Biden 'Science' Advisor Calls For 4-6 Week Nationwide Lockdown

Shutting down businesses and paying people for lost wages for four to six weeks could help keep the coronavirus pandemic in check and get the economy on track until a vaccine is approved and distributed, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, a coronavirus advisor to Presidential hopeful, Joe Biden.

Osterholm, part of the 13-person COVID-19 advisory panel that Biden announced Monday, told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday that the US had a "big pool of money" to help pay for people's lost wages and get the economy back on track during a lockdown while a vaccine was being rolled out.

This is the same 'scientist' who co-wrote an op-ed with Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari in which the two argued for more restrictive and uniform lockdowns across the nation.

“The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential,” they wrote in the New York Times.“To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.”

“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers, for losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” he said. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks.”

“We could really watch ourselves cruising into the vaccine availability in the first and second quarter of next year while bringing back the economy long before that,” he said Wednesday.

This goes against a surprising report out of JPMorgan, where the bank finds no meaningful curve development differences between countries with and without strong curve intervention.

Coronavirus lockdowns have failed to alter the course of the pandemic but have instead 'destroyed millions of livelihoods', a JP Morgan study has claimed. 

Falling infection rates since lockdowns were lifted suggest that the virus 'likely has its own dynamics' which are 'unrelated to often inconsistent lockdown measures', a report published by the financial services giant said. 

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