If you are advocating for lockdowns, you are complicit in tearing families apart. You are complicit in inflicting untold suffering on millions of people around the world. You are complicit in casting the poorest and most vulnerable in our societies into even further grinding poverty. You are complicit in murder.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
from: https://www.activistpost.com/2020/11/what-no-one-is-saying-about-the-lockdowns.html
Dave Cullen presents some things that you might want to be considering in the light of all that we are being coerced into giving up right now.
Check it out:
In a stunning rebuke of the “science” and the “doctors” and leftist politicians and career bureaucrats in the US and across much of The West, The Epoch Times’ Evan Pentchoukov reports that The World Health Organization’s special envoy on COVID-19 has urged world leaders to stop using lockdowns as the primary control method against the spread of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.
“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” David Nabarro told The Spectator in an interview aired on Oct. 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.”
[ZH: How long before this video is removed by Twitter?]
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.
“This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe actually,” he added. “And so we really do appeal to all world leaders: Stop using lockdown as your primary control method, develop better systems for doing it, work together and learn from each other, but remember – lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.”
Nabarro isn’t the only scientist opposing lockdowns.
A number of medical or public health scientists and medical practitioners have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which states that “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”
The signatories include: “Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University and a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.”
“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,” the declaration states.
With few exceptions, world leaders followed in the footsteps of the Chinese communist regime when responding to the outbreak of the virus, imposing unprecedented lockdowns. Sweden, which did not impose a lockdown, did not experience an adverse outcome compared to some locales and nations that did.
In the United States, President Donald Trump delegated the decisions on lockdown measures to the governors of individual states, but has pushed for the economy to be reopened, and lockdowns lifted.
As William Anderson recently wrote for The Mises Institute,lockdowns only serve the progressive political class…
We have to understand that the political classes and their media have a vested interest in the lockdown status quo, and that includes regular provision of what only can be called disinformation. The mainstream media this past summer dutifully reported a highly questionable (I use that term charitably) report that the Sturgis Bike Rally in South Dakota led to more than a quarter million covid infections and more than $12 billion of medical costs. It should have been obvious on its face that the report was deeply flawed, yet in their desire to fuel the covid-is-killing-us narrative, journalists took this too-good-to-be-true story and ran with it.
As for politicians, the covid crisis has been a godsend for those governmental executives and bureaucrats who see constitutional restrictions that limit their authority as mere obstacles to be easily swept away. Governors such as Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Andrew Cuomo of New York, Gavin Newsom of California, and Tom Wolfe of Pennsylvania have received adoring coverage in the media for seizing and employing dictatorial powers, Whitmer even unilaterally deciding that the sale of garden seeds in stores was illegal. Cuomo’s decision to force the housing of covid-19 patients in nursing homes led to the deaths of thousands of people, yet his national media coverage is uniformly positive.
Contrast the affirmative news coverage of Cuomo with the barrage of media attacks on Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Noem has emphasized personal responsibility and did not attempt mass closures of schools and businesses in the state, and the mainstream media erupted with fury. That South Dakota has come through this pandemic relatively well does not matter with the media, as the only acceptable action (to mainstream and elite journalists) in response to covid is for governors to single-handedly seize power and lock down their citizens.
Keep in mind that the real losses that Americans suffered because of the heavy-handed governmental response to the covid outbreak are permanent. As Robert Higgs so eloquently pointed out in Crisis and Leviathan, governments often create crises or, at the very least, they manipulate events such as natural disasters and use them as opportunities to expand governmental powers. Even after the crises end, governments keep some of their newly self-granted powers—and most people raise little or no concern even when government has curtailed more of their freedoms.
Presumably, this means Joe Biden will now be pushing for lockdowns to be lifted across all blue states?… because he is “listening to the scientists”?
We wonder how long it will be before WHO also urges the end of mask-wearing?
In the end, as Anderson concluded, the only way that the political classes can “make us safe” is for us to do what is necessary to make ourselves safe, or as relatively safe as possible. When a virus is afoot—as is the case most of the time—we do what we can to avoid it and do what we can to treat it. In other words, we appeal to real medical science, not what the political and media classes have cooked up for us.
from: https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/who-flip-flops-urges-world-leaders-stop-using-lockdowns-fight-covid-contagion?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter
Posted by Julie Celestial on (1 day ago)
Categories: Featured articles, Hunger
The UN has warned that the world is on the verge of the worst food crisis in at least 50 years as the recession following the COVID-19 pandemic may put basic nutrition beyond impoverished people’s reach. The organization has urged governments to take prompt action to prevent further disaster as 49 million more may fall into extreme poverty due to the outbreak.
Food systems are failing and the pandemic is mitigating the situation, said UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, on June 9, 2020.
“Unless immediate action is taken, it is increasingly clear that there is an impending global food emergency that could have long term impacts on hundreds of millions of children and adults.”
Although harvests of crops are holding up and export bans and protectionism have been largely avoided so far, the worst of the pandemic’s impacts and the recession that will follow is yet to be felt.
This year, about 49 million more may fall into extreme poverty due to the coronavirus as the number of people who are severely food insecure will rapidly expand.
“Even in countries with abundant food, we see risks of disruptions in the food supply chain,” Guterres pointed out. “We need to act now to avoid the worst impacts of our efforts to control the pandemic.”
The secretary-general plotted a three-point plan to restore the world’s ailing food systems and avoid further harm.
First, countries must focus aid on the worst-affected regions to ward off immediate disaster and for governments to prioritize food supply chains.
“That means designating food and nutrition services as essential while implementing appropriate protections for food workers. It means preserving critical humanitarian food, livelihood, and nutrition assistance to vulnerable groups.”
“And it means positioning food in food-crisis countries to reinforce and scale up social protection systems,” he added.
Second, countries must strengthen social protection systems for nutrition by safeguarding access to safe and nutritious food, especially for young children, pregnant and breastfeeding women, older people, and other vulnerable groups.
“This includes supporting children who no longer have access to school meals,” he continued.
Third, people must invest in the future by building a more inclusive and sustainable world.
“We have an opportunity to build a more inclusive and sustainable world,” Guterres said. “Let us build food systems that better address the needs of food producers and workers. Let us provide more inclusive access to healthy and nutritious food so we can eradicate hunger.”
According to Maximo Torero, the chief economist of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the world’s food systems were under threat as never before in modern times, as the coronavirus outbreak and lockdowns hinder people’s ability to buy and sell food.
“We need to be careful,” Torero reminded, “this is a very different food crisis than the ones we have seen.”
The UN’s report on the pandemic’s impact on food security shows that harvests are healthy and supplies of staple foods are robust, but most people get theirs from local markets, which are affected by the lockdowns.
Loss of income attributed to lockdowns are also putting food out of reach for many people who are already struggling. Although global markets remained steady, the price of basic necessities has started to hike in some nations.
Lockdowns are slowing down harvests while millions of seasonal laborers are not able to work. Food waste has hit damaging levels as farmers are forced to throw perishable produce as the result of supply chain problems. Meat industry plants have been forced to close as well.
“The Covid-19 crisis is attacking us at every angle,” said Agnes Kalibata, the UN secretary-general’s special envoy for the 2021 food systems summit.
“It has exposed dangerous deficiencies in our food systems and actively threatens the lives and livelihoods of people around the world, especially the more than 1 billion people who have employment in the various industries in food systems.”
Kalibata added that there was also a chance for countries to improve food systems, alongside reducing poverty and increasing worldwide resilience.
“Food has always brought people together and it can again if we build back better as it relates to our food systems.”
Featured image credit: Prayag Tejwani/Unsplash
from: https://watchers.news/2020/06/10/world-on-the-brink-of-worst-food-crisis-in-50-years-un-warns/
