(Already) Worse Than the 'Great Recession'

Issues and Insights calls for an immediate end to the unscientific and economically devastating "lockdowns" first initiated in the name of fighting the pandemic.

At one point, the piece notes that the economic costs in the United States have been "catastrophic" and "worse than the 2007-2008 Great Recession." This is true, but one of the chief virtues of the piece is its mention of some of the other many costs of the tyrannical policy of indefinite mass home detention, first packaged as "two weeks to flatten the curve:"

Image by Nik Shuliahin, via Unsplash, license.

"The lockdowns led to wide unemployment and economic recession, resulting in increased drug and alcohol abuse and increases in domestic abuse and suicides," wrote Joel Zinsberg, a medical doctor and lawyer and a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

"Most studies in a systematic literature review found a positive association between economic recession and increased suicides," Zinsberg wrote in City Journal. "Data from the 2008 Great Recession showed a strong positive correlation between increasing unemployment and increasing suicide in middle aged (45 -- 64) people. Ten times as many people texted a federal government disaster mental-distress hotline in April 2020 as in April 2019."

Moreover, many with serious conditions have been avoiding treatment, as they were told to do by those in charge of lockdowns early on in the pandemic. Many of those who have died did so without any COVID-19 infection at all. [links in original]

The piece cites evidence that, for all this, the "lockdowns" were not even a successful strategy for fighting the pandemic.

Although I cannot speak for or against the Great Barrington Declaration the piece points to, I can and will recommend the excellent white paper, "A Pro-Freedom Approach to Infectious Disease," which not only offers an argument against such policies, but offers a well-considered, viable alternative.

-- CAV