It is time to consider the evidence. It is not simply that Lockdowns don't work. We must face the fact that the State is an ineffective institution for the control of a pandemic. Only adult behaviour by informed citizens can solve this problem. We must delegate responsibility to the man on the spot.
My letter published in The Australian on Tuesday, 20 July 2021 follows.
I am not one to question "The Science". But I am ever alert to flaws in "The Logic".
Gladys Berejiklian locked down Sydney to contain the Coronavirus. A fortnight later, the numbers had gone up not down. So she had "no alternative" but to increase the severity of the lockdown.
Here in Victoria, Dan Andrews said, "You only get one chance" as he implemented Lockdown No. 5.
I wonder what will happen if "The Beast" continues to outsmart our Premiers.
Personally, I have given up worrying. I just stay home with my wife, listen to music, read a book, turn on the telly and watch the footy. While the Cats keep winning I do not have a care in the world. It is great to be old.
It is the young whose lives have been scarred forever by the lies and the incompetence.
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In October 2020, when three eminent epidemiologists – Sunetra Gupta from Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford and Martin Kulldorff from Harvard – composed the Great Barrington Declaration, it was endorsed by over eight hundred thousand citizens and professional colleagues. Nonetheless, they were subjected to virulent ad hominin attacks for their suggestion that lockdown policies were producing devastating effects on public health and that focussed protection would yield preferable results.
Douglas Allen's Covid Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature, April 2021, recent articles by Steve Waterman and Adam Creighton, and the work of Gigi Foster among others suggests that the Great Barrington professors were correct.
Or you might read The Panic Pandemic by John Tierney in the City Journal about how "fearmongering from journalists, scientists, and politicians did more harm than the virus."
It is time for the adults to admit that the Premiers have no clothes.
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Postscript Sunday 15th August 2021
It is now seven weeks since the NSW government initiated a lockdown in Sydney to contain the coronavirus outbreak. Since then the daily number of new cases has increased from fewer than 20 to 200 then 300 and yesterday hit a new high of 466. NSW has now gone into a statewide lockdown with police stepping up compliance, and $5,000 fines for those breaking the rules.
In Victoria, the fifth lockdown had hardly ended when it was replaced by a 7-day, sixth lockdown which has already been extended into its second week. Again, the number of daily cases continues to rise albeit at a much lower level than NSW – about 25 cases per day.
On 10 August 2021, Professor Anthony Brookes, Professor of Genomics and Health Data Science at the University of Leicester published a paper entitled Assembling Covid Jigsaw Pieces Into a Complete Pandemic Picture.
Brookes concludes that:
"Overall there is a minimal positive impact from quarantine policy, isolation requirements, Test and Trace regimes, social distancing, masking or other non-pharmaceutical interventions."
"Immunity created by SARS-CoV-2 infection, layered on top of pre-existing immunity due to cross-immunity to other coronaviruses, provides good protection against infection, severe disease/death, and being infectious. Immunity created by vaccination also helps protect against serious disease and death, but does little or nothing to provide protection against infection or being infectious (which completely negates the case for vaccine ID cards).
Population immunity stems mainly from natural infections, with vaccines adding only slightly to this (and only in recent months). Population immunity is created by societal waves of infection and is somewhat variant-specific. An emerging new variant is able to infect (or re-infect) some fraction of individuals and this serves to top up and broaden the scope of our population immunity to also protect against the new variant."
Optimistically, he concludes that "the ongoing arms-race between viral mutations and growing human immunity will always eventually be won by the human immune system. The virus then becomes a low-level endemic pathogen in equilibrium with its human species. If this were not the case all humans would have been wiped out by viruses eons ago!"
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Update Friday 3rd September 2021
Despite the lockdowns, the number of cases continues to rise.
Yesterday the number of new cases in NSW was 1431 and in Victoria 208.
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