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Robbed? It wasn’t Covid that issued the shutdown edicts.

By James Bovard | Brownstone Institute | February 9, 2023

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Biden rewrote the history of the pandemic. Biden lamented, “Covid had shut down our businesses. Schools were closed. We were robbed of so much.” But it wasn’t Covid that issued the shutdown edicts.

We were robbed by politicians like Biden who disrupted lives in a futile effort to thwart a virus that infected hundreds of millions of Americans anyhow. There was never solid evidence to justify shutting businesses or schools but that did not deter politicians from promising to save humanity by destroying freedom.

After Pfizer and Moderna, Biden was perhaps the biggest Covid profiteer in America. In 2020, Biden ran one of the most fear-based presidential campaigns in modern history. Biden talked as if every American family had lost a member or two from this pestilence. He routinely exaggerated Covid death tolls by a hundred- or a thousand-fold, publicly asserting that millions of Americans had been killed by Covid-19. Biden was helped mightily by fear-mongering media coverage.

A Brookings Institute analysis noted, “Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to overestimate [Covid] harm. Forty-one percent of Democrats… answered that half or more of those infected by COVID-19 need to be hospitalized.” At that time, the rate of hospitalization was between 1 percent and 5 percent – so those Democratic voters overestimated the risk of hospitalization by up to 20-fold.

In the final debate between the presidential candidates in October 2020, Biden blamed Trump for every Covid fatality: “220,000 Americans dead…. Anyone who’s responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States.” Biden promised, “I will take care of this. I will end this. I’m going to shut down the virus, not the country.” In a speech on the day before Election Day, he declared, “We’re going to beat this virus. We’re going to get it under control, I promise you.” Biden won the presidency as a result of only 43,000 votes in three swing states. The disruption and damage caused by lockdowns were invoked as proof of Trump’s negligence, rather than seen as evidence of an unprecedented political panic-mongering and repression.

After taking office, Biden issued a flurry of edicts, including mandating masks for anyone on federal property. In September 2021, he mandated that more than 100 million be injected with Covid vaccines, despite proliferating evidence that the vaccines were failing to prevent transmission or infections. In an October 2021 CNN Town Hall, Biden vilified vaccine skeptics as murderers who only wanted “the freedom to kill you” with Covid.

On Tuesday night, Biden announced, “Covid no longer controls our lives.” But Biden extended the official Covid emergency at least until May 11, entitling him to sweeping additional power. Biden still claims that Covid miraculously entitles him to “forgive” half a trillion dollars in federal student debt. And the Biden administration is fighting to perpetuate vaccine mandates on foreign visitors to America and to preserve the president’s prerogative to impose mask mandates.

The carnage from Covid crackdowns is still being tabulated. A 2022 Johns Hopkins University analysis of 24 studies on the impact of lockdowns in the United States and Europe found “no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality.” The pointless shutdowns did far more damage than Biden will ever admit:

• A National Bureau of Economic Research analysis estimated that young Americans suffered “171,000 excess non-Covid deaths during 2020 and 2021… a historic, yet largely unacknowledged, health emergency.” Many of those fatalities were “collateral damage” from shutdowns and other Covid policies.
• Millions of jobs were lost thanks to lockdowns, a major reason why life expectancy in the United States had its sharpest plunge since World War Two.
• Forced isolation was a Grim Reaper. Deaths from drug overdoses set an all-time record of 108,000 in 2021 and alcohol-related deaths jumped 25% in the first year of the pandemic.
• The Biden administration suppressed free speech on Twitter and other social media based on a single theme: “Be very afraid of Covid and do exactly what we say to stay safe,” as journalist David Zweig summarized in the TwitterFiles. Official fear-mongering helped boost the percentage of Americans reporting struggling with depression or anxiety by more than 300 percent.

If Biden can shift blame for disastrous Covid policies, politicians will be more likely to pointlessly lock down the nation in the future. Americans deserve to see all the federal records and all the state government records to expose the recklessness and deceit that permeated Covid policies. America will not recover from the pandemic until all the COVID lies and abuses by officialdom have been exposed.

James Bovard, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is author and lecturer whose commentary targets examples of waste, failures, corruption, cronyism and abuses of power in government. He is a USA Today columnist and is a frequent contributor to The Hill. He is the author of ten books.

February 9, 2023 - Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States