Hospital Corridor
© Off-Guardian
The latest figures from the UK's Office of National Statistics (ONS) suggest that the knock-on effects of lockdown may be harming more people than "Covid" ever did, or so the press are saying anyway.

The ONS's weekly data apparently shows over 10,000 more reported deaths than expected.

Since none of these excess deaths has been "linked with Covid", the press is calling them the "true cost of lockdown", with some papers suggesting lockdown is "killing more people than Covid".

To which the only proper response is: "No shit."

Even for those who still cling to the orthodoxy that "Covid" actually exists, the fact lockdown was going to do more damage than it prevented was obvious from the moment early mortality studies showed "Covid" had a 99.5% survival rate, back in the spring of 2020.

Many experts in economics, statistics, epidemiology and virology voiced this opinion, and were vilified and abused for their trouble.

And, really, anyone with the smallest shred of common sense could figure it out for themselves. Shutting down the health service and crashing the economy is never going to end well (unless you want to kill people, then it's a great plan).

Even Dr David Nabarro, World Health Organization special envoy for Covid-19, described lockdowns as a "global catastrophe" in October 2020:
We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of the virus[...] it seems we may have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition [...] This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe."
So the question is not "Is lockdown worse than Covid?" The answer to that is "yes", and we've known that for over two years.

The real question is: why are they finally admitting it?

It's not just this week's excess deaths either. Elsewhere the media is concerned about the mental health impacts of lockdowns, delays in cancer treatments, the "lockdown drinking", the impact on children missing school, teenagers self-harming and so and so on.

Professor Karol Sikora - one of those vilified experts I mentioned earlier - has even been given space in the Telegraph to write a 2000 word "I told you so".

Why?

Perhaps the answer to that lies not in what they're talking about, but in what they are most pointedly not talking about.

The excess deaths are being very definitely laid at the feet of lockdowns, not the experimental "vaccines".

Now, were the deaths really caused by the lockdown? Or by the "vaccines"? Or a mix of both? We don't know, and can likely never know.

At this point our collective trust in institutions and official figures should be low enough to question if there were any excess deaths. Maybe they just made them up. They do that.

Regardless of the truth of it, the narrative is certainly shifting to highlight "the true cost of lockdowns".

This could be about disguising the harm done by untested vaccines, admitting to potentially deleterious effects of lockdown to spare Pfizer's blushes.

There's a lot more invested in the vaccines than the lockdown - in every sense of the word - and if something has to be blamed it makes sense they would much rather it be lockdowns than jabs.

That's a decent explanation, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were more to it.

This narrative could be about setting up the public for the next "covid" wave or some new "pandemic".

Consider how quickly the "true cost of lockdown" story could be parlayed into a new mainstream consensus that "Lockdown was so damaging, we must do whatever it takes to avoid another".

Then consider how "Whatever it takes" could take the form of quarantine camps for the unvaccinated, vaccines mandates, enforced testing and surveillance...or whatever the hell else they want.