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Finding Digital Answers to Global Sustainability Threats

Finding Digital Answers to Global Sustainability Threats

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How digital technologies can foster climate action in the context of the European Green Deal and enable global mobilization of SDG impact finance?

According to NASA, the World Meteorological Organization and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a scientific agency within the United States Department of Commerce, the last 10 years leading up to the end of 2019, as well as the last winter, has been confirmed as the warmest decade on record. Yet, nature produced another warning for humanity in Australia with the severe 2019–2020 bushfire season that led to the burning of 21% of the country’s forested area. With the devastating coronavirus pandemic spreading across the globe and disrupting the way we live our lives, this gives us an indication of the challenge the world could face if it does not address climate change.

The world’s most prominent answer to these global challenges has been the establishment of the Sustainable Development Goals — also known as SDGs or the Global Goals — and the United Nations 2030 Agenda, which are recognized and expected to be implemented by all countries. However, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, has determined that an estimated $2.5 trillion per year of investment is needed to deliver the SDGs. To achieve these goals in the developing countries that suffer the most from global problems, finance development ought to be deployed smartly and strategically, leveraging private capital mobilization.

On Nov. 29, 2018, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres initiated the Task Force on Digital Financing of the Sustainable Development Goals with its main aim to recommend and catalyze ways to harness digitalization and accelerate SDG financing. “We have already seen how technology has helped expand financial inclusion — itself an important goal — by 1.2 billion people in just six years,” said Guterres. He continued:

“But we have only just begun to tap the potential of digital finance and investment to meet the broader agenda set forth in the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on climate change.”

In order to give an immediate response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the U.N. Task Force on Digital Financing of SDG’s is aiming to involve the latest knowledge and competence of their members to provide solutions that can slow down the crisis. Meanwhile, the International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications, or INATBA, has also started similar initiatives. They have been striving to implement the secure and immutable tracking facilities of blockchain technology, which can support organizations and states to advise various stakeholders.

In the final report planned for July 2020, the task force will:

  1. Address the most critical questions on the results of the digitalization of financing to achieve the SDGs.
  2. Consider how this process will reshape financial and monetary systems.
  3. List the main digital-finance limitations and opportunities.
  4. Identify the parties in charge of risk management and mitigation.

To encourage exploration and the eventual use of digital technologies in support of climate action, the U.N. Climate Change secretariat has initiated the Climate Chain Coalition, or CCC. Since 2017, it has united more than 200 members from 50 countries, allowing them to share experience on important global platforms — including the World Bank Innovate4Climate and the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26.

“Climate change secretariat recognizes the potential of blockchain, and it’s a broader ecosystem to enhance climate finance by improving the accuracy of impact assessment and it’s attribution to financiers as well increasing efficiency, trust and liquidity,” said Massamba Thioye, the co-chair of CCC, in a private conversation. He also leads the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, secretariat work that explores possible use cases of digital technologies — including blockchain technology, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, smart contracts and other Fourth Industrial Revolution technology to enhance climate action. CCC members are looking forward to having space where they can showcase real-life use cases during the U.N.’s landmark climate conference, COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland, this November and online events over the coming months.

Digital tech as a key enabler of the European Green Deal

While the U.N. has been assessing and encouraging innovative approaches to bridge digital tech with SDG finance, the European Union Commission may soon approve a truly ambitious aim to become the world’s first climate-neutral continent by 2050, while decoupling economic growth from resource use.

The European Green Deal implies, among many policy initiatives, the extension of the EU ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme), the establishment of a carbon border adjustment tax and a “Just Transition Fund,” as well as a truly impressive 1-trillion-euro investment. One of the main financial incentives behind the Green Deal is the European Commission’s Action Plan on Financing Sustainable Growth that will be soon powered by the EU Taxonomy.

The taxonomy will allow investors to know whether the investment is green or not, assess SDG-associated risks and transform financial inflows to economic activities and projects that are beneficial for sustainable development. It connects the European Green Deal with the needs of the real economy by establishing a classification system that enables the categorization of economic activities and sectors that play key roles in climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Digitization may become the key enabler of the EU Taxonomy by employing Industry 4.0 integrated systems for both software and hardware to ensure that various sectors of the economy meet the eligibility criteria. EU officials and documents have also emphasized other effects of the digital transformation and application of technologies, such as AI, IoT and blockchain technology, toward the successful implementation of the Green Deal.

EU claims for the digital SDG finance domination

On Jan. 14, 2020, the Blockchains for the European Green Deal event was organized in Brussels by the European Partners for the Environment in partnership with the CCC. The main statement announced and agreed upon by participants was the necessity of integrating blockchain technologies to bring innovative approaches and address the SDG’s implementation — which would be both transformational and essential for the EU. The European and U.N. officials, experts and representatives from high-tech companies who attended the event have agreed on collaborating toward common standards, the open-source software and data that would adhere to the EU’s policies.

Similar messages were announced from the stage of another high-level event called Connecting the Dots: Digitalization, Finance & Sustainable Development, which was held on Jan. 27, 2020, and organized by SDSN Germany, Sustainable Digital Finance Alliance and U.N. Task Force on Digital Financing of the SDGs in cooperation with the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. The event’s main focus was the potential of new technologies to contribute to the achievement of SDGs by promoting financial innovations and digitalization.

The President of the European Investment Bank, Werner Hoyer, who delivered a key-note speech at the event, stated earlier in Davos, Switzerland, that “the world’s future economy must marry digitalization and innovation with climate action.” In his speech, he underlined the necessity of the EIB to become a digital climate bank and a financial engine of Europe’s leadership on climate action. His comments were supported by Simon Zadek, the Sherpa of the U.N. Secretary General’s Task Force on Digital Financing of the Sustainable Development Goals; Adolf Kloke-Lesch, the executive director of SDSN Germany; and Sabrina Schulz, the head of Berlin Office for the KfW Group. Schulz especially pointed out that KfW Group is becoming a transformational climate bank closely involved in the digitization of climate finance and already leveraging blockchain opportunities in this field.

The role of digitization in bridging the SDG finance gap

The aforementioned facts and statements witness that there is a global consensus on the pivotal role that digital technologies can play in the mobilization of the development and private finance needed to successfully attain U.N.’s SDGs. Based on the latest publications and consultations with key stakeholders, we have listed some of the main effects of digitalization on SDG financing:

1. Digitalization will empower infrastructure frameworks for climate action and multi-stakeholder engagement

Taxonomies and standards are advantageous tools that make capital markets analyze and acknowledge investment opportunities to enhance the goals of environmental policies. The creation of holistic digital frameworks that combine both software and hardware tools may help to ensure that economic activities match the proposed standards and rules.

Application of blockchain technology for the EU carbon border adjustment mechanism may help to ensure that European products are not at risk of carbon leakage or disadvantaged by more carbon-intensive imports from other countries. Providing unprecedented transparency and traceability, it will also help to ensure that the price of imports reflects more accurately the carbon content and better assess the overall greenhouse gas emissions, as well as their reduction potential along the supply chains to successfully execute the Green New Deal.

As another example, the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure, in partnership with the CCC, is currently working on a unique object identification initiative — a data and digital technology innovation infrastructure, or D2I2, for multi-stakeholder climate action coordination and incentivization. The framework is being set to deliver a global digital services infrastructure for climate action, including digital identities, services, resources (financial, intellectual, etc.) and other domains. This could bring the necessary data architecture and tools that will allow us to implement taxonomies faster and more successfully.

Building on the aforementioned Unique Object Identification — together with digital identities of persons and institutions — the D2I2 consortium has been working toward the development of a digital climate action documentation and coordination language and coordination system that will enable the development of digital tools for engagement mechanisms like those envisaged by the European Climate Pact or Climate Neutral Now initiatives. Such a digital framework will allow stakeholders to digitally specify and sign their pledges and climate action suggestions with concrete, monitorable information with all the relevant parameters uniquely identified.

Through such a global challenges mapping platform, individuals, schools, cities and companies will be empowered to digitally sign a climate pact with their local, sub-national, national or global community, specifying intended and recommended climate action with digital identities based on uniquely identified and localized objects, services, resources and outcomes — thus, opening unprecedented opportunities for multi-stakeholder engagement in climate action.

2. Collection and analysis of real economy data will help to better assess risks and investment outcomes

Once collected directly from the ground, the impact data will answer the question if the corporates and financiers are really changing their investment practices to execute a long-term thinking approach and to increase reporting transparency and public accountability for real targets behind the environmental, social and governance policies.

The real economy data acquisition can be done with drones, satellites and IoT — wireless sensors that collect different kinds of real economy data (electricity, water, heat consumption, etc.). Satellites are mainly used for soil, air, vegetation water quality assessment, identification of illegal activities, acquisition of historical data on fires or floods for future forecasting, and analysis. AI and cameras enable advanced condition project monitoring and forecasting techniques, which will enable us to decrease operational and maintenance costs, as well as to better predict the outcome of the project.

In Davos, several leading international players like Refinitiv, the World Economic Forum, FinTech4Good and the U.N. formed an alliance with the main aim to accelerate the mobilization of capital into sustainable finance. This alliance will provide fundamental ESG data access and extra alternative data sets that may be considered the key drivers to help investors make sustainable investment decisions and positively contribute to the U.N. SDGs 2030 Agenda.

Amid the COVID-19 crisis, digitalization may help to tackle numerous current challenges and advise citizens on the symptoms of infection, to better manage medical data across organizations and countries, and to track donations for medical supplies and medicine. Firstly, it can abate misinformation through constant and automatic synchronization, which makes it almost impossible to manipulate or change any kind of information relevant for crisis mitigation and adaptation. Secondly, it could establish successful communication between various organizations like hospitals and research centers, along with secure donations and medical supplies, making the whole process transparent and enhancing public confidence in the system. Finally, digital impact finance tools will have great potential for the SDG impact-oriented optimization of public, post-pandemic economic stimulus packages, which can be expected to be launched soon by governments all over the world on a huge scale.

3. Digitalization will make impact investments more accessible and financially attractive

Access in developed and developing countries to low-cost finance from the capital market is critical to attaining SDGs. However, financiers will not invest in projects simply because this is the right thing to do morally. They will do it if there is enough trust and economic sense.

The majority of investors still use Excel spreadsheets to calculate impact-related metrics and manage their portfolios — which takes both time and money. A lot of financiers’ money is also wasted on ensuring that oversea investments match impact investment criteria, have low ESG risks and provide the correct information on SDG impact.

Digitization significantly lowers transaction costs by introducing portfolio management automation, building trust, avoiding unwanted intermediaries and allowing to enter the climate finance market more freely while ensuring the alignment to major taxonomies and standards.

Decentralized finance brings new revenue opportunities through tokenization of real assets or securities — equity, debt, revenue sharing instruments, etc. — as well as enabling their fractional ownership and usage. This allows for significantly smaller investment sizes and thus enables access to finance for SMEs that are currently excluded from the international SDG finance due to the limitations of existing policies and procedures.

DeFi can potentially increase profitability and liquidity of impact investments by seamlessly issuing impact derivatives — carbon credits, renewable energy certificates, etc. — and secondary trading of digital assets. However, this potential may only be unlocked by the introduction of clear governmental regulations in the digital finance sector and the emergence of regulated platforms for secondary trading.

4. Digital technologies can bring new challenges yet to be addressed

The U.N. Task Force lists some risks and challenges of digitalization, such as digital divide, systematic exclusions that may bolster some examples of discrimination, biases in algorithms, and also a great environmental footprint, resulting from high energy demand for proof-of-work blockchain transaction confirmations. Some of those limitations are being dealt with by the technologies of the next generation that are now being delivered to the market.

For example, the development of Web 3.0 protocols such as Cosmos, Polkadot and Parity Substrate have brought sufficient advantages in comparison to their predecessors: new energy-saving consensus mechanisms, the absence of a central point of control, a reduction in hacks and data breaches, seamless integration with IoT and long-awaited interoperability.

The interoperability of blockchain technology allows us to avoid such problems like double accounting enabling cross-blockchain transfers of any type of data or asset. This would enable us to ensure that impact results are attributed fairly and not claimed by many investors at the same time. However, there are still regulatory, security and market immaturity associated risks that need to be considered.

5. Digital technologies may help to abate greenwashing of introducing new investment instruments

The green bond market is growing at a fast pace and has already reached over $240 billion. However, there are challenges, such as complex issuance processes due to the requirement of an additional layer of “green performance” data, a lack of transparency and the risk of “greenwashing.” While Africa and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, are recognized as the most promising markets for green bonds, the issuance volume remains comparably low due to the lack of trust and clear guidelines on green bonds issuance, as well as a lack of investor awareness.

Smart contracts running on a blockchain may play their role in solving these issues. They are pre-programmed digital forms of agreements and are executed automatically when certain conditions are met. The smart contracts enable building decentralized applications and protocols with far more sophisticated functionality than simply sending and receiving cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin (BTC).

The logic of any existing or future green bond framework or methodology can be described in the form of smart contracts and their integration with impact monitoring solutions. The impact is then automatically monitored, recorded on a blockchain with high transparency and immutability, and then attributed to the relevant financier. This opens doors to the issuance of programmable SDG bonds and blended finance instruments with their financial parameters linked to the impact data acquired directly from the project site.

Conclusion

The recent high-level announcements and events made earlier this year witness that we are currently facing the merger of two growing trends: digitalization and impact finance. The pivotal role of digital technologies in bridging the $2.5 trillion SDG investment gap and attainment of a broader U.N. 2030 Agenda has been officially acknowledged by the international bodies, states, corporations and financiers who are starting the phase of active adoption.

Moreover, their deployment for enhancing SDG finance could become a new global competitive factor and a potential key enabler of the latest policies, taxonomies, methodologies and standards, bringing more transparent data architecture and democratized digital infrastructure to implement Agenda 2030.

To reach the full potential of digitalization, it is necessary to combine various Industry 4.0 technologies. Monitoring technologies such as drones, satellites and IoT enable trusted real economy data acquisition. Blockchain technology may store the acquired data, providing unprecedented transparency and immutability, while AI will help to analyze it and use the processed data for decision making.

The new generations of digital technologies that are already being deployed provide answers to critical technological constraints, which previously prevented their wide adoption: a big environmental footprint, limited scalability and interoperability. However, there are still some limitations such as software risks, digital divide and autocracy that have yet to be addressed.

Digitization may solve the growing greenwashing challenge by enabling the accurate measurement and attribution of SDG contributions made by multiple financiers. It can also help to mobilize private capital while increasing the financial attractiveness of impact investments by the introduction of new financial tools and liquidity opportunities, as well as more effective ESG risk assessment and management.

Unprecedented crises like climate change and its growing consequences, new deadly viruses, rising sea levels or extreme weather events force us to immediately rethink global economic and social systems. During the COVID-19 pandemic and even prior to that, digitalization has shown us successful examples of faster transparent evaluation and distribution of resources to where they are most needed. These early examples may serve as the building blocks of a more sustainable and prosperous future for our world. However, if there is any way out of the current situation, we’ll certainly only be able to find it all together, and digital technologies will help bring down the dividing walls by allowing us to better understand and trust one another.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

This article was co-authored by Alexey Shadrin, Tom Baumann, Marina Spitsyna and Miroslav Polzer.

Alexey Shadrin, the founder of Evercity.io and the digital finance group leader of Climate Chain Coalition.

Tom Baumann, the founder and co-chair of the Climate Chain Coalition, as well as a founding member and co-chair of INATBA Climate Action Working Group.

Marina Spitsyna, a master graduate of the Technical University of Munich.

Miroslav Polzer, the executive director of the International Association for the Advancement of Innovative Approaches to Global Challenges, Climate Chain Coalition EU and outreach groups leader.

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When words make you sick

In a new book, experts in a variety of fields explore nocebo effects – how negative expectations concerning health can make a person sick. It is the…

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In a new book, experts in a variety of fields explore nocebo effects – how negative expectations concerning health can make a person sick. It is the first time a book has been written on this subject.

“I think it’s the idea that words really matter. It’s fascinating that how we communicate can affect the outcome. Communication in health care is perhaps more important than the patient recognises,” says Charlotte Blease, who is a researcher at the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health at Uppsala University. 
Along with colleagues at Brown University in the United States and the University of Zurich in Switzerland she has written the book “The Nocebo Effect: When Words Make You Sick”. Nocebo is sometimes called the placebo’s evil twin. A placebo effect occurs when a patient thinks they feel better because of receiving medicine and part of that perception is due not to the drug but to positive expectations. The concept of the nocebo effect means that harmful things can happen because a person expects it – unconsciously or consciously. This is the first time the phenomenon has been addressed in a scholarly book. Researchers in medicine, history, culture, psychology and philosophy have examined it, each in their own particular area. 

Credit: Catherine Blease

In a new book, experts in a variety of fields explore nocebo effects – how negative expectations concerning health can make a person sick. It is the first time a book has been written on this subject.

“I think it’s the idea that words really matter. It’s fascinating that how we communicate can affect the outcome. Communication in health care is perhaps more important than the patient recognises,” says Charlotte Blease, who is a researcher at the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health at Uppsala University. 
Along with colleagues at Brown University in the United States and the University of Zurich in Switzerland she has written the book “The Nocebo Effect: When Words Make You Sick”. Nocebo is sometimes called the placebo’s evil twin. A placebo effect occurs when a patient thinks they feel better because of receiving medicine and part of that perception is due not to the drug but to positive expectations. The concept of the nocebo effect means that harmful things can happen because a person expects it – unconsciously or consciously. This is the first time the phenomenon has been addressed in a scholarly book. Researchers in medicine, history, culture, psychology and philosophy have examined it, each in their own particular area. 

“It’s a very new field, an emerging discipline. Even if the nocebo effect is documented far back in history, it perhaps became especially obvious during the coronavirus pandemic,” Blease says.

A previous study of patients during the pandemic (see below) shows that as many as three quarters of the reported side-effects of the coronavirus vaccine may be due to the nocebo effect. The study involved more than 45,000 participants, approximately half of whom were injected with a saline solution instead of the vaccine but despite this still experienced many side-effects such as nausea and headache. In the book, the authors highlight that one issue that disappeared in the discussion of side-effects during the coronavirus pandemic was that many of these were actually due to the nocebo effect.

“Whether this is due to expectations – the nocebo effect – remains to be understood. However, it is curious that so many participants reported side-effects after receiving no vaccine. Regardless, some people may have been put off by what they heard about side-effects,” Blease comments.


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Anti-Semitism As The Harbinger Of Global Chaos

Anti-Semitism As The Harbinger Of Global Chaos

Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness,

On the off chance you hadn’t noticed,…

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Anti-Semitism As The Harbinger Of Global Chaos

Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness,

On the off chance you hadn’t noticed, the world appears to be at an especially precarious moment presently. Obviously, war continues to rage in Ukraine and Gaza, with no end in sight to either conflict. Great Britain and Japan are currently in recession. Canada’s economy is an absolute disaster, with almost no hope of near-term recovery. Much of continental Europe and China are struggling economically, if not officially contracting. Some experts believe that the global economy more generally is sliding, slowly but surely, into recession. The only economic bright spot in the world is the United States, and even here we have our problems with consumer spending and sentiment, massive credit concerns, and inarguably sticky inflation.

Meanwhile, China is investing in and winning friends, and influencing people in the Global South. U.S.-backed Kurdish leaders are warning that ISIS is resurgent in Syria and Iraq. The Marine general in charge of U.S. Africa Command is warning of Russia’s increasing influence on that continent. Sudan remains mired in civil war. Nigeria is plagued by Islamist terrorism and mass kidnappings. Mexico is in the midst of a full-blown war with the drug cartels, who continue to grow bolder and more militarily sophisticated.

Everywhere one looks, chaos reigns—or, at the very least, bubbles just below the surface.

Perhaps most telling among the signs of disarray is the unnerving rise of antisemitism in the United States, Europe, and throughout the world. Antisemitism, in general, has been intensifying, slowly but surely, over the last decade or so. Over the last few months, however, it has emerged fully into the open, undaunted and unembarrassed. What was once considered shameful and disconcerting is now warmly welcomed as a “rational” response to American foreign policy, Israeli war practices, “colonialism,” and “white privilege.”

All of this is troubling, to put it mildly, both in and of itself and as a harbinger of greater and more deadly global unrest.

Hatred of and anger toward Jews is not the same as other forms of bigotry.  

In many ways, the history of Western anti-Jewish hatred mirrors the history of Western political chaos and collapse.  Or, to put it another way, historically, Jews are not only the perennial scapegoats during periods of social upheaval and displacement, but resurgent anti-Semitism serves as the proverbial canary in the coal mine for the rise of revolutionary movements.

In his classic, The Pursuit of the Millennium, the British historian Norman Cohn argues that the Jewish diaspora generally fit comfortably, if tentatively into European society for most of the first thousand years or so A.D., and only became a hated and perpetually persecuted minority with the rise of utopian Millenarianism that accompanied and then outlived the Crusades.  Beginning then and continuing for the next nearly a thousand years, Europeans came to associate Jews with the antichrist and thus to associate hatred and persecution of Jews with preparing the battlespace for the Second Coming.  Many historians, including Hannah Arendt, believed that the anti-Semitism that was such an integral part of the West’s 20th-century collapse into totalitarianism was relatively new and, in any case, distinct from medieval anti-Semitism.  Cohn’s history suggests otherwise, connecting the religious eschatology of medieval Europe to the quasi-religious eschatology of post-Enlightenment Europe, thereby connecting the persistence of Western anti-Semitism as well.

Cohn tells us that millenarian moments and the millenarian movements that capitalize on those moments all share a common group of characteristics. They all appear under certain social and economic conditions. They all appeal to a certain segment of the population at large, who then present themselves as economic, spiritual, and political leaders. They all utilize scapegoats, meaning that they all identify a different, usually much smaller segment of the population on whom they can blame all the world’s ills and then set about to cure those ills through the elimination of the scapegoat. And more often than not, that scapegoat tends to be Jewish.

In the conclusion to the second edition of Pursuit of the Millennium, Cohn notes that the millenarian fervor of the middle ages may have changed, but it never really died, and it maintained its common characteristics even as it became secular or “quasi-religious.” He wrote:

The story told in Pursuit of the Millennium ended some four centuries ago but is not without relevance to our own times. [I have] shown in another work [Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion] how closely the Nazi phantasy of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy of destruction is related to the phantasies that inspired Emico of Leningrad and the Master of Hungary; and how mass disorientation and insecurity have fostered the demonization of the Jew in this as in much earlier centuries. The parallels and indeed the continuity are incontestable.

The parallels between the rise of Nazism and the current global unrest and demonization of the Jewish people are also largely incontestable. The election that brought Hitler to power didn’t happen in a vacuum, after all. It happened in the midst of global chaos, namely the Great Depression. It also followed the decadence and distortion of the Weimer Era. As the New York Fed has shown, even a global pandemic—the 1919 Spanish Flu outbreak—contributed to the sense of discomfort and disconnect among the German population, prompting increased support for Hitler and his Nazis.

The present global chaos doesn’t have to end the same way the chaos of a century ago did. It doesn’t have to result in the ascension of millenarian ideologies and their totalitarian defenders. History has shown that extremism can be short-circuited and radical ideologies undone. The first step in doing so, however, must be to bring an end to the rationalization of the persecution of the world’s Jews. The second step is to end the persecution itself.

Antisemitism is ugly and shameful, and it must be treated as such. For their sake and ours.

Tyler Durden Tue, 03/19/2024 - 02:00

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Report Criticizes ‘Catastrophic Errors’ Of COVID Lockdowns, Warns Of Repeat

Report Criticizes ‘Catastrophic Errors’ Of COVID Lockdowns, Warns Of Repeat

Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

It…

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Report Criticizes 'Catastrophic Errors' Of COVID Lockdowns, Warns Of Repeat

Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

It was four years ago, in March 2020, that health officials declared COVID-19 a pandemic and America began shutting down schools, closing small businesses, restricting gatherings and travel, and other lockdown measures to “slow the spread” of the virus.

UNICEF unveiled its "Pandemic Classroom," a model made up of 168 empty desks, each seat representing one million children living in countries where schools were almost entirely closed during the COVID pandemic lockdowns, at the U.N. Headquarters in New York City on March 2, 2021. (Chris Farber/UNICEF via Getty Images)

To mark that grim anniversary, a group of medical and policy experts released a report, called “COVID Lessons Learned,” which assesses the government’s response to the pandemic. According to the report, that response included a few notable successes, along with a litany of failures that have taken a severe toll on the population.

During the pandemic, many governments across the globe acted in lockstep to pursue authoritative policies in response to the disease, locking down populations, closing schools, shutting businesses, sealing borders, banning gatherings, and enforcing various mask and vaccine mandates. What were initially imposed as short-term mandates and emergency powers given to presidents, ministers, governors, and health officials soon became extended into a longer-term expansion of official power.

“Even though the initial point of temporary lockdowns was to ’slow the spread,' which meant to allow hospitals to function without being overwhelmed, instead it rapidly turned into stopping COVID cases at all costs,” Dr. Scott Atlas, a physician, former White House Coronavirus Task Force member, and one of the authors of the report, stated at a March 15 press conference.

Published by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP), the report was co-authored by Steve Hanke, economics professor and director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics; Casey Mulligan, former chief economist of the White House Council of Economic Advisors; and CTUP President Philip Kerpen. 

According to the report, one of the first errors was the unprecedented authority that public officials took upon themselves to enforce health mandates on Americans. 

Granting public health agencies extraordinary powers was a major error,” Mr. Hanke told The Epoch Times. “It, in effect, granted these agencies a license to deceive the public.”

The authors argue that authoritative measures were largely ineffective in fighting the virus, but often proved highly detrimental to public health. 

The report quantifies the cost of lockdowns, both in terms of economic costs and the number of non-COVID excess deaths that occurred and continue to occur after the pandemic. It estimates that the number of non-COVID excess deaths, defined as deaths in excess of normal rates, at about 100,000 per year in the United States.

‘They Will Try to Do This Again’

“Lockdowns, schools closures, and mandates were catastrophic errors, pushed with remarkable fervor by public health authorities at all levels,” the report states. The authors are skeptical, however, that health authorities will learn from the experience.

“My worry is that if we have another pandemic or another virus, I think that Washington is still going to try to do these failed policies,” said Steve Moore, a CTUP economist. “We’re not here to say ‘this guy got it wrong' or ’that guy or got it wrong,’ but we should learn the lessons from these very, very severe mistakes that will have costs for not just years, but decades to come. 

“I guarantee you, they will try to do this again,” Mr. Moore said. “And what’s really troubling me is the people who made these mistakes still have not really conceded that they were wrong.”

Mr. Hanke was equally pessimistic.

“Unfortunately, the public health establishment is in the authoritarian model of the state,” he said. “Their entire edifice is one in which the state, not the individual, should reign supreme.”

The authors are also critical of what they say was a multifaceted campaign in which public officials, the news media, and social media companies cooperated to frighten the population into compliance with COVID mandates.

During COVID, the public health establishment … intentionally stoked and amplified fear, which overlaid enormous economic, social, educational and health harms on top of the harms of the virus itself,” the report states. 

The authors contrasted the authoritative response of many U.S. states to policies in Sweden, which they say relied more on providing advice and information to the public rather than attempting to force behaviors.

Sweden’s constitution, called the “Regeringsform,” guarantees the liberty of Swedes to move freely within the realm and prohibits severe lockdowns, Mr. Hanke stated.

“By following the Regeringsform during COVID, the Swedes ended up with one of the lowest excess death rates in the world,” he said.  

Because the Swedish government avoided strict mandates and was more forthright in sharing information with its people, many citizens altered their behavior voluntarily to protect themselves.

“A much wiser strategy than issuing lockdown orders would have been to tell the American people the truth, stick to the facts, educate citizens about the balance of risks, and let individuals make their own decisions about whether to keep their businesses open, whether to socially isolate, attend church, send their children to school, and so on,” the report states.

‘A Pretext to Enhance Their Power’

The CTUP report cites a 2021 study on government power and emergencies by economists Christian Bjornskov and Stefan Voigt, which found that the more emergency power a government accumulates during times of crisis, “the higher the number of people killed as a consequence of a natural disaster, controlling for its severity.

As this is an unexpected result, we discuss a number of potential explanations, the most plausible being that governments use natural disasters as a pretext to enhance their power,” the study’s authors state. “Furthermore, the easier it is to call a state of emergency, the larger the negative effects on basic human rights.”

“All the things that people do in their lives … they have purposes,” Mr. Mulligan said. “And for somebody in Washington D.C. to tell them to stop doing all those things, they can’t even begin to comprehend the disruption and the losses.

“We see in the death certificates a big elevation in people dying from heart conditions, diabetes conditions, obesity conditions,” he said, while deaths from alcoholism and drug overdoses “skyrocketed and have not come down.”

The report also challenged the narrative that most hospitals were overrun by the surge of COVID cases.

“Almost any measure of hospital utilization was very low, historically, throughout the pandemic period, even though we had all these headlines that our hospitals were overwhelmed,” Mr. Kerpen stated. “The truth was actually the opposite, and this was likely the result of public health messaging and political orders, canceling medical procedures and intentionally stoking fear, causing people to cancel their appointments.”

The effect of this, the authors argue, was a sharp increase in non-COVID deaths because people were avoiding necessary treatments and screenings. 

“There were actually mass layoffs in this sector at one point,” Mr. Kerpen said, “and even now, total discharges are well below pre-pandemic levels.”

In addition, as health mandates became more draconian, many people became concerned at the expansion of government power and the loss of civil liberties, particularly when government directives—such as banning outdoor church services but allowing mass social-justice protests—often seemed unreasonable or politicized. 

The report also criticized the single-minded focus on vaccines and the failure by the NIH and the FDA to do clinical trials on existing drugs that were known to be safe and could have been effective in treating those infected with COVID-19.

Because so much of the process of approving the vaccines, the risks and benefits, and the reporting of possible side-effects was kept from the public, people were unable to give informed consent to their own health care, Mr. Kerpen said. 

“And when the Biden administration came in and started mandating them, now you had something that was inherently experimental with some questionable data, and instead of saying, ‘Now you have a choice whether you want it or not,’ in the context of a pandemic they tried to mandate them,” he said.

Pandemic Censorship

Tech oligopolies and the corporate media also receive criticism for their collaboration with government to control public messaging and censor dissenting voices. According to the authors, many government and health officials collaborated with tech oligarchs, news media corporations, and even scientific journals to censor critical views on the pandemic.

The Biden administration is currently defending itself before the Supreme Court against charges brought by Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general, who charged that administration officials pressured tech companies to censor information that contradicted official narratives on COVID-19’s origins, related mandates and treatment, as well as censoring political speech that was critical of President Biden during his 2020 campaign. The case is Murthy v. Missouri.

Mr. Hanke stated that a previous report he co-authored, titled “Did Lockdowns Work?,” which was critical of lockdowns, was refused by medical journals, even when they published op-eds that criticized it and published numerous pro-lockdown reports. 

Dr. Vinay Prasad—a physician, epidemiologist, professor at the University of California at San Francisco’s medical school and author of over 350 academic articles and letters—has made similar allegations of censorship by medical journals.

“Specifically, MedRxiv and SSRN have been reluctant to post articles critical of the CDC, mask and vaccine mandates, and the Biden administration’s health care policies,” Dr. Prasad stated.

Heightening concerns about medical censorship is the “zero-draft” World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic treaty currently being circulated for approval by member states, including the United States. It commits members to jointly seek out and “tackle” what the WHO deems as “misinformation and disinformation.”

One of the enduring consequences of the COVID years is a general loss of public trust in public officials, health experts, and official narratives. 

“Operation Warp Speed was a terrific success with highly unexpected rapidity of development [of vaccines],” Dr. Atlas said. “But the serious flaws centered around not being open with the public about the uncertainties, particularly of the vaccines’ efficacy and safety.” 

“One result of the government’s error-ridden COVID response was that Americans have justifiably lost faith in public health institutions,” the report states. According to the authors, if health officials want to regain the public’s trust, they should begin with an accurate assessment of their actions during the pandemic.

“The best way to restore trust is to admit you were wrong,” Dr. Atlas said. “I think we all know that in our personal lives, but here it’s very important because there has been a massive lack of trust now in institutions, in experts, in data, in science itself.

I think it’s going to be very difficult to restore that without admission of error,” he said.

Recommendations for a Future Pandemic

The CTUP report recommends that Congress and state legislatures set strict limitations on powers conferred to the executive branch, including health officials, and set time limits that would require legislation to be extended. This would give the public a voice in health emergency measures through their elected representatives.

It further recommends that research grants should be independent of policy positions and that NIH funding should be decentralized or block-granted to states to distribute.

Congress should mandate public disclosure of all FDA, CDC, and NIH discussions and decisions, including statements of any persons who provide advice to these agencies. Congress should also make explicit that CDC guidance is advisory and does not constitute laws or mandates. 

The report also recommends that the United States immediately halt negotiations of agreements with the WHO “until satisfactory transparency and accountability is achieved.”

Tyler Durden Mon, 03/18/2024 - 23:00

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