Lockdowns likely caused “more harm than benefit” with “wide-ranging damage” that will be felt for years to come, a grim new study has found.
Pandemic lockdowns likely caused “more harm than benefit” with “substantial and wide-ranging collateral damage” that will be felt for years to come, including millions of non-Covid excess deaths, a rise in child abuse and domestic violence, and trillions of dollars in economic losses, according to new research.
Dr Kevin Bardosh, an applied medical anthropologist from the University of Washington, conducted a “comprehensive” review of more than 600 research publications to evaluate the “global state of knowledge” on the adverse social impacts caused by lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs).
“It looks like many original predictions of adverse effects are broadly supported by research data,” Australian National University infectious disease expert Professor
Peter Collignon wrote on Twitter in response to Dr Bardosh’s paper.
In a thread summarising
his findings, Dr Bardosh noted that Covid was the “most disruptive global crisis since WWII and the use of NPIs, including lockdown, the most consequential set of policies in modern public health history”.
“Early on, many voiced concern that NPIs would cause widespread social harm, especially for vulnerable [and] poorer people,” he said. “Now, a few years in future, we can evaluate concerns with wisdom of hindsight and based on a lot of research evidence.”
The
preprint paper, which was funded by UK charity Collateral Global, found that “the collateral damage of the pandemic response was substantial, wide-ranging and will leave behind a legacy of harm for hundreds of millions of people in the years ahead”.