(SNews) – Restricting public freedoms and forcing unpopular mandates onto populations around the world during the Covid pandemic were a failure and were based on “weak evidence,” an official government report has revealed.
The UK’s Health Security Agency (HSA) recently published a report detailing the results of a lengthy examination into the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in preventing or slowing Covid infections in the country.
The UK, like many other Western nations, imposed lockdowns, travel restrictions, mask mandates, and social distancing during the pandemic.
The goal of the UK’s HSA was to use primary studies on NPIs within the community to see how successful or unsuccessful they were at reducing the spread of the virus.
“The purpose of this rapid mapping review was to identify and categorize primary studies that reported on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) implemented in community settings to reduce the transmission of coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK,” the report notes.
“Streamlined systematic methods were used, including literature searches (using sources such as Medline, Embase, and medRxiv) and use of systematic reviews as sources to identify relevant primary studies.”
They found that the justifications for Covid interventions were based on exceptionally weak evidence.
In fact, roughly 67 percent of the identified evidence was based on modeling and was determined to be essentially useless.
“Two-thirds of the evidence identified was based on modeling studies (100 out of 151 studies),” the report explains.
“There was a lack of experimental studies (2 out of 151 studies) and individual-level observational studies (22 out of 151 studies).
“Apart from test and release strategies for which 2 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were identified, the body of evidence available on the effectiveness of NPIs in the UK provides weak evidence in terms of study design, as it is mainly based on modeling studies, ecological studies, mixed-methods studies, and qualitative studies.
“This is a key learning point for future pandemic preparedness: there is a need to strengthen the evaluation of interventions and build this into the design and implementation of public health interventions and government policies from the start of any future pandemic or other public health emergency.”
Modeling, as we know, is functionally useless.
It is incredibly prone to bias, incorrect assumptions, and the ideological needs of its creators.
Typically, modeling is considered too weak to rely on for major decision-making purposes without other definitive supporting evidence.
Nevertheless, that’s exactly what the United States, the UK, and many other countries did.
Government health agencies, world leaders, and top “experts” embraced modeling as fact at the beginning of the pandemic.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Anthony Fauci, and others, repeatedly referenced unreliable, poor-quality “evidence” throughout the panemic because it confirmed their biases.
This government report concurs, simply stating:
“There is a lack of strong evidence on the effectiveness of NPIs to reduce COVID-19 transmission, and for many NPIs, the scientific consensus shifted over the course of the pandemic.”
As we know, the scientific consensus shifted over the course of the pandemic because it became politically expedient for it to shift.
As the HSA report highlights, there was little solid, high-quality data showing that NPIs were having a significant impact on the spread of the virus.
Yet, this reality has been predicted by decades of pandemic planning.
However, the consensus shifted toward NPIs and away from something approaching Sweden’s strategy or the Great Barrington Declaration, simply because Fauci, the CDC, and other “experts” demanded it shift to suit their ideological aims.
The few high-quality studies on NPIs such as masking were conducted during the pandemic.
These studies showed that there was no benefit from mask-wearing at an individual or population level.
Instead of admitting to the public that they were relying on weak evidence, the “experts” insisted that their interventions were based on following “The Science.”
At every turn, when criticized or questioned, they would default back to an appeal to authority by arguing that the consensus in the scientific community unequivocally believed that the evidence showed that lockdowns, mandates, travel restrictions, and other NPIs were based on the best available information.
In the early days of the pandemic, most Western nations abandoned decades of planning out of fear, while claiming publicly to be “following the science.”
Sweden, meanwhile, was the exception.
The Swedish government incorporated a more hands-off approach that relied on protecting the elderly while allowing immunity to build up amongst the younger, healthy populations.
The people of Sweden were not locked in their homes, blocked from traveling or forced to wear masks or take vaccines.
Businesses and schools remained open and Swedes were urged to make their own decisions about their personal health and protections.
According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), “the available data on excess all-cause mortality rates indicate that Sweden experienced fewer deaths per population unit during the pandemic (2020–2022) than most high-income countries and was comparable to neighboring Nordic countries through the pandemic.”
Instead of following Sweden’s example, Western leaders abandoned the evidence in favor of politics.
And now, a systemic, detailed review of the evidence base relied on by those same experts has now concluded that there never was any high-quality information suggesting that pandemic policies were justifiable.
The mandates were forced onto the taxpaying public based on wishful thinking from unelected bureaucratic “health experts.”
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