COVID-19 restrictions only creates poverty—WHO

By Alexander Nyarko Yeboah – GITFIConline.com

Tema Oct 12, Gitficonline—The World Health Organization(WHO) has asked world leaders to reconsider “using lock downs as a primary control method” for fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Lock downs just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer,” Dr. David Nabarro says.

He said this yesterday in an appeal to world leaders in a statement to The Spectator, which was intercepted by Gitficonline.com.

Dr. Nabarro was doubtful of the essence of the lock downs by observing that after making the living condition of the people worse, there was no mention of the potential lives the restrictions had saved.

“We in the World Health Organization…believe the only time a lock down is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, re balance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it,” Dr. Nabarro explained.

Dr. Nabarro’s main criticism of lock downs involved the global impact, explaining how poorer economies had been indirectly affected.“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry in the Caribbean, for example, or in the Pacific because people aren’t taking their holidays,” he said.

He added that, “Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world… Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.”

Dr. Nabarro said, instead of strict lock downs as it happened in places like China, Spain, Melbourne, etc., there was the need for a new approach to containing the virus.

“And so, we really do appeal to all world leaders: stop using lock down as your primary control method. Develop better systems for doing it. Work together and learn from each other,” he said.

Dr. Nabarro’s message supported an earlier claim by some health experts from all over the world who in a petition called for an end to coronavirus lock downs.

The petition, which became known as the Great Barrington Declaration, insisted that the lock downs were doing “irreparable damage.”

“As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection,” the petition explained.

“Current lock down policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” it added.

The petition, which had had 12,000 signatures so far, was authored by Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University.