Mainstream liberal news has largely ignored a new study showing that COVID lockdowns had virtually no effect on stopping COVID-19 – because they ‘already have their own narrative written’, according to the study’s author.
A review by three respected economists from Johns Hopkins University, Lund University in Sweden and the Danish think-tank the Center for Political Studies, found that restrictions imposed in the spring of 2020 – including stay-at-home orders, masks mandates and social distancing – only reduced COVID mortality by 0.2 percent.
The study, published in the Studies in Applied Economics January 2022 edition, that lockdowns caused ‘enormous economic and social costs’ and concluded that they were ‘ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument’ going forward.
But the study was largely ignored by mainstream American media outlets, with just DailyMail.com, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and the Washington Times publicizing it.
The study was nowhere to be found on the New York Times, Washington Post and ABC News websites, and while some regional NBC and CBS affiliates reported on the story, the national networks did not.
On Wednesday night, a Johns Hopkins university professor who was not involved in the study slammed the media institutions for downplaying the study.
Dr. Martin Makary, a professor of surgery at the private university in Baltimore, warned that ‘people may already have their own narrative written’ about the effectiveness of lockdowns in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
‘Pretty quickly we started to get the data from Northern Italy that, not only was it not equally distributed in the population, but the harm was so profoundly skewed towards older people and people with co-morbidities,’ he said.
‘Even in the early days of New York, we got data that was largely ignored. That 80 percent of the deaths were in people over 65, and half of them, roughly, were in nursing homes.
‘And yet we continued to treat this as if everybody was at equal risk, and we continue to do that today. In schools, where children bear the biggest burden of the restrictions in this country. So I think the public is hungry for honesty and basic humility from public health officials.’
‘Johns Hopkins itself did not even put out a press release about this study, and if you look at the media coverage, it’s one of the biggest stories in the world today, and yet certain media outlets have not even covered it,’ Makary told the Fox News host.