 million Britons had gone without food at some point in the previous three weeks. An estimated 1 million people had by then already lost all sources of income
- A Canadian survey in early October 2020 found 22% of Canadians experienced high anxiety levels — four times higher than the prepandemic rate — and 13% reported severe depression. The drug overdose epidemic has also significantly worsened this year
- In Japan — which didn’t even implement lockdowns — government statistics reveal more people died from suicide in the month of October than have died from COVID-19 all year
- Lockdowns have also resulted in dramatic increases in domestic abuse, rape and child sex abuse. Children are also falling behind socially and developmentally, even if they’re not exposed to direct abuse
In a December 9, 2020, Twitter thread,1 Michael P. Senger, an attorney and author of the September 2020 article,2 “China’s Global Lockdown Propaganda Campaign,” reviewed the largely hidden impacts of global lockdowns. Ivor Cummins’ video above also reviews data showing just how “hugely ineffective” lockdowns have been.
As one would expect, shutting down businesses for extended periods of time leads to businesses going under for impaired cash flow from lack of revenue. Back in August 2020, Bloomberg reported3 that more than half of all small business owners feared their businesses wouldn’t survive. They were right.
According to a September 2020 economic impact report4 by Yelp, 163,735 U.S. businesses had closed their doors as of August 31, 2020, and of those, 60% — a total of 97,966 businesses — were permanent closures.5 As noted by Senger:6
“That ’leaders’ across the world transformed into tyrants, believing they had a right to bankrupt their subjects, is the core evil of lockdown.”
The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History
How does shutting small businesses but allowing big box stores to stay open protect public health? There’s really no rhyme or reason for such a decision, other than to shift wealth away from small, private business owners to multinational corporations.
While working-class Americans have been forced to file for unemployment by the tens of millions, the top five richest people in the U.S. increased their wealth by 26% between March 18 and June 17, 2020.7 Since the beginning of the pandemic, the collective wealth of 651 billionaires in the U.S. rose by more than 36% ($1 trillion).8 The assets of these 651 billionaires is now nearly double that of the combined wealth of the least wealthy 165 million Americans.
As noted by Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, “Never before has America seen such an accumulation of wealth in so few hands.”9
Far from being the great equalizer, COVID-19 is the greatest wealth transfer scheme in the history of the world. Indeed, you may as well call it what it is: grand-scale asset theft from the poor and middle class. A December 14, 2020, article10 in The Defender reviews who has benefited from pandemic measures the most, from the finance and tech industries to the pharmaceutical and military-intelligence sectors.
Minority-Owned Businesses Have Taken Biggest Hit
According to an August 10, 2020, article11 by Forbes, pandemic measures had eliminated nearly half of all Black-owned small businesses in the U.S. by the end of April 2020. It cites data from a New York Fed report,12 which found that “Black-owned businesses were more than twice as likely to shutter as their white counterparts.”
While nationally representative data on small businesses showed active business ownership dropped 22% between February and April 2020, the number of businesses owned by Blacks dropped by 41%. The decline in Latin-owned businesses was 32%; Asian-owned 26%; and White-owned 17%. According to Forbes:13
“At the same time, Black-owned firms, already smarting from a Great Recession that hurt them badly, already entered the crisis with ‘weaker cash positions, weaker bank relationships, and preexisting funding gaps.’ ‘Even the healthiest Black firms were financially disadvantaged at the onset of COVID-19,’ said the report.”
Food Insecurity at Staggering Levels
Mere weeks into the pandemic, Americans were lining up at food banks. An April 12, 2020, article14 in The New York Times showed miles-long lines in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Miami, Florida and elsewhere:
“In many cities, lines outside food pantries have become glaring symbols of financial precarity, showing how quickly the pandemic has devastated working people’s finances.
In San Antonio, 10,000 families began arriving before dawn on Thursday at a now-shuttered swap meet hall to receive boxes of food. Normally, 200 to 400 families might show up during a normal food distribution.
‘It’s a wave of need,’ said Eric Cooper, president of the San Antonio Food Bank. ‘They were all let go. There’s no savings. There’s no slack in their household budget. The money’s run out. It just shows how desperate people are.’”
The situation is much the same in other countries. An April 10, 2020, report15 by the Financial Times cited survey results showing an estimated 3 million Britons had gone without food at some point in the previous three weeks. An estimated 1 million people had by then already lost all sources of income.
Anna Taylor, executive director for the Food Foundation in the U.K., told the Financial Times there’s a “food poverty problem that has not been dealt with” that is now becoming glaringly apparent — and that was mere weeks into the pandemic. We’re now nine months down the line, and governments around the world are again calling for lockdowns over the winter holidays.
Mental Health Slides as Despair Grows
That forcing people into poverty will have a detrimental effect on their mental health is also not surprising. A Canadian survey16 in early October 2020 found 22% of Canadians experienced high anxiety levels — four times higher than the prepandemic rate — and 13% reported severe depression.
In the U.S., an August 2020 survey17,18 by the American Psychological Association found Gen-Z’ers are among the hardest hit in this regard, with young adults aged 18 to 23 reporting the highest levels of stress and depression.
More than 7 out of 10 in this age group reported symptoms of depression in the two weeks before the survey. Among teens aged 13 to 17, 51% said the pandemic makes it impossible to plan for the future. Sixty-seven percent of college-aged respondents echoed this concern.
With despair comes drug-related problems, and according to the American Medical Association, the drug overdose epidemic has significantly worsened and become more complicated this year. “More than 40 states have reported increases in opioid-related mortality as well as ongoing concerns for those with a mental illness or substance use disorder,” the AMA reported in an Issue Brief19 updated December 9, 2020.
A list of national news included in the AMA’s brief20 include reports of increases in overdose-related cardiac arrests, surges in street fentanyl leading to deaths in the thousands and a “dramatic increase” in illicit opioid fatalities. Spikes and record numbers of overdose deaths have been reported in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, District of Columbia, Illinois, Florida and many other states.
Young Adults Dying in Greater Than Normal Numbers
That pandemic measures are doing more harm than good can also be seen in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data21,22 showing that, compared to previous years, excess deaths among 25- to 44-year-olds has increased by a remarkable 26.5%, even though this age group accounts for fewer than 3% of COVID-19-related deaths.
To put it bluntly, in our misguided efforts to prevent the elderly and immune compromised from dying from COVID-19, we’re sacrificing people who are in the prime of their lives. As noted by Senger:23
“Per CDC, despite mass PCR testing and disproportionate false positives, at least 100,947 excess deaths in 2020 were not even linked to COVID-19 AT ALL. In other words, over 100,000 Americans were murdered this year by their OWN GOVERNMENT.”
Lockdowns Dramatically Increase Domestic Abuse
Rising despair is also reflected in statistics showing dramatic increases in domestic abuse, rape, child sex abuse and suicides. By July 2020, Ireland reported a 98% increase in people seeking counseling for rape and child sex abuse.24
Data from the British group Women’s Aid showed 61% of domestic abuse victims reported abuse had worsened during the lockdown.25 The number of women killed by their domestic partners also doubled during the first three weeks of lockdowns in the U.K.26
In the U.S., data27 from a Massachusetts hospital revealed a dramatic jump in patients seeking emergency care after being battered by their domestic partner in the nine weeks between March 11 and May 3, 2020, when the state had ordered schools closed.
During this time, 26 patients were treated for domestic abuse injuries that included strangulation, stabbing, burns and gunshot wounds. That’s just one shy of the number of cases seen in the same time period during 2018 and 2019 combined. In other words, domestic abuse cases were nearly double the annual norm for that hospital.
In early April 2020, United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres warned28 of a “horrifying” surge in global domestic abuse linked to pandemic lockdowns as calls to helplines in some countries had by then already doubled.29 The number of people looking into divorce in the U.S. was also 34% higher in March through June 2020 compared to the same time frame in 2019.30
Children Brought to Suffer in Countless Ways
Child abuse, meanwhile, is less likely to be detected and reported thanks to virtual schooling. As noted by Human Rights Watch:31
“More than 1.5 billion students are out of school. Widespread job and income loss and economic insecurity among families are likely to increase rates of child labor, sexual exploitation, teenage pregnancy, and child marriage.
Stresses on families, particularly those living under quarantines and lockdowns, are increasing the incidence of domestic violence … ‘The risks posed by the COVID-19 crisis to children are enormous,’ said Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director at Human Rights Watch ...
Child abuse is less likely to be detected during the COVID-19 crisis, as child protection agencies have reduced monitoring to avoid spreading the virus, and teachers are less able to detect signs of ill treatment with schools closed.”
There are signs of rising child abuse though, including a British study32 that found a shocking 1,493% rise in the incidence of abusive head trauma among children during the first month of the lockdown, compared to the same time period in the previous three years.
Children are also in danger of falling behind socially and developmentally, even if they’re not exposed to direct abuse. In November 2020, The Guardian reported that many children are regressing mentally and physically as a result of the lockdowns.33
The Washington Post reported34 scholastic achievement gaps have widened in the U.S. and early literacy among kindergarteners has seen a sharp decline this year.
According to The Economist,35 American children over the age of 10 cut physical activity by half during the lockdown, spending most of their time playing video games and eating junk food. Indeed, closing parks and beaches right along with small businesses and schools was undoubtedly among the most ignorant and destructive pandemic measures of all.
Suicide Epidemic
Preventing healthy people from working and upending everyone’s lives has also (as expected) resulted in a massive rise in suicide, and abnormal spikes became apparent within weeks of the initial lockdowns.
As noted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in “How the Government Uses Fear to Control,” research from the 1980s found that for every 1-point rise in unemployment there were 37,000 excess deaths, 4,000 excess imprisonments and 3,300 excess admissions into mental institutions. Kennedy also cites recent data from a hospital in San Francisco that stated they saw one year’s-worth of suicides in a single month, a 1,200% increase.
In September 2020, Cook Children's Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, admitted a record number of 37 pediatric patients who had tried to commit suicide. Dr. Kia Carter, medical director of Psychiatry at Cook Children’s told CBS:36
“September of 2020 has been the highest month ever that we've seen suicidal patients admitted to our medical center … Suicide has become the second leading cause of death for kids and adolescents in the last year, versus two years ago when it was the third leading cause of death.”
In Japan — which didn’t even implement lockdowns — government statistics reveal more people died from suicide in the month of October than have died from COVID-19 all year.37 While only 2,087 Japanese had died from COVID-19 as of November 27, 2020, the suicide toll in October alone was 2,153. Women make up the lion’s share of suicides, and hotlines are also reporting that women are confessing thoughts of killing their children out of sheer desperation.
Developing World Fares Even Worse
As horrible as all of these statistics are, they don’t even begin to compare to the tragedies taking place in developing nations. In India, millions of migrant workers were stranded early on in the pandemic without a way to make a living and unable to leave the cities due to lockdown orders.38
Food lines stretched for miles in South Africa at the end of April 202039 and in Saudi Arabia, “hundreds if not thousands” of African migrants — mostly Ethiopian men — have been left to die from lack of food and water in COVID-19 detention centers after a moratorium on deportation was issued in April, according to an August 30, 2020, report by The Telegraph.40
The United Nations estimates pandemic responses have “pushed an additional 150 million children into multidimensional poverty — deprived of education, health, housing, nutrition, sanitation or water,”41 and at the end of April 2020 warned the world was facing “famine of biblical proportions, with only a limited amount of time to act before starvation claims hundreds of millions of lives."42
“All this for a virus that caused no above-average mortality in countries without lockdowns — and which WHO estimates already infected 10% of people worldwide by October. In other words, all for absolutely nothing,” Senger writes.43
Pandemics Highlight Pre-Existing Health Inequalities
Indeed, an ever-growing number of doctors, academics and scientists are now questioning the validity of using PCR tests to diagnose “cases,” the usefulness of face masks, the questionable classification of COVID-19 deaths, and the suppression of scientifically verified methods of prevention and treatment, as well as the safety and usefulness of COVID-19 vaccines.
There are clear problems in all of these areas, yet questions and logical thinking have been, and continue to be, met with harsh resistance and denial. Those leading the charge in terms of pandemic responses have not been shy about their censoring of counter-narratives, almost without exception.
When it comes to the disease itself, we now know certain comorbidities significantly raise your risk of complications and deaths. Among the top ones are obesity, insulin resistance and vitamin D deficiency.
While these conditions are exceptionally common overall, they’re particularly prevalent in Black and indigenous communities, and when combined with inadequate access to health care, these groups also end up being disproportionally affected by COVID-19.44
COVID-19 Is a Class War
While the media and political and economic institutions claim the pandemic narrative is based on scientific consensus, this clearly isn’t the case. There’s no evidence supporting universal mask use, for example, and there’s even less scientific support for lockdowns — a strategy based on a high school project that won third place.45
James Corbett of the Corbett Report discusses this shocking revelation in the video above. Now, as many small businesses are failing thanks to months-long shutdowns and employment opportunities look bleak, world leaders are suddenly joining the World Economic Forum in calling for a Great Reset of the economy.46
This is hardly a random coincidence. This plan, which has been in the works for decades, will further empower and enrich wealthy, unelected powerbrokers while enslaving and impoverishing everyone else. The fact that the pandemic has been used to shift wealth from the poor and middle class to the ultra-wealthy is clear for anyone to see at this point. As noted by IPS News:47
“The COVID pandemic has not been the ‘Great Equalizer’ as suggested by the likes of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and members of the World Economic Forum. Rather, it has exacerbated existing inequalities along gender, race and economic class divides across the world.48”
The Global Restructuring
At this point, it should be obvious for anyone paying attention that the pandemic is being prolonged and exaggerated for a reason, and it’s not because there’s concern for life. Quite the contrary.
It’s a ploy to quite literally enslave the global population within a digital surveillance system49 — a system so unnatural and inhumane that no rational population would ever voluntarily go down that road.
“The ‘Great Reset’ seeks to … expand corporate control of natural resources and state surveillance of individuals,” IPS News writes.50 “In the post-pandemic ‘Great Reset,’ there would not be much life left outside the technological-corporate nexus dominated by monolithic agribusiness, pharmaceutical, communication, defense and other inter-connected corporations, and the governments and media serving them.
The proponents of the ‘Great Reset’51 envisage a Brave New World where, ‘You will own nothing. And you will be happy. Whatever you want, you will rent, and it will be delivered by drones.’
But it is more likely that this elite-led revolution will make the vast majority of humanity a powerless appendage of technology with little consciousness and meaning in their lives.”
It should also be clear that most if not all pandemic restrictions to freedom are meant to become permanent. In other words, these past nine months have been a preview of the world the technocratic elite wants to implement as part of the new social and economic order.
If this is the first time you’re hearing any of this, be sure to review “Who Pressed the Great Reset Button?” “The Pressing Dangers of Technocracy,” “The Global Takeover Is Underway” and “Coronavirus Fraud Scandal — The Biggest Fight Has Just Begun.”
Now’s the Time to Fight Back
It’s important to understand that now’s the time to fight back: to resist any and all unconstitutional edicts. Once the “new world order” is in place, you will no longer be able to do a thing about it.
Your life — your health, educational and work opportunities, your finances and your very identity — will be so meshed with the automated technological infrastructure that any attempt to break free will result in you being locked out or erased from the system, leaving you with no ability to learn, work, travel or engage in commerce.
It sounds far-fetched, I know, but when you follow the technocratic plan to its inevitable end, that’s basically what you end up with. The warning signs are all around us, if we’re willing to see them for what they actually are. The only question now is whether enough people are willing to resist it to make a difference.
Most important of all is the need to release the fear. It’s a fearful public that allows the technocratic elite to dictate the future and rip away our personal freedoms. It’s fear that allows tyranny to flourish. Really look at the data, so you can see for yourself that panic is unwarranted, and that the so-called “solutions” to the pandemic are in fact a path of total destruction.
This destruction — both moral and economic — is necessary for the Great Reset to occur. The technocratic elite need everything and everyone to fall apart in order to justify the implementation of their new system. Without this desperation, no one would agree to what they have planned.
For practical strategies on how you can respond in light of all the tyrannical interventions that have been imposed on us, check out James Corbett’s interview with Howard Lichtman below. I also recommend reading “Constitutional Sheriffs Are the Difference Between Freedom and Tyranny.”
Last but not least, now is also the time to take control of your own health. Make it a point to really take care of yourself. Remember, insulin resistance, obesity and vitamin D deficiency top the list of comorbidities that significantly raise your risk complications and death from COVID-19.
These are also underlying factors in a host of other chronic diseases, including mental health problems, so by addressing them, you’ll improve your chances of getting through this challenging time with your health and sanity intact. You can find tons of information about how to reverse all of these issues by searching my article archives.
No comments:
Post a Comment