The COVID Lockdown Strategy: What Can We Learn From the Data?
St. Paul, MN, March 28, 2022 — For the past two years, COVID numbers related to cases and deaths have dominated media outlets, but one key data point has been noticeably absent in the eyes of biochemist and immunologist Hugh McTavish, Ph.D.: How many COVID deaths did the lockdown strategy prevent?
“Lockdowns were just a catastrophic mistake — one of the worst public policy disasters and mistakes ever,” Dr. McTavish said in a recent interview. “They threw 1 in 5 Americans, 19.3 percent to be precise, into moderate to severe depression.”
Calling the dramatic uptick in depression, drug overdoses and suicides “entirely predictable,” Dr. McTavish delivers an unflinching look into deaths of despair, “lost time of life” and other unsettling consequences of the lockdown response in his new book, COVID Lockdown Insanity. In it, Dr. McTavish reveals the staggering human toll of long-term isolation coupled with the shuttering of lifelines like churches and workplaces.
Dr. McTavish’s careful examination of the scientific evidence related to COVID-19 transmission and his analyses of both the human and economic costs of the lockdown strategy illuminate the dysfunctionality of the government’s policy response. In the end, he lights a path toward making more enlightened decisions that offer hope of real solutions.
In the book, Dr. McTavish dissects the data that shows:
- The COVID lockdowns threw 63 million Americans into major depression.
- All evidence suggests that the lockdown response to COVID failed to decrease COVID deaths at all.
- Even if the lockdowns prevented 200,000 COVID deaths, which they probably did not, the lockdowns caused three times more loss of life in increased suicides, drug overdose deaths, cancer deaths and heart disease deaths than they saved in prevented COVID deaths.
- For every 1 COVID death prevented, the lockdowns caused these harms: 1/3 of a death of despair (suicide or drug overdose); 316 people thrown into major depression; 127 people out of work; 350 students out of school; 1,640 people denied the right to live their lives as they wish and made at least a little less happy.
- Mask wearing has “little or no effect” on COVID cases or deaths.
- Hand washing and hand sanitizer use is the best intervention and could dramatically reduce COVID deaths, but this was underemphasized.
- Asymptomatic people very rarely spread COVID.
- Children do not spread COVID, and closing schools had no effect on COVID spread at all, and we knew that by the summer of 2020, and CDC staff wrote a paper saying so in January 2021.
In conclusion, Dr. McTavish says, “Lockdowns have no advantage at all. If you think life is better than death, a long life is better than a shorter life, happiness is better than depression, more money is better than less, education is better than ignorance, child abuse and domestic abuse are bad things, and more personal freedom is better than less, then you agree the lockdowns were a mistake.”
Hugh McTavish is a Ph.D. biochemist and immunologist and a patent attorney. He has authored 18 refereed scientific journal articles and is the inventor of 21 U.S. patents. He has also written two prior books on public policy and nature. He has started two pharmaceutical companies off his own inventions. He lives near St. Paul, Minnesota.
For more information, please visit www.hughmctavish.com (where you can read COVID Lockdown Insanity for free) or COVID-Sanity.org, or follow him on Twitter (@covid-sanity).
COVID Lockdown Insanity: The COVID Deaths It Prevented, the Depression and Suicides it Caused, What We Should Have Done, and What It Shows We Could Do Now to Address Real Crises
Publisher: West Fork Press
ISBN-10: 1737327112
ISBN-13: 978-1737327110
Available from Amazon.com
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