Following the herd
When a certain percentage of a population becomes immune to an infection—significantly limiting its spread—it is called herd immunity. Vaccines rely on herd immunity. Admittedly, since there was no vaccine before December 2020, reaching herd immunity for COVID could have been a very bruising process. Thus, in October 2020, doctors and scientists released a document called the Great Barrington Declaration. Authors of this declaration criticized lockdowns for harming physical and mental health, writing on their website, “Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health—leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden.” The Great Barrington Declaration instead offered an approach called focused protection.
The Great Barrington Declaration wasn’t radical at all, because focused protection was not new. It had been a standard method of fighting disease outbreaks for a long time. The declaration urged that the young and healthy—who faced negligible risk of death from COVID—be permitted to live their lives as normal. By becoming naturally infected, they would build up immunity. Protection of the elderly and others who were more vulnerable would be encouraged. Eventually, natural infection of the young and healthy would create herd immunity that would also protect the elderly and other vulnerable people.
The Great Barrington Declaration was authored by Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University. The document was not politically driven. Gupta was once featured in a Daily Kos diary on a list of “trailblazing women” and described herself as “more left than Labour”, but the declaration’s signatories sported a variety of political views. Bhattacharya said he received racist attacks and death threats for his views on managing the pandemic.
A study in Israel said focused protection could have reduced pandemic deaths by 43 percent, and other evidence suggests it would have reduced deaths by much more.
Since the outbreak began, lenient approaches have received an unfair rap from the media (big surprise). The far-right Breitbart News bashed Sweden’s lax policies in April 2020, forecasting a “tragedy.” President Trump similarly mischaracterized the Swedish approach. That month, Trump made a post on Twitter assailing Sweden while praising America’s tough lockdowns: “Despite reports to the contrary, Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown. ... The United States made the correct decision!” This followed the American media’s botched coverage of early March. Media outlets either downplayed this virus—even periodically claiming it wasn’t real—or they claimed the virus was so cataclysmic that it would kill far more people than any serious observer would think possible. It’s impossible for both statements to be true, so why should anyone trust the media?
An organization in Washington state even sued Fox News and cable companies that carried it after the channel insisted the virus was a hoax. The suit sought relief under the state’s Consumer Protection Act. Just a few months later, Fox News accused Black Lives Matter rallies of spreading the virus. This shows how even a single channel darted between denial and alarmism. Their credibility is shot.
Incidentally, our overlords’ definition of herd immunity actually changed during the crisis. It evolved from significant immunity to almost total eradication—just so restrictions could continue. They also had kept arbitrarily increasing the threshold for the former—one of many ways in which they moved the goalposts for lifting restrictions.
One thing we didn’t have herd immunity to was the false news supergurus and their desire to gut established pandemic practices. Not long before, the pandemic playbook did not prescribe lockdowns. If there was a pandemic like COVID, it said authorities should “consider” canceling indoor sporting events. More severe measures were not suggested. One official document said that even if a pandemic virus killed an unimaginable 50 percent of those infected, schools should close no longer than six months—not the year or two that became the COVID norm. Famed statistician Nate Silver estimated in August 2021 that the infection fatality rate of SARS-CoV-2 was about 0.1 percent.
Why lockdowns? Where did the idea come from?
For decades, many countries placed limits on the disabled—which even took the form of forced sterilization. Some disabled people were the subject of government experiments. The world’s rulers considered the poor and disabled to be burdens on society. School textbooks in the Third Reich featured math problems that focused on the financial costs of taking care of the disabled. In today’s healthcare debate, this feeling is still expressed by pundits who warn followers they will pay too much for healthcare just so others can have costly treatments.
To our overlords, a human life is often considered merely a dollar sign.
A New York Times piece in April 2020 touched on how lockdowns became the rule. In 2006, two U.S. government doctors presented a proposal to the George W. Bush administration to require the public to stay at home if there was a pandemic. At first, the physicians found their faces laughed in. Another doctor said, “There were two words between ‘shut’ and ‘up.’ ” The idea was said by most to be legally, ethically, and socially unsound.
But officials in the Bush regime were privately impressed with the idea. In 2007, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention seemingly made it an agency policy. Yet during the 2009-10 swine flu and 2014-15 Ebola virus pandemics, lockdowns were not enacted in America or almost anywhere else. It was only during COVID—after the Chinese government said the Wuhan lockdown was working—that any part of America or most other countries put lockdowns into practice. In other words, they said lockdowns worked because China said they did.
This dogma of believing the Chinese Communist Party through thick and thin was also held by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who was later the disastrous CDC director under President Biden. Walensky said, “To give you a sense of what lockdowns were able to do in other countries, and I mean really strict lockdowns, in China their death rate is three per million.” There you have it, folks. The head of the CDC actually trusted CCP propaganda.
Walensky also once admitted she got some of her info on vaccines from CNN—not the other way around.
It might seem surprising that Democrats would latch onto a Bush plan like lockdowns. In February 2020, reporter Matthew Zeitlin posted on Twitter that the COVID response was on “the same politico-cultural lines as everything else.” He said liberals were saying that “quarantines are ineffective, the flu is more dangerous, relax.” He said the conservative response was “freak out, travel ban, quarantine.” In fact, as late as that month, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio urged folks to visit his city’s Chinatown, where many residents often traveled to Wuhan. He said the neighborhood was as safe as any other. This was before de Blasio’s many pandemic abuses that proved what an incompetent ogre he was. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said San Francisco’s Chinatown was also safe.
In March, one of the loudest voices supporting lockdowns was disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. For years after he left office, the Republican was always being interviewed by news outlets for his unwanted opinions on things he knew nothing about. That month, Gingrich penned a Newsweek piece strongly endorsing lockdowns. At the time, Gingrich lived in Italy because his wife Callista Gingrich was Ambassador to the Holy See. Italy had just become the first Western country to issue a lockdown.
Newtzi noted that most stores and all restaurants and churches were closed. “The streets are almost empty,” he wrote. He added that this mass house arrest was “not an overreaction.”
Another major lockdown voice in America was Dr. Mehmet Oz, best known as host of The Dr. Oz Show. He praised the Chinese government for its lockdown policy, saying, “The Chinese numbers have dropped dramatically, which is fantastic news. ... We just have to copy what they did, take their blueprint, and repeat it here in this country.” In 2022, Oz went on to become the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania—which he lost.
So now we’ve got the Bush administration, the Chinese Communist Party, Newt Gingrich, and Dr. Oz backing lockdowns. What a combo! This was even as one expert said lockdowns would be “patently unconstitutional in the United States.”
The fact that lives were equated with dollars is key to understanding the rise of stay-at-home orders. It should have been obvious that these orders would create circumstances that would leave a streak of death. There was also no evidence the orders would prevent COVID-19 deaths. One of the most vulnerable groups during lockdowns was people with disabilities that would otherwise have a relatively low death rate. Many of them qualified for disability benefits but would be receiving these benefits for a long time because their disability—despite being severe—had a low rate of mortality. An example is post-traumatic stress disorder. This condition might have a low death rate on its own, but deaths related to it would increase exponentially under social isolation.
Our rulers didn’t give a damn about anyone’s life. Your life meant absolutely nothing to them. Nothing. Like that Third Reich schoolbook, they considered people a liability and a financial burden to society. They were rubbing their hands together in excitement now that they had an excuse to eliminate people who they deemed burdensome. Among others, this included the disabled who would die under lockdowns, as well as the elderly who would not only not be saved from COVID but would in fact die sooner because of lockdowns. Elderly nursing home patients often could not see family because of lockdown-related limits, and this itself was detrimental to their health. They also could not die with dignity—and family could not grieve with dignity.
The cruelty of the lockdown experiment was shocking.
Death with dignity was not in lockdownists’ lexicon. A man said his father’s emergency heart surgery was postponed by a governor’s executive order—and he died just days later because of it. Then—because of lockdowns—no funeral was allowed. Another person said that—even in late 2020—only three people were allowed at a loved one’s visitation. In another case, a woman said each of her parents received a simple graveside service when they died, but later she got a rude letter about how services were supposed to be limited to 10 people. Video from another funeral is disgraceful: A mourner moved his chair closer to that of his mother to comfort her after her husband had died. Immediately, a man disrupted the eulogy to make him move his chair back.
Very real principles of medical ethics were shredded, as the young were required to sacrifice the most. Medical institutions make important decisions every day to save the young, but this principle was shoved aside under the “new normal.” Yet lockdowns still did not save the old. Not only did some die from lockdown conditions, but lockdowns did not save those who it was supposed to save. If they did, why was the death count so high, and why was it worse under lockdowns? The young are the future, but lockdowns didn’t even save older people—and destroyed young people’s lives. We don’t even need to have a debate about whether the price of lockdowns outweighed public health benefits—because lockdowns did not provide such benefits. Nothing suggests lockdowns saved even one life.
As some assailed Americans as irresponsible oafs for not supporting permanent COVID restrictions, they also attacked younger generations for not following restrictions that they claimed would save the old—even though the old were not saved. A study by University of Chicago researchers released in April 2021 on shelter-in-place orders said, “We find no evidence that SIP policies led to reductions in new COVID cases or deaths.” We know lockdowns didn’t save anyone from COVID, because almost everyone ended up being infected by the virus even with lockdowns.
A later report by American, Swedish, and Danish scientists confirmed that lockdowns had “little to no effect” on COVID deaths.
Lockdowns are the modern equivalent of eugenics—and served the same purpose. As the crisis wore on, however, lockdownists increasingly claimed that a lack of lockdowns was a form of eugenics. They did not explain how. This was another act of projection. In other words, whoever smelt it dealt it.
Lockdown charlatanism was ballooning out of control in March 2020. Entire Internet domains—not just websites but whole domain names—appeared out of nowhere endorsing lockdowns. These sites provided a steady stream of lockdown propaganda. Who could afford to buy so many domains? How were such slick sites put together so quickly? Even into 2023, I noticed one of these sites was still soliciting donations. Why was it trying to raise money that late? This snake oil also got a boost from the alarmist quackery found in an Imperial College London report.
The flatulent constructor of this British university’s report was epidemiologist Dr. Neil Ferguson. Ferguson forecast that if we didn’t lock down long and hard, we’d see an apocalyptic number of COVID-19 deaths. His predictions for the death toll were so high that there was no way we were going to reach that number in such a short time—no matter how bad things got. He said America would reach 2.2 million fatalities by October 2020 unless it locked down severely for two years. (The U.S. had about 600,000 as of May 2021.) He said Britain would have 510,000. (The U.K. had about 130,000 by May 2021.) Researchers at New York University and the New England Complex Systems Institute quickly wrote a piece discrediting the Ferguson report, noting that it failed to take into account the ability to monitor cases. This piece said Imperial College’s “conclusions that there will be resurgent outbreaks are wrong.”
Nobody should have listened to Ferguson, because he had a history of making ridiculously pessimistic predictions. He had warned that 150,000 people in Britain would die from the outbreak of mad cow disease in 2001. This led to the culling of six million animals. But only about 200 people there died. He said the later swine flu pandemic would kill 65,000 in the U.K., but it went on to kill only 457. He forecast in 2005 that the bird flu would kill 200 million worldwide, but it killed 282. Not 282 million—just 282.
How wrong was Ferguson about COVID? An article by Franz Neuhold that appeared on the Socialist Alternative website blasted his study. Neuhold wrote that many governments were instituting “undemocratic actions” and that Ferguson’s study prodded Britain’s right-wing Prime Minister Boris Johnson to impose a lockdown. This article said it was too early to calculate the virus’s death rate. This shows a big flaw of lockdowns: If a government is going to institute severe measures, the government has the burden to show it will work. It can’t just say that something “might” happen otherwise. It was also noted that some people were confusing the case fatality rate (the proportion of deaths among confirmed cases) with the infection fatality rate (an estimate of deaths among all those infected).
Neuhold went on to write that “there is no scientific data whatsoever to support total lock-down measures.”
Business Insider—as shameless a cheerleader for lockdown culture as any other—went on to print a ridiculous, lengthy puff piece that absurdly credited Ferguson with saving thousands of lives. But even this article said a competing model by the University of Oxford challenged Ferguson’s model and that Ferguson had predicted unrealistically high death tolls for past disease outbreaks. (Business Insider was renamed to simply Insider in 2021.)
Ferguson was further debunked when it was discovered that his modeling was based on computer coding he wrote that was full of errors. One tech executive said the coding was a “buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming” and that he would have fired any programmer who wrote code that bad. The modeling would have been just as accurate if it had been compiled on a broken Speak & Spell.
That was before Ferguson was caught violating his own lockdown to visit his mistress. Yet even after Ferguson was proven to be a complete idiot and hypocrite, media outlets still kept interviewing him. In fact, in 2023, British health officials put Ferguson on a panel to provide models for a new bird flu outbreak—as the media was whipping up panic over a bird flu strain that had been seen in humans for years and already had vaccines available.
Similar to Ferguson’s blunder was an error in math by American “experts” that confused the case fatality rate with the infection fatality rate—making the virus appear 10 times as deadly as it was. This foul-up also influenced lockdowns worldwide.
Around the time lockdowns began in the U.S., some dissenters noted that South Korea did not implement lockdowns even though it had the highest case rate in the world back then. South Korean officials said they did not have lockdowns because their country was a democracy, and democracies don’t do that type of thing. On the other hand, South Korea dug in on other totalitarian measures.
As lockdowns grew, there was some dissent, but it was not widely honored. AlterNet was mostly part of the genre of “progressive” sites that sold out during the pandemic, but it ran a surprisingly coherent article in which ACLU attorney Ahilan Arulanantha warned of a “slide into martial law.” (It’s not like the rest of the ACLU paid any heed to this warning.) Arulanantha said Sri Lankan authorities arrested thousands of people just for leaving their homes.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., President Trump proposed unlawfully suspending habeas corpus. Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that Umatilla County, Oregon, actually did. Corrupt far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán used the pandemic as an excuse to rule by decree indefinitely. This allowed him to classify all information regarding a huge Chinese railway project, which was the biggest infrastructure investment in Hungary’s history. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte—who had failed to prepare his country for the virus—said people violating lockdown could be sent to prison. Police fatally shot a retired soldier who broke lockdown. A teacher there was arrested for “inciting sedition” for noting that her mayor was hoarding relief goods instead of distributing them. Duterte also warned that “leftists” who protested lockdowns would be shot by police. “I will bury you,” he said. In Peru, right-wing President Martín Vizcarra authorized the military to use deadly force to enforce a nationwide lockdown and rammed through a law that protected military and police from criminal liability if they killed anyone. Vizcarra was later removed from office by legislators who called him “morally incompetent.” In India, the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party urged the Supreme Court to require news outlets to get government permission before reporting on lockdowns. Bolivia—led by right-wing President Jeanine Áñez, who had seized power in a CIA-backed coup that ousted the elected President Evo Morales—announced 10-year prison terms for people who “promote noncompliance” with lockdown rules. In 2021, Áñez was arrested over massacres in 2019 that killed Morales supporters. Canada’s Globe & Mail reported that Kenyan and South African forces employed rubber bullets, tear gas, and beatings to carry out lockdowns. Spain used its military to enforce COVD rules. Greece had particularly harsh restrictions under the far-right New Democracy party, which had seized power in 2019.
The lockdown enforcement actions listed above are enough to acquaint you with the authoritarian nature of those behind lockdowns and related heavy-handed measures—who continued broadcasting their support for lockdown culture far and wide over three years later.
Lockdowns also worsened domestic violence. The New York Times reported that lockdowns forced people to spend more time at home where they would be subjected to such abuse. Isolation also destroyed support networks. Bristol University sociologist Dr. Marianne Hester said this was entirely predictable. A woman in China said her husband beat her so severely with a high chair that its legs broke off. Domestic violence shelters in Italy became full. A domestic violence emergency number in Spain saw an 18 percent increase in calls. French police saw a 32 percent increase in domestic violence. One British region reported a 20 percent spike. New York state saw a 30 percent increase in calls to its domestic violence hotline. A Chinese province had a threefold increase. In Cleveland, it was up 30 percent. In Jacksonville, Florida, it was 20 percent, according to WJXT-TV. Sheriff Mike Williams said it was “probably directly related to the quarantine.” Authorities in Salt Lake City and in Hampton, Virginia, also observed major increases. The YWCA of Northern New Jersey reported a 24 percent jump. As lockdowns slogged on, WEEK-TV reported that Sheriff Brian Asbell of Peoria County, Illinois, said 45 percent of bookings were connected with domestic violence—twice what it was a year earlier.
A twofold increase in domestic violence was found in New York City. Perpetrators boasted to their victims that they could not get restraining orders, because courts were closed.
Even some on Daily Kos weren’t entirely blind to this crisis. A Daily Kos diary reported on a domestic violence shooting in Pennsylvania. It also said that in Cherokee County, South Carolina, Sheriff Steve Mueller said his department experienced a 35 percent increase in domestic violence cases. One commenter observed, “More evidence of things not considered in the shut it all down rush. It’s great to listen to public health experts, but when you are going to drastically overhaul how we live our lives there should have been many voices and a broader conversation. If that had happened surely someone would have thought about this being a potential issue.” Unfortunately, another user smugly scoffed at that observation and implied that domestic violence victims just weren’t important enough to care about.
HuffPost reported that the U.S. had three domestic violence murder-suicides on a single day. One was by a Maryland man who drove a half-hour to kill his estranged wife. Another was by a Texas man who tried to kill his girlfriend but ended up taking the life of her 15-year-old daughter.
Public officials showcased bottomless ignorance and a complete lack of caring about domestic violence. An article on the Socialist Resurgence website reported that services for survivors were becoming more limited, and travel restrictions made it harder for victims to escape abuse. A woman in China’s Guangdong province was barred from leaving her village even after suffering life-threatening injuries in a domestic violence attack. In the Chinese province of Shanxi, a woman committed suicide by jumping out of an 11th floor window. The BBC reported that a woman in Spain was killed right in front of her children. In Russia, a man flew into an 18-hour rage in which he threw items at his wife.
Rarely was this crisis acknowledged by public officials. In Santa Barbara County, California, District Attorney Joyce Dudley said early in the lockdown, “We will see an increase in domestic violence, child abuse, elder abuse, animal abuse, spousal rape.” Not only were there more of these crimes, but it is believed that a smaller proportion were reported.
NPR reported terrifying surges in domestic violence in South Africa and Australia. Activists in Turkey said there was a sharp increase in the killing of women. Al Jazeera reported a domestic violence spike in India. During that surge, a woman in Chennai tried escaping her husband’s beatings, but a police barricade blocked the street. Police told her to go back home because “police and courts are shut for 21 days.”
CNN reported that a 16-year-old boy in Atlanta was allegedly shot to death by his stepfather because he failed to follow stay-at-home orders.
In April 2020, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll revealed lockdowns had significantly worsened mental health in the U.S., and was especially rough on women. The resulting job losses were also expected to produce more suicides. Euronews reported China was also facing a mental health tragedy.
Physicians at the Cleveland Clinic reported that the incidence of stress-induced cardiomyopathy quadrupled from March 1 to April 30.
Lockdowns proved disastrous for gay and transgender youth, as many were isolated with family members who rejected them.
WZZM-TV reported that stay-at-home orders led to a threefold spike in thefts from cars in Muskegon, Michigan. Guns were among the stolen items. A month into the lockdown, even the Cincinnati Enquirer—part of the avidly pro-lockdown Gannett media empire—reported a rise in violent crime. Following what was the latest in a series of homicides, Cincinnati’s Assistant Police Chief Paul Neudigate called it “probably the worst 28 days of gun violence that we’ve seen in the last four years.” WCPO-TV reported that during those four weeks, the city saw nine homicides, 13 rapes, 77 aggravated assaults, and 76 robberies. A separate Enquirer piece around that time said more Cincinnati women had been fatally shot in that month than in all of 2019.
In Santa Cruz, California, a gang of five allegedly tried to rob and loot businesses throughout the city. In Brooklyn, a man allegedly tried to rob a deli of money and Tylenol. Police found him on a nearby rooftop. A spike in hate crimes was reported in some regions.
USA Today reported that homicides surged 27 percent in California in 2020—hitting Black and Hispanic communities especially hard. Homicides were up 32 percent in a sampling of major cities nationwide. Much of this was because of young men being deprived of school, work, and recreational activities, according to UCLA anthropologist Dr. Jorja Leap.
A Reuters investigation in April 2020 said COVID-19 measures were creating a spike in suicides, much of it related to job losses. The United States Air Force Academy imposed its own lockdown, which was quickly linked to at least two suicides. As the public was discouraged from using businesses, health agencies also faced a loss of tax revenue. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya—the Stanford epidemiologist who helped author the Great Barrington Declaration—warned, “Depressions are deadly for people, poor people especially.”
Despite that rare honest take by a major news source warning of suicides and other deaths, authorities doubled down. There’s nothing like a crisis to bring out the absolute worst of elitists’ cold inhumanity.
Isolation itself can drive suicide. In England, a 19-year-old woman committed suicide because “she could no longer cope” with lockdown isolation. KTXL-TV said a 15-year-old girl in Stockton, California, hanged herself. In the nearby Natomas district, educators said two young people there also committed suicide. A 15-year-old boy in Wales fell victim to suicide because he felt “isolated from the world.” There was no indication that he suffered from depression or other mental health conditions beforehand. A man in England committed suicide after lockdowns worsened his bipolar disorder. In Knox County, Tennessee, there were eight suspected suicides within only 48 hours. The county reported only 83 suicides through all of 2019, so the suicide rate increased almost 18 times. A man in India hanged himself because he was wasn’t able to see his wife, who was stranded at her parents’ home.
British police chiefs revealed a nationwide spike in suicides after just two weeks of lockdown. A therapist in Phoenix told KTVK-TV that he feared lockdowns would lead to suicides. The station also reported that an elderly man shot his wife to death after not being able to leave their home.
As late as July 2022, doctors at a North Carolina hospital said suicide attempts by children and young adults had increased 15 times. CBS reported in February 2022 that researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital found that COVID lockdowns may have caused brain inflammations affecting mental health. Nobody else reported this story, and it was quickly swept under the rug.
Lockdowns had serious consequences, but many found the virus itself harder to take seriously because of government actions that seemed to spread it. For example, classist San Francisco Mayor London Breed—an awful mayor through and through—corralled homeless people into the convention center. A packed building would seem to be one of the likeliest places for this virus to spread. (To give you an idea of the level of growing public incompetence there, Breed had recently defended illegal searches of a freelance journalist that resulted in the city having to pay a six-figure settlement. Breed was later fined $23,000 for ethics violations in a different case.)
As lockdowns were expanding on American soil, it was impossible not to notice the media’s support for it. This is true of media nationwide and in cities that had two newspapers that were supposedly of opposite editorial stances—probably because both papers were often owned by the same company. In an unrelated matter, one “progressive” paper effectively urged canceling the Democratic presidential primary, so that shows you what the media is like. Mike DeWine actually did cancel this primary in Ohio, using COVID as a pretext. Some nobody also endorsed passing a federal law to allow the President to impose a nationwide lockdown and override state laws that prevented lockdowns. This piece also said Congress should suspend habeas corpus.
Another aspect of lockdown culture is interstate or sometimes even intrastate travel bans—an idea that raised the frightful specter of internal checkpoints to stop all travelers. I heard a story from family about such a checkpoint between Ohio and Indiana. Rhode Island sent the National Guard door to door to search for out-of-state visitors. California had checkpoints between counties. One county in Colorado banned anyone not residing in the county from entering—under penalty of 18 months in jail and a $5,000 fine. President Trump wasn’t innocent of floating such a plan. “Some people would like to see New York quarantined because it’s a hotspot—New York, New Jersey, one or two other places, certain parts of Connecticut, quarantined,” Trump said in March 2020. “I’m thinking about that right now. We might not have to do it, but there is a possibility that sometime today we’ll do a quarantine, short term, two weeks, on New York, probably New Jersey, certain parts of Connecticut.”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo threatened to sue the Trump administration if this occurred. “A lockdown is what they did in Wuhan, China,” the Democrat told CNN. “We’re not in China, and we’re not in Wuhan. I don’t believe it would be legal. I believe it would be illegal.”
Needless to say, Cuomo’s word wasn’t exactly golden. He also seemed to rule out lockdowns at a separate briefing that month: “That cannot happen. It cannot happen legally.” Yet only three days after that statement, he signed a stay-at-home order. This was nine months before Cuomo began facing a series of sexual harassment allegations, which led to an impeachment investigation by lawmakers and calls to resign even by fellow Democrats. The scandal later led to Cuomo resigning as a discredited disgrace.
Early in the pandemic, Cuomo had also sent COVID patients to nursing homes—infecting some of the most vulnerable. He covered up thousands of deaths that resulted, but he had a lot of help from the media in this cover-up. This practice also took place in Michigan, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Connecticut followed almost two years later. After Cuomo showed such disregard for lives, it was hard to take him seriously when he said lockdowns would save lives.