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Notes -
Valids points, and in no way am I saying this paper is perfect or irrefutable.
But I will say;
Control for mainstream/publication bias. The (scientific/)establishment consensus was that NPI's were effective. This was enforced with strong Big-Tech state colluded censorship.
Most if not all the papers that speak positively about lockdowns have similar shortcomings. The only difference is they don't get much if any scrutiny at all. You won't find 50 links "debunking" a popular just as flawed meta analysis as the one I linked.
I think mechanistically even bereft of any empirical analysis, the costs of lockdowns are far too much relative to their benefit. This can be easily argued for. see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.1976051?journalCode=cijb20
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