How the COVID-19 Lockdowns Emerged

On December 31, 2019, China alerted the World Health Organization (WHO) to several cases of unusual pneumonia in Wuhan. On January 7, officials attributed this to a new virus, which they named 2019-nCoV (later named COVID-19), and which was identified as belonging to the coronavirus family, which includes SARS and the common cold. The first death attributed to the new virus occurred on January 11. During January many more such deaths occurred in China, and began to occur in Western countries. During Febrary government officials in Western countries spoke of the possibility of million of deaths, causing fear and panic among those who believed them.

The origin of this panic seems to have been a report from CNN on January 26, 2020, of an alleged statement by China's health minister Ma Xiaowei that people who are (supposedly) infected by the virus can infect others without themselves showing any symptoms of illness. If that were true (and there is zero evidence for this) then you could be infected just by walking down the street — clearly a reason to panic. Ma didn't explain why he thought the virus can be spread before someone has symptoms, but that didn't stop Dr. William Schaffner, a longtime adviser to the CDC, from taking this claim seriously — in effect endorsing it. Other CDC officials took up the theme. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases picked up the ball and ran with it. Dr. Fauci is quoted as saying, "the Chinese did not tell U.S. health authorities that the virus could spread before someone is symptomatic", thus implicitly suggesting that indeed that was the case. This was denied by epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm, who stated, "I know of no evidence in 17 years of working with coronaviruses ... where anyone has been found to be infectious during their incubation period." On January 30 the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter from 16 German doctors claiming that a symptomless Chinese woman (arriving from China) had infected a German man in Munich, but when they got around to actually asking her, she said that while in Munich she had in fact shown symptoms, which worsened on her return to China. Thanks to CNN, Dr. Fauci,and the German doctors, the rumor of symptomless transition morphed into "fact" among government officials and the general public. From then on the MSM issued increasingly alarming reports of deaths due to this (allegedly) new illness, ignoring the fact that people were (as usual) dying of the (not reported) seasonal flu.

John Nolte: Dr. Fauci Is Either a Liar or a Fraud And for a devastating exposé of the 36-year career of this vile quack doctor see the final article in William Engdahl's Covid article compilation here. [Fauci was sidelined by Trump in August 2019, but was restored to grace under the Biden administration.]

In February, as Italy began reporting infections, Prof. Neil Ferguson, Head of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London, dusted off a computer program he had written 15 years ago implementing a model for infectious disease spreading. Using data available from Italy he concluded (following his history of vastly over-estimating deaths in previous epidemics) that 510,000 people (2.5 million in the U.S.) could die if the U.K. government didn't abandon its approach at that time of regarding the virus as a variant influenze virus, and thus treating people with severe symptoms (hospitalizing were necessary) but allowing those without such symptoms to recover and develop immunity.

Based partly on Ferguson's fear-mongering, on  February 23 in Italy the first lockdowns and compulsory "social distancing" began. Early in March Britain also imposed lockdowns, later extended to the entire U.K., despite the fact that Prof. Ferguson had revised his death toll estimate from 510,000 down to 20,000.

The term "lockdown" normally means keeping prisoners locked down in their cells, typically following a riot. It was also used in the MSM following the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013 (likely a false flag) to confine people to their homes until given permission to come out — a trial run, or a social experiment? For details as to the damage caused by the lockdown order — by one estimate it cost the city of Boston at least $333 million — see The 2013 Lockdown Experiment in Boston.

On March 7 one Dr. James Lawler (U. of University Medical Center) misinformed the world (to the delight of the MSM) that about 96 million Americans could become infected with coronavirus, of whom about half a million would die. On March 11 the WHO, after much delay, declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. On March 15 New York mayor Bill de Blasio declared (with no evidence) that the virus can spread rapidly through "close interactions," and issued an order (which was soon after repeated by governors of many other states) to close restaurants, bars and cafes. On March 16 most European countries imposed lockdowns and border closures. On March 20 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (along with governors of many other states) shut down all "non-essential businesses", thereby depriving millions of people of their jobs and their livelihoods, leading to bankruptcies and suicides. By March 30 approximately 265 million Americans were under indefinite lockdown and martial law in all but name.

In late April a 'revised' version of the computer code written by Ferguson to predict 510,000 deaths in the U.K. was released to the GitHub code repository. It was examined by an anonymous ex-Google software engineer, who found numerous flaws and bugs, in particular that, from the same input data the program would produce very different outputs. This makes it useless for scientific purposes, and also worse than useless as a basis for political decisions — and consequently worse than useless as a justification for government orders, some of which were later found to be unconstitutional. (For further details see Computer model that locked down the world turns out to be sh*tcode.)

A comment (by Frito) on Zero Hedge about Ferguson's shoddy code:

The thing that really has me pissed off, is that my government [the U.K.] (and many others around the world), jumped in and spent hundreds of billions of dollars and suspended the civil liberties of millions of people indefinitely and destroyed the livelihoods of countless small business people based on just one unverified source [that is, Ferguson]. There was ZERO due diligence done. The first thing that should have been done was to require the production of the full source code for the simulation software (as it was run, not this "cleaned up" stuff), and all input data so that it could be verified. If they didn't want to provide it, then the simulation results should have been discarded.

Ferguson's "scientific" advice was bogus, and Boris Johnson was criminally negligent in accepting it and ordering the lockdown of the entire U.K. But will they ever see jail time for wrecking the U.K. economy and ruining the lives of millions of people?

Andrew Chen: Professor Explains Flaw in Many Models Used for COVID-19 Lockdown Policies

Economics professor Doug Allen wanted to know why so many early models used to create COVID-19 lockdown policies turned out to be highly incorrect. What he found was that a great majority were based on false assumptions and “tended to over-estimate the benefits and under-estimate the costs.” He found it troubling [or incomprehensible?] that policies such as total lockdowns were based on those models.
Paul Joseph Watson: German Study Finds Lockdown 'Had No Effect' on Stopping Spread of Coronavirus
The study found that, on all three occasions before Germany imposed its lockdowns in November, December and April, infection rates had already begun to fall.

As stated above, the term "lockdown" originally meant locking down prisoners in a penal institution following a riot, or to prevent one. The meaning of the word has been broadened to cover locking down civilian populations, under the pretext of reducing the spread of a genetically modified virus with a lethality barely greater than the seasonal flu, for reasons only known the the tyrannical governments that impose them.

The Covid-19-related lockdowns in the West began in Europe in March 2020. There have been rolling lockdowns ever since, though mainly in the countries of the EU (and Britain). Very likely there will be no end to them in the foreseeable future. Why do people accept them? Because of widespread fear resulting from sustained government propaganda, and a willingness by many (but not all) people to believe what their government tells them and to accept draconian restrictions on their (formerly) normal behavior. Why do those who accept this do so? The short answer is: fear of the allegedly fatal virus, stupidity, and fear of a government all-to-ready to fine and imprison them for defying government orders. Whoever thought that the majority of humans in Western countries could descend this level of idiocy and cowardice?

See COVID-19 PsyOp — Control by Fear for a blow-by-blow description of the debacle since March 2020.

Here are a couple of links from June 2021 which specifically concern the lockdowns:


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