Joe Biden’s Covid advisor Dr. Michael Osterholm called for an unconstitutional 4-6 week nationwide lockdown “like they did in New Zealand and Australia.”
Osterholm said a 6 week nationwide lockdown would get Covid under control and revive the economy.
We know that lockdowns do not work.
We also know that lockdowns destroy jobs and destroy the economy.
“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers for losses to small companies to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” Osterholm said. “If we did that, then we could lockdown for four-to-six weeks.”
CNBC reported:
Shutting down businesses and paying people for lost wages for four to six weeks could help keep the coronavirus pandemic in check and get the economy on track until a vaccine is approved and distributed, said Dr. Michael Osterholm.
Osterholm, who serves as director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said earlier this week that the country is headed toward “Covid hell.” Cases are rising as more people grow tired of wearing masks and social distancing, suffering from so-called “pandemic fatigue,” he said Wednesday. Colder weather is also driving people indoors where the virus can spread more easily.
A nationwide lockdown would drive the number of new cases and hospitalizations down to manageable levels while the world awaits a vaccine, he told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.
Recall, Osterholm wrote a New York Times op-ed over the summer praising Chinese Communist style authoritarian lockdowns: “To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.”
“We could really watch ourselves cruising into the vaccine availability in the first and second quarter of next year while bringing back the economy long before that,” he said Wednesday.
Joe Biden previously got called out by a few reporters over his vow to lock down the US and conceded that a US President does not have the Constitutional authority to do so.