Jeffrey Tucker, a scholar, and author at The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) penned an article titled, ‘The 2006 Origins of the Lockdown Idea.’
This lockdown was unlike anything that was ever done before. It has caused tremendous educational, social, and economic devastation, even in our hospitals and to our medical professionals, causing furloughs at 256+ hospitals. As Tucker writes, we didn’t lock down in 1968/69, 1957, or 1949-1952, or even during 1918.
President Trump listened to the doctors at NIH and CDC. We now know that the CDC is mostly a political organization. The doctors, specifically Dr. Anthony Fauci, have given us misinformation or confusing information. since day one. But that’s an aside.
There was nothing normal about the lockdown and there is NO scientific basis for it. The idea for this monstrous lockdown was concocted 14 years ago.
Mr. Tucker believes that the first time the idea appeared was in the New York Times was February 12, 2006:
If the avian flu goes pandemic while Tamiflu and vaccines are still in short supply, experts say, the only protection most Americans will have is “social distancing,” which is the new politically correct way of saying “quarantine.”
But distancing also encompasses less drastic measures, like wearing face masks, staying out of elevators — and the [elbow] bump. Such stratagems, those experts say, will rewrite the ways we interact, at least during the weeks when the waves of influenza are washing over us.
The 2006 Bird Flu was a no-never-mind as cases of flu go. But, it sent George W. Bush to the library to read about the 1918 Spanish flu.
The New York Times (April 22, 2020) takes it from there, reporting that “two federal government doctors, Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, met with a colleague at a burger joint in suburban Washington for a final review of a proposal they knew would be treated like a piñata: telling Americans to stay home from work and school the next time the country was hit by a deadly pandemic.”
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The Times seems quite smitten with the idea.
The government didn’t bring any legal or economic experts in, just Mecher (formerly of Chicago and an intensive care doctor with no previous expertise in pandemics) and the oncologist Hatchett.
That’s where then-14-year-old Laura M. Glass, high school student, comes in. She recently declined to be interviewed when the Albuquerque Journal did a deep dive into this history.
About Laura:
Laura, with some guidance from her dad, devised a computer simulation that showed how people – family members, co-workers, students in schools, people in social situations – interact. What she discovered was that school kids come in contact with about 140 people a day, more than any other group. Based on that finding, her program showed that in a hypothetical town of 10,000 people, 5,000 would be infected during a pandemic if no measures were taken, but only 500 would be infected if the schools were closed.
Laura’s name appears on the foundational paper arguing for lockdowns and forced human separation. That paper is Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza (2006). It set out a model for forced separation and applied it with good results backward in time to 1957. They conclude with a chilling call for what amounts to a totalitarian lockdown, all stated very matter-of-factly.
In other words, it was a high-school science experiment that eventually became law of the land, and through a circuitous route propelled not by science but politics.
The primary author of this paper was Robert J. Glass, a complex-systems analyst with Sandia National Laboratories. He had no medical training, much less expertise in immunology or epidemiology.
It was rejected out of hand at the time.
AIER found the original article in response to the 14-year-olds paper in 2006. The manifesto: Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza. The authors included D.A. Henderson, along with three professors from Johns Hopkins: infectious disease specialist Thomas V.Inglesby, epidemiologist Jennifer B. Nuzzo, and physician Tara O’Toole.
It fully refuted the model.
They dismissed it historically, economically, socially, ethically, and medically. Their conclusion:
Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.
We took a manageable pandemic and turned it into a catastrophe, Tucker explains. But, George W. Bush apparently sided with the idea of social distancing and quarantines and it became the plan.
We invented a virus-controlling totalitarian society that some politicians will never give up.
Watch:
This information came from one of my readers, Greg.
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