By Paul Bois – DailyWire.com
Former New York Times report Alex Berenson, a staunch critic of the governmental measures implemented to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic, declared that history will look at the lockdown orders “as a colossal mistake.”
Speaking with Fox Nation, Berenson said that the evidence increasingly shows that the COVID-19 projections were based on questionable science that has been proven false.
“The virus appears to be less dangerous than we thought it was a month ago,” he told “Fox Nation 101: COVID Contrarian.” “The economic devastation and the societal devastation of the lockdowns appear to be greater than even the worst projections were a month ago.”
Berenson then argued that politicians and public health officials put themselves in a difficult situation by implementing such harsh measures without having the evidence to back it up.
“What I think is that people took a very, very aggressive action a month ago without necessarily thinking through what the economic or societal consequences were going to be,” said Bereson. “Now more and more evidence is coming out that we responded too harshly, that maybe we should have taken smaller steps and seen what happened before we went to the place we went. And it seems to me very, very hard, both for politicians and for the public health establishment, to acknowledge this and to walk us back in a reasonable way.”
Berenson became a staunch critic of the lockdowns back in April when U.K. Imperial College professor Neil Ferguson began revising his original model, which predicted up to 500,000 deaths in the U.K. and 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. without COVID-19 mitigations.
“I’ve been watching this like a hawk and I’ve been watching the models, both the Imperial College and now more recently, the major U.S. model, which is the University of Washington model, fail on a daily basis, fail to predict what is happening now, what is going to happen in months or years or even in a week,” said Berenson. “I think most scientists agree it is more dangerous than the flu, but it doesn’t seem to be 10 or 20 or 30 times as dangerous as the flu. It’s on the spectrum of the flu. That’s what the data is now suggesting.”
Going forward, Berenson stressed the importance of public health officials protecting vulnerable communities while allowing the economy to recover.
“There will be plenty of time to sort out the blame for the mistakes that were made and try to make sure we do a better job next time,” said Berenson. “Right now, every day that goes by, the economy gets a little bit worse. Every day that goes by, there are more people who can’t pay their bills, every day that goes by kids are being stuck at home sometimes with abusive parents.”
“Every day that goes by our society frays a little bit more,” he continued. “Let’s worry about fixing this now and then we can try to sort out what went wrong in the coming weeks and months.”
