By M.D. Kittle

MADISON — For two years, leftist governors, power-grabbing local health directors and mad scientists have stolen our liberties in the failed pursuit of controling a virus. They assured us they were taking these drastic steps for our own good.

They were wrong. Terribly wrong.

A new, comprehensive analysis by Johns Hopkins University finds what many of us have been screaming for a long time: “lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.” In short, locking down society failed miserably.

“Overall, we conclude that lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic, at least not during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic,” states the study, “Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality,”

Sadly, scientists, including the esteemed and insanely arrogant Anthony Fauci, knew this before they foisted destructive lockdowns on society.

“Reports from the 1918 influenza pandemic indicate that social-distancing measures did not stop or appear to dramatically reduce transmission…”  So why did Fauci and friends think it would work this time?

No doubt about it, the virus is deadly. It’s killed about 900,000 Americans. But the growing body of evidence, including Johns Hopkins’ latest contributions, says lockdowns did little, if anything, to curb the morbidity numbers.

Thousands of scientists in the Great Barrington Declaration early on argued against the kind of extreme lockdown measures pushed by Fauci and his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Gov. Tony Evers and Public Health Madison & Dane County and all kinds of authoritarian pandemic-era regimes.

Not only did their stringent COVID restrictions not work, they caused much more harm than good. They cost us our freedom, our jobs, our investments. Their quarantines and isolation campaigns, fueled by fear, drove up alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide rates. They robbed us of time — lots of lost time — that we can never get back.

The governors and the lawmakers and the health directors who shut everything down are tools leading tools to the false fields of the Nanny State.

They are collectively, Empower Wisconsin’s Tool of the Week.