Lockdowns were an Unscientific Experiment. We were the Lab Rats.
Extended lockdowns and school closures were not recommended by scientific research or our pandemic planning documents. We did them anyway.
#StayTheFuckHome
As time separates us from the shock of covid’s arrival and our descent into mandatory shutdowns of public spaces and the indefinite closure of in-person schooling, the evaluation of these unprecedented public health measures has begun and what most of us see does not look good.
We bankrupted endless local businesses. We ruined education, often permanently, for many of our least-privileged children. We let all manner of medical needs go untreated. To pay for this misery, our government borrowed trillions, leaving a debt time-bomb growing exponentially on our country’s balance sheet.
As Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean put it succinctly in the New York Magazine article below and here, lockdowns were both a failure and, more pointedly, were an unscientific experiment with no science to back them up.
Indeed, as Sarah Saves Receipts (SSR) shall detail, stringent lockdowns were not recommended by existing scientific research and not recommended by our own pandemic planning documents. School closures, if done at all, were advised to be kept brief. Yet inexplicably we did them anyway.
Moreover, it is impossible that our public health leadership was unaware of this. Every research document SSR reviewed concluded lockdowns don’t help and only cause harms. Every pre-pandemic planning document echoed the conclusions of the research and either advised against these measures completely, or that they be kept brief. It took SSR all of a few hours one afternoon to find most of these documents.
Receipts are forthcoming.
Yet, instead of following their own science, our public health officials, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, threw away the “manuals” and turned us and our children into the lab rats for a plan they made up on the fly.
Sarah Saves Receipts (SSR) believes their malpractice will go down as perhaps the greatest and definitely the most avoidable miscarriage of public health policy in the history of the world. Post lockdown evaluations are beginning to validate this claim:
Consider this 2022 Johns Hopkins meta-study which concluded covid lockdowns to be ill-founded, offering little or no benefit, but at the expense of high costs:
While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.
The study can be found here: Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and Study of Business Enterprise: Literature Review & Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on Covid Mortality
In 2023, the UK Health Security Agency chimed in with similar disappointing conclusions of no evidence that lockdowns helped:
UnHerd: Government report: no good evidence that lockdowns worked
“…there is a lack of strong evidence on the effectiveness of NPIs to reduce COVID-19 transmission, and for many NPIs the scientific consensus shifted over the course of the pandemic.”
The full report cited in the UnHerd article can be found here: UK Health Security Agency: Effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce transmission of COVID-19 in the UK
However, Sarah Saves Receipts believes the most important receipts are those which document that our public health officials knew all along that their plan did not “follow the science”; in fact, quite the opposite.
On to the receipts.
A good place to begin familiarizing oneself with pre-pandemic research and planning is this link from the American Institue for Economic Research (AIER). It efficiently highlights a range of key anti-lockdown research plus government and NGO planning:
American Institute for Economic Research: What They Said about Lockdowns before 2020
Posted in January 2021, it was impressively authored by what seems to be a AIER high school intern named Micha Sparks. I highlight a few of her bullet points from her post, but urge readers to click through to the actual piece.
Fauci said that shutting down the country does not work. (January 24, 2020)
“I can’t imagine shutting down New York or Los Angeles…because historically when you shut things down it doesn’t have a major effect.”
World Health Organization Report discusses NPIs and why quarantine is ineffective. (2019)
“…home quarantine of exposed individuals to reduce transmission is not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure, and there would be considerable difficulties in implementing it.”
WHO acknowledges social-distancing did not stop or dramatically reduce transmission during the 1918 influenza pandemic. (2006)
“NPIs, including quarantining, require better and more focused methods to make them more effective and less “burdensome.” “Ill persons… should remain home…but forced isolation and quarantine are ineffective and impractical.”
A team of Johns Hopkins scholars say quarantines don’t work but are pursued for political reasons. (September 2019)
“In the report, they explain how quarantine is more political than related to public health: “During an emergency, it should be expected that implementation of some NPIs, such as travel restrictions and quarantine, might be pursued for social or political purposes by political leaders, rather than pursued because of public health evidence… In the context of a high-impact respiratory pathogen, quarantine may be the least likely NPI to be effective in controlling the spread due to high transmissibility.”
Unfortunately, the link from this last quote sourced from Johns Hopkins has conveniently gone dead. Thus, SSR need note we could not verify it. However, given its damning inference that quarantines of the healthy are borne more of political science than actual academic science, we are not surprised it has vanished. It doesn’t fit the narrative.
In SSR’s Substack detailing the lies public health told about masks, among our many receipts was the below 2006 meta-study that concluded masks are ineffective. This same study concluded that large-scale quarantine measures and school closures were ill-advised and come with serious negative consequences. The meta study comes from the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism:
Regarding large scale quarantine measures the study is forceful:
“There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to slow the spread of influenza…. The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme… that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.”
For emphasis, the meta study concludes that lockdowns should “be eliminated from serious consideration.” One would think that if our own public health officials reviewed this study or any range of the studies that SSR reviewed, they would have come to the same conclusion as the studies. However, amazingly Dr. Fauci and team concluded 100% the opposite; namely, lockdowns and school closures do work.
This study also hints that politics ends up coming to the fore in these decisions:
Despite this recommendation by experts, mandatory large-scale quarantine continues to be considered as an option by some authorities and government officials.
One can read the full quotes directly from the study (unfortunately, SSR only has a pdf copy and not a live link, but it can be found by searching the web):
What SSR found in Government Pandemic Planning Documents
Given that the research found lockdowns and school closures to be both ineffective, harmful and not recommended, one would expect our government pandemic planning documents to reflect those conclusions. For the most part they did.
United Kingdom:
A review of a 2011 United Kingdom pandemic preparedness planning document reflects the conclusions of contemporary research in clear terms. Regarding gatherings of the public this document advises:
“There is very limited evidence that restrictions on mass gatherings will have any significant effect on influenza virus transmission… For these reasons, the working presumption will be that Government will not impose any such restrictions.”
When it comes to school closures the document advises precautionary school closures early in pandemic, but once the virus is established, closures are no longer recommended. (SSR take: the virus is now at community spread and cannot be stopped.)
“Using a precautionary approach in the early stages of an influenza pandemic and depending on the public health risk assessment, Directors of Public Health may advise localised closures… Once the virus is more established in the country, the general policy would be that schools should not close…The impact of closure of schools and similar settings on all sectors would have substantial economic and social consequences…”
These quotes and more can be found in the below snippets from the actual planning document:
United States:
Regarding United States pandemic planning as it pertained to lockdowns and school closures, SSR found a 2007 CDC “Interim Pre-pandemic Planning Guidance” document. We choose to highlight from this particular document because it provides the clearest direction regarding lockdowns and school closures our research found.
The document defines a five category “Pandemic Severity Index” with Categories 4 & 5 being the most severe. Both Category 4 and 5 are advised to enact the same and most stringent non-pharmaceutical interventions. Category 5 severity, the document notes, is on par with the 1918 Spanish Flu. Covid was not the Spanish Flu. However, for sake of argument and ease, we will assume in this post that Covid was a Category 4 pandemic. As such, Covid would be slated for the most stringent of response.
The table below lays out the document’s Pandemic Severity Index:
What recommendations did the planning document make regarding lockdowns for Category 4 and Category 5 events?
Lockdowns, defined as isolation and quarantine should be “voluntary” and applied to both the ill and household members of homes with ill persons. (See top portion of the table below.)
Nowhere does the document recommend long-term mandatory lockdowns or full closures of restaurants, travel, hotels, shops, or smaller gathering places. The document does recommend (at the bottom of the table) working from home where possible and modifying or cancelling indoor stadium events.
What recommendations did this planning document make regarding school closures?
School closures and curtailment of out-of-school activities were recommended for a maximum of 12 weeks or less.
Did Public Health Officials follow their Own Research or Planning Documents? No, and at Great Cost.
Nowhere did any document reviewed by SSR recommend a virtual shutdown of society. The above recommendations were for “voluntary” isolation of the ill and the quarantine only of those with ill household members. Healthy people should not be shut in. School closures should be limited to 12 weeks even for the most severe of pandemics.
Comparatively, public health officials shut down pretty much everything — schools, businesses, travel — based on a strategy unrelated to the restrained approach recommended by our own planning documents. Worst, these officials completely sold-out children — the demographic least impacted by the virus — by moving schools to remote far beyond the 3-month recommended limit.
See this New York Times article and their “startling” 2023 discovery of the harms in-person school closures forced on children.
New York Times: The Startling Evidence on Learning Loss Is In
Too bad the NYT did not “discover” all the research and planning documents SSR found in only a few hours or work early in 2020. Had the New York Times exposed the malpractice of our public health officials, maybe these harms could have been avoided.
Here is more excellent, though also after the fact, reporting from journalists who could have helped prevent these harms in the first place:
ProPublica: The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning
The Atlantic: The Biggest Disruption in the History of American Education
This below post from the American Institute for Economic Research includes many links to the CDC and other government agencies detailing lockdown harms with statistics:
American Institute for Economic Research: Cost of Lockdowns: A Preliminary Report
More broadly speaking this table lays them out categorically:
Paying for an Unscientific, Hysterical Covid Response isn’t Cheap. The Federal Gov’t has the debt death spiral to show for it.
Making up a pandemic response as you go not only causes more societal harms, but it turns out, also costs money. A lot of it.
The lockdowns were predicated on our government printing unprecedented quantities of money — trillions — to offset the costly harms caused by a knee-jerk and emphatically unscientific pandemic response.
Some of that money was appropriately paid to suffering businesses that never needed to fully shut down. However, it also created massive windfalls for a range of business owners whose businesses were hardly impacted. These payments, though generally legal, became massive regressive transfers to people who were generally well off before pandemic and thanks to those payments became wealthier still.
Of course, large sums of PPP money were also stolen:
NBC News: Biggest fraud in a generation': The looting of the Covid relief plan known as PPP
Wall Street Journal: Some Startups Went From Rescue PPP Loans to SPAC Windfalls
What did the rest of us get? We got a few modest pandemic payouts, a few thousand dollars at most. A connection few make is that all the money printed to pay for unnecessary pandemic policies only served to generate a massive wave of inflation. For most, this inflation essentially clawed back the handouts. Some got seriously rich, most of us, when one nets out inflation, got nothing, nada, zilch.
However, we all do get to share in the massive public debt. All those trillions in printed money is now government debt. It is so much debt, and the interest payments are so high, that the United States is now entering what is called a debt death spiral.
Every additional slug of debt we take on, we then take on additional debt in order to pay the interest on the new debt. Then, we take out still more debt to pay the interest on the interest. This new interest is also now added to the debt and the principal grows. And so on.
Below are projections from the Congressional Budget Office:
One can read about the United States government’s dire fiscal situation in this Substack:
Sweden proved it was possible to respond scientifically to pandemic and have a better outcome.
The only jurisdiction that followed the actual science was Sweden. Sweden’s response was led by Dr. Anders Tegnell, a Swedish official who is that country’s version of Dr. Anthony Fauci. The difference between the two is that Dr. Tegnell actually did “follow the science”. The State of Florida soon followed their model guided by a combination of Harvard and Stanford scientists who had worked with or were closely familiar with Sweden’s efforts.
Despite a coordinated effort by the mainstream media to smear Tegnell and the Swedish effort, Sweden’s excess death numbers bore out well over the long haul, including when compared to Europe as a whole and other Scandinavian peer countries.
SSR intends to provide readers with a deeper dive into Sweden’s effort to follow the science as compared to the United States made up on-the-fly experiment. In the end, Sweden’s excess mortality turned out to be the best in Europe.
(Please subscribe for free in order to receive our receipts on Sweden when they post.)
Why didn’t the U.S. follow the actual science?
Instead of being the Winston Churchills of pandemic giving us strength to remain calm and follow a plan based on our existing research and planning, our public health professionals had us follow a divisive plan of unscientific, harmful, and costly lockdowns and school closures.
Regardless of how one feels about lockdowns and school closures, it’s hard to believe the public wouldn’t have wanted the information posted here. Incredibly the advocacy journalists of mainstream media; instead of finding the documents SSR easily found, publicizing them, and then grilling and scrutinizing our public health elites; only acted as giddy sycophants making celebrities out of officials who were lying to us.
Moreover, journalism worked hand-in-hand with government to censor and discredit those scientists that argued to link the policies we were implementing to our actual research and planning. SSR intends to share receipts in future posts.
Journalists should have been defending small business owners being bankrupted. They should have stood up for children whose education was being horribly set back. They should have put the teachers’ unions on notice that children in Sweden and much of Europe were back in school. They should have pointed out that public health leaders were only stoking fear and making us unwittingly complicit in a state coordinated effort to harm ourselves, our neighbors, our local businesses, and especially our children.
#StayTheFuckHome. They told us to shut everything down when they should have been guiding us to #KeepCalmAndCarryOn. Lockdowns weren’t going stop the virus and they knew it. They knew staying calm, making moderate changes to our activities, and especially keeping children in school would have minimized harms. They didn’t do any of that. They threw away the manual.
What the government told us was the disinformation.
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P.S. Speaking of harms of lockdowns. The day prior to posting this Substack, the CDC tweeted out this helpful tip to drink less alcohol, pointing out a dramatic increase in alcoholism beginning in, hold your breath, 2020. No where do they mention that their own unscientific lockdowns caused untold stress, undoubtedly contributed to more drinking, and on top of it cancelled meetings such as Alcohol Anonymous.