A newly released report found that several “catastrophic errors” were made during the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to a report published this week by the non-profit Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP), lockdowns, school closures, and draconian vaccine mandates were major problems when dealing with the effects of the pandemic that took rights away from Americans.
Titled "COVID Lessons Learned A Retrospective After Four Years," the report offers ten lessons that leaders of the country need to learn to not make the same mistakes twice.
“Conventional wisdom pre-COVID was that communities respond best to pandemics when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted," the authors wrote. "During COVID, the public health establishment followed the opposite principle: they intentionally stoked and amplified fear, which overlaid enormous economic, social, educational and health harms on top of the harms of the virus itself.”
The authors added that the World Health Organization (WHO) did not have the power to set laws or mandates for people the way they did. They advised term limits for senior health agency positions and to limit their powers.
“SARS-CoV2 was a dangerous virus, but a calm, proportionate response would have applied the lessons from past influenza pandemics and used existing pandemic response plans. Instead, from the moment the virus was detected in America, the public health community and politicians spread an outsized message of fear and doom," the report continued.
The authors pointed out how the months-long lockdowns did not reduce deaths or help stem the spread of COVID-19, saying "Rarely had any discernable casual impact.” They also noted that remote learning caused great impacts on kids such as socialization issues, mental illness, substance abuse, and suicidal thoughts.
The report also read that masks had little to no effect on stopping the spread of COVID, and possibly harmed those who constantly wore them.
“A much wiser strategy than issuing lockdown orders would have been to tell the American people the truth, stick to the facts, educate citizens about the balance of risks, and let individuals make their own decisions about whether to keep their businesses open, whether to socially isolate, attend church, send their children to school and so on,” the report read.
The authors cited the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) survey data, saying that the mass lockdowns resulted in over 49 million Americans being out of work.
“Anthony Fauci, the head of the largest federal grantmaking entity, created an environment in which it was very difficult for most medical experts to break with the dominant narratives on lockdowns, masks, or overwhelmed hospitals," the report states. “The National Institutes of Health (NIH) became the principal advocate of lockdown policies, but failed to run high-quality trials of repurposed drugs and non-pharmaceutical interventions.”