Economist Douglas Allen, author of a 2020 report calling lockdowns one of Canada's greatest public policy failures, argues that it is important to keep making the case against them for the historical record.
Professor Douglas Allen still refuting lockdowns | Western Standard - Lee Harding:
January 29, 2022 - "Two years ago, Simon Fraser University economics professor Douglas Allen published an academic paper condemning pandemic lockdowns as doing more harm than good. 'An examination of over 80 COVID-19 studies reveals that many relied on assumptions that were false, and which tended to over-estimate the benefits and underestimate the costs of lockdown,' Allen wrote in April of 2021. 'The cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282. That is, it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history.'
"In an interview with Western Standard, Allen said his suspicions were already aroused a full year prior.... 'When the lockdowns first cane, ... I thought to myself, maybe I've misunderstood, we must be facing something that's three times worse than smallpox in the 17th century. I just thought I'd completely missed the seriousness of the virus,” Allen recalls. 'Almost immediately, I started doing my own research on this sort of stuff....
There was a group of economists in in UCLA, that by the end of the summer of 2020, had done such phenomenal work that really showed, I thought, that the lock downs were useless, that the virus was moving through populations exactly the same way, regardless of what the culture, the civilization, what governments were doing. And then I thought, ‘Okay, well, now it's over, right? There's no way we'll go back to lockdown in the fall.’ And of course we did.
"Allen said he got involved in a lawsuit to stop the lockdowns that was unsuccessful. 'I wrote a report that, when the lawsuit went nowhere, for nothing better to do, I posted it on my Facebook, I only have six friends on Facebook, but somebody shared it. I posted it on a Monday. And by Thursday, it went viral. And it was nonstop after that' Two journals asked him to publish reports, which Allen claims have been downloaded a “record” 70,000 times.
"The question remains why a paper so sought by the public was almost completely ignored by the media. 'The mainstream media was part of the message, right? Whether they were literally in bed with the state or not, they went along with the beginning. Again, you're telling people certain things, and then you find out they're not true, you can either admit that you made a mistake, or you can just carry on with that narrative,' Allen explains. 'I personally don't believe in big conspiracies, I just think it was in every person's interest'....
Here you are, you're a politician. By the end of April of 2020, there had been a loss of wealth in the country by a third the stock market value just crashed, you had destroyed a third of the wealth of the country. Oops. And you're going to admit that? Not a chance, right? What you're going to do is say, ‘Well, we thought it would be two weeks to bend the curve, it obviously wasn't. We're going to have to go for another two weeks and another two weeks, and you're just hoping and praying that this thing goes away. And you can declare victory....
"The very infectious, but less lethal Omicron provided the way out of lockdowns, Allen says, but the damage to the economy and the lives that this took cannot be restored.
> When you're unemployed, your income goes down your diet, quality of diet goes down, your anxiety levels go up, your mental health goes down, all these things contribute to a shorter life. In the United States, for the first year of the pandemic, lost life years, due to just the unemployment part, is about 800,000 lives. If you convert the unemployment into lost lives. My impression is each category of costs swamps the benefits of lockdown.....
Lost GDP. Certainly, that's important. But my goodness, that's just the starting of things. There has to be a full accounting of what you might even call the loss of livelihood, or the loss of living.... The deaths of despair, the overdoses, the suicides, and all these sorts of things have to be accounted for..... Deaths caused by lost cancer appointments or other health appointments, those sorts of things, the complete failure of the healthcare system has to be accounted for.”
