WHO envoy: Stop using the lockdown as your primary control method

Let us see if certain governments will follow this change in the Party Line from the WHO and how the mass media will spin this (or whether they even report it) . So far I have seen a couple of reports from conservative (but no liberal) outlets.

Meanwhile, I cannot get to the article from Epoch Times cited in the article below.

WHO Flip-Flops: Urges World Leaders To Stop Using Lockdowns To Fight COVID Contagion

Zero Hedge,

11 October, 2020

In a stunning rebuke of the "science" and the "doctors" and leftist politicians and career bureaucrats in the US and across much of The West, The Epoch Times' Evan Pentchoukov reports that The World Health Organization’s special envoy on COVID-19 has urged world leaders to stop using lockdowns as the primary control method against the spread of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” David Nabarro told The Spectator in an interview aired on Oct. 8.

“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”

[ZH: How long before this video is removed by Twitter?]

Nabarro pointed to the collateral damage that lockdowns are having worldwide, especially among poorer populations.

“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry, for example in the Caribbean or in the Pacific, because people aren’t taking their holidays. Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world because their markets have got dented. Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. Seems that we may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents, in poor families, are not able to afford it,” Nabarro said.

“This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe actually,” he added. “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, but remember - lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer."

Nabarro isn’t the only scientist opposing lockdowns.

A number of medical or public health scientists and medical practitioners have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which states that “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”

The signatories include: “Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University and a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.”

“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk,” the declaration states.

With few exceptions, world leaders followed in the footsteps of the Chinese communist regime when responding to the outbreak of the virus, imposing unprecedented lockdowns. Sweden, which did not impose a lockdown, did not experience an adverse outcome compared to some locales and nations that did.

In the United States, President Donald Trump delegated the decisions on lockdown measures to the governors of individual states, but has pushed for the economy to be reopened, and lockdowns lifted.

As William Anderson recently wrote for The Mises Institute, lockdowns only serve the progressive political class...

We have to understand that the political classes and their media have a vested interest in the lockdown status quo, and that includes regular provision of what only can be called disinformation. The mainstream media this past summer dutifully reported a highly questionable (I use that term charitably) report that the Sturgis Bike Rally in South Dakota led to more than a quarter million covid infections and more than $12 billion of medical costs. It should have been obvious on its face that the report was deeply flawed, yet in their desire to fuel the covid-is-killing-us narrative, journalists took this too-good-to-be-true story and ran with it.

As for politicians, the covid crisis has been a godsend for those governmental executives and bureaucrats who see constitutional restrictions that limit their authority as mere obstacles to be easily swept away. Governors such as Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Andrew Cuomo of New York, Gavin Newsom of California, and Tom Wolfe of Pennsylvania have received adoring coverage in the media for seizing and employing dictatorial powers, Whitmer even unilaterally deciding that the sale of garden seeds in stores was illegal. Cuomo’s decision to force the housing of covid-19 patients in nursing homes led to the deaths of thousands of people, yet his national media coverage is uniformly positive.

Contrast the affirmative news coverage of Cuomo with the barrage of media attacks on Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Noem has emphasized personal responsibility and did not attempt mass closures of schools and businesses in the state, and the mainstream media erupted with fury. That South Dakota has come through this pandemic relatively well does not matter with the media, as the only acceptable action (to mainstream and elite journalists) in response to covid is for governors to single-handedly seize power and lock down their citizens.

Keep in mind that the real losses that Americans suffered because of the heavy-handed governmental response to the covid outbreak are permanent. As Robert Higgs so eloquently pointed out in Crisis and Leviathan, governments often create crises or, at the very least, they manipulate events such as natural disasters and use them as opportunities to expand governmental powers. Even after the crises end, governments keep some of their newly self-granted powers—and most people raise little or no concern even when government has curtailed more of their freedoms.

Presumably, this means Joe Biden will now be pushing for lockdowns to be lifted across all blue states?... because he is "listening to the scientists"?

We wonder how long it will be before WHO also urges the end of mask-wearing?

In the end, as Anderson concluded, the only way that the political classes can “make us safe” is for us to do what is necessary to make ourselves safe, or as relatively safe as possible. When a virus is afoot—as is the case most of the time—we do what we can to avoid it and do what we can to treat it. In other words, we appeal to real medical science, not what the political and media classes have cooked up for us.

Epoch Times seems to be unavailable at this time but I did find this.

David Nabarro (born 26 August 1949) is a medical doctor who has made his career in the international civil service, working for either the Secretary-General of the United Nations or the Director-General of the World Health Organization. Most recently from February 2020 he has helped the DGWHO deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

WHO envoy: Stop using the lockdown as your primary control method

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/10/11/whos_covid_envoy_to_world_leaders_stop_using_the_lockdown_as_your_primary_control_method.html#!

COVID Shocker: WHO Does Policy U-Turn, Condemns Use of Lockdowns

https://21stcenturywire.com/2020/10/11/covid-shocker-who-does-policy-u-turn-condemns-lockdowns/

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.”

However, increased economic and social devastation from WHO policy recommendations has 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.