by WorldTribune Staff, May 26, 2020
Coronavirus lockdown measures imposed by politicians are responsible for more deaths than they saved, a Noble Prize-winning scientist said.
“I think lockdown saved no lives,” said Stanford School of Medicine Professor Michael Levitt, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, The Telegraph reported.
“I think it may have cost lives. It will have saved a few road accident lives, things like that, but social damage — domestic abuse, divorces, alcoholism — has been extreme. And then you have those who were not treated for other conditions,” Levitt said.
As TheBlaze reported last week, California doctors said they’ve seen more deaths from suicide than coronavirus during the mandatory lockdowns.
The early coronavirus models, which were widely pushed by the major media, grossly overestimated the impact of the virus and created unnecessary “panic,” Levitt said.
“I think that the real virus was the panic virus,” Levitt said. “For reasons that were not clear to me, I think the leaders panicked and the people panicked and I think there was a huge lack of discussion.”
Instead of mass lockdowns, Levitt has advocated for developing “herd immunity.”
Levitt said in an interview earlier this month:
I think the policy of herd immunity is the right policy. I think Britain was on exactly the right track before they were fed wrong numbers. And they made a huge mistake. I see the standout winners as Germany and Sweden. They didn’t practice too much lockdown and they got enough people sick to get some herd immunity.
I see the standout losers as countries like Austria, Australia and Israel that had very strict lockdown but didn’t have many cases.They have damaged their economies, caused massive social damage, damaged the educational year of their children, but not obtained any herd immunity.
There is no doubt in my mind, that when we come to look back on this, the damage done by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a huge factor.
Japan: No lockdown, 850 virus deaths
Japan has ended its coronavirus state of emergency after reporting just 851 deaths and never having implementing a lockdown.
“I have decided to end the state of emergency across the nation,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said during a televised press conference on Monday. “In just over a month and a half, we almost brought (the infection) situation under control.”
As of Monday, Japan had reported 16,628 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. Of those infected, 13,612 have recovered and 851 have died.
“The number of coronavirus deaths and infections within the population has been kept to an extremely small level compared to other Group of Seven nations,” Abe said.
Tokyo, the nation’s capital with 14 million residents, reported more than 5,100 cases. On Monday, the city reported just eight new infections.
The coronavirus crisis saw Japan’s hosting of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games postponed.
Chicago mayor orders police to raid church
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Sunday ordered police to raid a South Side church for holding services in defiance of her coronavirus lockdown order.
Lightfoot reportedly sent three marked squad cars and two unmarked cars full of officers to the Chicago Cornerstone Baptist Church in the South Side’s Woodlawn neighborhood.
The pastor of the congregation, Courtney Lewis, reportedly shut and locked the doors and refused to allow the officers to gain entry to the building, Todd Starnes reported.
Pastor Lewis told Starnes that he felt like he was confronting “the Soviet-style KGB” as the officers pounded on his doors and demanded entry to shut the church down.
“Thankfully, our doors were locked as a normal safety precaution we take each service to protect our members from the escalating gun violence in Chicago,” Lewis said.
A sentry that is usually posted outside the sanctuary to monitor the street during service also reported seeing occupants of a dark car with tinted windows filming the incident through one opened window.
“All we are seeking is the same consideration and trust that is being tendered toward the liquor stores, abortion clinics, and Walmart,” Lewis told Starnes.
Late last week, Lightfoot said churches’ desire to re-open is “dangerous and foolish.”
Also last week, the city began fining churches that Lightfoot believes are violating her lockdown orders, Fox News reported. After some started holding services on the second weekend of May, fines were handed out to churches, including Philadelphia Romanian Church of God, Elim Romanian Pentecostal Church, Metro Praise International, and others.
Brooklyn field hospital closes after seeing zero virus patients
A $21 million field hospital in Brooklyn, authorized by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, opened and closed without seeing any patients, the New York Post reported.
The Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook was one of several makeshift hospital sites throughout the city intended to relieve the city’s overcrowded hospitals amid the pandemic, the report said.
De Blasio announced plans for the 750-bed field hospital in Red Hook on March 31, one day after the USNS Comfort hospital ship arrived in New York to aid in the fight against coronavirus. WABC reported that the USNS Comfort treated 182 patients over three and a half weeks before it departed at the end of April.
The funding for the Red Hook makeshift hospital is expected to be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
GOP lawmaker stuns The View with admission that he took hydroxy
Republican Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly revealed that he took hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 after he was infected with the virus.
Kelly, 72, was diagnosed with the virus in March and has since recovered. During an interview on The View last week, Kelly explained some of his symptoms and revealed that he was prescribed hydroxychloroquine.
“I thought at first I just had some strain of the flu,” he said. “I didn’t really recognize it as something that I hadn’t had before. My wife, though, was very, very aware of it and said, ‘You know what, you’re sleeping with two blankets on, you’re still cold, you’re not eating, you have no sense of taste, and when you sleep, you’re sleeping like 16 to 18 hours a day, and you’re still tired.’ ”
Kelly said that within a day of getting tested, “they told me, ‘Listen, you have the virus, so what we want you to do is stay home, and we’ll prescribe stuff.’ So a Z-Pak, which most people use, and then the hydroxychloroquine, I took it. So maybe that reduced the effects on me, but I didn’t have the respiratory part, which is a real blessing.”
Joy Behar, one of the co-hosts of The View, was shocked: “Wow. I can’t believe anybody with a brain would take that stuff, but you seem like an intelligent guy,” she told Kelly. “You’re a representative in Congress. Why would you take that drug? There are terrible consequences.”
Kelly responded: “I appreciate that’s your view, that’s not my view. In my case, I can’t say definitively that’s what cured me, but I can say definitively that I took it, and I can say that I went through a period of time that I was sick. I came out of it within about nine days, and then I self-quarantined for another month on top of that.”
Rocker Sammy Hagar says he’s done with ‘coronavirus crap’
Former Van Halen frontman and “I Can’t Drive 55” singer Sammy Hagar on Friday declared himself done with coronavirus lockdowns.
“I don’t say the word ‘hate’ very much, but I hate this frigging coronavirus crap,” the 72-year-old said during an interview with KSHE-95, a classic rock radio station based in St. Louis.
“I’m not afraid of it, and I’m not locking down anymore. I’ll go around to anyone. If you don’t wanna be around me, fine. Keep your distance — I’m all cool with that. It’s not like I’m against that. But I’m sorry — I have no fear at my age about it,” Hagar said.
Asked if he was concerned, at his age, about the virus, Hagar said: “I thought, you know what? I’ve had the best life of any human being on this planet. If the damn thing wants to come and get me and kill me, let it be,. Life isn’t gonna be any better from this day on for the rest of my life than it has been. And I swear to you — I came to grips with it.”
In a separate interview published earlier last week, Hagar referred to coronavirus as “the flu” and harshly criticized the economic shutdown it sparked.
“I’d rather personally get sick and even personally die, if that’s what it takes. We have to save the world and this country from this economic thing that’s going to kill more people in the long run,” Hagar told Rolling Stone.
“This shutdown of the economy is going to make that escalate 10 times and then we’re all going to be sick and you can’t walk down the street. I would rather see everyone go back to work. If some of us have to sacrifice on that, OK. I will die for my children and my grandchildren to have a life anywhere close to the life that I had in this wonderful country and freedom. That’s just the way that I feel about it.”
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