'Resume Life as Normal:' Over 6,500 Scientists and Health Professionals Sign Anti-Lockdown Petition
“Listen to the science.”
That’s been the rallying cry of the left on a myriad of issues over the past several years: abortion, sex and gender, climate change and, most recently, the coronavirus.
Never mind the fact that objective science often disagrees with the left’s contentions.
So, they should be happy to reopen the country now that over 6,500 scientists and medical professionals have signed an anti-lockdown petition, according to the U.K. Daily Mail.
The petition, written by Dr. Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, calls for the United States and the United Kingdom to end their lockdowns and promotes allowing the virus to spread among young people in order to build herd immunity.
Over 60,000 members of the public have backed the petition.
The authors advocate protecting those who are vulnerable while letting the rest of us get back to business as usual.
In support, the petition cites the low death rate among young and healthy people who contract the coronavirus, as well as the negative physical and mental effects of the continued lockdowns.
“Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal,” the scientists wrote.
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“Keeping these [lockdown] measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”
The scientists are right: Many people are coping with mental health issues due to prolonged isolation brought about by the lockdowns. Many people are struggling to feed their families because their jobs have been shut down by the government — including many restaurant and hourly workers who live paycheck to paycheck.
That’s not to say the coronavirus isn’t serious. Rather, there are many other repercussions of shutting down large chunks of the country with no end in sight other than whether fewer people are exposed to the virus.
Of course, just because a lot of scientists and professors agree that we should strive for herd immunity doesn’t guarantee it will work.
Because the coronavirus is a novel virus, there are many unanswered questions regarding the long-term effects of the disease and whether contracting it once precludes you from getting it again.
However, petitions like this and the opinions of a large number of medical and scientific experts should have been part of the conversation from the beginning.
Instead, the left — the self-proclaimed “party of science” — has hidden behind the vague veil of “science” to ram down destructive policies.
“Listen to the science” means nothing if it is simply used as an end to promote a narrative and shut down dissenters, rather than as an objective tool to determine policies and procedures.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
UPDATE, Oct. 9, 2020: The Western Journal has added a link to the petition in question to this story.
