This latest policy u-turn by the World Health Organization (WHO) could make life awkward for fanatical lockdown governments in the UK, Australia and Spain, as well as in states like New York.
Yesterday, WHO lead official Dr. David Nabarro appealed to world leaders to stop “using lockdowns as your primary control method” of suppressing COVID-19.
“Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer,” said Dr. Nabarro.
He went on to warn western governments that draconian lockdown policies are only achieving one thing – unnecessary poverty and suffering.
At no point did he state that medieval-style lockdown measures have ‘saved lives.’
This goes directly against repeated statements by WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who has advocating for lockdowns all along, saying that, “[L]ockdowns enabled many countries to suppress transmission and take the pressure off their health systems.”
It still remains to be seen whether this change in envoy Dr Nabarro’s own stance will be reflected in the WHO’s overall global policy recommendations on COVID.
Increased economic and social devastation from previous WHO policy recommendations have already triggered a wave of dissent across the world as more people begin to realise that lockdowns never really worked to begin with.
During a recent interview with British magazine, The Spectator, Dr Nabarro said, “We in the World Health Organisation do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus.”
The intention of his statement was clear, as he categorically rebuked the use of lockdowns by authoritarian governments in the UK and elsewhere:
“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
He also blamed reckless lockdown policies and obsessive travel restrictions as being responsible for decimating delicate economies which rely on tourism to survive, as well as strangling small farmers in poorer regions:
“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry in the Caribbean, for example, or in the Pacific because people aren’t taking their holidays.”
“Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. … Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.”
Dr Nabarro is instead advocating for practical and science-based approach to dealing with the risk of Coronavirus:
“And so, we really do appeal to all world leaders: stop using lockdown as your primary control method. Develop better systems for doing it. Work together and learn from each other.”
Dr Nabarro’s message has come just a week after the release of the Great Barrington Declaration drafted by a group of the world’s top epidemiologists including Dr. Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University – which has declared lockdowns as doing “irreparable damage” to economies and societies.
“As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection…. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” reads the declaration now signed by thousands of scientists, health officials and concerned citizens.
It now remains to be seen if lockdown states will heed the advice of the same WHO which helped lead them into this debacle to begin with.
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