Lockdowns Are Killing Us

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, we are now nearly 1 year into the most self-destructive social experiment in the recorded history of human civilization.

On this day 1 year ago, we enjoyed the greatest economic expansion in our lifetimes. The poverty rate was at its lowest in 60 years. The unemployment rate was the lowest in 50 years. Wage growth was the strongest in 40 years. The wage gap was narrowing, with blue-collar wages rising the fastest. Unemployment rates for minority groups and women were at the lowest ever recorded.

Then, over the course of just a few catastrophic weeks, our government took a wrecking ball to it all. In the second quarter, GDP plunged by one-third, the worst decline in productivity ever recorded. Unemployment skyrocketed to its highest levels since the Great Depression. Tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs. Trillions of dollars of the Nation's wealth were squandered.

In the months since, our children have been robbed of a year of their education. Millions of Americans have been forbidden from earning a living by their own government. Shopkeepers have seen their life's work destroyed, and when in desperation they try to hold on, they are led away in handcuffs.

Our most cherished rights to worship freely; to peaceably assemble; and not to be deprived of our lives, liberty, or property without due process of law have all been destroyed.

Now, COVID did not cause this damage. Public officials did. They promised us it was for our own good and that it would save lives. But mounting evidence in multiple scientific studies is putting the lie to these sophistries. It is becoming increasingly, tragically, and bitterly clear that the lockdowns have not only failed to save lives, but they are costing lives.

Last month, the University of Denmark released the results of a study comparing Danish municipalities that locked down with those that did not. Their conclusion: The lockdowns had ``statistically insignificant effects.''

Their conclusion mirrored a similar study out of Stanford University that compared eight lockdown nations and two non-lockdown nations. They concluded: ``We fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures.''

Now, these are studies based not on assumptions and models but on actual, real-life, hardcore data. That is what the science is telling us, and it is telling us the same thing for multiple studies: The lockdowns have not saved lives, certainly not to any statistically significant level.

But it gets worse, much worse. We are now seeing mounting evidence that the lockdowns are costing lives on a staggering scale. Last month, the National Bureau of Economic Research warned that increases in poverty caused by the lockdowns will cost more than 800,000 American lives over the next 15 years due to higher poverty levels, with the deaths disproportionately affecting African Americans and women. That comports with a U.N. warning that tens of millions of people worldwide are being pushed to the brink of starvation.

Suicide rates have jumped dramatically over the past year. Dementia deaths between March and September jumped 13,000 as patients were left with little means of social interaction. San Francisco reported that additional deaths from drug overdoses exceeded the total COVID deaths in 2020.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the CDC reported 475,000 excess deaths in the United States at a time when it was reporting 281,000 COVID-related fatalities. Now, that difference is 192,000 additional deaths unexplained by normal mortality and COVID combined.

Could it be this is the butcher's bill from a folly that has produced skyrocketing suicides, drug and alcohol deaths, domestic homicides, isolation-related deaths, delayed health screenings, delayed health treatments, and poverty-related deaths?

Unlike COVID, which is a curse brought us by nature, lockdown deaths are the fault of specific individuals in positions of public trust who imposed draconian restrictions out of panic, fear, ignorance, or egotism. They preened and virtue-signaled and boasted how much they cared for the lives of others while they have pursued a folly that is needlessly taking an appalling toll of lives and livelihoods.

Some of those responsible hold power by virtue of appointments by elected officials while others are elected officials themselves, and I fear this nightmare will not end until the officials who are responsible for it are removed from the offices they hold.

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