COVID Is Over — But Did We Learn Anything From It?

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

The lockdowns instituted during the COVID pandemic were only supposed to last a few days. Remember “14 days to flatten the curve” was all that was needed to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed by patients infected with the rapidly spreading novel coronavirus.

Two weeks turned into three, then months. Schools were closed. Businesses were shut down. Commercial activity in the world’s most powerful nation ground almost to a halt, but the virus kept killing, mutating and spreading.

States like California and Kentucky enforced the lockdowns with ruthless efficiency. The free exercise of worship and assembly was crushed on the altar of public health and safety.

Was it worth it? The Committee to Unleash Prosperity’s report, “COVID Lessons Learned: A Retrospective After Four Years,” says no. Its authors, who include the Hoover Institution’s Dr. Scott Atlas (who served as an adviser to the White House Coronavirus Task Force), Johns Hopkins University economist Steve Hanke and the University of Chicago’s Casey Mulligan conclude, by using publicly available data and peer-reviewed studies, that the lockdowns cost more lives than they saved.

Atlas, Hanke, Mulligan and Phil Kerpen, president of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP) and the fourth and final co-author, conclude: “The ordered shutdown of our schools, churches, and businesses brought little health benefits while imposing multi-trillions of dollars of long-term societal costs.”

“We did not focus on theories or models. We looked at cold, hard facts,” Kerpen says. “The evidence is overwhelming. Lockdowns, school closures, and societal panic/disruption resulted in a staggering number of excess non-COVID deaths in the United States versus zero in non-lockdown Sweden.”

Kerpen estimates that the policies implemented during the lockdowns saved approximately 16,000 lives while causing about 400,000 extra deaths and imposing staggering economic costs, including the loss of 49 million jobs.

Other adverse consequences stemming from the lockdowns cited in the report include a $6 trillion increase in government debt, hundreds of thousands of business bankruptcies and hundreds of thousands of excess deaths from loneliness, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse and delayed hospital care in part due to the forced social isolation.

In the U.S., catastrophes like COVID are usually followed by the appointment of bi-partisan, blue-ribbon commissions to study everything and issue recommendations we’re told will prevent something similar from happening again.

That hasn’t been done this time, which reinforces the suspicion in some minds that COVID-era policymakers who are still in a position to influence the conversation are hiding something. Having made a hash of things, they just as soon allow it all to slide down the memory hole.

Even in China, where popular opinion doesn’t matter, the investigation into the origins of the virus hit a stonewall thanks to what news reports have called “bureaucratic infighting.”

Too many people think the lockdowns worked. They’re ignoring the data. The CTUP report shows them to be wrong. It’s a call for a further probe that searches for the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it might be. Without it, how can we be sure the public’s health and safety will be protected the next time, not to mention our civil liberties?

The CTUP report offers a few “lessons learned” that should inform policymakers’ decision-making in the next crisis. One is that “Leaders should calm public fears, not stoke them.”

“Conventional wisdom pre-COVID was that communities respond best to pandemics when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted,” the authors conclude. During the pandemic, responsible officials in the public eye “intentionally stoked and amplified fear, which overlaid enormous economic, social, educational, and health harms on top of the harms of the virus itself.”

As hard as it is to argue against that, it’s easy to suggest the crisis was used as a political club. What of it? Suppose public health officials, the media, and other policymakers deliberately ignored sound science and proven pandemic countermeasures to inflict political damage on a president they wished to see booted from office. Does that matter? The answer is yes, it does.

There’s more to be learned because there’s more to be studied. None of the nations that used lockdowns to prevent COVID from spreading can report that they worked as intended.

“The best-performing major country in the world was Sweden,” Kerpen says, “which did not employ mandatory lockdowns. Yet, to the extent that official and unofficial commissions in many countries have issued reports, they say the principal lesson to be learned from the pandemic is to lockdown harder and faster. The evidence doesn’t support that. It tells us that the lockdown policies must never be imposed again.”

If Kerpen is correct, and the evidence suggests he is, then policymakers are drawing the wrong conclusions. Lockdowns were a failure, not a success.

Other ways must be found to prevent a future outbreak from turning into a pandemic, hopefully, before the next crisis presents itself.

A former U.S. News & World Report columnist and United Press International senior political writer, Peter Roff is an acknowledged expert on U.S. politics and the policy process. His take on politics and policy appears frequently in print and on U.S. and international broadcasting outlets. Email him at RoffColumns AT gmail.com. Follow him on social media AT TheRoffDraft.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

The Covid 19 Disaster: When Do We Get The Apologies?

Published on July 10, 2025

Bruce Dowbiggin

Breaking: Drs. Bonnie Henry and Theresa Tam have been appointed to the Order of Canada in recognition of their role in the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

And so the game of covid liar’s poker has more winners. It’s like awarding the captain of the Titanic the Nobel Prize for his work on floatation. As we now know these two— and the other WHO finger puppets in Canada— made the Covid 19 episode worse, not better, with their prescription for panic, positives and punishment. Even as they knew the truth about the limits of the virus and the efficacy of vaccines they continued to spew fallacious PCR data on the extent of the sickness and who was at risk.

Put simply, to protect vulnerable seniors they said kids were also at great risk. Which was unconscionable.

In this they encouraged Justin Trudeau in his worst instincts, combining his father’s insouciant disregard for civil rights (sending in the police) with his mother’s mental stability. Propped up by Team Tam and its U.S. allies such as Anthony Fauci, this hysteria peaked with a sequestered PM crushing the Truckers Convoy’s vaccine protest with emergency measures and destruction of civil liberties.

Lest you wonder, this overreach was recognized at the time. Justice Maclean wrote at the trial of Convoy organizers, “Defendants & other persons remain at liberty to engage in a peaceful, lawful & safe protest”. On Feb. 16, he continued a no-honking order, again writing: “Defendants & other persons remain at liberty to engage in a peaceful, lawful & safe protest.”

The leaders of the Convoy, lynched by Canadian media’s phoney claims of right-wing American interference, are still fighting jail time on charges of nuisance. While violent criminals are routinely released on bail or absolved.

Justice Richard Mosley later concluded that while the convoy was a disruption of public order, it didn’t constitute a national emergency and invoking the act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility.” But in real time Team Tam made no attempts to correct the wilder misgivings about Covid (lockdowns, mandatory vaccines). Trudeau was given a hall pass. Needless to say the purchased media made things infinitely worse regurgitating these mistakes.

In short, they knew better but hid the truth. But why pick on Henry and Tam? Under Trudeau and his wingman Jagmeet Singh this was the golden age of lies and prevarications in Canada and the U.S. No apologies were ever offered when the truth emerged.

As we’ve noted before, Trudeau cried with a teddy bear carefully positioned over 751 alleged unmarked graves in a known Catholic cemetery that the local Cowessess band abandoned. The Liberal government knew the claim of 215 “children’s graves” was false, and still ran with it to get Trudeau his photo-op. Naturally the CBC Media Party played (and still plays) accomplice in this farce as the Canadian flag was lowered to half-mast for six months and Trudeau ratted out Canada at the UN as a genocidal state.

There were more, plenty more Trudeau scandals that media endorsed and then stood by even as the truth was revealed. SNC Lavalin. We Charity. Arrive Can app. Firing indigenous justice minister. Chinese drug infiltration/ money laundering. Nazi Celebrated in Parliament. Welcome To Canada immigration. Nova Scotia massacre. McKinsey Consultation. Blackface. And so on.

And were there apologies when it came time to make the Trudeau Liberals accountable? No, they staged a media circus over Donald Trump’s assertion of 51st state. All the fake news and deliberate lies went poof, allowing Mark Carney to seamlessly assume the PM job.

Lest We Forget Pt. 2 it was not exclusive to Canada. As we are now learning: Barack Obama and Joe Biden sat in an August 3, 2016 Situation Room briefing and said, yeah, let the highest officials in our administration fabricate evidence to frame the opposing party candidate Donald Trump. Obama. Biden. Comey. McCabe. Strzok. Page. Rice. Etc.

Knowingly using the faked Clinton campaign ‘Steele Dossier’ hoax, they launched a federal investigation into the Trump presidential campaign that lasted three years after Trump was sworn in as the nation’s 45th President. Arresting and jailing his partners and colleagues. Inventing fake stories for their media enablers. Let’s repeat that. Saint Obama knew there was criminal activity in the process but let his henchmen try to fix an election.

And when the ruse was uncovered no one apologized. No one in authority was fired or jailed. The Pulitzer Prizes awarded to the NT Times and Washington Post for disseminating the DEMs scandal were not rescinded. Nor were they given back by the lying newspapers.

The concerted frauds of the same U.S. DOJ, FBI and State Departments were fed by media and accepted by gullible publics in Canada and America. The fantastical 2020 election results were likewise drummed into the public irrespective of the sudden “appearance” of 27 million new votes during a pandemic.

It was all a fitting preamble to the 2020-2024 Biden senility scandal with Democrats running a man they knew was in full dementia. In the 2020 election Biden was hidden from public view, the better to let media attack Trump for spurious charges launched by partisan DNC attorneys in Georgia, New York and DC. Even then it took the suppression of Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop just prior to the election to get his father elected.

The dance of denial continued in Biden’s term as he physically and mentally deteriorated before the American public. But inquiries about who was running the government if not Biden were harshly suppressed. Media lackeys noted he was sharp as a tack mentally and in tip-top physical condition when he wasn’t falling down stairs.

It took the stunning 2024 debate debacle with Trump to strip away the lies about Biden’s health, now said to be advanced prostate cancer and Parkinson’s. The media, caught in their own lies about Biden’s condition, offered no apologies and tried to blame Biden’s stutter for the performance.. Right.

These were the two greatest U.S. hoaxes from people who’d cried hoax incessantly. They were hardly the only abuse of public trust. Some of the perpetrators are said to now be under investigation— even as they hand out awards to each other. The media’s credibility is shattered and yet they still blame others. Jaded voters are taking a “we’ll see” approach. But expectations of any change in DC or Ottawa are limited.

As Stephen Taylor posted on X: “Turns out for Liberals, ‘elbows up’ just means ‘noses up’ like it always has.”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

Freedom Convoy

Court Orders Bank Freezing Records in Freedom Convoy Case

Published on July 9, 2025

Todayville

By Cindy Harper

UNRAVELING THE DEBAKING

A Canadian court has ordered the release of documents that could shed light on how federal authorities and law enforcement worked together to freeze the bank accounts of a protester involved in the Freedom Convoy.

Both the RCMP and TD Bank are now required to provide records related to Evan Blackman, who took part in the 2022 demonstrations and had his accounts frozen despite not being convicted of any crime at the time.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) announced the Ontario Court of Justice ruling. The organization is representing Blackman, whose legal team argues that the actions taken against him amounted to a serious abuse of power.

“The freezing of Mr. Blackman’s bank accounts was an extreme overreach on the part of the police and the federal government,” said his lawyer, Chris Fleury. “These records will hopefully reveal exactly how and why Mr. Blackman’s accounts [were] frozen.”

Blackman was arrested during the mass protests in Ottawa, which drew thousands of Canadians opposed to vaccine mandates and other pandemic-era restrictions.

Although he faced charges of mischief and obstructing police, those charges were dismissed in October due to a lack of evidence. Despite this, prosecutors have appealed, and a trial is set to begin on August 14.

At the height of the protests, TD Bank froze three of Blackman’s accounts following government orders issued under the Emergencies Act. Then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had invoked the act to grant his government broad powers to disrupt the protest movement, including the unprecedented use of financial institutions to penalize individuals for their support or participation.

In 2024, a Federal Court Justice ruled that Trudeau’s decision to invoke the act had not been justified.

Blackman’s legal team plans to use the newly released records to demonstrate the extent of government intrusion into personal freedoms.

According to the JCCF, this case may be the first in Canada where a criminal trial includes a Charter challenge over the freezing of personal bank accounts under emergency legislation.