Postpandemic Hindsight

>> Scott Atlas: Lockdowns were actually lockdowns, no matter what you hear people denying that anyone did lockdowns. In fact, in October, I was in a meeting in the White House because by then it had become obvious after my constant ranting internally that lockdowns were horrible. Deborah Burke said, Scott, no one in the White House task force wants lockdowns, we don't want lockdowns.

And so I said at that meeting, are you for closing schools and businesses? Yes. Are you for limiting medical care? For non Covid care? Yes, are you for limiting groups and family interactions? Yes, restricting movement, curfews, quarantining low-risk people? Yes, I said, well, then you're for lockdowns. They don't like the word because they know it's poison.

The lockdowns failed. Why do I say that? They failed and they destroyed people. They failed. This is a study from Bjornskov, 24 European countries. Severe lockdown policies, more severe policies, shelter in place, were not associated with lower mortality. The point of the lockdowns is to stop people from dying because you're causing collateral damage here.

The lockdowns are not a free lunch here. I mean, that's not even on the table. This is Stanford's study, January 2021. We do not find benefits, significant benefits, on case growth of the more severe lockdowns. In fact, John Ioannidis, one of the co-authors, said, most countries, the lockdowns were pro-contagion.

They increased the spread because, remember, the lockdowns are confining people indoors. You remember when the beaches were closed and the parks were closed, probably. National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2021, Rand Institute, USC. They looked at 43 countries and the United States, and once the lockdowns were implemented, they found that longer shelter in place orders were associated with more excess deaths.

Excess deaths are deaths above the baseline of what happens in a non pandemic year. With faster, earlier imposition of lockdowns, more excess deaths occurred. Once the lockdowns were instituted, the excess deaths that had been falling began to rise. This is the data.

>> Scott Atlas: Johns Hopkins, January, 2022, looked at a meta analysis of the world studies on lockdowns.

And the bottom line is that lockdowns had little to no effect, yet they were severely destructive. Quote their final statement, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument. This was known in 2000, 615 years before this. Roughly the standard pandemic literature on policy of what to do said, don't use lockdowns because they don't work and they destroy people.

That was ignored. National Bureau of Economic Research, Kerpen, and others, including Casey Mulligan at University of Chicago, looked at in a statistical way, very detailed on three categories, mortality, economic damage, and educational harms, on how the states did. And here's what they found. First, New Jersey, New York, and California were among the worst in all three categories.

Utah, Nebraska, and Vermont were leaders in all three categories. And the outliers in their geographic area, because we're a big country and there's differences and we know that. Illinois, New Mexico, Colorado, and California did worse than their geographic neighbors. Florida, Arkansas, West Virginia, Utah did better than their geographic neighbors.

This is their map, this is their ranking quantitatively. And this is the top end of the spectrum of performance of the management of the pandemic, taking into account all those harms. And we see that two of the states that did almost nothing lockdown wise, although Governor DeSantis initially imposed the lockdown and then publicly stated he made a mistake.

By the way, they've been living normally in Florida now for two years. This is the month anniversary of when everything was opened. Two years. Nobody notices that here in California, by the way. This is the bottom of the scale. This is the reproduction of their data, by the way.

And you'll notice that the bottom six, Illinois, California, New Mexico, New York, Washington, DC, and New Jersey, are most of the most restrictive lockdown policies. Lockdowns hurt low income families and spared affluent families. Here's the changes in employment by wages. The bottom graph here is the bottom wave.

The most destructive deep loss of jobs is due in the bottom wage. And it's very obvious here that as you go up in wages, you were not impacted in employment. This is the effect on educational progress by income group. The low income families had a massive drop in educational performance, not the affluent families.

We're supposed to be a country that cares about the low income and the poor people here. Anybody who thinks that the lockdowns were good either doesn't know the data, denies the data, or is lying if they also say they care about the poor people. Otherwise, they shouldn't say they care about the poor people.

Again, we look at what policies are done here on the basis of the data, not on what we feel. Job losses persist mainly for low wage workers, not for affluent people. We heard an excellent presentation earlier at this meeting about how people like to work at home. And this is sort of the new economy.

By the way, they're self assessing if they were more productive. I don't know if you caught that, but you'll notice who works at home, affluent people work at home.

>> Scott Atlas: I call lockdowns a luxury of the rich. I borrowed that phrase two years ago from Sunetra Gupta at Oxford, but I think it really encapsulates everything.

The economic harms of the lockdowns equaled lives lost. This was known. This was decades of literature. When severe economic downturns occur, people die. This is not new turf. Yet none of the economists, almost none, were talking about this. I'm not an economist, I was called up by one of the economists at University of Chicago, John Burge.

And he said, Scott, you're writing a lot back in the spring of 2020 about COVID. I'd like you to help me write a paper on what's happening with the lockdowns. And what we found, this is back in the spring of 2020, was that number of life years lost, which is how economists talk, were double from the lockdowns than they were for the virus even then.

I say lockdowns directly killed people, and of course, it's factually true, but I wanna just give you some examples. Half of 650,000 United States cancer chemotherapy patients stopped getting their chemo because they were afraid. They were convinced that medical centers were dangerous. They stayed home. 40% to 50% of stroke and acute heart attack patients did not call the ambulance.

They were afraid to get into an ambulance. Organ transplants from living donors were down 85% in 2020 during the lockdown. The needs for these medical cares did not go away. People died. More than two-thirds of cancer screenings were skipped during 2020. Severe child abuse, I already mentioned. And ironically, the childhood vaccinations, half of them, 50% to 60%, were skipped because people were afraid to bring their kid in for the diseases that actually are potentially lethal for children.

>> Scott Atlas: The Western world lockdowns inflicted worldwide harms. Interruption of critical medical care occurred because of supply chains and other things. There's a massive dependence on Western world for other countries to get things like medical supplies. Tuberculosis alone, 400,000 new TBP deaths occurred due to the lockdowns, not from the virus.

Tens of thousands of malaria deaths occurred in babies because they couldn't get malaria nets to these countries, because of the lockdowns. 1.5 billion children were shut out of education. 100 million plus more children underwent sexual abuse and exploitation, violence, genital mutilation, or childhood pregnancies. That's a decision of the people who imposed the lockdowns.

Covid learning has been a total disaster. This is an explosion of children worldwide published a few weeks ago, who cannot understand a simple text by age ten, explosion. There's an explosion of spousal abuse. A record number, the highest rate in 25 years worldwide spousal abuse from the lockdowns.

>> Scott Atlas: 100 million more people were thrown into extreme poverty worldwide from the lockdowns. That's $1.90 per day living.

>> Scott Atlas: Feynman said, it does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published.

If your prediction is wrong, then your hypothesis is wrong, period. Another illustration, I'd like to compare Florida to California because they did the opposite in terms of policy. And they're similar states in ways. They're very large, they're heterogeneous, urban, rural, they're heterogeneous demographically. There's one difference, and that is that Florida is much older than California.

And of course, when it's only the old people that die, roughly, from COVID, that means Florida is far more vulnerable to COVID deaths than California. This is states by age, median age. This is states by age, percent over 65. That's Florida and California highlighted. And what were the differences?

Well, after year 1,

>> Scott Atlas: They had a totally different pandemic policy. Of course, Florida opened their schools. This is Florida, green as kids in-person schools, in-person schools from fall. This is California. Something like 16% of kids had in-person learning. So the collateral damage, which we already know, that's severe in California, not present in Florida.

What about protecting people from dying from COVID? Well, the age-adjusted COVID mortality after year 1 was better in Florida, lower than in California. Excess mortality increase lower in Florida than California. This is after two plus years. Excess mortality increased during the pandemic. California versus Florida, with the US overall.

California worse than Florida. No matter what Gavin Newsom says, California did worse than Florida. This is age-adjusted COVID mortality as of a few weeks ago when I had the time to go and look at the chart. Florida did better than two-thirds of states, better. The burden is not on Florida to do better, by the way.

They didn't get the collateral damage. The burden is on the people who destroyed people and shut down, saying they're gonna save lives from COVID. The burden is on them to do better, not Florida. What about the vaccines? I wanna cover something about the vaccines because this is very controversial, and it shouldn't be.

Here's the data on the vaccines, first from Israel. And what it shows here is that the protection after four months roughly was very high against severe disease and death. That's extremely high. There's no vaccine that protects 100%. But it's not very good at stopping another case of COVID, symptomatic or not.

Okay, 40%, that was the first study from Israel. Second study I'll show you is from Qatar. By the way, why am I showing these other countries? Because the CDC has lost trust. They've not been forthcoming on some of the data. So we look at all the country's data, and now, there's a renewed importance to doing that.

Here's Qatar, New England Journal of Medicine, October 6th. I'm showing you the actual charts from the papers, it's not opinion. Effectiveness against any infection with the vaccine. After four months, it drops to unacceptable 20%. A vaccine would never be approved for that. So in terms of, it's protective for a few months against getting an infection.

What about against death and severe disease? It's very good, okay, up to six months. This number, the error bars are so big here. It's because there's so few cases. So we don't even look at that, it's not meaningful. But when you look at their data, protecting against death, it's very high for six months, which was the duration that we had at the time.

This is a study from Sweden.

>> Scott Atlas: Vaccine effectiveness against a symptomatic infection starts off pretty good, but it drops after about four or five months significantly, and continues to drop against a reinfection. What about against hospitalization or death? This is their data. I made a chart, because they didn't include the chart.

I used their data points. And it shows that if you're under 80, you have extremely high protection against death. And if you're over 80, you have very high protection against death, although it starts to wane once you get out after six months. So the message here is, from the data, the vaccines protect against death and dying.

They don't protect very well even then against reinfection, after a few months. This is a study, very important study, August 2021, Israel assessing, what about people who've had COVID? Because this is basic biology. When you've had a viral infection, you retain protection against the viral infection. That's fundamental biology, it's not Epidemiology or virology associated.

You don't learn it in your fellowship, you don't learn it in medical school, you don't learn it in college, you learn it in AP high school biology. Not sure how many people here took AP high school biology, but I did. And what the data showed was that recovered people have a better resistance against symptomatic infection by 27 fold compared to people who've had the vaccine and never been infected.

Recovered people who've not been vaccinated have better protection against all infection, whether symptomatic or not, by 13 fold compared to people who've never had the infection but been vaccinated and against severe disease hospitalization. Recovered people have better protection against those who've been vaccinated by Eightfold. This is a separate study from December 2021.

Israel protection against new infection and against COVID. And this is talking about if you've recovered or if you've recovered and then been vaccinated, or if you were vaccinated, then got an infection and recovered. Those are three different sort of scenarios. The point is, if you've had Covid, is it beneficial to get the vaccine?

That's the question they're trying to answer. And this is their data, there was no difference in protection against a new infection or against severe COVID for people who've been recovered from COVID and never been vaccinated compared to those who've been recovered from COVID and then got vaccinated compared to those who were first vaccinated and then got COVID and recovered.

Okay, so in this study, there is no reason to get the vaccine if you've had COVID. That's what this study is showing you. What about the newer variants, Omicron and these kinds of variants, which, by the way, were expected. That's how a pandemic evolves. Viruses get less lethal and retain or even increase contagiousness as they sort of, as a pandemic peters up.

That's normal biology. This is the data from December 20, 2021, Denmark on Omicron since time since vaccine. This is the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine data. And it shows that after two months, the protection against an infection after two months of having been vaccinated is four or 10%. That's essentially zero after 60 days.

This is New York data in five to eleven year olds and twelve to 17 year olds. After 30 days, there's no protection. 30 days of vaccine. It takes two weeks to get an antibody response. When you inject somebody with a vaccine, if there's no protection after 30 days and you take two weeks to get the vaccine generated response.

You would postulate then, if you believe in doing this, that you would have to take a vaccine every ten to 14 days for the rest of your life if you're trying to block yourself from getting a variant that is not very lethal. So this is the data on the vaccine so far.

They do not protect as well or as long as natural immunity, meaning immunity of recovered patients against infection, against symptomatic infection or severe infection. The vaccines protect well against COVID death and severe disease, at least by observational data. There are no solid randomized controlled trials and it's very difficult to do that now because 80% of Americans have had Covid.

So the studies will essentially never be done. Never, it's impossible. The protection against infection is extremely low after only four months, sometimes only after one to two months if you're talking about the newer variants. Therefore, you cannot generate herd immunity or protect society on the basis of these vaccines.

Right? Because the vaccines do not stop reinfection or spread of infection. They offer what I like to say is a personal protective benefit, that you won't die. If you have a high risk to die, you take the vaccine because you think, because it has significant protective effect against dying.

But the vaccine does not stop you from being a, quote, danger to other people. That's proven. That's not subject to debate. There is insufficient data. This is very important to understand on long term effects on safety and on the boosters, because everything was done in what's called emergency use authorization, which things are shortcut in terms of the time needed to assess.

A typical vaccine is not assessed for safety until at least five years. Just generally. What about COVID vaccines in young people? This is the UK's government advisory committee statement on vaccinating. The margin of benefit based on health perspective, it's considered too small to support universal vaccination on otherwise healthy twelve to 15 year olds.

That was the UK, the nordic countries, scandinavian countries didn't. Most of them did not recommend getting vaccines for young people, meaning under 20 in most of these countries. This is the United States FDA advisory meeting, statement by editor in chief of New England Journal of Medicine. But we're never going to learn how safe the vaccine is unless you start giving it that.

Just the way it goes. I mean, that's unconscionable. That's on record. Public health ethics in the United States have essentially disappeared. This statement, quote, if a school is implementing a testing strategy, testing should be offered on a voluntary basis. It is unethical and illegal to test someone who does not want to be tested, including students whose parents or guardians don't want them to be tested.

Where am I getting this statement that was on the CDC website? October 13, 2020. You can't find that statement anymore. It was reported in the news, and I have my own record of it. That statement was pulled down. That was before vaccines. And now, as all of you know who went to college or are in college, almost every university has required testing, including this one.

And vaccination and boosters. This is unethical, and I'm not sure it's illegal. I'm not a lawyer.