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May 11, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:20
LOCKDOWNS 282 TIMES WORSE?
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Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
Hope you're doing well. So, very interesting stuff here from the Epoch Times.
Professor explains flaw in many models used for COVID-19 lockdown policies.
Economics professor Doug Allen wanted to know why So many early models used to create COVID-19 lockdown policies turned out to be highly incorrect.
And as I've said before, you know, if people don't have any stake in it, if they don't lose their jobs or lose money based upon their predictions, if they don't lose at least status or things like that, I don't really care what they have to say.
I mean, it's just a bunch of bureaucratic noise nonsense.
What he found is that a great majority were based on false assumptions and, quote, tended to overestimate the benefits and underestimate the costs, end quote.
He found it troubling that policies such as total lockdowns were based on these models.
This is a quote. They were built on a set of assumptions.
Those assumptions turned out to be really important, and the models are very sensitive to them, and they turned out to be false.
And he's the Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University.
Alan says that most of the early cost-benefit studies that he reviewed didn't try to distinguish between mandated and voluntary changes in people's behavior in the face of a pandemic.
Rather, they just assumed an exponential growth of cases of infection day after day until herd immunity is reached.
Now, that's really fascinating, right?
So what he's saying here is that the assumptions, the models that the scientists use were based on the assumption that the only way to change human behavior or the only human behavior that people would ever change Modify would be based upon orders from the government,
that there would be no self-regulating choices, that people wouldn't sit there and say, oh, well, we're in a pandemic, so maybe I should stay away from people, maybe I shouldn't be in crowded areas, and you would do this without a government mandate because, you know, we like to do that crazy little thing called living.
And so basically the view of these techno bureaucrats is that you and I are robots that can't possibly judge what's best for us.
We can't make logical, sensible decisions based upon our own health preferences and needs and preference to live.
That the only way that we could ever change our behavior is based upon government mandates.
And that's a really chilling situation.
So it's called public choice theory.
It's basically the argument that whatever incentives you put or don't put into people's lives, they won't change their behavior.
So if, for instance, you say, well, we will give single mothers Money to support them in child raising that people won't, women in particular, won't change their behavior to say, well, being a mom is much more fun than working a minimum wage job, so I'll just have a bunch of kids without a dad and make money that way.
Or if you say, we will give people money who are involuntarily unemployed, then the assumption is that people will never sit there and say, well, gosh, it's way more fun getting 500 bucks a week from the government than it is working some minimum wage job, so I'll just do that.
And so this foundational, like, don't understand how human beings work, but these people are in charge of public policy decisions, and they have absolutely no idea how people work.
They are autistic, or that's sort of an insult to autistic people.
I apologize for that. It's really sociopathic or psychopathic in the way that they simply view human beings as inert chess pawns to be moved around by government bureaucrats, and the people will never make a decision on their own.
Of course, this goes completely against the whole concept of voting, but that's perhaps a topic for another time.
So it's just important to remember that these are the kinds of people who are in charge.
And, of course, the other thing, too, is that the incentives are all weird for this kind of stuff, right?
So you have this Marxist-led World Health Organization that puts out these mandates, and then anybody who goes against these mandates is considered to be spreading disinformation and putting people's lives at risk, and that's how you get censorship.
And this is how you shut down any possibility of debate.
I mean, people, obviously, if they feel that there's been a robust debate, if they've heard all sides of the story, they're usually much more comfortable with whatever is put in place.
But if you relentlessly crush any questions or any dissent, then people are much less likely to take the outcome.
of whatever decision is made and the fact that these lockdowns were pursued with no debate, with no feedback from people, with no cost-benefit analysis, no long-term studies.
Well, that just means that they were propaganda-based rather than science-based, right?
So, again, he says they didn't try to distinguish between mandate and voluntary changes in people's behavior in the face of a pandemic.
Rather, they just assumed an exponential growth of cases of infection day after day until herd immunity is reached.
In a paper he published in April in which he compiled his findings based on a review of over 80 papers on the effects of lockdown around the world.
By the way, I'm going to blow your mind with a number in just a sec here.
Well, he's going to blow both of our minds, I guess.
Alan concluded that the lockdowns may be one of the one of quote the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada's history.
That's not good.
He says many of the studies early in the pandemic assume that human behavior changes only as a result of state-mandated interventions, such as the closing of schools and non-essential businesses' masks and social distancing orders and restrictions on private social gatherings.
However, they didn't take into consideration people's voluntary behavioral changes in response to the virus threat, which have a major impact on evaluating the merits of a lockdown policy.
Yeah, I think that would be fair to say.
The quote is, human beings make choices and we respond to the environment that we're in.
But these early models did not take this into account, Alan said.
If there's a virus around, I don't go to stores often.
If I go to a store, I go to a store that doesn't have me meeting so many people.
If I do meet people, I tend to still stand my distance from them.
You don't need lockdowns to induce people to behave that way.
Allen's own cost benefit analysis is based on the calculation of life years saved.
And this is something I've talked about since early last year, life years saved.
So if, you know, the average age of death in Canada of people from COVID or with COVID associated with their deaths It's actually higher than the average life expectancy.
So you might have saved with this sort of stuff.
You might have saved six months.
You might have saved a year from people's lives with these massive lockdowns.
Of course, that year or six months is then basically locked in solitary confinement with no access.
And they may, of course, as many old people have said, like I've had my life.
Don't destroy the economy for the younger people.
And I'd rather take the risk and spend time with my grandchildren and spend time with my children rather than be locked into this room in basically house arrest prison for whatever time I have left.
But, of course, you don't get that choice, right?
So life is saved.
If you look at the life he is saved from lockdowns, even if we assume that it saved some old people's lives, fairly safe to say I'm sure it did.
But if you look at, say, for instance, the children who weren't born, the people who aren't getting health care, a surgeon wrote to me yesterday just saying that the diagnoses are really terrible these days because people have been too terrified or too locked down to go to the doctor.
doctor to go to the hospital to get preventive care done, to get tests done to, you know, you've got a lump, you'll just cross your fingers and hope for the best.
And the amount of illness that has gone beyond the treatable stage, particularly cancer, of course, is massive, huge, right?
So life he has saved is really interesting, right?
So he says, so he's done a cost benefit based on a calculation of the cost benefit.
Oh, not to mention, sorry, not to mention, of course, the fact that a lot of babies haven't been born.
So you've lost 80 years right there, right?
Because people have postponed having kids.
I asked this in my newsletter for people, and then some people have postponed having kids because of the pandemic, right?
So life is saved, which determines, quote, how many years of lost life will have been caused by the various harms of lockdowns versus how many years of lost life were saved by lockdowns, right?
How many years of lost life will have been caused by the various harms of lockdowns versus how many years of lost life were saved?
Based on his lost life calculations, lockdown measures have caused 282 times more harm than benefit to Canadian society over the long term.
Or 282 times more life years lost than saved.
And here we can look at things like suicide, stress-related illnesses because your small to medium business has been destroyed or your restaurant business has been destroyed, opiate addictions because, of course, a lot of people It's now going to be, I assume a bare minimum calculation, three and a half years before Ontario can catch up with all of the deferred, what are called non-essential or non-emergency surgeries.
So it's going to take three and a half years just to catch up.
Now that's got a human cost that is unbelievable.
So of course what happens is if somebody is in chronic pain because of their knee or their hip degradation or something like that, then what happens of course is if they can't get the medicine, then they'll just take a bunch of opiates, which could cause addiction, which could cause death.
So, 282 times more harm than benefit to Canadian society.
But for people to see that, they would need to see the seen versus the unseen.
You see a COVID death.
You don't see in a cluster, or specifically, unless the media points it out, which they're never going to do because they serve the powers that be.
I mean, Canadian media gets their money, for the most part, from the government.
They're just as much objectivity as Pravda under Stalin.
Well, but they're perceived as being objective, so I guess it's even worse, right?
But you would have to have people tracing that, right?
So somebody who dies of COVID gets front page, people talk about the story, weeping family, funerals, and so on, and that's really vivid.
Somebody who didn't catch their cancer early because they didn't have access.
Somebody who got addicted to and died from opiate overdoses because they had to use painkillers rather than get preventive care or optional surgery for their knee or their hip or back or whatever it is.
Well, you don't see those people unless, of course, the media points it out, which they're not going to do.
Furthermore, the limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million and the patterns of daily deaths per million is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdowns across countries.
So at the beginning, you could say, well, we just didn't have enough information.
There weren't enough experiments, there weren't enough options, right?
Sort of where we are with vaccines in some ways, right?
I think the vaccine experiment, which is currently going on, ends in October 2022 or something like that.
Anyway. So what he's saying, of course, is that we now have countries, we have states in America.
I mean, half of America doesn't really know that the other half of America has been going about their normal daily life for six months or more, sometimes more in places.
Like California doesn't really know much about Florida and just, yeah, it's crazy stuff.
I mean, Texas is an example as well.
So there's lots of examples.
Sweden, of course, which had barely any lockdown at all.
So there's lots of examples, of course, now.
Of countries and states which have a wide variety of lockdown measures.
And there's enough data that you could really objectively evaluate lockdowns and whether they work, whether they save people's lives, because we've now had more than a year of experimental data.
And that's, you know, it's a pretty good amount of data, right?
All across the world. So he says the limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why after one year the unconditional cumulative deaths per million and the patterns of daily deaths per million is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries.
In other words in his assessment heavy lockdowns do not meaningfully reduce the number of deaths in the areas where they are implemented when compared to areas where lockdowns were not implemented or as stringent.
Now the one thing I wanted to mention which is a good thing to be skeptical about is this which is Lockdowns will reduce certain deaths, of course, right?
I mean, there are fewer people on the road, there are fewer people skiing, there are fewer people skateboarding, there are fewer people, whatever it is.
Now, they will increase the deaths over time.
One of the big life losses that is going to go on is, you know, the 25 to 40 pounds that people have gained over the course of the pandemic.
It's going to have massive long-term healthcare issues.
Diabetes in the long run, if people don't lose the weight or they continue to gain it.
Joint issues, back problems, you know, just you name it, right?
That's going to be a huge issue.
But again, it's spread out and it's in the future and politicians don't really care about that.
But of course, there will be some drop in deaths.
Simply because of lockdowns.
Now, whether they make up for...
I mean, you could lock down all of society and cut a whole bunch of deaths, but then you just cause a whole bunch of other problems in the same way that you could say, well, we're not going to have any traffic fatalities, which are, what, 35,000 a year on average in the U.S.? We're not going to have any traffic fatalities if we lower the speed limit to 15 kilometers an hour.
It's like, well, yes, but then nothing gets anywhere and takes forever to get anywhere, and the price of food goes way up and all that, right?
So, you know, we make some cost-benefit.
All exercise can cause injury, but not exercising causes muscle and bone degeneration, so it's not good, right?
So he says today, some 14 months into the pandemic, many jurisdictions across Canada are still following the same policy trajectory outlined at the beginning of the pandemic.
Allen attributes this to politics.
He says the politicians often take credit for having achieved a reduction in case numbers through their lockdown measures.
He said, I think it makes perfect sense why they do exactly what they did.
Last year, if you were a politician, would you say, we're not going to lock down because it doesn't make a difference, and we actually did the equivalent of killing 600,000 people this last year?
You wouldn't, he said, because, quote, the alternative is they, the politicians, have to admit that they made a mistake, and they caused multiple more loss of life years than they saved, right?
So, yeah, politicians don't ever have to admit fault, which is why, again, people who don't face any negative consequences for the bad predictions have no interest in them, right?
Yeah. Alan laments that media, for the most part, have carried only one side of the debate on COVID-19 restrictions and haven't examined the other side.
Adding to the concern, he says, is that views contrary to the official government response are often pulled from social media platforms.
Hello? Yeah, can't confirm.
Can't confirm. He says he has heard that even his own published study has been censored by some social media sites.
In some sense, these are private platforms.
They can do what they want. But on the other hand, I feel kind of sad that we live in the kind of world where opposing opposing opinions is either dismissed, ignored, or name-called, and in some ways cancelled.
So, yeah, that's really, really important.
I just want to dip in here and I'll put a link to the article below.
But, yeah, you should read this and read the source article and all kinds of good stuff.
But, you know, this number, if you really process this and share this with people, I completely don't mean to pat myself on the back and give myself a hernia, but it was early April last year, late March or early April, I did a whole video saying that we need to open up because the costs of closing are going to be far greater.
But it's the seen versus the unseen.
So opening may cause some more COVID deaths, but it will reduce all of the other kinds of deaths from deferred medical issues from depression, suicidality, drug addiction, from degeneration of health because people are stuck inside and depressed and anxious and all that.
So yeah, I mean, I did predict this, so what, 13, 14 months ago, and I won't say it's nice to see data because the one thing that's true about philosophy in the modern world is you always hate being right.
You hate being right. I'd love to have been wrong about this one, but this number is just, it's a staggering number.
We expect harm from the government as a whole in general, right?
But this number is just absolutely astounding.
600,000 people Killed.
This last year.
282 times more life years lost than saved.
Well, that's a government program. Violence always achieves the opposite of its stated goal.
If you like a girl and you want her to love you and you decide to kidnap her, she's going to end up hating you.
So, the violence will always achieve the opposite of its stated goal.
Statism is violence.
Government is violence. And just as a reminder, right, this is what's important to recognize, that the people who run these kinds of things, they simply do not understand humanity at all.
They have a cold, in my view, sociopathic view of us as mechanistic robots that only move when we're pushed by force, and you do not want these kinds of people in charge if you like.
But that's where we are.
This is Van Molyneux, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
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