Now that the COVID-19 restrictions and mandates have mostly played out and been done away with, the aftermath of what they have done to the economy and people’s mental health is still unclear. For over a year, citizens all over the world were subject to absurd mandates that did little to stop the coronavirus from spreading. Even when governments announced the COVID-19 drug by Pfizer, the virus continued to surge. Recently, one of the leading scientists on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) admitted that the COVID-19 models used when making decisions by the government-held too much power as they didn’t factor in mental health or the economy.
It wasn’t that long ago that SAGE called for Britain to invoke another series of lockdowns over the Christmas holiday. That was around the same time the group claimed 6,000 deaths per day due to COVID-19. Now, as can be seen in the video below, Professor John Edmunds noted that the models should have been just “one component” when making decisions.
Having seen the economy struggle and mental health concerns soar, Edmunds stated, “One of the issues is that it’s only one component in decision making. So the epidemiological models is only one component. And I wondered, and I worried that we had too much weight. There’s, of course, an enormous economic impact from many of the interventions and other indirect impacts on psychological health and so on. Now, these, in principle, could be included, but in practice, they were not. And, and they were not for many reasons, the link between cases and the economic impact is really unclear. The social and psychological impact of restrictions is still not clear and certainly not clear ahead of time. So these things were not included. And I actually think, in many respects, it was a great failure of health economics, not to really contribute to this field.”
It should be noted this isn’t the first time Edmunds criticized the COVID-19 agenda. In 2020, he suggested Boris Johnson’s COVID-19 response was a “lorry speeding down a hill.” “If you can imagine, we’re in a kind of lorry at the top of a hill. The engine’s gone, but we do have brakes. And the lorry’s just at walking pace, and it’s starting to pick up speed. What you can do is hit the brakes hard now and bring it back down to less than walking pace, almost to a stop. And then ease off and keep the brakes on to some extent. That should keep the lorry’s speed down at a low level.”
The professor added, “We allowed the epidemic to gather speed and gather speed, and then we put the brakes on, and then to bring the epidemic down, we had to put the brakes on for a very long time, very hard. That had a terrible effect on the economy. If they acted quicker – now – then I think it would not just limit the epidemic but also limit the impact on the economy as well.”
This piece was written by Zach Heilman on May 12, 2022. It originally appeared in RedVoiceMedia.com and is used by permission.
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