Despite advocating for extended lockdowns, advisers admit that the negative impacts never made it into their model.
QUICK FACTS:
- Professor John Edmunds was part of the SAGE team reportedly advising the government that Omicron deaths would reach 6,000 per day if there was not another lockdown late last year.
- The professor called for the government to keep lockdowns in place and said they would be “taking a risk” if they lifted restrictions.
- Now, Edmonds is admitting that the other health impacts, as well as the economic harm, weren’t factored into his models.
- Edmonds called the death projections by SAGE “truly eye-watering” while speaking at a medical conference on Tuesday.
WHAT THE PROFESSOR SAYS ABOUT LOCKDOWNS NOW:
- “The epidemiological model is only one component [of decision-making] and I wondered and I worried that we’d had too much weight,” said Edmunds.
- “There is of course an enormous economic impact from many of the interventions and other indirect impacts on psychological health and so on. Now, these in principle could be included but in practice they were not,” he added.
- “It certainly didn’t help us move very fast here and, in fact, I wonder whether because we had these tools and policymakers could ask us questions — ‘what about if we did this and what about if we did that’ — that that might have actually contributed to us actually making a decision quite slowly.”
BACKGROUND:
- There was a tremendous blow to the economy in the United Kingdom, as in other places, due to the lockdowns, in addition to the already discovered negative impact on the mental health of adults.
- Additionally, the recent outbreak of hepatitis in young children from the UK, United States, and other nations is now being linked to the extended lockdown and lack of immune-building interaction between young children and their peers.
