[TiltonBB]

Follow the science” has been the battle cry of lockdown supporters
since the Covid-19 pandemic began. Yet before March 2020, the
mainstream scientific community, including the World Health
Organization, strongly opposed lockdowns and similar measures
against infectious disease.

When the Wuhan region of China imposed harsh restrictions on Jan. 23, 2020,
Anthony Fauci questioned the move.
“That’s something that I don’t think we could possibly do in the United States,
I can’t imagine shutting down New York or Los Angeles, ” Dr. Fauci told CNN.
He likely had the scientific literature in mind when he advised that “historically, when you
shut things down, it doesn’t have a major effect.”

What caused the scientific community to abandon its aversion to
lockdowns? The empirical evidence didn’t change. Rather, the
lockdown strategy originated from the same sources the WHO had
heavily deprecated in its 2019 report: speculative and untested
epidemiological models.

In reality, lockdown stringency is a poor predictor of Covid-related
mortality. Our examination of the 50 U.S. states and 26 countries
found no discernible pattern connecting the two—a basic
expectation if lockdowns performed as “the science” often insists.
So why did public-health authorities abandon their opposition to
lockdowns? Why did they rush to embrace the untested claims of
flawed epidemiological modeling? One answer appears in the Johns
Hopkins study from 2019: “Some NPIs, such as travel restrictions
and quarantine, might be pursued for social or political purposes
by political leaders, rather than pursued because of public health
evidence.”