UK Dept. Of Health Official Admits They Got EVERYTHING Wrong About Pandemic — Lockdown Did More Harm Than Good
Professor Mark Woolhouse, a member of the SAGE modeling subgroup SPI-M, expressed deep regret while admitting to the fact that he and the Government’s other scientific advisors got practically everything regarding the Covid epidemic entirely wrong.
He describes how lockdown caused more harm than good in his new book, The Year the World Went Mad, and the missteps that made the UK epidemic worse.
“Lockdowns aren’t a public health policy,” said Woolhouse, an infectious disease researcher at Edinburgh University. They are indicative of a public health policy failure.”
“We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt,” he argues…. “All this to protect the NHS from a disease that is a far, far greater threat to the elderly, frail and infirm than to the young and healthy.
Harry de Quettevill reports in The Telegraph:
“We knew from February [2020], never mind March, that the lockdown would not solve the problem. It would simply delay it,” Woolhouse says, a note of enduring disbelief in his voice. And yet in government, “there was no attention paid to that rather obvious drawback of the strategy”.
Instead, lockdowns – which “only made sense in the context of eradication” – became the tool of choice to control Covid. The die was cast in China, which instituted ultra-strict measures and, unforgivably in Woolhouse’s book, was praised by the World Health Organisation for its “bold approach”. “The WHO,” he suggests, “got the biggest calls completely wrong in 2020. The early global response to the pandemic was woefully inadequate.”
Watching on, the rest of the world found itself following the same template, even though no work had been done to assess the costs of lockdowns. After swine flu, modellers had studied the knock-on consequences of many elements of infection control, but they had never envisaged “an instruction for most of the population to stay at home”.
So in March 2020, Britain issued the most dramatic civilian order since the war, with no idea what the harms might be. Why?
Even today, Woolhouse says, from his office at the University of Edinburgh: “I don’t have a good answer for you. It was a frustration from the beginning.” What he does know is that while extremely detailed modelling was being done “on what the epidemic itself might look like and the harms that novel coronavirus would cause… on the other side of the scales, we had pretty much nothing at all. There was never at any stage, even by the following year, any form of analysis of the harms caused by lockdowns. Were they even considered? I haven’t seen any evidence that they were and that is very, very troubling.”
https://en-volve.com/2022/02/22/uk-dept-of-health-official-admits-they-got-everything-wrong-about-pandemic-lockdown-did-more-harm-than-good/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/20/covid-made-world-go-mad-know-now-year-lockdown/