“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as a primary means of control of this virus,” said Dr. David Nabarro, a Special Envoy of the World Health Organization Director-General on Covid-19 in an interview with Andrew Neil on Spectator TV.
“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted,” continued Nabarro. “But by and large, we’d rather not do it. Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry, for example, in the Caribbean or in the Pacific because people aren’t taking their holidays.”
“Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world because their markets have got dented. Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents in poor families are not able to afford it. This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe, actually.”
Nabarro appealed to all world leaders to “Stop using lockdown as your primary control method, develop better systems for doing it, work together, and learn from each other. Remember, lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never, ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.”
