Alan Jones: Our deadly lockdown strategy looking worse and worse by the day
Border closures are proving deadly while Australians have been locked up thanks to a lockdown strategy that looks more and more discredited by the day, writes Alan Jones.
Opinion
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The death of an unborn baby last week from the New South Wales town of Ballina piles tragedy on to stupidity in relation to border closures.
On this, the Prime Minister is right. He has always argued for no border closures, but the Premiers are in open defiance.
It is instructive to note that Gigi Foster, an economics professor at UNSW, has provided the only detailed cost-benefit analysis of Australian lockdowns. Her modelling calculates that lockdowns cost twice as much life as they save.
I have written before about the rampant alarmism leading to undiluted fear over many months; yet, I cannot recall, months on, a single politician stating, as such a person of responsibility should state, that 99% of all cases are mild.
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But while there have been, worldwide, 850,149 deaths, as of today, there have been 5.4 million deaths from cancer.
8.6 million from communicable disease. 1.6 million from grog.
The voter is going to react with venom once it is clear that politicians are using this politician-generated fear for electoral purposes believing that the polls justify what they are doing, independently of the fact that there is no evidence that what state leaders are doing has any basis in science.
On March 16, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer told us 150,000 Australians could die. We have seen 611 deaths.
The modelling has been a joke.
Did the government get other advice?
These questions now have become so serious, the ramifications so great when you contemplate debt, unemployment, business bankruptcy, suicides, the impact on education, to say nothing of the corrosive power of fear and anxiety, that there is a case here for a Royal Commission to determine how we got to this point.
In the five days since last Thursday, there have been 80 reported deaths. But such is the chaotic nature of the Victorian system that 33 of those are the result of a “reconciliation” and, according to officials, have occurred over several weeks.
Be that as it may, every day, about 450 Australians die of natural causes.
Every day, 150 people die in nursing homes. Every day, 136 Australians die of cancer.
Every day, 48 Australians die of heart disease.
We don’t have breathless news bulletins reporting all of this. We don’t place people under house arrest.
We don’t close down the economy.
There has never before, in our history, been a general curfew imposed on any Australian city.
Last October, the World Health Organisation issued “advice on pandemics and epidemics”.
And in a column which was headed “Not recommended in any circumstances”, it listed “contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry and exit screening, border closures.”
Even though the World Health Organisation argued that these were “not recommended in any circumstances”, Australian governments have done exactly what was “not recommended”.
The Prime Minister said on March 15, rightly, “Our aim in all of this is to protect the most vulnerable”; but we have spent almost $400 billion on the 1% who weren’t vulnerable and we have ignored those who were.
We now have the worst of many worlds.
Business has been smashed; we put more than a million people out of work; the suicide rates have escalated; and many of those whom we were supposed to look after have died.
The Lancet Medical Journal is an independent, international medical journal dating back to 1823, regarded as a world leader in the publication of papers that have made a crucial contribution to science and human health. In a recent publication it argued, “In our analysis, full lockdowns and widespread COVID-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality”.
What advice have governments been given?
Professor Mark Woolhouse, from the University of Edinburgh, is a Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology.
I suspect he might know more than people like Queensland’s Dr Jeannette Young and the NSW Chief Medical Officer, Dr Kerry Chant.
Professor Woolhouse is a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on behaviours that advises the British government. He argued recently that the lockdown was, “A panic measure and I believe history will say that trying to control COVID-19 through lockdown was a monumental mistake on a global scale… I never want to see National lockdown again…. I suspect right now, more people are being harmed by the collateral effects of lockdown than by COVID-19”.
As the Emeritus Professor Ramesh Thakur, from the Crawford School of Public Policy at ANU said recently, in relation to the Spanish flu, “Authorities did not close down whole societies and economies in 1918…..the State didn’t enter homes to tell people how to live, who and how many to meet, where, when and what they could shop for and which businesses could operate under what conditions…. Melbourne is effectively under Martial Law, masquerading as medical law… this is public policy insanity. Coronaphobia will kill more than coronavirus.”
Professor Sunetra Gupta, who is the Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University, recently urged Australia, “to abandon its selfish and self-congratulatory lockdown tactics”.
Is such an opinion to be completely discounted?
Michael Levitt is a Nobel Prize winner, a biophysicist and a Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University, who has claimed that in regard to lockdown measures, “The level of stupidity going on here is amazing”.
And he argued that lockdowns are “a huge mistake”.
Professor John Iaonnidis from the Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, a Professor of Medicine and a Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health has said, “If we had not known about a new virus out there and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams”.
This brings me, appropriately, to Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of America, who argued with relevance for us today, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety”.