Against the advice of the W.H.O., a series of politicians have been imposing endless lockdowns on “their” populations.  Such pseudo-incarcerations are always deemed to be “based on data & science” but, in fact, they’re not.  Rather, they’re arbitrary, highly political, and are clearly destroying the livelihoods of large numbers of private sector workers.

How did this all get started?  The idea of lockdowns and social distancing came about from the 2004 science project of a 14 year old girl in Albuquerque named Laura Glass, daughter of Robert J. Glass, a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories.  Together, father & daughter and two others published Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza in 2006.  This was then championed in federal government circles in 2006-2007 by Dr. Carl Mecher, a Department of Veterans Affairs physician and by February 2007 this approach became official U.S. policy.

While the science behind this paper is arguably sound, it does not take into account the human cost of never-ending lockdowns.  The furthest they go is as follows:

Implementation of social distancing strategies is challenging. They likely must be imposed for the duration of the local epidemic and possibly until a strain-specific vaccine is developed and distributed. If compliance with the strategy is high over this period, an epidemic within a community can be averted. However, if neighboring communities do not also use these interventions, infected neighbors will continue to introduce influenza and prolong the local epidemic, albeit at a depressed level more easily accommodated by healthcare systems.

Even Dr. Mecher had some reservations about applying the lockdown and social distancing policy this year:

Dr. Mecher was a key voice on the “Red Dawn” email chain of public health experts in raising early warnings this year about the coronavirus outbreak and Mr. Trump’s reluctance to embrace shutdowns and social distancing. The shutdown this year is much bigger than Dr. Mecher and others imagined would be necessary or practical. Testing has been limited and some states issued social distancing orders even before confirming the coronavirus was spreading within their borders.

Dr. Markel called it “very gratifying to see our work used to help save lives.” But, he added, “it is also horrifying.”

“We always knew this would be applied in worst-case scenarios,” he said. “Even when you are working on dystopian concepts, you always hope it will never be used.”

It’s too bad that most politicians who have imposed lockdowns and social distancing have been oblivious to the grave human and societal costs of this disastrous policy.