Juno News - Medical professionals are speaking out against lockdowns

00:00:00.000 Throughout the course of this pandemic, over the past six months, different people at different

00:00:09.460 times have stopped and paused and looked at all the measures we're doing and thought,

00:00:13.620 well, hold on a second. We want to beat back the coronavirus. We want to flatten the curve. But

00:00:17.920 what about all the economic consequences? What about all the secondary health effects? What

00:00:22.900 about all the rising alcoholism rates, suicides, family strife that we're hearing about? Doesn't

00:00:28.220 that matter as well? And we haven't heard too much of that from official public health sources or

00:00:33.420 medical experts until more recently. Now, a whole lot more numbers of doctors, infectious disease

00:00:40.420 specialists, and so on all across the medical community are stepping forward to say, yes,

00:00:45.980 these things do matter, and we are worried about the greater harms that lockdowns are causing.

00:00:51.660 Maybe there needs to be a better way, a smarter way, a more data-driven way to approaching all of this.

00:00:58.280 More and more open letters are appearing in media, something called the Great Barrington

00:01:03.100 Declaration, 20 doctors here, four doctors here, these experts, that experts, coming up with statements

00:01:08.940 that they put in the media and different newspapers and so on. It seems that we are on the cusp of

00:01:14.140 something of a sea change here, where people all across the medical community are beginning to think

00:01:19.620 more about this and speak openly about it a whole lot more. Their concerns that public health officials are

00:01:25.920 just thinking way too singularly minded, focused on that one thing, flattening the curve, beating down

00:01:32.040 coronavirus rates, without discussion of what this means for broader society, for the development of

00:01:37.980 our children, for our broader holistic health as a community. This is a great thing to see, and it

00:01:43.980 should be encouraged. Not all of these experts are in total agreement. They're not all saying the same

00:01:48.300 thing. It's not a left-wing thing, a right-wing thing. Some of them support different ideas. Some like

00:01:53.500 herd immunity, others don't, but they're all in agreement of the idea that we've got to do things

00:01:59.080 differently. We've got to do it better. Those voices are really important. I think you're going to see

00:02:04.780 even more of them, and I think we need to do a lot to leave as much space for that as possible and

00:02:10.660 open the conversation, because one of the very points that some of these doctors have made is that

00:02:15.980 right now the conversation is too closed. There's not enough voices in it, and what we're really

00:02:20.980 dealing with right now is not a medical specialty issue, not even so much a public health issue,

00:02:26.060 but a whole-of-society conversation about how do we want to live our lives for the next six months,

00:02:32.500 18 months, two years, three years, I don't know, five years, until there's a workable vaccine that

00:02:37.520 everybody has, or, well, in the eventuality that no vaccine really does the job all that well, so we

00:02:43.000 just have to learn to live with coronavirus and manage our lives and our health care accordingly.

00:02:48.600 So really great to see these voices step forward, and like I said, a lot of them are of different

00:02:53.560 opinions when it comes to the specifics, but it's just still great to see the conversation finally,

00:02:58.900 I think, mature in this direction.

Juno News - October 08, 2020