Our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP) have just released a must-read study of the effects of the United States government’s response to the COVID pandemic (or as we prefer to call it the Communist Chinese proof of concept bioweapons attack).
Four years ago this week, the government initiated unprecedented federal lockdowns of the economy to combat COVID. The just-released comprehensive Committee To Unleash Prosperity study of the academic evidence and dozens of peer-reviewed studies conclude that the ordered shutdown of our schools, churches, and businesses brought little health benefits while imposing multi-trillions of dollars of long-term societal costs.
These costs include a $6 trillion increase in government debt, hundreds of thousands of business bankruptcies, one to two years of lost schooling for young children, tens of millions of Americans out of work, and hundreds of thousands of excess deaths from loneliness, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, delayed hospital care in part due to the forced social isolation.
The lower wages to workers in the future from the educational losses could be in the trillions of dollars over the decades to come.
These costs exceeded by multiple times any health benefits from mandates and lockdowns.
States that didn’t shut down at all or quickly reopened had no different death rates on average than states that did. But the non-lockdown states had much swifter recoveries than states that shut down for a year or more.
This chart from the study shows that the one country, Sweden, that did not surrender to panic and lockdowns had one of the lowest rates of all-cause excess deaths:
These are some of the conclusions by a first-of-its-kind retrospective study by CTUP and co-authored by four of the nation’s top experts on the pandemic – Dr. Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution, economist Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins University, Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago, and Phil Kerpen, president of CTUP. The study concludes that many of the government policies had catastrophic social, educational, and economic consequences and that these mistakes should never again be repeated.
Among the ten conclusions are two that stood out to us because they had deleterious national effects that continue to this day:
Lesson #4: Government Should Not Pay People More Not to Work
Congress authorized $600 per week unemployment bonuses early in the pandemic, despite warnings that the consequences would be substantial, prolonged unemployment and associated economic underperformance. The evidence shows conclusively that bonuses for not working increased unemployment rates, which plunged rapidly when the original $600 bonus ended, before stalling when a $300 bonus took effect.
Lesson #7: Government Should Not Suppress Dissent or Police the Boundaries of Science
A poisonous interplay between America’s media, Big Tech, and the academic science and public health community has severely harmed the public. Scientists used the media to bully others, and the media gave them the imprimatur of “the experts” to disparage the opposing views. Censorship took many forms, including legacy media, social media, preprint servers, and university campuses. Scientific journals published character smears and social media actively suffocated voices that dissented from the accepted COVID narrative.
Anthony Fauci, the head of the largest federal grantmaking entity, created an environment in which it was very difficult for most medical experts to break with the dominant narratives on lockdowns, masks, or overwhelmed hospitals. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) became the principal advocate of lockdown policies, but failed to run high-quality trials of repurposed drugs and non-pharmaceutical interventions.
We chose to highlight the two conclusions cited above because of the deep societal harm they caused and the fact that they were strictly political – not medical – in nature.
The progress toward ending the culture of government dependency that was achieved through bipartisan welfare to work programs was ended in a few short months through the direct payments to workers – who were paid not to work in businesses that were shutdown unnecessarily. Many small businesses and enterprises with thin operating margins were killed outright by the shutdowns, but many have also died subsequent to the shutdown from lack of workers. What’s more, the cultural change to “work from home” has caused an acute decline in customer service in some industries and especially in government where many employees have simply refused to return to work in the office.
However, the least recognized, but most harmful effect of the failed COVID policies was the suppression of dissent and the replacement of scientific inquiry with politically correct narratives. This outrageous erosion of constitutional liberty and free expression undid 2,000 years of western civilization and the progress of the European Enlightenment in a matter of months and replaced it with a regime that would have made Nero’s persecution of Rome’s Christians look mild in comparison.
Innocent men and women were hounded from their jobs, denied access to the public square and in many cases imprisoned for questioning the politically correct narrative, engaging in legitimate scientific research, treating patients according to sound medical protocols or simply engaging in otherwise legitimate pursuits, such as cutting hair or selling seeds and gardening equipment. The result of this “poisonous interplay between America’s media, Big Tech, and the academic science and public health community” all but destroyed trust in scientific integrity and the last shreds of public trust in Big Media and Big Tech.
The good news is that this distrust engendered the rigorous independent examination of the science, medical, tech and media sectors and the subsequent exposure of the corruption and venality of many of their major players.