Article Source: Stanford Doctor: Lockdowns Were An ‘Overreaction’ To ‘Protect The Rich’
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, told podcast host Megyn Kelly that lockdowns have ineffectively addressed the concerns and danger COVID-19 poses to certain communities.
“I’ve come to think of it as trickle-down epidemiology. We’ve used the lockdowns to protect the rich, whereas we essentially expose the — like in California for instance, it’s the poor areas that have had the high death rates from COVID. The lockdowns haven’t protected people living in places where there’s high poverty,” Bhattacharya said on “The Megyn Kelly Show.” “Minority populations, especially Hispanics, have been hard hit. Fifty percent of people who have had COVID deaths are Hispanic in California.”
According to Battacharya, lockdowns were an “unfocused overreaction” that served as a distraction from addressing the people who are the most vulnerable to the virus.
“The lockdowns have been an enormous and ineffective overreaction, not actually protecting the population from COVID. While at the same time, the collateral damage is absolutely devastating,” he continued. “It’s an unfocused overreaction. … We just should have focused on the population we knew to be at risk, protected them, thought of creative ways to protect them from the beginning of the epidemic. … And for the rest of the population, the lockdown, we should have been thinking about the collateral damage from the very beginning.”
One aspect of this “collateral damage,” Kelly said, is the fact that teachers unions are preventing students from returning to in-person learning, another decision that is hurting already at-risk communities.
“Their standard of safety knows no bounds. The truth is no amount of safety measures is going to get these teachers back in the classroom. … We’re seeing this decade dichotomy happening across the nation between public and private schools. The private schools go back, and the kids who were in the public school system, which doesn’t have as much money behind them, they don’t get to go,” Kelly said. “It’s unfair. … The schools have to reopen. It’s safe, it’s been proven safe. The Chicago teachers who refuse to obey the district order to get back in the classrooms should be fired. Same for those in Montclair, New Jersey, and any other district that puts the well-being of students last.”
Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.