APPARENTLY the wealth of the most affluent people in the world increased dramatically, by the trillions, in fact. That’s another piece of the puzzle. You’re saying that the laptop class, so to speak, got this focused protection as a result of the policy, also while being told that they were on the right side of things morally, because of doing their part to stop the spread – Jan Jekielek, Epoch TV, April 5 2022
Lockdown reorganised society to protect the wealthy while sacrificing the poor and the vulnerable. It has proved to be the biggest driver of inequality in our lifetime. That is the judgment of Dr Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, one of the epidemiologists behind the Great Barrington Declaration, one of the dissenting scientists whom US Covid czar Anthony Fauci immediately set out to censor and demonise instead of engaging with their rational policy response advocacy.
In a recent interview with Jan Jekielek of American Thought Leaders and Epoch TV,,Bhattacharya reveals why he was sceptical from the start about the science behind the ‘fifteen days to slow the spread’ promise. He immediately anticipated a wide range of collateral damage. Whatever form lockdowns over the world have taken they have had one thing in common, he says. They have proved a catastrophic failure: catastrophic ‘on its own terms of protecting people from getting and contracting Covid’ and catastrophic ‘in terms of all of the collateral harms it has had on societies around the world’. Lockdown, he says, is the single biggest public health mistake in history.
He is particularly condemnatory about the illusion of consensus that Tony Fauci, US health chief Francis Collins and Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust which funds many epidemiologists and scientists in the UK, worked to create by their ‘marginalising of scientists that disagreed with them, by working with the press and Big Tech to suppress the voices of scientists who did’.
He reserves particular anger for the impact of lockdown on the poor and on children: ‘We stopped the lives of these children for nothing. One other note to add to this about children, it’s not equally distributed. Parents of richer children sent their kids to private schools. In private schools that actually met in person, they had tutoring pods, where they would hire teachers who didn’t have anything to do because their school was out. They would hire these tutors and they would come to their home and teach the kids. Poor parents didn’t have that option. So you’re a poor family, maybe you’re a single mom, you have to go work. Your kids stay at home on Zoom school, and no one’s supervising them. Again, it was an example of trickle-down epidemiology. One group, the poor, have to pay the harms for compliance with this lockdown order that, again, didn’t do very much.’
In sum, he says, ‘We harmed the well-being of the working class, the poor, and the well-being of kids. We harmed the health, both the psychological and physical health of huge populations in the West.’
And it was all for nothing.
As to the enormous negative consequences on the health and well-being of the poor and developing countries he details he has this to say: ‘One World Bank estimate early in the pandemic said that there would be 100million people thrown into poverty as a consequence of the lockdowns. Poverty meaning less than $2 a day of income. Now why might that be? For the last 20-some years or even longer, we’ve had this globalisation of the world economy. Our economic systems are interconnected with each other. Poor countries reorganised their economies so they would fit in, and when these connections were severed overnight or greatly disrupted, and supply chains were disrupted, it threw a lot of people who were headed toward the middle class within the poor countries into poverty, dire poverty. We had lifted a billion people out of poverty over the last 20-some years, a great success, an unheralded success. But the progress on that has been halted over the last two years and 100million people are poor that otherwise wouldn’t have been, absent these lockdowns. The consequences of that on health have been devastating. Tens of millions of people are starving as a consequence of these lockdowns. The UN put an estimate out in March of 2021 that in South Asia alone, almost 30,000 children had died from starvation as a consequence of the lockdowns.
‘The stress that the lockdowns have placed on the poor everywhere around the world has been enormous. I don’t believe that there’s a single poor person on the face of the earth that has not been harmed by these lockdowns. It’s so sad. This is why I believe it’s the biggest public health error in history.’
You can watch a promo of the interview below:
To access the full interview and full transcript please click here.
