The incredibly stupefying origins of the COVID-19 lockdown, the world’s greatest mistake

Just when you thought this whole situation couldn’t get any more bizarre, we get word of the absurd origins of pandemic safety theater.

One would expect that a blue-ribbon team of experts would have carefully developed a policy with life or death implications for billions of people around the world. A team of experts with the top women and men of the fields’ microbiology and epidemiology interspersed with a few Nobel peace recipients for good measure.

It would be incumbent upon this bevy of boffins to methodically research what has worked in the past with other outbreaks and pandemics, especially paying attention to the subject of just quarantining the sick and protecting the vulnerable as well as looking at effective mitigation techniques, perhaps with an eye towards assessing ideas that are patently unworkable through practical considerations.

Well, one would be wrong in assuming that took place in developing the disastrous pandemic policies currently in place. Instead, we have the absurd tale of a high school science project of a 15-year-old sophomore that ended up being the key part of almost every politician’s plan for this kind of crisis.

The origins of the ‘lockdown’ and social distancing plan

Jeffrey A. Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research detailed The 2006 Origins of the Lockdown Idea, noting that:

We didn’t lock down almost the entire country in 1968/69, 1957, or 1949-1952, or even during 1918. But in a terrifying few days in March 2020, it happened to all of us, causing an avalanche of social, cultural, and economic destruction that will ring through the ages.

We are in the midst of what Dennis Prager has stated May Be the Greatest Mistake in History.  It began as a science fair entry by a 15-year-old high school sophomore for slowing the spread of pandemics by closing down the schools. We must point out that the original idea was to have Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza.

As in the resulting documentation from the CDC, these social distancing strategies to mitigate ‘the local progression of pandemic influenza’ somehow morphed into a blanket shutdown of ‘non-essential’ people, and as they say, the rest is history.

It wasn’t about ‘flattening the curve’

We should also point out that in the discussion portion of the paper:

Implementation of social distancing strategies is challenging. They likely must be imposed for the duration of the local epidemic and possibly until a strain-specific vaccine is developed and distributed. If compliance with the strategy is high over this period, an epidemic within a community can be averted. However, if neighboring communities do not also use these interventions, infected neighbors will continue to introduce influenza and prolong the local epidemic, albeit at a depressed level more easily accommodated by healthcare systems.

[Emphasis added]

They note that these strategies were to be ‘imposed for the duration of the local epidemic and possibly until a strain-specific vaccine is developed and distributed’. So while this was never envisioned to be widespread and certainly not applied to the entire planet, the contention was that this would be imposed until a vaccine was developed, not just to ‘flatten the curve’.

The scientific community reacted negatively to these proposals at the time and they were championed by politicians and other non-experts in the field. We’re seeing now that once the nation’s socialist left discovered a newfound excuse to control everyone, they quietly dropped ‘flatten the curve’ pretense and threw away the goalposts.

Originally published on the NOQ Report