 COVID lockdown. So the World Health Organization today, or yesterday, I think, released a study that looked at excess deaths across the world, country by country, during the COVID pandemic. And you know, you could link that up to lockdowns. And looking at it, looking at it, you can see an interesting pattern. And that is, from the perspective of deaths per 100,000 from COVID, excess deaths. So here you'd include deaths from COVID, deaths from other diseases that were not treated because of COVID, because of lockdowns, because, oh, FJ, FG, thank you, $50, really appreciate it. Simon, thank you, really appreciate the support from you guys. Thank you. So and it includes maybe the decline in deaths because of less traffic accidents or whatever, because through lockdowns through COVID. But it was interesting to see kind of the countries and the excess death. So for example, what it showed, I think, is that if what you care about is excess death, then the best policy, if you only care about excess death, is the best policy is absolute totalitarian lockdowns. Shut everybody down. Don't let them move. And indeed, you'd expect that, right? If everybody's home, can't leave home, they're literally not going to infect other people. And they're not going to be driving, so no traffic accidents. They're not going to be out and about. And it turns out that if you do that, right? If you do that, then excess deaths go down. So for example, Australia. So amazing results from its lockdowns. If what you care about is just excess deaths. Excess deaths were actually negative. Fewer people died in Australia than would have been expected. China locks everybody down. Not a lot of people are dying in China, right? Maybe, maybe ultimately, they'll be dying of starvation. But so far, not that many people. So authoritarianism in this narrow sense works, right? Of course, it doesn't, because it creates all kinds of other problems and destroys your economy. And it creates depression, it creates all other, all kinds of other things. But in terms of if all you care about is excess deaths. But, and this is interesting, if you're not totalitarian, that is, if you're not just shutting people down, then countries that had lockdowns did worse than countries that didn't have lockdowns. So for example, Sweden originally was criticized heavily for not having lockdowns. They basically told their citizens, we're not locking you down. You know, hear the facts, behave like adults, socially distanced, wear masks, be careful, everything and people. And, you know, Sweden had too many excess deaths because of COVID, because they didn't protect the elderly. They didn't do anything to kind of, they didn't do enough testing of people who were dealing with elderly. So that a lot of people in old age homes, like in the US and like in other places died of COVID. But they had in total fewer excess deaths than many other countries in Europe where the lockdowns were pretty stringent, not as stringent as China's Australia, but pretty stringent. The UK, which originally had very stringent lockdowns, but then as the pandemic progressed, was viewed as one of the looser countries in terms of restrictions, actually again had a lot fewer excess deaths than many other countries in Europe that are a lot more stringent. So it turns out that if, you know, the freedom actually works that not being totalitarian, but not being authoritarian at all, not doing lockdowns at all. And you see the same results out of Florida, out of the United States. Florida didn't lock down, it had a lot, it locked down originally, but then it had a lot looser policies than the rest of the US. California locked down a lot. On the end, Florida and California, when you control for age of population and all these other things, didn't do that definitely. So freedom works. You don't get worse results when you respect freedom. You don't get worse results when you respect people's ability to make choices for themselves, people's ability to pursue values for themselves. And you benefit from the fact, just from purely material perspective, you benefit from the fact that people go to work and they produce and the economy doesn't take a huge hit. So I think the numbers coming out on excess deaths are super interesting and they go against a lot of the ultimate recommendations of the World Health Organization and the US and so on, in that ultimately, lockdowns did not work. Lockdowns in the West, lockdowns that were not totalitarian lockdowns did not work. And of course, if you look at lockdowns in China, they're not gonna work, not in the sense of the well-being of the country. I mean, Shanghai has been shut down for weeks now. There's no production. I just saw video of people locked up in a manufacturing plant in dormitories, where they're producing, I think Mac books for Apple. And these people are fed up and they're breaking through the barricades. And this is in China where they're afraid of repercussions. And they're just, they're not willing to take it anymore. And they're breaking through. And I think generally, I wouldn't expect if we saw some social unrest in China, I wouldn't expect if this started to create some hostility of the population against Xi. I wouldn't be surprised, although I don't expect this, but I wouldn't be surprised that Xi has a hard time in the upcoming meetings of the Chinese Communist Party to get kind of the lifetime appointment that he is seeking, kind of the third another term. I think this is going to cause a lot of problems in China. I think the economy is shot. The economy is in real trouble in China. Not only are they experiencing the same kind of cost of living increases that we're all seeing over here, production is down, jobs are down. The government has already printed a lot of money. Now they're gonna have to print out more money to hand to people so they don't revolt against this. All of this, all of this. Sorry, could you say that again? Oh, see, we stop it. I wasn't talking to you. All of this is just being, is going to be and is and will be a complete and other disaster for China. So no lockdowns. I mean, it's unbelievable what Western governments got away with. It's unbelievable what the Australians let their government do. Australians and New Zealanders, but we should be now prepared to fight these lockdowns and to prevent them from happening in the future. All right. Yeah, I mean, this is not a deliberate strategy. I don't know what the strategy is. So free trade says there are hundreds of cargo ships off the off the Chinese coast that can't load upload unload. Someone suggested it's a deliberate strategy. It's a deliberate strategy to commit suicide. I mean, it's the worst thing possible for China. It's much worse for China than it is for the rest of us. So China is in deep, deep trouble. Xi, I think is in trouble because of what's going on. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. 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