Publisher's Synopsis
Book updated August 25, 2021 with updated data analysis and reporting on pandemic risks and casualties, the impact on kids, detailed reporting on education impacts, and media coverage.
In COVID-19: Lockdowns on Trial , author and researcher Michael Betrus provides you with a fast-paced journey through the pandemic and the collateral impact of the lockdowns. COVID-19: Lockdowns on Trial walks you through the analysis of the earliest data from the cruise ships and the models that triggered the lockdowns, and how the actual data never added up to the life-altering decisions made by governments around the world, and especially in America. To justify lockdowns as an effective mitigation tactic, those states locking down must well outperform those that did not. See how that did not happen.You will read about:
- Impact of the lockdowns that prompted hundreds of thousands of lockdown-deaths, tens of millions of American kids out of class for over a year and rises in deaths of despair over the lockdowns
- The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and state data with insight from medical studies from the Lancet, medRxiv, JAMA Network, BMJ, Nature and others
- Analysis of actual COVID-19 deaths and how they were counted
- A breakdown of how the media covered the pandemic, driving panic in the American public and keeping politicians from re-opening after the lockdowns, along with apocalyptic predictions that never came true
- Social consequences of the lockdowns: increasing domestic violence, distance learning challenges, suicides
- Over 100 charts, graphs, and tables included illustrating the data
Author Michael Betrus has written over a dozen business books and has conducted hundreds of television, radio and podcast interviews on the pandemic and the lockdowns.
"Michael Betrus has been on the forefront of beating back the media-driven, political and scientific falsehoods that have come to mark so much of this coronavirus chaos in America - and he's done it the old-fashioned way: with determined research and a dogged pursuit of fact-based statistics. As Betrus makes clear, the coronavirus is real. But the response has been highly suspect. Any scared American needs to read this book to understand how to protect without going overboard. As a matter of fact, "Lockdowns On Trial" ought to be on the nightstand of any scientist, health bureaucrat, member of the media or public servant involved in coronavirus mitigation, as a tool to fight the hype and stay a steady, calmer, even constitutional course." - Cheryl Chumley, The Washington Times and best-selling author.
"For a book with more data and evidence, in addition to a longer perspective on how free societies deal with pandemics, I would suggest Lockdowns on Trial by Michael Betrus. The prose is elegant and mercifully calm. He cites a huge amount of the literature showing a lack of any correlation between lockdown policies and disease mitigation. I find this book highly credible in addition to readable, with mercifully little in the way of politicized argumentation. Other issues covered here: media bias, censorship, masks and their (lack of) effectiveness, the complete absence of evidence of some relationship between lockdowns and disease outcomes. The chapters on suicides, drug overdoses, depression, learning loss, missed treatments, weight gain, business closures, and more terrible things, are enormously depressing and hard to read. Indeed, I'm hard-pressed to think of a single issue of note not covered in this book. - Jeffrey Tucker, American Institute of Economic Research book review, April 15, 2021.
