Juno News - October 08, 2020Medical professionals are speaking out against lockdowns
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Summary
In this episode, I talk about the growing number of doctors and infectious disease specialists across the medical community who are starting to say, yes, these things do matter, and we are worried about the greater harms that coronavirus lockdowns are causing.
Transcript
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Throughout the course of this pandemic, over the past six months, different people at different
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times have stopped and paused and looked at all the measures we're doing and thought,
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well, hold on a second. We want to beat back the coronavirus. We want to flatten the curve. But
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what about all the economic consequences? What about all the secondary health effects? What
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about all the rising alcoholism rates, suicides, family strife that we're hearing about? Doesn't
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that matter as well? And we haven't heard too much of that from official public health sources or
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medical experts until more recently. Now, a whole lot more numbers of doctors, infectious disease
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specialists, and so on all across the medical community are stepping forward to say, yes,
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these things do matter, and we are worried about the greater harms that lockdowns are causing.
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Maybe there needs to be a better way, a smarter way, a more data-driven way to approaching all of this.
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More and more open letters are appearing in media, something called the Great Barrington
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Declaration, 20 doctors here, four doctors here, these experts, that experts, coming up with statements
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that they put in the media and different newspapers and so on. It seems that we are on the cusp of
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something of a sea change here, where people all across the medical community are beginning to think
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more about this and speak openly about it a whole lot more. Their concerns that public health officials are
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just thinking way too singularly minded, focused on that one thing, flattening the curve, beating down
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coronavirus rates, without discussion of what this means for broader society, for the development of
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our children, for our broader holistic health as a community. This is a great thing to see, and it
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should be encouraged. Not all of these experts are in total agreement. They're not all saying the same
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thing. It's not a left-wing thing, a right-wing thing. Some of them support different ideas. Some like
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herd immunity, others don't, but they're all in agreement of the idea that we've got to do things
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differently. We've got to do it better. Those voices are really important. I think you're going to see
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even more of them, and I think we need to do a lot to leave as much space for that as possible and
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open the conversation, because one of the very points that some of these doctors have made is that
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right now the conversation is too closed. There's not enough voices in it, and what we're really
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dealing with right now is not a medical specialty issue, not even so much a public health issue,
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but a whole-of-society conversation about how do we want to live our lives for the next six months,
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18 months, two years, three years, I don't know, five years, until there's a workable vaccine that
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everybody has, or, well, in the eventuality that no vaccine really does the job all that well, so we
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just have to learn to live with coronavirus and manage our lives and our health care accordingly.
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So really great to see these voices step forward, and like I said, a lot of them are of different
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opinions when it comes to the specifics, but it's just still great to see the conversation finally,