A MASSIVE body of research into the damage of covid lockdowns show they harmed millions of people and created long-lasting negative impacts. The research contradicts the nonsensical policies promoted by the public health ‘expert’ class and their media partners, and enacted by incompetent, cowardly politicians.
Mask mandates had been thoroughly discouraged by decades of pre-covid pandemic planning. There was no body of research supporting the closing of certain businesses at different hours of the day, as many jurisdictions demanded.
No studies were conducted on the reduction of infection rates resulting from placing directional arrows on the floors of grocery stores to direct people through aisles in predetermined patterns.
There were no randomised controlled trials on closing skate parks and beaches, arresting people surfing alone in the ocean, restricting capacity to random percentages based on inaccurate assumptions of community spread.
We had no idea whether closing schools would be effective or ‘save lives’, but we did it anyway. We didn’t know if vaccine passports would have a meaningful impact on community spread, yet we were encouraged to push that too.
All these ‘interventions’ started with little to no evidence. That’s bad enough. What makes it much worse is that we implemented them all with zero consideration of the adverse effects.
Lockdowns were an unprecedented incursion on freedom and liberty. What would that do to society, the economy, mental health and so on? It appeared that no one involved gave those considerations a second thought, and now we’re paying the price.
A systematic review of 132 studies of covid policies was published in Health Affairs Scholar by writers from the Department of Health Policy, Richard M Fairbanks School of Public Health in Indianapolis, synthesising the research into ancillary outcomes from lockdowns, school closures, and other mandates. The goal of this review was to find the ‘unintended health effects’ resulting from those policies.
They write that while policymakers and public health authorities have produced years of reports and lectures on the importance of mandates and lockdowns in reducing viral transmission, there’s a large ‘gap in the literature’ regarding what other impacts may have resulted from ‘shelter-in-place/stay-at-home orders, workplace closures, and school closures’.
All 132 studies included in the analysis were peer-reviewed. Those studies resulted in finding more than 450 unique outcomes and the overwhelming majority of those outcomes were negative.
What makes their results even more infuriating is that there was, as the writers explain, ‘very low quality’ evidence that lockdowns would be effective, as well as a ‘lack of information on potential unintended downstream consequences’. Yet decision-makers ploughed forward anyway, despite the ‘serious ethical, economic, health equity, and human rights concerns’ resulting from such policies.
Not to mention that the researchers found that lockdowns had ‘little to no effect on Covid-19 mortality’, the most important stated goal of lockdowns. Stay home, save lives, the mantra went. Turns out, like so many other government messages, that this was completely and utterly incorrect.
So we’ve established that there was no reduction in covid mortality from lockdowns, very low quality evidence supporting lockdowns in the first place, and an overwhelming majority of studies found negative side effects from those policies. All great news so far. But it gets even better when examining what those negative side effects actually were, and how widespread those results were.
The researchers found that ‘over 90 per cent of mental health, obesity-related, and health-related social need outcomes’ were impacted by lockdowns. Of the 454 unique measurements from those studies, 75 per cent were reported as ‘detrimental’.
After years of politicians and public health figures extolling the importance of mental health, mental health outcomes in this research were astonishingly bad. They found that 93 per cent of mental health outcomes studied were ‘deemed detrimental’. And that wasn’t a small sample either, as the researchers found that it was the ‘most frequently studied category’.
If one only uses Google to search outcomes, lockdowns were associated with increased activity for terms like ‘boredom’, ‘loneliness’, ‘sadness’ and ‘worry’.
There was a significant rise in positive suicide screenings among adolescents and a consistent increase in mental health facility use for diagnoses like panic disorder and severe stress. Incredibly, ‘quasi-experimental work found that increases in mental health facility use were more strongly associated with the presence of lockdown policies than with the pandemic or illness itself’. That suggests ‘policy restrictions exerted an independent effect on population well-being’. Horrifying.
So the lockdowns led to increased suicidal ideation, a massive increase in mental health facility usage, rampant loneliness, panic disorder and had no impact on mortality rates. The good news doesn’t end there.
As we know, obesity is one of the most harmful physical conditions, resulting in any number of significant health issues. Well, lockdowns helped there too. Of the analyses studying the effect of lockdowns on obesity, outcomes were ‘overwhelmingly negative’, with ‘94.3 per cent of analyses reporting detrimental effects’.
In one specific study, there was an astonishing ‘19-fold increase in obesity risk among children previously classified at normal weight prepandemic’. Another study found a remarkable ‘tenfold increase in BMI z-score gain among children during school closures’. Great work, ‘health’ experts!
Thanks to delayed healthcare screenings, the review found substantially higher rates of late-stage lung cancer diagnoses. And the breakdown in social order led to increases in trauma-related admissions due to gun and knife violence.
That’s not a surprise, as lockdowns led to massive unemployment and stress over financial stability. Sure enough, when the researchers examined research on those side effects, they found that ‘100 per cent of outcomes’ related to employment, food access, and economic stability were detrimental.
Similarly, childhood development and education also had detrimental outcomes. In 96.6 per cent of studies, there was significant learning loss and disrupted socialisation among younger demographics – who were, of course, at essentially zero risk of significant impacts from covid itself.
For a group who claims to care about ‘equity’ and trying to force equal outcomes across different racial and ethnic groups, public health experts somehow ignored the inequitable negative side effects from lockdowns. Vulnerable demographic groups were significantly more likely to report negative outcomes (more than 90 per cent of the time) than more stable groups. One hundred per cent of outcomes for those vulnerable groups were deemed detrimental regarding important health determinants like obesity, food access and economic stability.
Nailed it again, health equity experts!
So to sum up, we had no evidence that lockdowns would be effective.
We had no research or consideration for the negative outcomes that would result from lockdowns and they had no impact on covid mortality.
In post-mortem research, the overwhelming majority of studied individual outcomes were negative or detrimental in important categories like mental health, physical health, economic conditions and obesity.
And for a group that claims to care about ‘equity’, public health policies overwhelmingly impacted already vulnerable demographic groups the most.
It’s hard to imagine a more comprehensive and thorough repudiation of the Anthony Fauci covid doctrine: do whatever Fauci says, never consider the consequences, then demean and label any and all critics, never admit wrongdoing or take accountability for the damage you’ve caused.
‘The Science’ in a nutshell.
This article appeared in the Brownstone Institute on June 5, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.
