Never before had goverments resorted to this method.
From the lepers in the Old Testament to the Plague of Justinian in Ancient Rome to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, Covid represents the first time ever in the history of managing pandemics that we quarantined healthy populations.
While the ancients did not understand the mechanisms of infectious disease—they knew nothing of viruses and bacteria—they nevertheless figured out many ways to mitigate the spread of contagion during epidemics.
These time-tested measures ranged from quarantining the sick to deploying those with natural immunity, who had recovered from illness, to care for them.
Lockdowns?
. . . were never part of conventional public health measures. In 1968 1-4 million people died in the H2N3 influenza pandemic; businesses and schools never closed, and large events were not cancelled. One thing we never did . . . was lock down entire populations. . . . In 2020 we had no empirical evidence that [a
lockdown] would work, only flawed mathematical models whose [predictions] were . . . wildly off by several orders of magnitude.
There followed “devastating economic consequences” and “major societal shifts.”
Our ruling class saw in Covid an opportunity to radically revolutionize society: recall how the phrase “the new normal” emerged almost immediately in the first weeks of the pandemic. In the first month Anthony Fauci made the absurd suggestion that perhaps never again would we go back to shaking hands. Never again?
The idea has a history:
Changes ushered in during lockdowns were signs of a broader social and political experiment “in which a new paradigm of governance over people and things is at play,” as described by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.
Its “basic features were already sketched” in 2013 . . .
. . . in a book by Patrick Zilberman, professor of the history of health in Paris, Microbial Storms . . . [the book] was remarkably predictive of what emerged during the first year of the pandemic. He showed that biomedical security,. . . previously a marginal part of political life and international relations, had assumed a central place in political strategies and calculations in recent years.
Already in 2005, for example, the WHO grossly over-predicted that the bird flu . . . would kill 2 to 50 million people. To prevent this impending disaster, WHO made recommendations that no nation [was] prepared to accept at the time—including population-wide lockdowns. . . . Zylberman predicted that “sanitary terror” would be used as an instrument of governance.
more more more to come on this grim development . . .
Blithe Spirit 
Reblogged this on Chicago Newspapers.
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