Well, what do you know? The World Health Organization has urged world leaders, including those in the United States, to stop using lockdowns as the primary control method against the spread of the China Virus, aka, the novel coronavirus or Covid-19.
This is a dramatic turnaround by the W.H.O. and I wonder how the mainstream media will cover it. I suspect it will not get much coverage because the organization’s new position on lockdowns does not comport with the media narrative.
But wait a minute. Don’t media mavens all say we must follow the science? Do what the medical experts tell us to do?
What’s going on?
What’s going on is that after watching one nation after another force citizens and businesses into lockdown mode, scientists are seeing that that strategy is having deleterious effects on the mental and physical well-being of people.
“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” David Nabarro, the WTO’s special envoy on COVID-19, said in an interview aired October 8. “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 pointed to the collateral damage that lockdowns are having worldwide, especially among poorer populations.
“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry, for example in the Caribbean or in the Pacific, because people aren’t taking their holidays. Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world because their markets have got dented. Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. Seems that we may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents, in poor families, are not able to afford it,” Nabarro said.
Yet, in the United States where COVID-19 has been politicized and turned into a campaign issue by Democrats during the 2020 presidential election, the new W.T.O. directive is being ignored by most of the legacy media.
With few exceptions, world leaders followed the lead of the Chinese communist regime when responding to the outbreak of the virus, imposing unprecedented lockdowns.
In the United States, President Trump delegated the decisions on lockdown measures to the governors of individual states. In the end, all but a handful of states enacted some sort of restrictive measures.
Sweden, which didn’t impose a lockdown, experienced a lower percentage of deaths than some locales and nations that set restrictions. In Sweden, from Jan 3 to October, 12 2020, there have been 98,451 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 5,894 deaths. There have been just 3 new deaths in the past seven days.
Interestingly, the W.H.O.’s new policy on lockdowns mirrors what more than 14,000 international public health scientists and medical practitioners said in the Great Barrington Declaration, (See my post on October 10) which states that “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”
The declaration states, “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.”
Clearly, this is the approach that the W.H.O. has decided also to take.
It’s about time. Herd immunity has worked in every other case where a communicable virus has infected people.
Just what is “herd immunity?”
Herd immunity, or community immunity, is when a large part of the population of an area is immune to a specific disease. If enough people are resistant to the cause of a disease, such as a virus or bacteria, it has nowhere to go.
While not every single individual may be immune, the group as a whole has protection. This is because there are fewer high-risk people overall. The infection rates drop, and the disease peters out. Herd immunity protects at-risk populations. These include babies and those whose immune systems are weak and can’t get resistance on their own.
As the W.H.O. says, there are two ways for nations and societies to achieve herd immunity and resistance.
You can develop resistance naturally. When your body is exposed to a virus or bacteria, it makes antibodies to fight off the infection. When you recover, your body keeps these antibodies. Your body will defend against another infection. This is what stopped the Zika virus outbreak in Brazil. Two years after the outbreak began, 63% of the population had had exposure to the virus. Researchers think the community reached the right level for herd immunity.
Vaccines can also build resistance. They make your body think a virus or bacteria has infected it. You don’t get sick, but your immune system still makes protective antibodies. The next time your body meets that bacteria or virus, it’s ready to fight it off. This is what stopped polio in the United States.
Will the United States stop the lockdown madness and begin reopening?
I doubt it. Because once the lockdowns end and the country reopens there will be a spike in cases and that will cause politicians and others to panic and push for another lockdown instead of allowing the virus to die out by itself.
Experts say for that to happen in the United States, 50 to 67 percent of the population would need to be resistant before herd immunity kicks in and the infection rates drop.
To its credit, that’s what the W.H.O. now believes and that’s the strategy that sane nations like Sweden have adopted.
I’m not holding my breath that American politicians and health professionals will do the same.
