Category: Inspiration

Dr. Ari Joffe is a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at University of Alberta. He has written a paper titled COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink that finds the harms of lockdowns are 10 times greater than their benefits.

You were a strong proponent of lockdowns initially but have since changed your mind. Why is that?

There are a few reasons why I supported lockdowns at first.

First, initial data falsely suggested that the infection fatality rate was up to 2-3%, that over 80% of the population would be infected, and modelling suggested repeated lockdowns would be necessary. But emerging data showed that the median infection fatality rate is 0.23%, that the median infection fatality rate in people under 70 years old is 0.05%, and that the high-risk group is older people especially those with severe co-morbidities. In addition, it is likely that in most situations only 20-40% of the population would be infected before ongoing transmission is limited (i.e., herd-immunity).

Second, I am an infectious diseases and critical care physician, and am not trained to make public policy decisions. I was only considering the direct effects of COVID-19 and my knowledge of how to prevent these direct effects. I was not considering the immense effects of the response to COVID-19 (that is, lockdowns) on public health and wellbeing.

Emerging data has shown a staggering amount of so-called ‘collateral damage’ due to the lockdowns. This can be predicted to adversely affect many millions of people globally with food insecurity [82-132 million more people], severe poverty [70 million more people], maternal and under age-5 mortality from interrupted healthcare [1.7 million more people], infectious diseases deaths from interrupted services [millions of people with Tuberculosis, Malaria, and HIV], school closures for children [affecting children’s future earning potential and lifespan], interrupted vaccination campaigns for millions of children, and intimate partner violence for millions of women. In high-income countries adverse effects also occur from delayed and interrupted healthcare, unemployment, loneliness, deteriorating mental health, increased opioid crisis deaths, and more.

Third, a formal cost-benefit analysis of different responses to the pandemic was not done by government or public health experts. Initially, I simply assumed that lockdowns to suppress the pandemic were the best approach. But policy decisions on public health should require a cost-benefit analysis. Since lockdowns are a public health intervention, aiming to improve the population wellbeing, we must consider both benefits of lockdowns, and costs of lockdowns on the population wellbeing. Once I became more informed, I realized that lockdowns cause far more harm than they prevent.

There has never been a full cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns done in Canada. What did you find when you did yours?

First, some background into the cost-benefit analysis. I discovered information I was not aware of before. First, framing decisions as between saving lives versus saving the economy is a false dichotomy. There is a strong long-run relationship between economic recession and public health. This makes sense, as government spending on things like healthcare, education, roads, sanitation, housing, nutrition, vaccines, safety, social security nets, clean energy, and other services determines the population well-being and life-expectancy. If the government is forced to spend less on these social determinants of health, there will be ‘statistical lives’ lost, that is, people will die in the years to come. Second, I had underestimated the effects of loneliness and unemployment on public health. It turns out that loneliness and unemployment are known to be among the strongest risk factors for early mortality, reduced lifespan, and chronic diseases. Third, in making policy decisions there are trade-offs to consider, costs and benefits, and we have to choose between options that each have tragic outcomes in order to advocate for the least people to die as possible.

In the cost-benefit analysis I consider the benefits of lockdowns in preventing deaths from COVID-19, and the costs of lockdowns in terms of the effects of the recession, loneliness, and unemployment on population wellbeing and mortality. I did not consider all of the other so-called ‘collateral damage’ of lockdowns mentioned above. It turned out that the costs of lockdowns are at least 10 times higher than the benefits. That is, lockdowns cause far more harm to population wellbeing than COVID-19 can. It is important to note that I support a focused protection approach, where we aim to protect those truly at high-risk of COVID-19 mortality, including older people, especially those with severe co-morbidities and those in nursing homes and hospitals.

You studied the role modelling played in shaping public opinion. Can you break that down for us?

I think that the initial modelling and forecasting were inaccurate. This led to a contagion of fear and policies across the world. Popular media focused on absolute numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths independent of context. There has been a sheer one-sided focus on preventing infection numbers. The economist Paul Frijters wrote that it was “all about seeming to reduce risks of infection and deaths from this one particular disease, to the exclusion of all other health risks or other life concerns.” Fear and anxiety spread, and we elevated COVID-19 above everything else that could possibly matter. Our cognitive biases prevented us from making optimal policy: we ignored hidden ‘statistical deaths’ reported at the population level, we preferred immediate benefits to even larger benefits in the future, we disregarded evidence that disproved our favorite theory, and escalated our commitment in the set course of action.

I found out that in Canada in 2018 there were over 23,000 deaths per month and over 775 deaths per day. In the world in 2019 there were over 58 million deaths and about 160,000 deaths per day. This means that on November 21 this year, COVID-19 accounted for 5.23% of deaths in Canada (2.42% in Alberta), and 3.06% of global deaths. Each day in non-pandemic years over 21,000 people die from tobacco use, 3,600 from pneumonia and diarrhea in children under 5-years-old, and 4,110 from Tuberculosis. We need to consider the tragic COVID-19 numbers in context.

https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/canadian-experts-research-finds-lockdown-harms-are-10-times-greater-than-benefits

On an health issue group page a person asked how you sift the wheat from the chaff as far as recommendations and advice were concerned. I sent him a reply then I thought you might get something from it.

Welcome to planet Earth where opinions are like backsides – everbody’s got one!

And in actual fact, for good reason. Every spirit/mind/body combination is unique! There are so many different ways a body under mental or emotional stress can malfunction you could rival the Encyclopedia Britannica trying to list them all. We all have emotional or spiritual baggage that is having an effect on our body. I think it was Dr Rashid Buttar who said every single patient who comes to see him with cancer is suffering from a major emotional trauma in their life and, one for one, they do not heal the cancer until the trauma has been addressed and handled!

And leaving the spirit and mind out of it for the moment, or maybe not, Keith Scott-Mumby says in his book Diet Wise that there are probably 7 billion correct diets on this planet – one for each of us!

What I have learned in trying to sift the chaff from the wheat is that most people cannot tell the difference between an opinion and fact so you have to be prepared to gather a lot of data and apply different techniques as you do. Sorry to break the bad news to you but to do the best job you really need to become your own health researcher. Most people will turn off at this point as it is a tough job. That is one reason the average lifespan is half what it could be. The majority of us are not prepared to learn and not prepared to discipline ourselves to do what we have learned.

Having said that, let’s see if I can share some more immediately usable information with which you can approach your task.

The first is the data alignment test. Does it align with or is it supported by data you know to be true. If it does, great. If not, it is either flat out wrong, wrong for you or you need more data to reconcile the differences.

The next is the sniff test – does it smell right. Some people call it your gut feeling, some call it instinct or intuition, some call it spiritual knowingness. Whatever the label, if the datum does not gel with your experience, note it as a non-aligned and not to be used datum for the present. Not to forget it completely and rule it out as something may come along to grant it credence.

Another is the credibility test. Not credentials, as all too often credentialled people are following an agenda because it profits them or they do not have the integrity to say what is true for them. Has this person been right a lot more than wrong and are they getting products in this area? A classic here is a person who has “cured” themself of an illness. (Of course you have to determine if the person is telling the truth.) It is presently illegal to cure many illnesses, it is only legal to cut and poison and hasten death in so doing. Actually the Chinese have a very good saying regarding this, “Never let the man saying it can’t be done get in the way of the man doing it.”

Then there is the old “suck it and see” acid test, “Did it work for me?” If it works for you it is completely irrelevant how many other people it did not work for, it worked for you. Full stop, end of story. Well, not completely. You may have eaten something you should not have eaten and gotten away with it, as many do for decades with sugar before it kills them, because the body is a remarkably complex and well engineered piece of work it will attempt to do the best with whatever you give it, for as long as it can.

On the flip side, just because it works for most people is no iron-clad guarantee it will work for you and be prepared to acknowledge that if it doesn’t! Of course you then have to keep looking for a solution.

Your progress in this education process will be similar to a bell curve. It will start off slow as you look up the definitions for words you do not understand, pick up speed as you learn the lingo and have more and more data with which to align new data, peak then you will learn less and less per given hour of research as you have a lot of the subject matter under the belt. But what I have found is that as much as I know, I do not know it all, I am learning all the time. And I rarely find someone from whom I learn nothing.

One reason we do not know it all is because there is so much to know. Another is that it is not completely charted territory.

For instance there is a top level classification of nutrients into fats, protein and carbohydrates. The next level of detail is vitamins and minerals. Under that you have some things called phytonutrients or phytochemicals. I understand there are 40,000 of them, of which we know and have named only about 10,000!

Hope this helped!