Tag: lockdowns

Lockdowns Didn’t Stop COVID-19 But it Did Cause Record Number of Overdose Deaths

With each day that passes, the number of lives lost in COVID-19-related deaths continues to tragically grow. However, in a less noticed but equally important trend, we continue to gain insight into the countless deaths caused by lockdown measures intended to stop the virus’s spread.

The latest entry into this tragic account is a new data set showing drug overdose deaths skyrocketed in 2020 amid the height of pandemic lockdowns.

“New data shows that more Americans died of drug overdoses in the year leading to September 2020 than any 12-month period since the opioid epidemic began,” Axios reports. “The stubborn increase of such ‘deaths of despair’ shows that the opioid epidemic still has room to grow and that some of the social distancing steps we took to rein in the pandemic may have brought deadly side effects.”

Released this week by the Centers for Disease Control, the figures show that at least 87,000 people died from overdoses from October 2019 to September 2020. This amounts to a 29 percent increase from the same period in the previous year.

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We Are Now Entering Full-Blown Tyranny In The Western World

If we accept what they are doing to us now, they are just going to keep pushing the envelope.  Over the past 12 months, authorities throughout the western world have used the pandemic as an excuse to impose Orwellian measures that we never would have accepted during normal times.  They are promising us that these measures are just “temporary”, but the pandemic has already been with us for a year and there are no signs that it is going away any time soon.  If those governing us are willing to go to such ridiculous extremes during a relatively minor pandemic, what are they going to be willing to do once things start getting really crazy?

Watching the events that have unfolded at a church in Edmonton in recent days has been a breaking point for me emotionally.

Last Wednesday, the RCMP received global attention when it put up a three layer fence around GraceLife Church in an attempt to keep people out.

I don’t know why they decided that one fence would not be sufficient.  Apparently having Christians gather together is so dangerous that three fences were needed.

Needless to say, this draconian move made a lot of headlines, and on Sunday approximately 400 Christians gathered to protest at the church.  Most of them were just singing hymns or reading the Bible, but when a few of them started tearing down one of the fences, 200 heavily-armed riot police moved in.

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The hidden death toll of lockdown

Evidence-based medicine might sound like a tautology — what kind of medicine isn’t based on evidence? I’m afraid that you’d be surprised. Massive decisions are often taken on misleading, low-quality evidence. We see this all the time. In the last pandemic, the swine flu outbreak of 2009, I did some work asking why the government spent £500 million on Tamiflu: then hailed as a wonder drug. In fact, it proved to have a very limited effect. The debate then had many of the same cast of characters as today: Jonathan Van-Tam, Neil Ferguson and others. The big difference this time is the influence of social media, whose viciousness is something to behold. It’s easy to see why academics would self-censor and stay away from the debate, especially if it means challenging a consensus. Academics who are tenured, like me, don’t have to worry so much about people pulling strings above us. This is the importance of tenure; it allows academic freedom. In a crisis, when tempers run so high, you need a variety of views more than ever.

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Covid-19 vaccine STILL does not mean you can ‘eat and drink indoors’, Fauci says, prompting Rand Paul to call him a ‘petty tyrant’

White House health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci is once again facing pushback after advising those who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 to still avoid normal activities, like eating and drinking indoors.

“Fauci continues to ignore 100 years of vaccine science,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) wrote about Fauci – with whom he has feuded before – in a Monday tweet slamming the infectious disease expert as a “petty tyrant.”

The comments came in response to a Sunday evening interview in which Fauci encouraged vaccinated individuals to continue taking precautions and not resuming normal activities just yet.

Asked if eating and drinking inside restaurants and bars is “okay now,” Fauci replied in the negative.

“For the simple reason that the level of infection, the dynamic of infection in the community are still really disturbingly high,” he said. “Like just yesterday there were close to 80,000 new infections and we’ve been hanging around 60, 75,000.”

Even if vaccinated, individuals need to “remember that you still have to be careful and not get involved in crowded situations, particularly indoors where people are not wearing masks,” according to Fauci.

“His only real theme is ‘do what I say’ even when it makes no sense,” Paul, a physician before he entered the Senate, wrote about Fauci. “If you’ve recovered or been vaccinated – go about your life.  Eat, drink, work, open the schools.”

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YouTube Censors Coronavirus Roundtable Hosted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

Google-owned YouTube took down a video of a roundtable conference hosted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), featuring former White House coronavirus task force member and medical scholar Scott Atlas, and the three co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.

The Great Barrington declaration argues that blanket lockdowns and mask mandates are counterproductive, instead advocating for a targeted approach focused on protecting vulnerable segments of the population.

The three co-authors, who attended Gov. DeSantis’ roundable, are Harvard professor of medicine Martin Kulldorff, Oxford professor of epidemiology Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford professor of medicine and epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya.

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Why The Push Is On To Make Pandemic Life “Permanent”

One year after Americans were ordered to close down society for “two weeks to flatten the curve,” Bloomberg columnist Andreas Kluth warned, “We Must Start Planning for a Permanent Pandemic.”

Because new variants of SARS-COV-2 are impervious to existing vaccines, says Kluth, and pharmaceutical companies will never be able to develop new vaccines fast enough to keep up, we will never be able to get “back to normal.”

“Get back to normal” means recovering the relative liberty we had in our already overregulated, pre-Covid lives. This is just the latest in a long series of crises that always seem to lead our wise rulers to the same conclusion: we just cannot afford freedom anymore.

Covid-19 certainly wasn’t the beginning. Americans were told “the world changed” after 9/11. Basic pillars of the American system, like the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, were too antiquated to deal with the “new threat of terrorism.” Warrantless surveillance of our phone, e-mail, and financial records and physical searches of our persons without probable cause of a crime became the norm. A few principled civil libertarians dissented, but the public largely complied without protest.

“Keep us safe,” they told the government, no matter the cost in dollars or liberty.

Perhaps seeing how willingly the public rolled over for the political right during the “War on Terror,” authoritarians on the left turbocharged their own war on “climate change.” Previously interested in merely significantly raising taxes and heavily regulating industry, they now wish to ban all sorts of things, including air travel, gasoline-powered cars, and even eating meat.

Since Covid-19, however, even the freedom to assemble and see each other’s faces may be permanently banned to help the government “keep us safe.”

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