Epidemiologist Warns Lockdown Policies ‘Not Evidence-Based’, Unsustainable In Democracies
By Amanda Prestigiacomo
On Friday, one of the world’s most senior epidemiologists, Professor Johan Giesecke, sat down with UnHeard and discussed lockdown policies across the globe, and what he perceives as the policies’ weaknesses in tackling the China-originated novel coronavirus, COVID-19.
Professor Giesecke currently serves as an advisor to the Swedish Government, was the first Chief Scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), and a former advisor to the director general of the WHO (he’s now retired and serves as an advisor to the WHO only in an honorary capacity).
“The measures we should take against the pandemic should be evidence-based,” he told UnHeard, “and when you start looking around for the measures are being taken now by different countries, you find that very few of them have the shred of evidence base.”
The only measure “we know” will work “is washing your hands is good for you and good for others when you’re in epidemic, but the rest, like border closures, school closures, social distancing, there’s almost no science behind most of these,” argued Giesecke.
In the end, the leading epidemiologist said, most democratized nations will have similar outcomes with regard to deaths, lockdown or not. Lockdowns, he argued, are unsustainable and could have serious political consequences, highlighting Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who recently made a controversial power grab citing the virus.
And yet, Giesecke said, theses measures are only arguably delaying deaths.
Aside from good hygiene, nations should do their best to protect the most vulnerable to COVID: mainly the elderly. Although Giesecke generally thinks Sweden has the right strategy by resisting lockdown, he noted that the nation “failed” when it has come to protecting nursing homes, which are relatively large in Sweden.
“We should have banned visitors earlier,” he said. “Many of the people working in nursing homes are from other countries, they’re refugees or asylum seekers in Sweden. They’re Swedish may not be perfect, they may not always understand the information that has been spread to the population. There are many things we could have done better a couple of weeks or a couple of months ago.”
full story at https://www.dailywire.com/news/epidemiologist-warns-lockdown-policies-not-evidence-based-unsustainable-in-democracies