The Quarantine of Healthy Populations

 A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles alongside my friend and colleague, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. A month prior, we had also lectured together at a conference in Rome (which, alas, was not recorded).

Co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, Jay Bhattacharya discusses the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown policies.

• Professor of health policy at Stanford and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Jay is one of three co-authors-along with Martin Kulldorff of Stanford and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford-of the great barrington declaration
• In recognition of his consequential research focusing on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, Loyola Marymount University presented him with the 16th Doshi Bridgebuilder Award
• Upon receipt of the award, Jay gave a lecture exploring the economic and human impact of COVID–19 Pandemic and policy responses

The “New Abnormal”

• Lockdowns were an entirely new and previously untested method of infection control.
• The term “lockdown” originated not in medicine or public health but the penal system
• Prisons go into lockdown to restore order and security when prisoners riot
• Only when the most tightly controlled and surveilled environment on the planet erupts into dangerous chaos, order is restored by asserting swift and complete control of the entire prison population by force

"worst case" logic was adopted as a key element of political rationality

• Lockdowns were formulated based on discredited worst-case-scenario modeling from the Imperial College London
• Consequently, the entire body of citizens, as a manifestation of civic spirit, gave up freedoms and rights that were not relinquished even by the citizens of London during the bombing of the city in World War II
• The new imposition of health as a legal obligation-biomedical security-was accepted with little resistance
• This system is far more effective at controlling populations than anything previously attempted by Western nations

Social Distancing

• A society grounded on "social distancing" is a manifest contradiction-it's a kind of anti-society
• Ordinary human contact-our most basic human need-was redefined as contagion-a threat to our existence
• Loneliness and social fragmentation were endemic in the West even prior to the coronavirus pandemic
• During lockdowns, we embraced and actively promoted what philosopher Hannah Arendt called "organized loneliness," a social state she identified as a precondition for totalitarianism

Lockdowns were the first and decisive step in our embrace of the biomedical security state

• This continued with forced vaccinations & discriminatory vaccine passports, mandated for novel products with minimal safety and efficacy testing.
• The resultant carnage-some of which Dr. Bhattacharya has summarized-was not, as many news reports misleadingly suggested, collateral damage inflicted by coronavirus. No, this was collateral damage imposed on us by our policy response.- Unless we learn from these policy failures we will be doomed to repeat them.

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-quarantine-of-health-populations/