May 4, 2025
COVID-19 on My Mind
By Clarice Feldman
Like most of us, I suppose, the shock to our system and way of life during the government’s response to COVID-19 cannot easily be forgotten. It was our taste of ill-considered government tyranny, a public-health disaster. As more information about its origins and how the disease was handled is revealed, it always gets my attention. In sum, banking on helping defeat Trump, the public-health establishment and media suppressed more credible options for dealing with a disease which was not life-threatening to most in order to promote a vaccine then in the works. The vaccine when it was developed and administered was not terribly effective and has itself caused substantial injury. In the process of locking the country down, the health establishment and government caused the very deleterious effects which the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration had warned against. Those opposing less tyrannical treatment of COVID-19 included Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose role in creating COVID-19 is no longer deniable.
At the outset, I’ll disclose my bias. I never believed the lockdowns which destroyed so many small businesses, detrimentally affected student learning, and caused so much mental illness and economic loss was warranted. My hero was not the press hero Dr. Anthony Fauci, it was John Ioannidis, the most outspoken and best positioned to know this reaction was unwarranted.
It began with a March 17 article in Stat [2020] that suggested governments around the world were taking sweeping and potentially harmful actions to limit the spread of COVID-19 without sufficient data. Then came a May 5 white paper he authored which suggested COVID-19 was not nearly as deadly as initially feared, a claim later supported by an NPR report that cited research from Johns Hopkins University showing a fatality risk as low as 0.5 percent. Ioannidis’s latest research on the COVID fatality rate pegs the median COVID-19 fatality risk at 0.25 percent, much lower than previous estimates but still about two and a half times higher than the seasonal flu. [snip] Ioannidis may be no libertarian, but many of the lockdown themes he touches will sound familiar to FEE readers -- deadly government policies that prohibited nursing homes from screening for COVID-19, soaring suicide, and widespread economic destruction resulting in millions of businesses wiped out and 40 million jobs lost.
While the costs of the lockdowns are apparent to all, less clear is how effective they have been in limiting the spread of the virus. A recent Bloomberg found “little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities.” Norway’s top health official recently stated the lockdowns probably were not necessary. Evidence from a recent JP Morgan report suggests most nations saw COVID infection rates fall after lockdowns were lifted.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/05/covid_19_on_my_mind.html
