Iowa's Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, says that her government "respects the people it serves and fights to protect their rights" which is why she "rejected the mandates and lockdowns of 2020." Her record indicates otherwise.
September 2, 2023 - "It seems that everyone is running from the lockdowns they once supported, and that includes former presidents and governors, and probably mayors too. Apologies would be better so we can at least have an honest accounting rather than an attempt to rewrite the history that everyone knows.
"Jack Phillips of Epoch Times alerts readers in his article of August 31, 2023, of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds’ recent statement on the subject of lockdowns. The Iowa State Government’s website says the following:
“Since news broke of COVID-19 restrictions being reinstated at some colleges and businesses across the U.S., concerned Iowans have been calling my office asking whether the same could happen here. My answer—not on my watch. In Iowa, government respects the people it serves and fights to protect their rights. I rejected the mandates and lockdowns of 2020, and my position has not changed.”
"Governor Reynolds 'rejected' the mandates and lockdowns of 2020?... Could it be the Governor has forgotten her 'orders?' On March 17, 2020, Governor Reynolds issued her first “Public Health Disaster Emergency” ... [which] ordered the following:
Restaurants and bars: Closed to the 'general public'
Social, community, spiritual, religious, recreational, leisure, and sporting gatherings and events of more than 10 people, including but not limited to parades, festivals, conventions, and fundraisers: Prohibited.
Senior citizen and adult daycare centers: Closed
Salons/barber shops: Closed
"A few weeks later on April 6, 2020, she doubled down. In this second proclamation, the Governor extended the timeline and expanded what she now says she 'rejected'.... To add insult, she also formally called on law enforcement to 'assist in the enforcement of these "mitigation efforts".' To wit:
To encourage further social distancing and mitigation efforts, the proclamation orders additional closures effective at 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, April 7th until Thursday, April 30th”: (Highlight and underline added)
Malls
Tobacco or vaping stores
Toy, gaming, music, instrument, movie, or adult entertainment stores
Social and fraternal clubs, including those at golf courses
Bingo halls, bowling alleys, pool halls, arcades, and amusement parks
Museums, libraries, aquariums, and zoos
Race tracks and speedway.
Roller or ice skating rinks and skate parks
Outdoor or indoor playgrounds or children’s play centers
Campgrounds....
"Should we resist the impulse to accrue to the Governor a little bit of gaslighting in her August 30, 2023 statement? Will she insist that businesses she ordered closed and the behaviors she prohibited – to be enforced by law enforcement – weren’t 'mandated' 'lockdowns?' That they were instead 'mitigation efforts' as spelled out in her 'orders?'...
"At best ... this PR stunt strains credulity. Especially when simple searches can recall those pesky things called facts. On the record.... At worst, why, some might suggest it describes a woman whose actual status rhymes with 'fire'....
"In the meantime, some of us who rejected all the unlawful nonsense, who were never fooled by any of these fools, who never cooperated and gave up all – remain unfooled – even when the likes of a Kim Reynolds attempts to rewrite history.'
The debate over the origins of COVID19 distracts from the more important debate, over whether pandemics can or should be "used by the political, expert and medical classes as a pretext for taking our #freedom," argues author John Tamny.
March 10, 2023 - "As seemingly everyone who’s been following the political tragedy that was and is the coronavirus well knows, the Department of Energy now confirms with a low level of confidence that the virus was inadvertently leaked from a lab in China [see video below - gd]. Unsurprisingly, and perhaps understandably, this conclusion has many gloating.... At the same time, this focus on the origins of the virus is a total distraction that politicians, scientists and doctors (including Fauci) have to be loving....
""[T]he virus’s origins really don’t matter. Lest the crowd that has long been properly anti-lockdown forgets, pathogens are as old as mankind is. Since they are, the accenting of where they come from is to completely miss the point. Instead, the always and everywhere expressed view should be that [this] reality should not be used by the political, expert and medical classes as a pretext for taking our freedom. Freedom is precious, and authoritarians can’t have it regardless of a pathogen’s origin or its presumed lethality.
"Indeed, while even the New York Times reported with great consistency in 2020 that the virus in a death sense was most associated with very sick, very old people in nursing homes, the accent on the previous truth by the anti-lockdown crowd similarly missed the point. And it missed the point dangerously. That is so because a focus on statistics or anecdote as a reason for not locking us down is to suggest that if the coronavirus or some future pathogen were truly lethal, politicians would have the right to lock us down.
"No thanks, which is once again why this focus on what the New York Times acknowledged way back when, what the CDC routinely acknowledged about those dying with the virus (remember 'comorbidities'?) since 2020, and what the DoE softly concludes right now is such a mistaken way to fight the battle. It is because it puts such a low price tag on freedom. Almost as bad, it hands the argument to those who have a need to trample on the rights of others. Think about it. As I argued in my 2021 book When Politicians Panicked, the more lethal any virus is the more that political action is wholly superfluous. If a virus is killing indiscriminately who among us seriously needs to be forced to be careful?
"Ok, but what if we don’t know the lethality of a spreading virus? Freedom is the answer once again. It’s precisely when fear is greatest and knowledge is least evident that freedom becomes most crucial. Indeed, free people do more than produce the economic resources that scientists and doctors require to come up with cures for what might be harmful or lethal. Equally important, free people produce information. By making different choices amid a spreading virus, free people teach us what behavior is most associated with sickness, death, or neither. In other words, lockdowns don’t protect us; rather they threaten our health by concealing essential information.
"Please think about this with what happened in 2020 top of mind. By locking us down, politicians and experts didn’t just wreck businesses, jobs, and living as we knew it up until then; they also blinded us to how to best deal with a spreading virus that they claimed was a huge threat to us. In that case, thank goodness the virus wasn’t remotely lethal for the vast majority of us.
"Still, the lockdowns were tragic. That they correlated with increased depression, alcoholism, job loss, business failure, and reduced classroom learning is a known and horrid quantity. Worse, and as logic would dictate, all this force logically didn’t improve our well-being or save lives. The taking of freedom never does.
"In which case, let’s not compound the errors of the past by focusing on the origin of the virus leak. Once again, viruses are a part of life, thus making origin irrelevant. Much worse, this focus on what’s irrelevant is exactly what the politicians and experts want us to do. If we waste time worrying about the where, we forget what the political and expert class did to us not too long ago.
"In short, the lockdowns were the true tragedy of 2020 and beyond, not something that is old as mankind. Let’s please not change the subject from what really mattered then, and matters now."
January 28, 2023 - "Military operatives in the UK's 'information warfare' brigade were part of a sinister operation that targeted politicians and high-profile journalists who raised doubts about the official pandemic response. They compiled dossiers on public figures such as ex-Minister David Davis, who questioned the modelling behind alarming death toll predictions, as well as journalists such as Peter Hitchens and Toby Young. Their dissenting views were then reported back to No 10.
"Documents obtained by the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, and shared exclusively with this newspaper, exposed the work of Government cells such as the Counter Disinformation Unit, based in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and the Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet Office. But the most secretive is the MoD's 77th Brigade, which deploys 'non-lethal engagement and legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours of adversaries'. According to a whistleblower who worked for the brigade during the lockdowns, ... British citizens' social media accounts were scrutinised – a sinister activity that the Ministry of Defence, in public, repeatedly denied doing.
"Papers show the outfits were tasked with countering 'disinformation' and 'harmful narratives... from purported experts', with civil servants and artificial intelligence deployed to 'scrape' social media for keywords such as 'ventilators' that would have been of interest. The information was then used to orchestrate Government responses to criticisms of policies such as the stay-at-home order, when police were given power to issue fines and break up gatherings. It also allowed Ministers to push social media platforms to remove posts and promote Government-approved lines....
"Mail on Sunday journalist Mr Hitchens was monitored after sharing an article, based on leaked NHS papers, which claimed data used to publicly justify lockdown was incomplete. An internal Rapid Response Unit email said Mr Hitchens wanted to 'further [an] anti-lockdown agenda and influence the Commons vote'. Writing today, Mr Hitchens ... says: 'The most astonishing thing about the great Covid panic was how many attacks the state managed to make on basic freedoms without anyone much even caring, let alone protesting. Now is the time to demand a full and powerful investigation into the dark material Big Brother Watch has bravely uncovered.'
"The whistleblower from 77 Brigade, which uses both regular and reserve troops, said: 'I developed the impression the Government were more interested in protecting the success of their policies than uncovering any potential foreign interference, and I regret that I was a part of it. Frankly, the work I was doing should never have happened.' The source also suggested that the Government was so focused on monitoring critics it may have missed genuine Chinese-led prolockdown campaigns.
"Silkie Carlo, of Big Brother Watch, said: 'This is an alarming case of mission creep, where public money and military power have been misused to monitor academics, journalists, campaigners and MPs who criticised the Government, particularly during the pandemic.... Contrary to their stated aims, these Government truth units are secretive and harmful to our democracy. The Counter Disinformation Unit should be suspended immediately and subject to a full investigation.'"
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.
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.”
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data indicates that Norway and no-lockdown Sweden had the lowest percentage of excess deaths in 2020 through 2022:
January 10, 2023 - "COVID lockdowns could have saved lives, by decreasing COVID deaths (and also incidentally decreasing some other deaths, for instance from auto accidents, from other communicable diseases, and the like). They also could have cost lives — for instance, through drug abuse deaths or suicides or homicides stemming from people being cooped up for months, drug abuse deaths or suicides or homicides stemming from economic damage and unemployment caused by the lockdown, cancers not caught early as people delayed early screening (even if such early screening would have been officially excluded from the lockdown), and so on. What was the likely aggregate of all these effects?....
"[T]o look at just one data point ... how did Sweden, which basically didn't lock down, fare compared to other prosperous countries? Sweden did have a higher COVID mortality rate than ... neighboring Norway, Denmark, and Finland. But what about what is sometimes called 'all-cause excess mortality,' which is to say total mortality in the country compared, on a percentage basis, to the pre-COVID mortality? Moreover, some of the effects of lockdowns (positive and negative) could have lasted well after the lockdowns.... What then about the all-causes excess mortality from 2020 to the present, rather than just based on the 2020 data or the 2020-21 data?
"A recent UK Office of National Statistics report says that Sweden and Norway were essentially tied for the lowest '[p]roportional all-cause excess-mortality scores' (which 'measure[] the percentage change in the number of deaths compared to the expected number of deaths (based on the five-year average [from 2015 to 2019])' among the listed European countries, looking at data from Jan. 2020 to June 2022: Their excess mortality was up 2.7%, compared to, say, 5.2% for Denmark, 7.1% for Finland, and 11.8% for the Netherlands....
"I also tried to do a similar analysis myself, based on OECD data (which covers most of Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel), for Mar. 2020 to Oct. 2022 (the most recent data I could find). Based on that data, Sweden seems to have had the lowest rate, even below Norway.... You can check my data in this spreadsheet; I downloaded the 2020, 2021, and 2022 weekly data from the OECD site, deleted a few Latin American countries that didn't have data for all the years, calculated the average excess death percentages for each year (see row 8 of each sheet), and then calculated the average excess death percentages for all three years (see row 2 of the 2022 sheet).
"I also asked our UCLA School of Law Empirical Research Group people to check into that, and they confirmed; here are the aggregate excess mortality percentages they reported (or see the Excel spreadsheet [linked in Reason article - gd]), though I think my data excluded the first 9 weeks of 2020 (as basically pre-COVID) and their analysis included it:
"Of course, there are obvious limitations with such an analysis....
this is based just on comparing one no-lockdown country to other countries; perhaps Sweden was an outlier for other reasons (what if, for instance, it had also improved various unrelated health care measures in the last couple of years, more so than other countries had?).
It would of course be helpful to also control for other factors, such as immunization rates over time, the fraction of the country that lives cheek-by-jowl in major population centers, more precise measures of age, and more.
The excess mortality data may be imprecise in some respects, though the COVID mortality data might be as well.
Total excess mortality is a crude measure in various ways; one might want to consider years of life lost (reasoning that, say, the death of a child with 70 years to live is even more tragic than the death of an adult with 7 years to live), or one might want to exclude suicide, or do something else.
One might also want to try to look at more than mortality, and include serious but not fatal long-term health results (both from COVID and other sources), lost educational opportunities for children, and many other things....
"This having been said, I thought the information on Sweden was worth noting, and of course I'd love to know whether there is more reliable information.
"I should note that I have neither been a strong supporter or strong opponent of lockdowns... Whether or not they are sound is an important empirical question, which deserves more study. And to the extent that Sweden's experiment seems to have been at least potentially successful (though contrary to the judgment of health authorities in other countries), I hope that it leads people to study the question more closely."
"Matt Hancock and I have almost nothing in common.... [I]mportantly, we fundamentally disagree over his handling of the pandemic.... How then could I have worked with him on his book about the pandemic? Some of my lockdown confidantes suggested it was a betrayal.... Quite the reverse. I wanted to get to the truth. What better way to find out what really happened – who said what to whom; the driving force and thinking behind key policies and decisions; who (if anyone) dissented; and how they were crushed – than to align myself with the key player?....
"In the event, Hancock shared far more than I could ever have imagined.... Published this week, co-authored by me, Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries are the first insider account from the heart of government of the most seismic political, economic and public health crisis of our times. I am not so naive as to imagine that he told me everything. However, since he still does not believe he did anything wrong, he was surprisingly inclined to disclosure. In an indication of how far he was prepared to go, the Cabinet Office requested almost 300 deletions and amendments to our original manuscript. Under pressure from me and out of his own desire that the book should be both entertaining and revelatory, to his credit, Hancock fought hard to retain as much controversial material as he could.... Here then – based not only on what is in the Pandemic Diaries but on every-thing I saw in the process of putting the book together – are what I consider the key lessons.
"The crusade to vaccinate the entire population against a disease with a low mortality rate among all but the very elderly is one of the most extraordinary cases of mission creep in political history. On 3 January 2021, Hancock told The Spectator that once priority groups had been jabbed (13 million doses) then ‘Cry freedom’. Instead, the government proceeded to attempt to vaccinate every-one, including children, and there was no freedom for another seven months.... Why did the goalposts move so far off the pitch? I believe multiple driving forces combined almost accidentally to create a policy which was never subjected to rigorous cost-benefit analysis.... Given the unprecedented speed at which the vaccine was developed, the government might have been expected to be extra careful about recording and analysing any reported side-effects. While there was much anxiety about potential adverse reactions during clinical trials, once it passed regulatory hurdles, ministers seemed to stop worrying....
"One of the most striking themes to emerge from internal communications is the scale of concern about Scotland.... Throughout the pandemic, far-reaching policy decisions, especially international travel restrictions and the timing of lockdowns, were distorted by what Sturgeon was doing or what No. 10 feared she might do. Hancock describes her move to mandate mask-wearing in secondary schools in late August 2020 as ‘one of her most egregious attempts at one-upmanship to date’, admitting the UK government was left ‘scrabbling around to formulate a response’. The UK government’s own guidance on face coverings had specifically excluded schools. Faced with an unpleasant choice between wheeling out the chief medical or scientific officer to say that the Scots were wrong or performing a U-turn, Downing Street chose the latter. That, rather than any medical reason, is why millions of schoolchildren were forced to spend months with grubby bits of material stuck to their faces....
"As far as Hancock was concerned, anyone who fundamentally disagreed with his approach was mad and dangerous and needed to be shut down.... Such was the fear of ‘anti-vaxxers’ that the Cabinet Office used a team hitherto dedicated to tackling Isis propaganda to curb their influence. The zero-tolerance approach extended to dissenting doctors and academics. The eminent scientists behind the so-called [Great] Barrington Declaration, which argued that public health efforts should focus on protecting the most vulnerable while allowing the g eneral population to build up natural immunity to the virus, were widely vilified: Hancock genuinely considered their views a threat to public health.... Anti-lockdown protests were quickly banned. When, in September 2020, the Cabinet Office tried to exempt demonstrations from the ‘rule of six’, Hancock enlisted Michael Gove to ‘kill it off’, arguing that marches would ‘undermine public confidence in social distancing’. Gove had no qualms about helping.....
"The accusation that he blithely discharged Covid-positive patients from hospitals into care homes, without thinking about how this might seed the virus among the frail elderly, or attempting to stop this happening, upsets and exasperates him. The evidence I have seen is broadly in his favour.... It later emerged that the primary source of new infection in these settings was in any case not hospital discharges, but the movement of staff between care homes.... Hancock knew he would be accused of ‘blaming’ hardworking staff if he emphasised the link (which is exactly what has now happened). He is on less solid ground in relation to the treatment of isolated care-home residents and their increasingly desperate relatives..... Behind the scenes, the then care home minister Helen Whately fought valiantly to persuade him to ease visiting restrictions to allow isolated residents some contact with their loved ones. She did not get very far. Internal communications reveal that the authorities expected to find cases of actual neglect of residents as a result of the suspension of routine care-home inspections.
"Hancock, Whitty and Johnson knew full well that non-medical face masks do very little to prevent transmission of the virus. People were made to wear them anyway because Dominic Cummings was fixated with them; because Nicola Sturgeon liked them; and above all because they were symbolic of the public health emergency. As early as 3 February 2020 – long before anyone outside the Department of Health was taking the prospect of a pandemic seriously – ministers were told the masks make no significant difference. In April 2020, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) reiterated this advice. At the end of that month, the Sage committee said much the same thing, telling ministers that it would be unreasonable to claim a large benefit. An ‘obsessed’ Cummings was the driving force behind mandating mask-wearing in all healthcare settings – and then in retail and hospitality. On 28 June he messaged Hancock to complain that the government was being insufficiently ‘aggressive’ on the issue and demanding that they be compulsory in shops and for restaurant staff....
"There is no doubt that Hancock worked phenomenally hard to do what he felt was best, based on all the information available at the time. Day after day, he was forced to make tremendously difficult judgments, balancing sharply competing interests.... While vast sums of public money were wasted and the collateral damage from lockdowns and other Covid policies was enormous, I do not believe there was any kind of conspiracy, still less any malign intent on the part of our political leaders during the crisis. They may have been misguided; and got some things catastrophically wrong, but mistakes were made in good faith. Whether or not those errors will be forgiven by a public only just beginning to realise the full consequences is another question."
One of the mysteries of the Covid-19 pandemic is why so many governments
quickly discarded their existing pandemic plans and opted to lock down instead. The story of the Crimson Contation may shed some
light on how that
December 22, 2022 - "The lockdowns of March 2020 shocked the American people
and most public health agencies, not to mention infectious disease doctors.
The idea of school shutdowns, business closures, plus mandatory remote work
and other restrictions have previously seemed inconceivable. It was especially
remarkable to have such an 'all-of-government' response to a virus that we
already knew posed a threat mainly to the elderly and infirm. Issues like
public-health precedent, American legal tradition, and medical knowledge about
dealing with respiratory viruses, not to mention natural immunity and
collateral damage of lockdowns, were all thrown out the window.
"Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci mentions a tabletop
exercise called Crimson Contagion that ran from January through August, 2019.
I had not previously heard of it and I found the mention remarkable, simply
because it proves that not everyone was shocked by lockdowns. They were not
part of official planning documents of either the CDC or WHO but they were
clearly in the plans of someone.
"I’ve only followed up on this report in light of growing focus on the person
who coordinated Crimson Contagion: Robert Kadlec, who served in the Trump
administration as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services,
Preparedness and Response. It was he who also ran the Covid response between
HHS and the Department of Homeland Security. Kadec’s lifetime government
service (and, yes, he is said to be CIA) extends all the way back to the G.W.
Bush administration when in 2007 he took the position of Special Assistant to
the President and Senior Director for Biodefense Policy on the Homeland
Security Council from 2007 to 2009. The very notion of lockdowns originated in
that administration.
"The 2019 tabletop exercise involved a huge number of public-sector agencies
across all states plus many private-sector associations. It postulated a
disease scenario in which a respiratory virus begins in China and spreads
around the world by air travelers. It is first detected in Chicago. The World
Health Organization declares a pandemic 47 days later. But then it was too
late: 110 million Americans became sick, with 7.7 million hospitalized and
586,000 dead.
"The conclusion of the exercise was that government was not well prepared for
a pandemic and urged more planning and fast acting to implement what we now
call lockdowns as we await a vaccine. Presumably, the vaccine then fixes
everything.
"The public knew nothing of this exercise until March 19, 2020, when the
New York Times reported on it for the first time. This was one day
following the detailed release of stay-at-home orders by the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency. The next day, National Public Radio also ran a
report on Crimson Contagion. The Times reported:
> The Crimson Contagion planning exercise run last year by the Department
of Health and Human Services involved officials from 12 states and at least
a dozen federal agencies. They included the Pentagon, the Department of
Veterans Affairs and the National Security Council. Groups like the American
Red Cross and American Nurses Association were invited to join, as were
health insurance companies and major hospitals like the Mayo Clinic.
The war game-like exercise was overseen by Robert P. Kadlec, a former Air
Force physician who has spent decades focused on biodefense issues. After
stints on the Bush administration’s Homeland Security Council and the staff
of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he was appointed assistant secretary
of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response.
"Also participating were former Trump administration officials Rex Tillerson
(Secretary of State, 2017-2018) and John F. Kelly, who was White House chief
of staff from 2017 to 2019. The NYT even ran a picture of the two of
them at the event.
"Here are some direct quotes from the October 2019 report of Crimson
Contagion:
The exercise revealed several workforce protection challenges under
conditions where medical countermeasures, such as the pandemic vaccine,
antiviral medications, and personal protective equipment, are limited. To
protect the public prior to vaccine distribution, public health officials
issued guidance on the implementation of nonpharmaceutical interventions
intended to slow the spread of the virus.
In keeping with non-pharmaceutical intervention recommendations, employers –
including government entities – sought to practice social distancing by
having a significant portion of their employees work remotely. Employers
encountered cascading impacts associated with making, communicating, and
implementing such work-distancing decisions.
At multiple levels of government, officials wrestled with identifying
employees who are essential and those who are nonessential in the context of
an incident forecasted to span many months. In addition, officials faced
challenges in determining which employees could perform their duties
remotely and hierarchical organizations, such as state and federal
departments and agencies, were uncertain as to the process for determining
and implementing remote-workforce decisions.
Also:
During the exercise, CDC recommended that states delay school openings for
six weeks, a follow-up to the initial (pre-exercise) recommendation that
states delay the opening of schools for two weeks if the disease is present
in the area. Many local jurisdictions and school districts have the
authority to decide to close schools (or keep schools open). This
distributed approach to school closure decisions caused confusion centered
on discrepancies between schools that remained open and those that closed.
In addition, while school delays and dismissals may be necessary over the
course of the pandemic response, state participants identified any continued
school delays and dismissals as having serious cascading impacts that
require a concerted public messaging campaign and government coordination.
Multiple states realized that dismissing schools is much more complex than
they previously appreciated....
"This exercise took place entirely out of the public eye but had strangely
prescient foretelling of events only 5 months later. Kadlec, who had organized
the entire tabletop exercise, was also later the author of the U.S. Senate
Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions report: An Analysis of the
Origins of the COVID-19 Pandemic, which came out earlier this year. Robert F.
Kennedy, Jr., reports: 'second only to his longtime crony and comrade in arms
Anthony Fauci, Robert Kadlec played a historic leadership role in fomenting
the contagious logic that infectious disease posed a national security threat
requiring a militarized response.' He is the signer of the report to HHS, in a
letter dated December 9, 2019....:
"By the time of this letter, US intelligence already knew of the Wuhan virus.
Four months later, US lockdowns began, starting with the March 8th
cancellation of South-by-Southwest by the Austin, Texas mayor, and extending
to the March 12th imposition of travel restrictions, the March 13 takeover by
FEMA, and the March 16th press conference by Trump, Fauci, and Deborah Birx,
which announced nationwide lockdowns....
"The lockdowns – to which Trump agreed only reluctantly and were extended far
past the point in which he believed they would control the virus – were the
most ruinous of the administration. Trump’s pollsters for 2020 all agreed that
these lockdowns created the conditions that drove him from office.
"What does it all mean? Perhaps it is all just a series of coincidental data
points, that what is called the worst pandemic in 100 years came only a few
months after an elaborate multi-agency trial run of the same in which former
high officials of the Trump administration participated. And perhaps the best
person to run the Covid response also happened to be the very person who
organized and managed the trial run in the previous season.
"Many people will surely say there is nothing to see here. There is so much
not to see these days."
December 8, 2022 - "In 2020, Washington Post columnist Max Boot happily served as one of the most useful idiots in Xi Jinping’s arsenal, prematurely declaring that the genocidal regime Xi leads, the one that had unleashed the coronavirus on the rest of the world, had won the pandemic.
"'China’s success is mainly due to the application of science in a country where people are taught to respect science,' explained Boot, who found it within himself to heap praise upon the Chinese Communist Party for, of all things, separating Covid-positive children from their parents. 'If the virus were a human enemy, [Donald] Trump would have long ago run up the white flag, while China would be accepting its unconditional surrender,” he concluded, putting a bow on a staggering #Resistance artifact that boasted the jaw-dropping title: 'China is beating the coronavirus while Trump leads America to defeat.'
Max Boot in 2014.
"Fast-forward to this week, and Boot has been forced to admit that you do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to the Chinese Communist Party. His epiphany, however, came without an admission of his own error in judgment.
"'China’s response to the covid-19 pandemic is widely acknowledged as a costly failure: Its draconian lockdowns have made it hard for ordinary people to get food or medicine and are depressing economic growth,' wrote Boot under the headline 'China’s covid policy failed. But don’t get cocky. So did America’s'....
"By the time Boot put pen to paper in 2020, reporting had confirmed that Uyghur prisoners in concentration camps were being subjected to what can only be described as torture. From the Associated Press:
One middle-aged Uighur woman told the AP that when she was detained at the height of China’s coronavirus outbreak, she was forced to drink a medicine that made her feel weak and nauseous. She and others in her cell had to strip naked once a week as guards hosed them and their cells down with disinfectant, she said. “It was scalding,” recounted the woman by phone from Xinjiang, declining to be named out of fear of retribution. “My hands were ruined, my skin was peeling.”
"Only now that the Chinese regime’s pandemic-related crimes have gone mainstream — even Han Chinese citizens are being welded into their homes and forcibly shipped off to quarantine camps — can Boot see the error of the CCP’s ways. And even now, he’s ... uncritically taking China’s word for its Covid-related death count, contrasting it with the death count in the United States, and blasting Republicans for 'flocking to the misguided banner of "medical freedom."' That’s a concept Boot might be particularly ill-suited to heap scorn upon.
"Of course, officials from both major American parties have erred over the course of the last two and half years. But ... the key difference between the U.S. and Chinese response to the pandemic is not, as Boot would sorely love for you to believe, that one was worse because of the involvement of Republicans. It’s that one featured an acknowledgement of the need for tradeoffs, as well as inevitable human error, while the other has been characterized by an unwillingness to compromise and chronic inhumanity. Donald Trump left the White House close two years ago, yet Boot still can’t wrap his mind around the distinction."
Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida known nationally for his opposition to Covid lockdowns and mandates, was re-elected this month with a 19-point margin of victory.
November 11, 2022 - "'A huge re-election victory vindicates his pandemic policies,' writes the Wall Street Journal. 'With runaway win, DeSantis’s political career becomes supercharged,' writes the New York Times. 'Ron DeSantis is the new Republican Party leader,' declares Fox News. 'Florida’s governor turned his coronavirus policies into a parable of American freedom,' observes the Atlantic.
"As well they should. The self-perpetuating lockdowns, mandates, and state of emergency that were imposed across much of the world in response to Covid-19 were a totalitarian aberrationincompatible with the values of constitutional democracy. Resisting those mandates wasn’t just a parable of American freedom — it was American freedom.
"Unlike some leaders such as South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, DeSantis didn’t initially see through the lockdowns. But he was one of the few political leaders to quickly and publicly recognize his error, vowing that Florida 'will never do any of these lockdowns again.' Where DeSantis really stands out, however, is in his wholehearted embrace, from that point forward, of the anti-lockdown movement in its entirety.
"He’s consulted and hosted roundtable discussions with prominent anti-lockdown activists and scientists including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, and appointed Dr. Joseph Ladapo, a strong opponent of Covid mandates, as his Surgeon General. DeSantis and his team became active within the anti-lockdown movement on social media, and he frequently voiced strong opposition to Covid mandates in his speeches, such as during his State of the State address:
Florida has become the escape hatch for those chafing under authoritarian, arbitrary and seemingly never-ending mandates and restrictions. Even today, across the nation we see students denied an education due to reckless, politically-motivated school closures, workers denied employment due to heavy-handed mandates and Americans denied freedoms due to a coercive biomedical apparatus.
These unprecedented policies have been as ineffective as they have been destructive. They are grounded more in blind adherence to Faucian declarations than they are in the constitutional traditions that are the foundation of free nations.
Florida is a free state. We reject the biomedical security state that curtails liberty, ruins livelihoods, and divides society. And we will protect the rights of individuals to live their lives free from the yoke of restrictions and mandates.
"DeSantis’s staunch support for the anti-lockdown cause may be explained, in no small part, by the fact that he remains one of the world’s only major political figures to publicly share his belief that the Chinese Communist Party played a key role in influencing the global response to Covid-19:
The [W]est did a lot of damage to itself by adopting some of these policies, which have proven to not work to stop the spread, but to be very economically destructive. I do think there was an information operation angle to this, where they really believed that if they could get these other countries to lock down, and they were willing to do some propaganda along the way, particularly in Europe, that ultimately would help China. And I think it has helped China.
"For this, DeSantis effectively became the face of the anti-lockdown movement in the United States. It was a bold political gamble ... and it drew the consternation of lockdown supporters, media and political elites across the country.
"But it paid off big. DeSantis won the race for reelection with a 19-point margin of victory—the widest victory margin in a Florida gubernatorial election since 2002. Even more telling, DeSantis’s odds to win the 2024 presidential election soared by more than 10 percentage points, making him the new frontrunner in the presidential race.
"The outsized significance of DeSantis’s victory isn’t so much in the victory itself, which was predicted, or even the margin of that victory. The real significance is that DeSantis outperformed by a wide margin at the same time the Republican Party underperformed across the rest of the country. This unique outperformance vindicates whatever DeSantis did differently [from] the rest of the GOP. And without a doubt, what DeSantis is best known for is his wholehearted embrace of the anti-lockdown movement."
October 10, 2022 - "Chinese cities were imposing fresh lockdowns and travel restrictions after the number of new daily COVID-19 cases tripled during a weeklong holiday, ahead of a major Communist Party meeting in Beijing next week. The latest lockdown started Monday in Fenyang city in northern China's Shanxi province after a preliminary positive case was found in citywide testing the previous day, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
"In the nearby Inner Mongolia region, the capital Hohhot announced that outside vehicles and passengers would be prohibited from entering the city starting Tuesday. Hohhot has recorded more than 2,000 cases over about 12 days.
"China is one of the few places in the world still resorting to harsh measures to keep the disease from spreading. The long-ruling Communist Party is particularly concerned as it tries to present a positive image of the nation in the run-up to a once-in-five-years party congress that starts Sunday.... But the number of new daily cases has still grown to about 1,800 from 600 at the start of the break.
"Leaders don't want a major outbreak to cast a pall over the congress, but their strict 'zero-COVID' approach has taken an economic toll, particularly on small businesses and temporary workers. Many in China hope the pandemic policy will ease after the meeting.
"Outbreaks have been reported across the country, with the largest in Inner Mongolia and the far-west Xinjiang region. Both have been recording several hundred new cases a day.
"Both Shanghai, where residents endured prolonged lockdowns earlier this year, and the national capital Beijing have had a small but growing number of cases. Two Shanghai districts announced closures of cinemas and other entertainment venues on Monday."
August 29, 2022 - "A Chinese think tank issued a rare public disagreement Monday with the ruling Communist Party’s severe 'zero COVID' policy, saying curbs that shut down cities and disrupt trade, travel and industry must change to prevent an 'economic stall.' The Anbound Research Center gave no details of possible changes but said President Xi Jinping’s government needs to focus on shoring up sinking growth. It noted the United States, Europe and Japan are recovering economically after easing anti-disease curbs.
"'Preventing the risk of economic stall should be the priority task,' the think tank said in a report titled, 'It’s Time for China to Adjust Its Virus Control and Prevention Policies'.... The report, dated Sunday, was posted on the Anbound Research Center’s accounts on the popular WeChat messaging platform and the Sina Weibo microblog service but was deleted from both on Monday afternoon....
"Economists warn that China needs to boost growth that sank to 2.5% over a year earlier in the first half of 2022, less than half the official annual target of 5.5%, after Shanghai and other industrial centers shut down starting in late March to fight virus outbreaks. 'China’s economy is at risk of stalling' due to the 'impact of epidemic prevention and control policies,' the think tank said....
"Economists and public health experts have warned since mid-2021 that 'zero COVID,' which aims to keep the virus out of China by isolating every case, is unsustainable. Officials respond that they have no alternative because letting the virus spread would overwhelm Chinese hospitals.
"A Shanghai physician with 3 million followers on social media, Zhang Wenhong, was shut down by official criticism and targeted by a plagiarism investigation in 2021 after he suggested China’s strategy could change and the world 'needs to learn how to coexist with the virus.'
"Founded in 1993, Anbound says it has served the Communist Party’s Central Financial and Economic Leading Group and provided research to government agencies and financial institutions. Its report gave no indication whether it might represent the thinking of officials who are unhappy with the soaring economic and human cost of “zero COVID.”
"China’s policy has kept deaths and infection numbers low but led to a wave of business failures. News reports say local governments are cutting public services and wages for civil servants to pay for virus testing and anti-disease measures.
"The economic impact of repeated shutdowns of companies and neighborhoods is more severe than last year, the think tank said. It said that 'freezing effect' might be even worse than when the outbreak began in 2020 and the whole economy shut down temporarily.... China needs to “focus on economic recovery and gradually integrate with the world,” the Anbound report said.... The government has stopped replacing passports that expire and has called on the public to avoid going abroad."
September 6, 2022 - "Footage showing that some residents in the earthquake-hit Chinese city of Chengdu were stopped from fleeing their compounds due to a Covid lockdown has sparked anger and disbelief online. Some in Chengdu say they were told to stay inside through a 6.6-magnitude earthquake on Monday that has killed at least 65 people. Those that ran out say they found the exits shut due to Covid restrictions.
"Chengdu, home to 21 million people, is currently under strict lockdown rules. China has a so-called zero Covid-19 policy, meaning that lockdowns are routinely imposed in communities when cases of the virus are detected. In some instances, apartment buildings where at least one person has tested positive for Covid have been designated 'sealed areas' - where residents are forbidden from setting foot outside their homes whether or not they have the virus.
"In one [video], a man swears at security guard, rattling what appears to be his apartment gates and trying to open it, shouting: 'Hurry up, open the door, it's an earthquake!' In response, the guards say: 'It's over, the earthquake's already over.' Another video claims to be an audio recording of a loudspeaker message that said: 'Go back home and do not gather here, it's just an earthquake'....
"One man told the BBC he had run out of his 30-floor building after feeling the earthquake's tremors. When he realised he was trapped, he raised complaints among the crowd gathered at the gates. 'Which one is more important? The lockdown or the earthquake?' Lu Siwei, a lawyer in Chengdu, had shouted. He says his neighbour replied: 'Do not incite emotions and do not talk politics.' After several heated rounds, Mr Lu says the man then physically assaulted him....
"'It's a joke that we have to discuss such a question,' said one commentator under a post from a local news site which quoted a lawyer saying citizens were 'constitutionally' free to flee to safety. The post had received over 3.7 million views by Tuesday. 'I guess it's fine if I die inside the building, at least I didn't get infected,' said another comment sarcastically.
"The Chengdu Health Commission later posted on its official WeChat account that 'priority should be given to safeguarding the lives of the public in the event of earthquakes, fires, floods and other disasters'.
"China's Covid policies require cities to enter strict lockdowns - even if just a handful of cases are reported. However, Beijing's drive to ensure 'zero Covid' has prompted rare public dissent from citizens.
"China is the world's last major economy attempting to entirely stamp out Covid outbreaks, claiming this is necessary to prevent wider surges of the virus which could overwhelm hospitals. The country has officially recorded fewer than 15,000 deaths since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins University."
August 25, 2022 - "One of the two candidates vying to replace Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, former Chancellor Rishi Sunak, ... claimed that he was gagged by the administration from publicly airing his objections to lockdown measures. Prime ministerial hopeful Rishi Sunak, who is currently trailing significantly in the polling against his opponent in the Conservative leadership race, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, has come out against the scientific establishment and the lockdown restrictions that were imposed at their behest in Britain.
"'We shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did,' Sunak told The Spectator. 'And you have to acknowledge trade-offs from the beginning. If we’d done all of that, we could be in a very different place.'
"The former Chancellor of the Exchequer said that one area in particular where he pushed back against the lockdown movement was the decision to close schools, despite children being less susceptible to serious cases of the Wuhan virus.... Sunak relayed objections he allegedly said during a government meeting: 'I was like: "Forget about the economy – surely we can all agree that kids not being in school is a major nightmare." There was a big silence afterwards. It was the first time someone had said it. I was so furious'....
"The Tory leadership hopeful went on to allege that the minutes from meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) were altered to remove opposing opinions from what the public saw....
"Sunak said that he 'wasn’t allowed to talk about' his concerns about trade-offs in public, adding: 'The script was not to ever acknowledge them. The script was: oh, there’s no trade-off, because doing this for our health is good for the economy.'
"Some have expressed scepticism over Sunak’s newly found opposition to lockdowns, particularly given his prominent role in subsidising people to stay home and businesses to remain shuttered during his time as the de facto top man at the Treasury.... Mr Sunak, one of the richest men in the House of Commons through his marriage to an Indian industrial heiress, has been struggling in the polling among the membership of the Conservative Party, many of whom have already cast their ballot in the leadership race to succeed Boris Johnson as party leader....
"Sunak has also been unable to shake the label of Brutus to Boris Johnson — who still enjoys widespread support within the party membership — with his resignation, alongside that of former Health Secretary Sajid Javid, ultimately sparking a wave of ministerial rebellions that forced Johnson to step down in July....
"Despite some accusing Sunak of attacking the lockdown regime as a callous political play to save his floundering campaign, it is notable given his close ties, including business ties through his father-in-law, to the World Economic Forum (WEF), which has been seen as one of the leading champions of lockdowns throughout the crisis."
August 11, 2022 - "Several COVID-hit Chinese cities from the country's east to west imposed fresh restrictions and lockdowns on their populations on Thursday to contain flare-ups that are again threatening to disrupt local economies. Reducing people's unnecessary movement for a few days - a softer type of lockdown - as soon as dozens of new cases emerge is a key practice of China's 'dynamic COVID-zero' strategy....
"The eastern export and manufacturing hub Yiwu said on Thursday it would enter three days of 'silent management', with most of its residents banned from leaving designated areas and some confined to their homes. Yiwu's 1.9 million people joined millions of others across several cities whose movements are restricted largely to their residential compounds, unless they have to go out for matters such as COVID tests, grocery shopping or hospital visits ... while all public venues in Yiwu were to be closed during the three days, excluding hospitals and other places offering essential services.
"In China's western region of Xinjiang, three cities in the Aksu area from Thursday allowed employees to leave their homes for work while restricting everyone else to necessary movements only. It is not clear when the measures will be lifted. Key districts in Xinjiang's capital Urumqi, meanwhile, have been in a five-day lockdown starting on Wednesday.
"Clusters in the tourism hotspots Hainan and Tibet continued to expand, with affected cities under lockdowns.
"Mainland China reported 1,993 domestically transmitted new coronavirus cases for Aug. 10 - 614 symptomatic and 1,379 asymptomatic - the National Health Commission said on Thursday. There were no new deaths, keeping fatalities at 5,226. China has confirmed 232,809 cases with symptoms as of Aug. 10, including local transmitted ones and those among arrivals."
August 7, 2022 "More than 80,000 tourists have been left stranded in a popular resort in China after a coronavirus outbreak sparked a lockdown. Authorities cancelled all flights and trains from Sanya, known as 'China's Hawaii, on Saturday, a day after 263 positive cases were confirmed. Travellers must now present five negative PCR tests over seven days before being allowed to leave....
"The restrictions on Sanya, a city on the southern Hainan Island and a popular surfing destination, come during the peak tourist season. Essential services such as supermarkets and pharmacies remain open, but entertainment venues have been closed since last week." Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-62455908
August 8 - "Kyle Newton was hoping for a break in the resort of Sanya on Hainan island - known as "China's Hawaii" - after enduring a harsh two-month Covid lockdown in Shanghai. His Hainan trip was due to last less than a week and was the teacher's first holiday in China since arriving just as the pandemic broke out.... But on Saturday, after 263 positive cases were confirmed in Sanya, authorities cancelled all flights and trains out of the city.
"On Monday the lockdown was extended to cover several cities after 504 cases were recorded on the island. The provincial capital Haikou - with a population of nearly three million - has been locked down and about seven million people have been told not to leave home except for food and Covid tests, state media said. Smaller towns Wuzhishan, Ledong and Chengmai are also locked down....
"Travellers must now present five negative PCR tests over seven days before they can leave - if they are able to book a flight out.... Mr Newton, from the UK, says he has had to queue for about two hours every morning to get a Covid test, which means he's been forced to cancel work meetings.... While those whose flights were cancelled on Saturday were reportedly offered free hotel rooms, Mr Newton said the hotel only offered him a 50% discount on the room rate for extending his stay due to the lockdown....
"Brian Hall, a professor at New York University Shanghai, also said it was unclear how long guests would have to remain in their rooms. His room is booked until Wednesday, and there has been no confirmation of the arrangement after this, he said. Dr Hall said it was his fourth period of confinement this year alone. Just four days after Shanghai lifted its lockdown at the beginning of June, Dr Hall's residential area was sealed again for another two weeks due to a suspected close contact case in a neighbouring compound. When he was allowed out, he immediately travelled to Sanya, where he had to do 10 days of quarantine.....
"Meanwhile, for residents such as Simon Vericel, the food supply remains 'annoying but so far not impossible'.... The Frenchman, who is a managing director for a PR firm, said they had been able to get food through delivery apps - but it can take more than 12 hours to arrive. Still, Mr Vericel says he has suffered minimally compared to tourists." Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-62461248
July 27, 2022 - "The Chinese metropolis of Wuhan has shut down a district of almost a million people after detecting four asymptomatic Covid cases, as the original epicenter of the pandemic takes no chances in preventing another outbreak under China's stringent zero-Covid policy. Authorities in Wuhan's Jiangxia district, home to more than 970,000 people, announced Wednesday its main urban areas would enforce three days of 'temporary control measures.'
"Entertainment venues -- including bars, cinemas and internet cafes -- small clinics and agricultural product marketplaces were closed; restaurant dining and large gatherings, from performances to conferences, were suspended; all places of worship were shut and religious activities banned; while tutoring institutions and tourist attractions halted operations, according to a government statement. All public transport, from buses to subway services, were suspended, and residents were urged not to leave the district unless absolutely necessary.
"Authorities also identified four high-risk neighborhoods where residents are banned from leaving their homes. A further four neighborhoods were designated as medium-risk, meaning residents cannot leave their compounds. The measures were aimed to 'further reduce the flow of people, lower the risk of cross-infection and achieve dynamic zero-Covid in the shortest time possible,' the statement said....
"Wuhan, a transport and industrial hub in central China's Hubei province, imposed the world's first Covid lockdown in early 2020 to contain the rampaging coronavirus, after initially playing down the outbreak and silencing health workers who tried to sound alarms.
The stringent lockdown shuttered businesses and confined residents to their homes for more than two months.... Despite the initial mishandling, the Chinese government has heralded Wuhan as a success story in its fight against the pandemic. In August 2020, as much of the world grappled with Covid-19, Wuhan made international headlines when it held an electronic music festival in an open air water park, with thousands of people partying....
"[S]nap lockdown, mass testing and strict quarantine have been used by authorities across China to contain sporadic outbreaks, in what has become known as the zero-Covid strategy. That approach had been mostly effective ... until this year, when the highly transmissible Omicron variant caused the country's largest outbreak since Wuhan [2020]. The financial hub of Shanghai was placed under more than two months of bruising lockdown,... Cities and towns around the country have also been subject to varying degrees of restrictions ... with some border towns undergoing intermittent lockdowns for months on end.
"The lockdowns have also wreaked extensive damage on the Chinese economy, plunging it into the slowest quarterly growth since the start of the pandemic. As much of the world moved on from the pandemic, Chinese officials, including the country's leader Xi Jinping, have repeatedly vowed to stick to the zero-Covid policy."
The international gambling hub of Macau, where 90% of the population is fully vaccinated for Covid, has been locked down, for the first time since February 2020.
July 10, 2022 - "The gambling enclave of Macau will enter a citywide lockdown early Monday, as authorities seek to contain a spiraling Covid-19 outbreak. Aside from essential services such as supermarkets, healthcare facilities and restaurants selling takeaway, all other businesses have been ordered to shut for a week, with residents required to stay at home. City officials urged the public not to panic-buy food, asking people to make purchases at staggered times to enable social distancing in queues.
"The order, issued Saturday by the territory’s chief executive, Ho Iat-seng, comes as Macau struggles to contain an outbreak that had already shuttered venues such as cinemas, salons and swimming pools. The Chinese gambling hub has recorded hundreds of cases in recent weeks, its worst-ever outbreak after keeping to China’s zero-Covid strategy for most of the pandemic.... Macau has a population of about 650,000. Throughout the pandemic, it has maintained strict Covid-containment measures. At one point, quarantine for travelers from what it deemed very high-risk countries was as long as 28 days.
"The lockdown order specified that all adults who needed to leave their homes would be required to wear masks of KN95-standard or above. Those who violated that order could be subject to jail time."
July 11, 2022 - "More than 30 zones in the city that have been deemed high risk are now under lockdown, meaning no one is allowed to enter or exit for at least five days. While the government said it was not imposing a citywide lockdown, the stringent measures mean Macau is effectively closed....
"Casinos were last shut in Macau in February 2020 for 15 days.... The industry employs most of the population directly or indirectly and accounts for more than 80% of government revenues. Casinos owned by Sands China, Wynn Macau, SJM Holdings, Galaxy Entertainment, Melco Resorts and MGM Resorts have been effectively shut for the past few weeks, with no gamblers and minimal staffing as per government requirements for people to work from home....
"Frustration is mounting at the government’s handling of the outbreak. Some residents have got into fights at testing centres while others have had to queue for more than 20 hours to access healthcare facilities. Residents will be required to take part in mass Covid tests four times this week as the government attempts to cut transmission chains. Residents have already been tested six times since mid June and are expected to do rapid antigen tests daily.
"More than 90% of Macau’s 600,000 residents are fully vaccinated against Covid but this is the first time the city has had to grapple with the fast-spreading Omicron variant. Authorities have added two hotels in popular casino resorts to be used as Covid medical facilities as they try to increase capacity to handle the surge of infections."
June 9, 2022 (6.47 am) - "Shanghai will lock down a district of 2.7 million people on Saturday to conduct mass coronavirus testing, city authorities said, as the Chinese metropolis struggles to fully emerge from punishing curbs. The city eased many restrictions last week, after confining most of its 25 million residents to their homes since March as China battled its worst Covid outbreak in two years. But the lockdown was never fully lifted, with hundreds of thousands in China’s biggest city still restricted to their homes and multiple residential compounds put under fresh stay-home orders.
"The south-western district of Minhang, home to 2.7 million people, will be placed under 'closed management' on Saturday morning and all residents will be tested, district authorities said in a social media post on Thursday. 'The closure will be lifted after samples have been collected,' they added, without giving a specific time or date.... The district’s announcement sparked fear among some social media users that the lockdown could be prolonged beyond Saturday if any cases are found."
June 9, 2022 (8.03 pm) - "Shanghai will briefly lock down most of the city this weekend for mass testing as Covid-19 cases continue to emerge, causing more disruption and triggering a renewed run on groceries days after exiting a grueling two-month shutdown. The plan emerged from one area with a handful of cases, then spread in hours to 15 of the financial hub’s 16 districts. It encompasses almost all of the city’s 25 million residents as health officials use testing to root out any silent transmission of the virus, a key tool in China’s Covid Zero arsenal.
"The quick escalation reflects the worry that continues to shroud Shanghai, which implemented one of the world’s strictest lockdowns in late March after a sluggish initial response to its outbreak. The newest move follows a rebound in infections within the community to six on both Thursday and Friday, up from zero a day earlier. Residents will be released after taking the tests, but they’ll be back under lockdown if new infections are found in their compounds. There were 5 additional infections found among people in quarantine on Thursday, for a total of 11 cases in the financial hub, health officials said. Nationwide, China added 73 infections.
"The threat of disruptive measures also returned to Beijing, as mass testing turned up 21 new local cases as of 3 p.m. on Friday. More than 4,400 people who were in close contact with those who were infected have been sent to government-mandated quarantine facilities. Several neighborhoods in the capital’s key Chaoyang district, home to company headquarters and embassies, were on alert after a flareup in a local bar ended a five-day streak of zero community spread on Thursday. There were two new infections found outside of quarantine there on Friday.
"The return of restrictions and mass testing in China’s biggest cities underscores the difficulty of eliminating the virus while the rest of the world accepts it as endemic. The disruption wrought by pandemic curbs have impacted production at companies like Sony Group Corp. and Tesla Inc. Still, President Xi Jinping continues to emphasize the country’s adherence to a policy that has delivered one of the lowest Covid death rates in the world. Xi called for Covid Zero to be adhered to 'unwaveringly' in a visit to Sichuan province Thursday, according to the official Xinhua news agency, while stating that it should be achieved in balance with the needs of the economy....
"Infections are also spreading in China’s north, with outbreaks in Inner Mongolia and in Dandong, a city on the border with North Korea, which recently acknowledged what it claimed was its first Covid outbreak."
May 27, 2022 - "'Conflict, COVID, the climate crisis and rising costs have combined in 2022 to create jeopardy for the world's 811 million hungry people,' the UN's World Food Program warned earlier this month. The organization went on to name Russia's invasion of Ukraine, climate shocks, 'the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic,' and rising food prices as culprits.
"This was hardly the first warning along these lines. In June 2021, the International Monetary Fund cautioned that 'early lockdown measures and supply chain disruptions induced a spike in consumer food prices.' Then we saw Thanksgiving headlines in the United States about the cost of serving a holiday meal at a time when the price of food worldwide had risen by almost a third over the previous year. International disruptions in the supply of precursor chemicals prompted Svein Tore Holsether, the CEO and president of fertilizer giant Yara International, to predict a 'food crisis.'
"A combination of always-unpredictable weather, trade disputes, and pandemic lockdowns stretched budgets, boosted costs, and threatened farmers' plans for growing seasons to come. And that was before Russian troops crossed the order of Ukraine, threatening the ability of two major breadbasket countries to satisfy global demand. 'Between them, Ukraine and Russia produce almost a third of the world's wheat and barley and half of its sunflower oil,' UN Secretary-General António Guterres noted on May 18. "There is no effective solution to the food crisis without reintegrating Ukraine's food production, as well as the food and fertilizer produced by Russia and Belarus, into world markets — despite the war.'
"Food prices around the world were up in April by 29.8 percent over the already elevated costs seen in the same month last year, according to the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization. That fueled demonstrations, food riots in Iran, and violent protests that toppled the government in Sri Lanka, which destroyed its own agricultural sector with a ban on modern fertilizers. Understandably, officialdom in many countries panicked.
"So, in typical political form governments are cutting off trade in what food they have, threatening to make the matter worse. 'India has defended its decision to ban exports of wheat after initially saying it would help ease a global supply crunch created by the war in Ukraine,' Voice of America reported earlier this week.... Malaysia banned the export of chickens, Indonesia restricted (after first outright banning) palm oil exports, and Ghana now blocks the export of rice, maize, and soybeans. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) currently counts 19 countries that forbid the export of some foods, and another seven that require government licenses.
"Historically, these requirements tend to spread, the organization warns, as governments emulate their neighbors to secure domestic supply. 'Export restrictions often had a cascading effect — when one country announced restrictions, others often followed suit, further exacerbating supply problems and creating a panicked atmosphere in global markets as importers sought to secure new suppliers, sending prices even higher,' according to IFPRI researchers Joseph Glauber, David Laborde, and Abdullah Mamun. 'Other countries have an incentive to have similar policies for similar reasons, and therefore this augments the problem and pushes food prices further up,' Michele Ruta, lead economist at the World Bank for macroeconomics, trade and investment, agreed in a statement to the The Wall Street Journal.
"The export bans can also be devastating for local producers who are cut off from international markets. That may mean ... fewer producers going forward, especially when production costs, including fertilizer and other inputs, are through the roof. 'Exporting helps keep the farms running, because the government's ceiling price at RM8.90 (US$2) keeps chicken prices low, but costs of chicken feed keep increasing month by month,' a Malaysian poultry farmer told ChannelNewsAsia this week. Indonesia's palm oil producers similarly protest restrictions on exports. They warn that because of the controls and a resulting glut of domestic supply, 'prices no longer cover costs.'
"It's difficult to find economists who think that export restrictions on food are a good idea. But politicians often support them anyway because they tend to play well with politically powerful urban constituents.... The inevitable result of export restrictions on food, though, is higher costs around the world, and often reduced production at home as farmers go out of business or switch to unrestricted crops. That means more poverty, hunger, and suffering going forward.
"It's all that much more infuriating when you remember that we previously enjoyed decades of steadily declining poverty and disappearing hunger thanks to innovation, free markets, and open societies. The current chaos can be largely laid at the feet of profoundly stupid policy decisions. Yes, drought, floods, and frosts played a significant role, but nature has never been cooperative, and humans have grown increasingly skilled at producing sufficient calories despite the fickleness of weather and climate. It took lockdowns, trade disputes, ignorant protectionism, and old-fashioned warfare to make the cost and availability of the next meal once again a matter of concern for a growing, rather than shrinking, portion of the world's population."
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