Recommendations to lock down, mask up, and social distance during the COVID-19 pandemic were not made on the best available scientific evidence and thus had nowhere near the effectiveness that their advocates either proclaimed or hoped for.
Sufficient data indicate that such measures contributed little to helping people avoid the risk of COVID or actually did more harm than good.
So says the first report released by a statewide grand jury that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis convened to investigate the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines and whether pharmaceutical manufacturers and executives, as well as medical organizations, engaged in “criminal activity or wrongdoing” in rolling out the jabs.
Read: Florida Sen. Scott Blasts Proposed Border Deal, Points Finger At Kentucky Sen. McConnell
The panel, first announced in December 2022, released its initial 33-page report on Friday. The grand jury began its work last June and noted in the report that it could not resolve the question at hand until jurors understood the success or failure of what they referred to as “nonpharmaceutical interventions,” or NPIs.
This meant lockdowns, masking, and social distancing.
The report states that the grand jury met with resistance from witnesses. The Biden administration has refused to cooperate, denying testimony from officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food & Drug Administration, and the U.S. Army. Other witnesses cited personal or professional conflicts with the grand jury or refused to cooperate because they believed it was politically motivated.
Still, the jury moved forward using the testimony from medical and scientific experts who did cooperate as well as the “surprising amount” of information about the COVID-19 pandemic that is already available in the “public sphere.”
Read: CNN Gives Florida Gov. DeSantis Opening To Promote Anti-Crime Record
The jury acknowledged that it was willing to give the FDA some flexibility in how it responded to “a true national emergency: A novel disease that is estimated to have killed almost a hundred thousand Floridians and millions worldwide.” Yet the jury also pointed out that there are reasons to question claims about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines.
The first stop on that path was looking at what was done before the vaccines came along, and how those steps affected the alleged risk of COVID.
Concerning lockdowns, the jury admitted it found a “pattern in the data showing a short-term stabilization of case growth that persists until the lockdown is lifted.” But that also exhibited “months or even years of excess mortality that can partially be attributed to collateral consequences concentrated in the groups at lowest risk from COVID-19 disease.”
It’s a fair point to argue lockdowns enabled people in high-risk groups to “bridge the gap” until 2021 when vaccines became widely available.
“On average, however, when one includes all age groups, lockdowns were not a good trade,” the report stated. “Comparative data showed that jurisdictions that held to them tended to end up with higher overall excess mortality. This is especially evident when compared to jurisdictions that targeted their protective efforts towards the highest-risk groups instead of mandating large-scale, extended periods of quarantine for everyone.”
Read: Jonathan Turley Predicts What The Supreme Court Will Focus On In Trump Ballot Case
“Effectively, lockdowns traded the immediate welfare of a smaller, affluent, well-represented group of older Americans who could afford to stay home for the longer-term welfare of a larger, less-affluent, poorly-represented group of children, teens, twenty-, thirty- and forty-somethings who could not,” the report continued. “If anything, the result of this was a modest benefit to the former group at the expense of the latter.”
As for masks, the jury noted it “never had sound evidence of their effectiveness” against the virus.
The report noted that masks were rendered useless once it was determined that the “primary” transmission method of COVID aerosol.
“Public health agencies failed to adequately explain this important distinction to the American public in favor of a broad mask recommendation that did not make nearly enough distinction between the types of masks available and put at risk those it sought to help<” the report stated.
“Well-financed federal agencies chose to fill the discourse with flawed observational and laboratory studies … to avoid the potential embarrassment of the public health advice they championed being invalidated by evidence.”
Read: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Nailed 2 Courthouse Victories Last Week
The aerosol-based spread of COVID also meant social distancing would not work either, the report noted.
Distance mattered far less than whether people were indoors or outdoors and the available airflow in their environment.
In its conclusion, the jury said, “We cannot ignore the fact that these NPIs were not administered based on the best available scientific data.”
“In fact, many public health recommendations and their attendant mandates departed significantly from scientific research that was contemporaneously available to everyone: Individuals, scientists, corporations and governments alike,” the report continued.
“Often this research was ignored by institutional policymakers. Occasionally it was even attacked. It is a sad state of affairs when something as simple as following the science constitutes an act of heresy, but here we are.”
“Some NPIs may have shifted risk to later in time or from one group to another or had some speculative efficacy against viral spread when used in perfect laboratory conditions,” the jury determined, but “comparative evidence suggests they did not significantly change the overall risk profile presented by the … virus in terms of excess death, especially once collateral consequences are taken into consideration.”
Android Users, Click To Download The Tampa Free Press App And Never Miss A Story. Follow Us On Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our free newsletter.