A new report has criticized the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, citing that lockdowns, school closures and vaccine mandates were “catastrophic errors.”
The report, published this week by the non-profit Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP), explains the government’s role in the crisis and offers ten lessons that must be learned, to avoid the same mistakes from being repeated.
“Conventional wisdom pre-COVID was that communities respond best to pandemics when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted,” the authors wrote.
“During COVID, the public health establishment followed the opposite principle: they intentionally stoked and amplified fear, which overlaid enormous economic, social, educational and health harms on top of the harms of the virus itself.”
The paper, titled “COVID Lessons Learned A Retrospective After Four Years,” was written by Scott Atlas, M.D., a senior fellow in health policy at the Hoover Institution and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Steve Hanke, Ph.D., a professor of applied economics at the Johns Hopkins University, Philip Kerpen, the president of the Committee to Unleash and Casey B. Mulligan, Ph.D., a professor in economics at the University of Chicago.
“SARS-CoV2 was a dangerous virus, but a calm, proportionate response would have applied the lessons from past influenza pandemics and used existing pandemic response plans. Instead, from the moment the virus was detected in America, the public health community and politicians spread an outsized message of fear and doom,” the paper said.
The authors noted that lockdowns did not work to reduce deaths or stop the virus from spreading, and that they “rarely had any discernable casual impact.”
“A much wiser strategy than issuing lockdown orders would have been to tell the American people the truth, stick to the facts, educate citizens about the balance of risks, and let individuals make their own decisions about whether to keep their businesses open, whether to socially isolate, attend church, send their children to school, and so on,” the authors wrote.
According to their research, masks also had little or no value and were possibly harmful, “amplifying fears by creating the irrational belief that an unmasked face presented a threat, causing conflict and division among citizens, and giving high-risk people the mistaken impression that masks were protective, potentially resulting in some people risking exposure who otherwise may not have.”
