Los Angeles County public health officials reinstated recommendations for indoor mask-wearing Monday despite the wide availability of COVID vaccines.
The new directive comes as nations around the world embrace yet another wave of lockdowns in a futile effort to contain spread of the COVID-19 Delta variant, a mutation that originated from India and is more contagious than other strains.
“Until we better understand how and to who the Delta variant is spreading, everyone should focus on maximum protection with minimum interruption to routine as all businesses operate without other restrictions like physical distancing and capacity limits,” county health officials said in a press release.
More than 11 million Australians are now under lockdown after a mere 34 cases were reported Tuesday. Meanwhile, citizens in Thailand and South Africa face new restrictions as Japan and Germany place limits on travel. After detailing his nightmare experience navigating this transnational health bureaucracy in pursuit of international travel, Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, offered this blunt suggestion, with a warning that temporary pandemic measures are here to stay:
In short, if you are thinking of taking a long-haul flight anywhere in the world right now, my advice is: stay home. …
The spirit of today’s bureaucracy — ‘out of an abundance of caution’ is the key phrase used by officials who have been taught that even a 0.01 percent risk is too much — will ensure that at least some rules and regulations stay in place even when they do little or now good (or even net harm).
The lockdown resurgence now brewing on America’s doorstep vindicates conservative warnings of a forever pandemic. That’s the concern that powerful interests vested in the draconian measures benefit from a population gripped with hysteria and obsessed with trying to live with zero risk.
The new L.A. guidelines, while non-binding, threaten to precede stricter rules resurfacing in the face of science as vaccines have proven effective against the variants. California was the first in the nation last year to implement an experimental statewide stay-home order, quickly followed by at least 42 other states, according to a New York Times tracker. Lockdown restrictions ultimately remained until months after three effective vaccines were broadly administered across the country. Today, masks are still required on airplanes and many children’s return to the classroom by September is uncertain.
New lockdowns are on the horizon, however, first spotted in the first state to embrace them and among the last to lift them. They’re embraced by activists led by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci cloaked in the moral righteousness of “following the science” with the help of a complicit press when lockdowns don’t actually follow science.
Drs. Peter McCullough of Baylor University and Harvey Risch of Yale are two of the nation’s leading experts on public health. With decades of medical experience between them, their testimony carries credibility that any reasonable standard would declare them experts worthy of advising how to navigate a pandemic. On Monday night, they each declared the global response to the Delta variant dramatic hysteria.
“The Delta variant is the mildest one we’ve seen so far, and even though it’ll proportionately take up a greater number of cases — and we expect this in the United States — it has a very low mortality, appears to be the most treatable strain that we’ve seen so far,” McCullough explained on Fox News. “We’re going to keep patients out of the hospital at a very low risk of mortality.”
Risch concurred.
“This is a very mild variant, and the cases are going to go up … whereas at the same time the mortality is flat, near zero,” Risch said, “so basically what the reaction to is a flu or a bad cold for most people who get it.”
Lockdowns, on the other hand, have been found to exacerbate public health emergencies and increase excess deaths. According to a study from the Rand Corporation with the University of Southern California for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the nation’s harsh pandemic restrictions may have killed more people than if we had done nothing.
We find that following the implementation of shelter-in-place policies, excess mortality increases. … We failed to find that countries or U.S. states that implemented [shelter in place] policies earlier, and in which [shelter-in-place] policies had longer to operate, had lower excess deaths than countries/U.S. states that were slower to implement [shelter in place] policies.
Dozens of other studies from elite academics ostracized by the establishment media loyal to Faucian prescriptions have come to similar conclusions: lockdowns don’t stop coronavirus.
A forever pandemic fueled by the appetite of statist elites, however, will only increase the continued death, division, and despair such restrictions bring.
