The World Health Organization’s special envoy on COVID-19 urged world leaders this week to stop “using lockdowns as your primary control method.”
“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Dr. David Nabarro said to The Spectator’s Andrew Neil. “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
Nabarro went on to point out several of the negative consequences lockdowns have caused across the world, including devastating tourism industries and increased hunger and poverty.
“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry in the Caribbean, for example, or in the Pacific because people aren’t taking their holidays,” he said. “Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. … Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.”
Earlier this week, thousands of medical health experts signed their names to a petition calling for the end of coronavirus lockdowns, citing the “irreparable damage” they’ve caused.
“As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection,” read the petition, known as the Great Barrington Declaration. “Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”
In the United States, lockdowns have been tied to increased thoughts of suicide from children, a surge in drug overdoses, an uptick in domestic violence, and a study conducted in May concluded that stress and anxiety from lockdowns could destroy seven times the years of life that lockdowns potentially save.