The Director-General’s Special Envoy says lockdowns have only achieved poverty.
By Roland T. Flackfizer
Photo by Edwin Hooper
The World Health Organization has reversed its initial COVID-19 position after calling for governments around the globe to cease widespread lockdowns on their countries and economies.
World Health Organization special envoy Dr. David Nabarro appealed to global leaders on October 8th, advising an end to “using lockdowns as your primary control method” of the coronavirus.
To be clear, the WHO’s repositioning on lockdowns does not effect the necessity for masks, large crowd reduction, or other safety methods which scientists have broad consensus on.
Dr. Nabarrao was appointed as one of six Special Envoys from the DGWHO, who were tasked to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in February of 2020.
Nabarro also advised that lockdowns were plunging many nations into poverty – without evidence of reducing Covid-19 mortality.
“Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer,” he said.
“We in the World Health Organisation do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Dr Nabarro told The Spectator.
“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
Dr Nabarro’s primary judgment on lockdowns were in regard to the global impact on poorer economies.
“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry in the Caribbean, for example, or in the Pacific because people aren’t taking their holidays,” Nabarro said.
“Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. … Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.”
Alternatively, Dr. Nabarro is proposing innovative methods to mitigating the transmission of the virus.
“And so, we really do appeal to all world leaders: stop using lockdown as your primary control method. Develop better systems for doing it. Work together and learn from each other.”
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