Last Updated on October 11, 2020
In a flip-flop of monumental proportions, the World Health Organization’s special envoy on COVID-19 is urging world leaders not to use lockdowns as the chief weapon against the virus.
David Nabarro, the special envoy named by the embattled organization, told reporters that lockdowns should be used sparingly and for only specific situations, temporary in nature.
“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Nabarro said in an interview October 8, 2020. “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.”
Nabarro specifically pointed to the devastation lockdowns have caused the economies of the world, and to the severe societal damage they cause to communities and the those below the poverty line.
“This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe, actually,” he said. “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.”
We need to learn to live with this virus. I urge people to read and think about this declaration.https://t.co/t2z9Cw7qNX
— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) October 8, 2020
Nabarro joins a growing community of medical and public health scientists and medical practitioners who are advocating for the abandonment of generalized lockdowns and mass quarantines.
A significant group of dignitaries from the scientific and medical fields have signed a document titled the Great Barrington Declaration, which declares, “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”
The leaders in the effort include professors, biostatisticians, epidemiologists, immunologists, Â health economists, public health policy experts and other medical and scientific professionals from institutions such as Harvard University, Stanford University, and Oxford University, among others.
The declaration says, in part, “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.”
While many leaders around the world opted to follow Communist China’s lead in quarantining its population, President Trump delegated the decisions on lockdowns and quarantine measures to the governors of individual states.
States like California, Michigan, and New York still have severe lockdown orders in effect, ignoring the new guidelines by the WHO and the scientific community.
