That's what made the lockdown so infuriating: anyone with a brain knew it was a useless gesture and would devastate society

Ed Driscoll, on InstaPundit:

THIS MUST HAVE BEEN PAINFUL FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE TO PUBLISH: ‘The lockdowns were never really effective:’ New research shows COVID stay-at-home orders did more harm than good.

Sumbul Siddiqui remembers every detail about the morning of March 10, 2020. She remembers feeling anxious as she walked into a Somerville conference room packed with masked-up mayors from around Boston. She remembers grim-looking doctors from Italy appearing on a big screen, describing the horrors of people collapsing and dying from a mysterious respiratory illness.

After that, Siddiqui, then mayor of Cambridge, did what she never imagined she would have to do: She called top city administrators and the school superintendent to begin the process of shutting down every school and municipal building in the state’s fourth-largest city.

“We all left that meeting terrified,” she said. “I remember saying, ‘OK, we have to shut things down. We have to stop the spread. I don’t want people to die.’”

Five years later, Siddiqui is still torn about the implications of that decision. On that same day, Governor Charlie Baker declared a state of emergency in Massachusetts and, within days, suspended in-person learning at public and private schools and banned on-site dining at bars and restaurants across the state.

Knowing what we know now, she wonders, did public officials react appropriately? Did they adequately consider the trade-offs among competing values, including the devastating costs of closing schools, businesses, and places of worship?

No. Next questions?

And the masks, “social distancing”, school lockdowns and even the touted vaccines. We knew, and the people who imposed all that also knew; they did it anyway.