Stark Reality Facing Off Against Fiction

When we consider the path forward, it’s important to separate the fiction created and promulgated by Imperial College modelers and other doomsday prophets within our government and various health agencies, from more objective, reality-based data.

The fact that lockdowns are still being implemented tells us they’re still operating based on fictional assumptions. The answer is to push back with real-world data and refuse to acquiesce to fantasy doomsday scenarios.

We also need to insist on formal cost-benefit analyses. To this day, no government has presented such an analysis to the public, which is what prompted Joffe to investigate the matter. As noted by Joffe in an interview with Toronto Sun columnist Anthony Furey:²⁰

“Since lockdowns are a public health intervention, aiming to improve the population wellbeing, we must consider both benefits of lockdowns, and costs of lockdowns on the population wellbeing.

Once I became more informed, I realized that lockdowns cause far more harm than they prevent … Emerging data has shown a staggering amount of so-called ‘collateral damage’ due to the lockdowns.”

Collateral damage cited by Joffe include:²¹

Cost-Benefit Analysis of Lockdowns

Essentially, Joffe’s paper is the cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns that should have at least been attempted before being implemented worldwide and then kept in place for months on end. In his interview with Furey, Joffe explains his approach:²³

“In the cost-benefit analysis I consider the benefits of lockdowns in preventing deaths from COVID-19, and the costs of lockdowns in terms of the effects of the recession, loneliness, and unemployment on population wellbeing and mortality.

I did not consider all of the other so-called ‘collateral damage’ of lockdowns mentioned above. It turned out that the costs of lockdowns [in Canada] are at least 10 times higher than the benefits. That is, lockdowns cause far more harm to population wellbeing than COVID-19 can.”

A primary benefit of the lockdowns was supposed to be the prevention of COVID-19 deaths. As detailed in Joffe’s report,²⁴ “Using the age distribution of deaths and comorbidities, in the U.K. the average person who died due to COVID-19 had 3 to 5 healthy years left to live.” That’s a Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY) score of 3 to 5, which equates to a Wellbeing Years (WELLBY) score of 18 to 30.

Joffe presents data showing that lockdowns “saved” 58.5 QALY or 360 million WELLBY, at most, seeing how herd immunity threshold and infection fatality rates are far lower than predicted. Joffe suspects the total number of deaths actually prevented by lockdowns is fewer than 5.2 million.

Meanwhile, the cost of the lockdowns in the U.K., in terms of WELLBY, is five times greater than might optimistically be saved, and may in reality be anywhere from 50 times to 87 times greater.

As mentioned by Joffe in the interview quote above, the cost for lockdowns in Canada is at least 10 times greater than the benefit. In his report, he cites data showing that in Australia, the minimum cost is 6.6 times higher, and in the U.S., the cost is estimated to be at least 5.2 times higher than the benefit of lockdowns.

A cost-benefit analysis performed for New Zealand, which looked at the cost of adding just five extra days of “COVID-19 alert level 4” found the cost in QALY was 94.9 times higher than the benefit. In his report, Joffe also cites research estimating that in order to “break even and make a radical containment and eradication policy worthwhile,” the infection fatality rate of SARS-CoV-2 would need to be 7.8%.²⁵

No matter how many non-COVID deaths are falsely attributed to COVID-19, you’re not going to reach that level of lethality, which means lockdowns are robbing the population of more life than the virus.

CDC Inflated COVID-19 Deaths by 1,670%, Violated Fed Law

Indeed, according to an October 2020 peer-reviewed study^26,27 by the Public Health Policy Initiative of the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention inflated COVID-19 mortality statistics by 1,670%, yet we’re still nowhere near a fatality ratio of 7.8%.

According to that study, the CDC appears to have violated federal law, including the Information Quality Act in Section 515 of Public Law 106-554 and the Paperwork Reduction Act codified at 44 USC 3501, and by doing so, the CDC was able to bypass essential oversight by the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

It’s an eye-opening report, which I encourage you to read through. It can offer a sobering reality check if you’re still worried. For example, on page 20, there’s a graph comparing the COVID-19 fatalities based on the CDC’s illegally updated reporting guidelines, against the fatality count had they continued using the guidelines that had been in use for the past 17 years.

As of August 23, 2020, the CDC reported a COVID-19 death toll of 161,392. Meanwhile, the more accurate fatality rate, using the standard reporting guidelines that had been in place since 2003, was a mere 9,684. No matter what data sets we look at, we find that the COVID-19 pandemic has been grossly overhyped and kept alive long past its natural expiration date.

How Did We Get Here and How Do We Move Forward?

Joffe answers these questions in his interview with Furey, stating:²⁸

“[The] initial modelling and forecasting were inaccurate. This led to a contagion of fear and policies across the world. Popular media focused on absolute numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths independent of context. There has been a sheer one-sided focus on preventing infection numbers.

The economist Paul Frijters wrote that it was ‘all about seeming to reduce risks of infection and deaths from this one particular disease, to the exclusion of all other health risks or other life concerns.’ Fear and anxiety spread, and we elevated COVID-19 above everything else that could possibly matter.

Our cognitive biases prevented us from making optimal policy: we ignored hidden ‘statistical deaths’ reported at the population level, we preferred immediate benefits to even larger benefits in the future, we disregarded evidence that disproved our favorite theory, and escalated our commitment in the set course of action …

Each day in non-pandemic years over 21,000 people die from tobacco use, 3,600 from pneumonia and diarrhea in children under 5-years-old, and 4,110 from Tuberculosis. We need to consider the tragic COVID-19 numbers in context.

I believe that we need to take an ‘effortful pause’ and reconsider the information available to us. We need to calibrate our response to the true risk, make rational cost-benefit analyses of the trade-offs, and end the lockdown groupthink.”

He repeats these sentiments in his report, in which he stresses the need to focus on protecting those at highest risk for severe COVID-19 and death thereof. This includes:

• Hospitalized patients
• Nursing home residents
• Crowded institutions such as homeless shelters, prisons and any large gathering
• People over the age of 70, especially if they have severe comorbidities

In these instances, universal masking and other infectious control strategies are warranted, Joffe says. The rest of the population can and should go back to normal life. Certainly, people should not be universally treated as high risk. The closing of schools, for example, is likely to have far-reaching and devastating consequences that are completely unnecessary. As noted by Joffe:²⁹

“We need to keep schools open because children have very low morbidity and mortality from COVID-19, and (especially those 10 years and younger) are less likely to be infected by, and have a low likelihood to be the source of transmission of SARS-CoV-2.”