“This pisses me off. The pandemic didn’t do that. The way we handled the pandemic did that!”

https://t.co/HvJk7BElLP

— Young Americans for Liberty (@YALiberty) October 18, 2022

On Friday, HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher noted that it wasn’t the COVID-19 pandemic that caused massive learning loss, it was the way government handled it.

Quoting a report, Maher said, “The pandemic erased two decades of progress in math and reading.’”

“See, right away, I’ve gotta say, this pisses me off,” he said. “I see these headlines all the time.”

“The pandemic didn’t do that. The way we handled the pandemic did that,” Maher insisted.

“The pandemic certainly was a thing but let’s not just say the pandemic,” he added. “Because it was not written in stone that we had to handle it the way we did.”

Maher continued to explain the damage done during the pandemic.

The host checked many boxes, “ACT scores are the lowest in 30 years, anxiety and depression way up. The body mass index increased, doubled for kids 2-19. Drug overdose deaths, murders way up, inflation at a 40-year high, domestic violence increased. Oh, and my favorite, car crashes. They couldn’t figure this out… finally… the experts said, you know what it is? People just went (expletive) mental. They went just nuts. They’re like, I’m home, the (expletive) kids are here all the time, my stupid husband is here all the time, I’m just going to take it out on the highway, and they did.”

Maher also noted that “Florida did well” during the pandemic by focusing on seniors and those most vulnerable as opposed to other states.

(h/t Breitbart and CNS News)

The post Bill Maher: The pandemic didn’t do the societal damage. The way we handled the pandemic did  appeared first on Liberty Tree.

NYT: US government made it ‘shockingly easy’ to commit pandemic fraud

“The COVID stimulus spending was one of the greatest scams in history & we’ll be paying for it for decades to come. Libertarians like ⁦@RepThomasMassie⁩ were the canaries in the coal mine who warned about this from the beginning.” ⁦@HannahDCox⁩ https://t.co/98cg85tcsv

— Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) October 6, 2022

BASEDPolitics‘ Hannah Cox writes, “In an episode of their podcast ‘The Daily’ this week, The New York Times said that, ‘when it comes to pandemic aid, the United States government made it shockingly easy to commit fraud.”

“The admittance comes on the tail of a grand jury recently indicting dozens of people in Minnesota for stealing almost a quarter of a billion dollars (yes, billion) from COVID relief programs,” Cox wrote. “But this incident is really only the tip of the iceberg it seems.”

She continued, “On the podcast, Times reporter David Fahrenthold said, ‘When you write about the fraud that happened against pandemic programs starting in 2020, it’s hard to think of any other episode in at least recent American history where so many people stole so much from the US government or so many people — just make it more broad, so many people broke federal law all at the same time.”

Cox observed, “Ultimately over 5 trillion was spent on COVID relief programs, and the dollars went in a lot of directions. But the Times says three programs were the most vulnerable to fraud: the federal unemployment benefits program, the Paycheck Protection Program, and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program.”

“The truth is we still have no idea just how much fraud occurred under these programs,” she noted. “Many of them used an honor system at the time that merely required people to declare under perjury they had been harmed by COVID and the lockdowns.”

Read the entire column.

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FEE’s Jon Miltimore writes, “In April, police officers located Lisa Hanson in Clear Lake, Iowa about 40 miles south of the restaurant she owns.

Officers placed her under arrest and transported her for booking. Hanson, who had not appeared for a March 10 court date, was released a few hours later. She admitted to one local news station that the experience was ‘unpleasant and scary.’

Wine Bar Owner Who Defied Lockdowns Receives 90-Day Jail Sentence—But Her Legal Battle May Just Be Beginning@miltimore79 @feeonline https://t.co/q2Xyhd6Tt7

— Brad Polumbo ?? ?‍? (@brad_polumbo) December 14, 2021

Hanson’s crime? She kept her restaurant—The Interchange Wine & Coffee Bistro—open in December against the order of Governor Tim Walz, who in mid November had issued a new lockdown on bars and restaurants, gyms, sports, and social gatherings. Walz’s order did not prohibit liquor stores, barber shops, salons, and retail businesses from operating.

Hanson publicly said she believed the order was unfair and a violation of her constitutional rights.

We knew right away that it was wrong what the government was doing to us,’ Hanson said following her arrest.”

Read the entire column.

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FEE’s Brad Polumbo writes, “Governments around the world took drastic measures in 2020 in hopes of slowing the spread of COVID-19, in many cases locking down economies and confining people to their homes for months on end. The extent to which these measures actually helped contain the COVID-19 pandemic is highly dubious. But the death toll from the unintended consequences of lockdowns continues to mount.

People around the world will be paying for lockdowns with their lives for years to come.https://t.co/JHlrwuDH55

— Jon Miltimore (@miltimore79) December 6, 2021

The World Health Organization (WHO) just reported that pandemic measures delayed and disrupted medical care for the global malaria crisis, leading to tens of thousands of additional deaths. An astounding 14 million additional malaria cases were recorded in 2020 compared to 2019, the WHO says. So, too, we saw 69,000 more malaria deaths in 2020 compared to 2019, 47,000 of which the organization says are directly attributable to disrupted diagnosis and treatment stemming from government pandemic restrictions.

That’s right: In their ultimately ineffective efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world inadvertently fueled the threat of another infectious disease.”

Read the entire column.

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FEE’s Brad Polumbo writes, “The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic will go down in American history as one of loss, economic suffering, and social strife. Not only did hundreds of thousands of citizens die of COVID-19, but the sweeping mandates and restrictions governments implemented in the name of slowing the spread had lethal consequences in their own right—the full scope of which won’t be known for decades. Yet new data confirm that fatal drug overdoses hit new highs between March 2020 and 2021, further illuminating the fallout of life under lockdown.

The sad yet inescapable conclusion is that in their efforts to halt one public health crisis, the authorities fueled another. https://t.co/eoGHFgZHyT

— FEE (@feeonline) October 14, 2021

An astounding 96,000 Americans died from drug overdoses over that one-year period, the latest figures released by the Centers for Disease Control reveal. That’s a 29.6 percent increase from the previous year…

The sad yet inescapable conclusion is that in their efforts to halt one public health crisis, the authorities fueled another. And drug overdoses are, unfortunately, not an outlier or exception. We can observe similar trends in domestic violence, mental health issues, and many other areas where the consequences of unprecedented interventions proved life-threatening in their own right.”

Read the entire column.

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Authoritarians are finally admitting that lockdowns do not diminish Covid outbreaks- they only produce increased joblessness, alcohol and drug abuse, depression and suicide, especially among kids deprived of school and structure. https://t.co/k3PIerhsHm

— Kelley Paul (@KelleyAshbyPaul) October 4, 2021

The New York Times reports, “For a year and a half, New Zealand has pursued a strategy of ‘Covid zero,’ closing its borders and quickly enforcing lockdowns to keep the coronavirus in check, a policy it maintained even as other Asia-Pacific countries transitioned to coexisting with the viral threat.

On Monday, New Zealand gave up the ghost.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern acknowledged an end to the elimination strategy seven weeks into a lockdown that has failed to halt an outbreak of the Delta variant, announcing that restrictions would be gradually lifted in Auckland, the country’s largest city.”

Read the entire story.

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FEE’s Jon Miltimore writes, In Australia, “residents are entering the ninth week of a lockdown that had initially been scheduled for two weeks. In many of the hardest-hit parts of the city, NBC reports, military personnel roam the streets and authorities issue fines of up to $3,700 to individuals breaking lockdown orders…

The policy has resulted in violent clashes between police and lockdown protesters, but public health officials have defended the policy, which is expected to last at least through September.

The decision by New Zealand and Australia to lockdown—and stay in lockdown as the virus spreads—fits a familiar pattern.

In 2020, numerous governments around the world went into lockdown to attempt to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. In the United States, public health officials created a ’15 days to slow the spread’ campaign—which quickly devolved, in many places, into indefinite closures of all economic sectors deemed ‘non-essential.’

The results of lockdowns were catastrophic—millions of job losses, millions of businesses destroyed, surging drug overdoses, increased youth suicide and depression, and a massive decrease in cancer screenings, among them. Globally, as many as 150 million people are expected to slip into extreme poverty, according to the World Bank.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford University Medical School, recently called lockdowns the ‘biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made.’

‘The harm to people is catastrophic,’ said Bhattacharya.

The harms would be bad enough, but an abundance of evidence also suggests the lockdowns were ineffective at containing the virus.”

Read the entire column.

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Steve Deace on Rand Paul’s call to ‘resist’ lockdowns: ‘This is one of the most presidential calls to action I’ve seen’

The Blaze’s Steve Deace said on Monday that Rand Paul’s recent video, in which he urged Americans to reject any anti-science mandates or lockdowns from the Biden administration, was one of the strongest ‘calls to action’ he has ever witnessed.

This is one of the most presidential calls to action/challenges I’ve seen in my career. Maybe my lifetime, given the stakes of the past year and a half. A modern day Rendezvous with Destiny. https://t.co/K610n9PSu1

— Steve Deace (@SteveDeaceShow) August 9, 2021

“It’s time for us to resist,” Paul said in the video.

“They can’t arrest all of us,” he continued. “They can’t keep all of your kids home from school. They can’t keep every government building closed – although I’ve got a long list of ones they might keep closed or might ought to keep closed.”

“We don’t have to accept the mandates, lockdowns, and harmful policies of the petty tyrants and bureaucrats,” Paul added.

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