A Supreme Court judge has labeled the avalanche of covid lockdown measures imposed across America as one of “the greatest breaches of civil liberties in this country’s peacetime history.”
Judge Neil Gorsuch delivered a staggering overview of the restrictions imposed by executive officials at both the state and federal levels.
In a statement written as part of a Supreme Court case on Title 42, Gorsuch said emergency decrees have been issued “on a breathtaking scale” during the pandemic.
“Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders and forced people to stay at home. They closed businesses and schools, public and private,” he wrote.
“They closed churches while allowing casinos and other favored businesses to continue. They threatened offenders with not only civil but also criminal sanctions.’
Judge Neil Gorsuch delivered a staggering overview of the restrictions imposed by executive officials at both the state and federal levels
Many businesses were forced to close as officials tried to stop the spread of covid — but the extreme measures amounted to some of the “biggest civil liberties violations” in U.S. history, a Supreme Court judge said. Pictured: A closed business in New York City
Justice Gorsuch also cited vaccine mandates and threats of firing for workers who refused the jab
The judge, who was nominated to the Supreme Court by Donald Trump in 2017, gave examples of how authorities monitored church parking lots, registered license plates and issued warnings that attendance at even field services meets all state social distancing and hygiene requirements . may amount to criminal conduct’.
He explained how “federal executive officials also got in the act” through vaccine mandates, including threats of firing for employees and service members who refused.
“Along the way, it seems that federal officials have been pressuring social media companies to withhold information about pandemic policies they disagreed with,” Gorsuch added.
The emergency decree was issued “at breakneck speed” while Congress and state legislatures “were too often silent.”
The statement was made as the Supreme Court rejected a case brought by Republican states seeking to enforce Title 42 public health policies that allowed the US to deny asylum seekers during the pandemic.
Schools were also closed across the country, hurting children’s education. Pictured: A student takes an online class from home in Miami, Florida, USA on Thursday, September 3, 2020
A closed school building in New York City on November 19, 2020
Judges said the case was moot because Title 42 would expire anyway after the Biden administration announced that the public health emergency would end on May 11.
Referring to the wider issue of strict lockdown policies during the pandemic, Gorsuch added: ‘No doubt many lessons can be learned from this chapter in our history, and hopefully serious efforts will be made to study it.
‘One lesson could be: fear and the desire for security are strong forces. They can lead to a cry for action – almost any action – as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat.
“A leader or an expert who claims he can solve anything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove to be an irresistible force.”
He concluded: “Make no mistake: bold action by the executive is sometimes necessary and appropriate. But when emergency decrees promise to solve some problems, they threaten to generate others.
“And ruling by an indefinite emergency order risks leaving us all with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties that are just as hollow.”
The Supreme Court judge called vaccine mandates in his criticism of lockdown measures “one of the greatest invasions of civil liberties in the nation’s history.”
Some studies have questioned whether the benefits of strict lockdown measures outweigh the drawbacks
Several studies have questioned the effectiveness of lockdown in the US and internationally, indicating that in some cases the negative impacts outweighed the positives.
An assessment by an international team of economists found that draconian closures have reduced Covid mortality in the UK, US and Europe by just 3 percent in 2020.
The experts, from Johns Hopkins University in the US, Lund University in Sweden and the Danish think tank the Center for Political Studies, said this equates to 6,000 fewer deaths in Europe and 4,000 fewer in the US.
But official data in the US has shown that the country has suffered nearly 300,000 more deaths than usual in more than two years of the pandemic, which cannot be attributed to Covid.
Dr. Coady Wing, a health policy expert from Indiana University, told DailyMail.com that these pandemic mandates were what kept people in need of care away from the doctor’s office the most — potentially costing thousands of lives.