Two years ago, Simon Fraser University economics professor Douglas Allen published an academic paper condemning pandemic lockdowns as doing more harm than good..“An examination of over 80 COVID-19 studies reveals that many relied on assumptions that were false, and which tended to over-estimate the benefits and underestimate the costs of lockdown,” Allen wrote in April of 2021.."The cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282. That is, it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history.”.In an interview with Western Standard, Allen said his suspicions were already aroused a full year prior..“When the lockdowns first cane, I was blown away. I just thought, given the obvious, enormous costs of shutting down life, I thought to myself, maybe I've misunderstood, we must be facing something that's three times worse than smallpox in the 17th century. I just thought I'd completely missed the seriousness of the virus,” Allen recalls..“Almost immediately, I started doing my own research on this sort of stuff. And many economists were on top of this thing right away. And most of the public health officers, I think, ignored thousands of papers that were done by economists over the first 18 months.”.“There was a group of economists in in UCLA, that by the end of the summer of 2020, had done such phenomenal work that really showed, I thought, that the lock downs were useless, that the virus was moving through populations exactly the same way, regardless of what the culture, the civilization, what governments were doing. And then I thought, ‘Okay, well, now it's over, right? There's no way we'll go back to lockdown in the fall.’ And of course we did.”.Allen said he got involved in a lawsuit to stop the lockdowns that was unsuccessful..“I wrote a report that, when the lawsuit went nowhere, for nothing better to do, I posted it on my Facebook, I only have six friends on Facebook, but somebody shared it. I posted it on a Monday. And by Thursday, it went viral. And it was nonstop after that.”.Two journals asked him to publish reports, which Allen claims have been downloaded a “record” 70,000 times. The question remains why a paper so sought by the public was almost completely ignored by the media..“The mainstream media was part of the message, right? Whether they were literally in bed with the state or not, they went along with the beginning. Again, you're telling people certain things, and then you find out they're not true, you can either admit that you made a mistake, or you can just carry on with that narrative,” Allen explains..“I personally don't believe in big conspiracies, I just think it was in every person's interest.”.Then again, the degree of journalistic ignorance has sometimes surprised Allen..“I was always struck too, and I've talked to various media people about how little they actually knew about the virus, because most of the information they got, they just got from the daily press conferences, they never bothered to look at the actual data.”.In the meantime, governments kept implementing strategies Allen says were demonstrably not working..“Here's my theory of what happened. The world panicked, every government panicked, and you had these models, like the ICO model that for Canada was saying we're going to lose over a quarter of a million people in three months,” Allen explains..“Here you are, you're a politician. By the end of April of 2020, there had been a loss of wealth in the country by a third the stock market value just crashed, you had destroyed a third of the wealth of the country. Oops. And you're going to admit that? Not a chance, right?".“What you're going to do is say, ‘Well, we thought it would be two weeks to bend the curve, it obviously wasn't. We're going to have to go for another two weeks and another two weeks, and you're just hoping and praying that this thing goes away. And you can declare victory.”.Governments bet heavily on a weak hand and played it out until, hopefully, it worked..“Just like in blackjack, when you're engaged in a double down strategy, the stakes get higher and higher and higher, because you're causing more and more damage. And there is no way you can let the truth out, right? Because now you're responsible for six rounds of lockdown.”.The very infectious, but less lethal Omicron provided the way out of lockdowns, Allen says, but the damage to the economy and the lives that this took cannot be restored..“When you're unemployed, your income goes down your diet, quality of diet goes down, your anxiety levels go up, your mental health goes down, all these things contribute to a shorter life. In the United States, for the first year of the pandemic, lost life years, due to just the unemployment part, is about 800,000 lives. If you convert the unemployment into lost lives. My impression is each category of costs swamps the benefits of lockdown. It's again going to be disaster.” .Although the pandemic years took lives, Allen is also concerned for how many youth had their lives destroyed. He recalls the lifetime damage done to orphans isolated in Romania during the Communist years, and wonders what the pandemic’s generational effect has been on Canadian children..“We dumped so much of the costs on the very young, and there's been lots of research on that. These are the very people that were going to experience the least consequences because of COVID. And yet, they experienced in essence, a generational effect, children that, their only view of human being was with a mask on and didn't get to read faces,” Allen muses..“We will probably find twenty years from now that those children that were born at the beginning of that pandemic, are going to be facing life lesson skills problems, that that were a result of that. But not only that, just the educational loss and the anxiety that these people suffered on and on and on.”.Allen says he turned down a leadership role in the National Citizens Inquiry, but would be glad to testify. Even so, the economist says the real cost of the pandemic goes far beyond money..“Lost GDP. Certainly, that's important. But my goodness, that's just the starting of things. There has to be a full accounting of what you might even call the loss of livelihood, or the loss of living. What does it mean when people cannot have a funeral to say goodbye to their loved ones, or they cannot have a marriage or wedding to celebrate that big event in life?” Allen says..“All these things, these getting togethers, the whole point of life is for the living. We lost that, really two years of lost living. They’re stories and narratives, but they're real, right, and somehow really important, very difficult to put dollar values on. But that has to be the case. .“The deaths of despair, the overdoses, the suicides, and all these sorts of things have to be accounted for. And there has to be kind of a narrative that goes along with that. Deaths caused by lost cancer appointments or other health appointments, those sorts of things, the complete failure of the healthcare system has to be accounted for. Just keep going.”
