 An October 30, 2025, study on COVID-19 lockdowns and school closures was published in Health Affairs Scholar.…){kind=link}
By Michael J. Talmo December 8, 2025 (published in State of the Nation)
An October 30, 2025, study on COVID-19 lockdowns and school closures was published in Health Affairs Scholar. It’s a sister publication of Health Affairs of Oxford University, which is one of the most respected peer-reviewed journals in the world and is referred to as the “bible of health policy.”
The title of the study is “The unintended health effects of US COVID-19 lockdowns: a systematic review.” It found that the lockdowns “had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.” It also documented the severe damage that the lockdowns did to people’s physical and mental health. However, as stated in the title, this wasn’t just a single study. It was a systematic review, which is a painstaking, thorough analysis of all the peer-reviewed literature on a particular topic. It then selects the best studies and synthesizes them into a single study. A systematic review is considered the gold standard in science, the highest level of evidence, because it eliminates bias and looks at the big picture.
The research team reported that their study was “the first to systematically qualify the health impacts of lockdowns and school closures in the United States.” They found that the lockdowns were implemented based on “very low quality” evidence regarding their effectiveness and “that the true infection risk was far lower than early, often unreliable simulation models suggested” (note 59 at the end of this quote references Neil Ferguson’s inaccurate COVID-19 computer modeling). Inaccuracy and flagrant error are standard fare for all computer modeling, as explained here and especially here.
The research team concluded that lockdowns and school closures in the US “contributed to significant adverse health effects” and were “consistent with studies conducted outside the United States.” All of these studies documented increases in anxiety, depression, obesity, food insecurity, unemployment, and overall economic instability. They also emphasized that such measures “may have inadvertently violated the foundational principles of public health ethics that emphasize justice, equity, and protection of vulnerable populations.” The research team also called for reflection on what level of infectious disease justifies restricting “access to education and the right to work, which are considered inalienable human rights directly linked to health and well-being.”
The entire study can be read here.