Lockdown Insanity: Broken Records, Broken Lives

Nowhere else on the planet has such a long lockdown had to be endured:

Never forget September 23, 2021. On this day a world record was broken. Metropolitan Melbourne has now been in lockdown for a total of 235 days – eight whole months! And along with this broken record, we have broken the state, the nation, people, economies, livelihoods, small businesses, the rule of law, basic human rights, and most civil liberties.

And sadly, I have had to live through it all – along with over 5 million other enslaved people. Consider how the records have tumbled:

Folks in the Czech Republic had spent 201 days in lockdown.
Citizens of London had spent 207 days in total being locked down.
The poor sods in Buenos Aires were locked down for 234 days.

But while they are now all free, or at least far freer than some of us, we who have had the extreme misfortune of living in the Melbourne metropolitan region have just marked this mind-numbing and soul-destroying milestone. No other jurisdiction on the planet has been under such hardcore and interminable lockdown.

And there is no end in sight! Yes, after months and months of Dictator Dan refusing to face reality and actually base his mindless decisions on the science and the medicine, he has finally admitted that his eradication strategy and vain dreams of zero cases were utterly ludicrous.

After plenty of backlash from his state’s slaves, he has finally relented a bit and admitted that we might need to learn to live with the virus. And the other day he said we MIGHT get a few more crumbs thrown to us by way of minor restrictions lifted – but at the end of October!

So we are all STILL in lockdown – in-house detention, complete with curfews, tight travel limits, most public activities off-limits, mask mania everywhere, and so on. Parliament has seldom sat for many months now. Victoria is a one-party state – a one-party dictatorship. We will likely be locked down well into next year.

Speaking of the recent Andrews’ roadmap to nowhere, Beverley McArthur MP, Western Victorian Region said this in a media release:

‘Guard rails’ and vaccine-apartheid are Premier Daniel Andrews’ COVID-19 roadmap for Victorians. His plan fails children, business, families, churches, the lonely, the ill. None of the current curfews and lockdowns change until 70 percent, and then 80 per cent fully vaccinated watermarks are met.
It completely ignores the most important statistic: that the most vulnerable people in our community, those aged 70+ years old, have a first dose vaccination rate of 91 per cent, and 74.1 percent for second dose. People aged over 70 represent 86 per cent of national deaths from Covid….
This statistic alone should have been at the forefront of the Premier’s announcement. Critically important co-morbidity and recovery data was also hidden. These are the key statistics we need. Yet the Andrews Roadmap continues to target the fit and healthy, the young, families, businesses and the part of the economy that is not vulnerable….
There was no roadmap to freedom in Victoria on Sunday. There was just a dead end road to nowhere – a fraud perpetrated on a very fragile, vulnerable community.

An important new article by Professor Ramesh Thakur titled “Coronavirus has become endemic, making Australia’s policy settings obsolete” is also worth quoting from. He writes:

A major study from the National Bureau of Economic Research in June, based on all-causes mortality data from 44 countries and all US states, concluded that earlier and longer lockdowns do not reduce deaths and if anything, lockdowns may increase deaths. Denmark lifted all restrictions from 10 September, including the requirement for domestic vaccine passports, declaring that Covid-19 is ‘no longer a critical threat to society’. At the time 73% of the population was fully vaccinated and Denmark’s daily new cases were still over 500. Meanwhile Sweden remains an excellent example of a lockdown-light to lockdown-free country with excess deaths lower for every year since 1990/91 bar one (2018/19).
Consistent with the NBER and several other studies confirming that lockdown restrictions are ineffectual for virus control, on Friday, weeks into the state’s 7th – or is it 8th? – lockdown, Victoria announced 510 new cases. Meanwhile on the same day, five weeks into a lockdown imposed after one case and with 55% full vaccination, the ACT recorded 30 new cases, bringing the total of active cases to 245 and another 341 recovered.
We know the virus doesn’t keep climbing and growing exponentially. That hasn’t happened anywhere in the world. Sooner or later, the curve will bend and head down. The strategy seems to be to wait for that peak, claim proof of success for restrictions and begin lifting them. Otherwise the doubling down on lockdowns despite daily evidence of how completely ineffectual they are makes no sense whatsoever.
Even more depressingly, most journalists and people seem to accept that transparent but flawed logic and credit their government with successful Covid management, despite clear evidence both locally and globally that policy interventions enforce coercive control on human behaviour without materially altering virus behaviour.

He continues:

The coronavirus pandemic has been the biggest and most successful power grab by self-aggrandising medicine men – sorry, health experts and officials – in Western history. Careerist politicians simply rolled over and then discovered that actually, spreading mass fear and hysteria through pandemic porn is a pretty effective way to dismantle all checks on the exercise of power and to win re-elections with massive mandates. The media has failed to do its job and hold the government’s feet to the fire.
It’s beyond belief and very dispiriting that we can all be locked up on the whim of a state or federal chief medico with no health advice published, against the mounting data from around the world that the pre-Covid consensus on the futility-cum-long term harms from lockdowns was correct.
The silence of the courts has been another surprise and disappointment. We’ve all learned at great cost that all a government has to do to escape parliamentary scrutiny and public accountability is to assert there is a health crisis and promulgate a package of measures whose justification, efficacy and collateral harms are not open to question. Even individual components of the package may not be independently scrutinised, no matter how unscientific, inconsistent and nonsensical.

He also discusses Covid vaccines and vaccine mandates:

Unaware that he was being broadcast live to the nation on a TV station with a microphone still switched on, Israeli health minister Nitzan Horowitz admitted on 12 September that vaccine passports were primarily about putting pressure on a hesitant public to get vaccinated and not for medical reasons. Meanwhile, who would have expected Sweden, which never imposed a hard lockdown but is 61% fully vaccinated, to ban travellers from Israel? There’s a turn for the books.
There is no medical or ethical justification for vaccine compulsion and coercion. Because both groups can be infected and transmit the virus but those with higher immunity face lower risks of severe illness and death, the non-immune should fear the vaccinated, not the other way round. Mandates would also require resolving the very knotty problem of separating natural and vaccinated immunity.
To survive Covid-19, infected people must have mounted an effective immune response. The goal of vaccination is to generate memory cells that can recognise the virus and rapidly mount an effective immune response. As a group of doctors from Arkansas note in the British Medical Journal, ‘There is now a growing body of literature supporting the conclusion that natural immunity not only confers robust, durable, and high-level protection against Covid-19, but also better than vaccine induced immunity’. Ignoring this reality instead of developing policy around it has seriously damaging real-world consequences, especially for poor countries.
With many infectious diseases, naturally-acquired immunity through infection is more powerful than vaccine-induced immunity and also lasts a lifetime. Several studies show stronger and more durable natural than vaccine-induced immunity against Covid-19. In late August, Israeli researchers published the largest real-world observational study to date comparing natural and vaccine-induced immunity using the 2.5 million strong database of Maccabi Healthcare Services.
The team conducted two analyses to show that uninfected but vaccinated Israelis were 6-13 times more likely to get infected than the naturally immune through prior infection; their risk of symptomatic infection was 27 times higher; and their risk of hospitalisation was eight times more. Far from rejecting the benefits of vaccines, the study concludes that ‘the immune systems of people who develop natural immunity … and then get vaccinated produce exceptionally broad and potent antibodies against the coronavirus’.
We seem to be in the gloaming phase of the dystopian night of a technology-enabled takeover of our lives by big business and government. It’s time to ‘ditch-‘n-switch’ as a pathway out of the nightmare.

And he concludes:

Almost all Australian governments, captured by ‘worrywart epidemiologists’ (thank you, Judith Sloan), seem obsessed with test and trace as the silver bullet to virus eradication. It’s expensive, intrusive and of limited utility in managing the disease, but it does keep alive the fear and paranoia and elevates stress and anxiety in society.
It’s long past time to acknowledge that SARS-CoV-2 is already endemic in the world and will keep circulating, mutating and escaping variant-specific vaccines; abandon mass testing and contact tracing of the asymptomatic; return to treating symptomatic cases only; encourage vaccine take-up through persuasion of its beneficial protective effects for individuals without vilifying the unvaccinated who pose no greater risk to others than the vaccinated; and lift all remaining restrictions on people’s lives and business activities.

Numerous medical experts have warned about the price of lockdowns, arguing more harm and perhaps even more deaths are a result of these harsh lockdowns. Dr Charles Levinson in the UK for example recently said this:

We’re told everything that has happened over the last 18 months has been to “save lives” – but the untold tragedy in all of this is the price millions have paid, many with their lives. Some have been warning about the non-Covid health crisis for months. Hundreds are dying every week because of it. What did politicians think would happen? They terrified the population and told them to stay at home. That’s exactly what countless seriously ill people did. Now those delays are translating into serious health issues and deaths.
I don’t say this lightly but I believe that the silence surrounding non-Covid excess deaths is a scandal. Every week since the start of this pandemic, hundreds more than the five-year average have been dying at home, and the vast majority have not been related to Covid.

Finally, this commentary by Peta Credlin is well worth listening to.