Local View: Damage from COVID-19 restrictions ‘cannot be undone’ – Duluth News Tribune

Its main purpose was to allow researchers to share large amounts of complex scientific data with peers in related fields. This enabled the best and brightest researchers in the world to share, criticize, approve, and learn from cutting-edge scientific and medical studies.

Fast forward five decades and witness how Stanford’s Silicon Valley, social-media-giant neighbors have silenced the voices and data from some of the best and brightest medical minds in the world.

Stanford’s own John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, Scott Atlas, and Michael Levitt have been silenced, threatened, and ostracized by their peers. In fact, Stanford’s Ioannidis warned against unprecedented actions without evidence. “First, do no harm,” he stated, referring to Hippocrates’ “Of the Epidemics,” which warns against harmful interventions without known benefits.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s policies have done much harm during the past year of pandemic, in my view, with little demonstrable benefit.

In March 2020, Ioannidis warned the world about the use of lockdowns and social-distancing measures. “We don’t know how long (they) can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health,” he wrote for the website Stat. “Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric.”

Ioannidis has since published a comprehensive analysis in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology that, in its conclusion, states that the effectiveness of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions, or NPIs, during the COVID-19 pandemic “were grossly overstated.”

Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has also refused to stay silent. More than just a preeminent medical professor and economist, Bhattacharya is a father. He has called the closing of schools, distance learning, and mask-wearing by young children not only unfounded but damaging.

“We have robbed these children of their birthright,” Bhattacharya said at a state of Florida roundtable COVID-19 discussion. He pointed to the inequitable effects of school closures on the affluent and poor. “I can work from home. I can teach my children. Poor families do not have this luxury, not only in the USA but globally. This is damage that cannot be undone.”

From a published interview with Dr. Michael Levitt, 2013 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, I learned the word “innumerate.” It is math’s equivalent of illiterate. Levitt used the word to characterize the media’s lack of statistical context regarding the pandemic. The deaths from the pandemic have been terrible, but deaths from infectious diseases have always been part of the human condition that we work to manage without closing civilization.

Now that the epidemic seems under control, we must find where we failed, to avoid the mistakes we made in this epidemic for when the next one hits. To do this, we need true and comprehensive information on all aspects of this epidemic. How many deaths were “from” COVID-19 rather than just “with” COVID-19? Ditto hospitalizations and hospital-contracted infections and deaths. How many nursing home deaths were counted as hospital deaths? How many COVID-19-positive staff and patients were knowingly permitted to enter nursing homes? How many nursing homes were allowed to expand without permitting?

With nearly 60% of all COVID-19 deaths in Minnesota occurring in long-term-care or assisted-living facilities, this information is critical for the future handling of all diseases. It is a scandal that these facts are not more widely known in our state. Though the lockdown was supposed to protect our elderly, in effect, it left our elderly vulnerable and exposed.

The French writer Voltaire had it right: “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead, we owe only the truth.”

Dan Lowe is the owner of Club Saratoga in Duluth’s Canal Park. This column was edited by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University before being submitted to and edited by the News Tribune.