Biden ‘Science’ Advisor Calls For 4-6 Week Nationwide Lockdown To Avoid “COVID Hell”

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Originally appeared at ZeroHedge

Meet the esteemed Dr. Michael Osterholm, who serves as director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, and is the latest “scientist” to join Joe Biden’s “special coronavirus transition advisory team.”

We have to do something, Osterholm argues, or – echoing the exact same words Dr. Fauci has fearmongered America with – the U.S. is headed for dark days before a vaccine becomes available.

The ‘casedemic’ does look terrifying.

So what is his suggestion?

Simple…

A nationwide lockdown would drive the number of new cases and hospitalizations down to manageable levels while the world awaits a vaccine, Osterholm told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.

“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers for losses to small companies to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” he said. “If we did that, then we could lockdown for four-to-six weeks.”

So a massive bailout for state and local governments… oh and “we, the people” while we all suffer locked-down like a dementia-ridden presidential candidate in our basements through Thanksgiving and Christmas… with depression and suicide rates soaring ever higher?

As a reminder, we note that this is the same ‘scientist’ who co-wrote an op-ed with Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari in which the two argued for more restrictive and uniform lockdowns across the nation.

“The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential,” they wrote in the New York Times.

“To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.”

In other words – Obey! Or the economy gets it… Again!

There’s just one thing… the real ‘science’ – where actual experiments are undergone, results noted, and theses concluded – shows that lockdowns do not work…

As we detailed earlier, in a surprising report out of JPMorgan, the bank finds no meaningful curve development differences between countries with and without strong curve intervention.

This makes the bank question if existing public health intervention (i.e., lockdown/ stricter social distancing) should remain in place next year, and leads JPM to conclude that “public health policy should consider approaches biased towards economic/pubic mental health over the urge to close the curve in 2021.”

To reach its “startling” conclusion, JPMorgan compared countries without lockdown, keeping the economy open under certain levels of social-distancing (Brazil, US, Sweden, Japan, Korea) to countries with strong curve intervention (UK, Germany, Italy, France, China, India) to see any meaningful differential in the curve development.

This outcome suggest that COVID-19 follows a similar diffusion and development process of other infectious diseases with certain life cycles. Therefore, JPMorgan would argue that public health policy should consider a bit more biased approach on economic/pubic mental health over the aim to close the infection curve in 2021 as lockdowns could be costly to the economy.

JPMorgan’s conclusion: “Keeping public activities open and tracing susceptible people leveraging technology looks to have better risk reward to us.”

And just in case you shrug off JPMorgan’s ‘scientific’ findings, a recent study in The Lancet (yes, that scientific journal) found no correlation whatsoever between severity of lockdown and number of covid deaths. And they didn’t find any correlation between border closures and covid deaths either. And there was no correlation between mass testing and covid deaths either, for that matter. Basically, nothing that various world governments have done to combat covid seems to have had any effect whatsoever on the number of deaths.

As Raul Ilargi Meijer noted, lockdowns are based on pretending we can make time stand still.

That, like in one of those slick videos, everything else stops moving while you can walk around it. All Else Being Equal. It never is, not for 6-7 months. And that the first lockdown didn’t work, at least not for long, should perhaps be a lesson. Maybe you should look for answers elsewhere. Because the damage just goes on, economically, psychologically, physically.

I’m not pretending I have the answers. I do have questions though. While the situation reminds me of Sisyphus, forced by Zeus to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity. Every time he nears the top of the hill, the boulder rolls back down.

We need to find a balance between the threat of COVID19 and the threat of everything else, very much including those things that are caused by our approach to COVID.

Presumably, Dr. Osterholm and the rest of his 11 wise men (and women and non-binary individuals) on Joe Biden’s COVID advisory team did not bother to look at the actual science… or actual facts… preferring instead to tie their careers to a Federal Reserve president (with no background in ‘sciencey’ stuff – but very well versed in massive government-funded bailouts) and the belief that if we just keep puking borrowed- or tax-payer-funded cash at people while shutting down the economy, then we will “keep the coronavirus pandemic in check and get the economy on track until a vaccine is approved and distributed.”

TL;DR: Ignore common sense and the real-world science experiment that just took place, shutdown the economy to get the economy back on track.

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