Oh, THAT Science!
While our understanding of viral transmission mechanisms leads to the assumption that lockdowns may be an effective pandemic management tool, this assumption cannot be supported by the evidence-based analysis of the present COVID-19 pandemic, as well as of the 19181920 H1N1 influenza type A pandemic (the Spanish Flu) and numerous less severe pandemics in the past. The price tag of lockdowns in terms of public health is highwe estimate that, even if somewhat effective in preventing death caused by infection, lockdowns may claim 20 times more life than they save. It is suggested therefore that a thorough cost benefit analysis should be performed before imposing any lockdown in the future
https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/ijerph/ijerph-19-09295/article_deploy/ijerph-19-09295-v2.pdf?version=1659419794
For only ~$1700 they finally got that published, huh?
MDPI is noted for their less than rigorous standards and is considered by some to be a predatory set of journals, recruiting papers and then charging the authors a hefty sum to publish them once accepted.
Another of their papers: "An Exploratory Study of Tweets about the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant: Insights from Sentiment Analysis, Language Interpretation, Source Tracking, Type Classification, and Embedded URL Detection"\\\
And in 2016, MDPI journal Behavioral Sciences published a review paper that claimed that watching pornography is a cause of erectile dysfunction.
My favorite line from the paper cited by Ward was this one:
Due to the vast amount of relevant literature, we found it unfeasible to perform a systematic review of the existing literature.Here's a line from another of the lead author's papers:
" The widespread introduction of regulations that obviously facilitate electoral fraud on the pretext of "facilitating" the turnout of very small extra groups of voters jeopardizes the certainty of the outcome of the choice made by all other voters. Mass postal voting with an unprecedented low percentage of rejected ballots, voting without identification cards, ballots collected by unofficial collectors - these and other novelties are now proposed to be established as a federal standard."I am also stunned by the suggestion that the authors were using the 1918-1920 flu for analysis of isolation effectiveness.
The data on the handling of the 1918 flu is famously lacking because of the combination of an absence of national health mechanisms and the drive to keep secret the degree to which individual nations were impacted by the flu because of the war. With such a paucity of data, trying to extrapolate what methods were used when we didn't even know what viruses are is asinine, at best.
Given that the Russian author is apparently writing to a purpose, it is no wonder he reaches so far for his "estimate" of the effectiveness of lockdowns. His numbers don't work and the data does not align with the conclusion.
This is propaganda disguised as science.
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