"For every life that was saved in the lockdown, 25 people were killed," US columnist Phil Kerpen has claimed.
This comes after US infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci faced a fierce grilling from Republican lawmakers in his first public appearance before Congress since leaving his White House advisory role in 2022.
During the pandemic, Dr Fauci, who is now retired, became the face of the US Covid-19 response and has been the subject of both praise and criticism.
Speaking to GBN America about the questioning, Kerpen said: "Fauci would walk into the White House task force meetings and say people aren't scared enough. We need to frighten them. We need to scare them.
Phil Kerpen spoke to Bev Turner on GBNA
GBNA
"When government does that, you create enormous additional problems as well as whatever problems the virus itself is causing. We found that lockdowns at best saved up to 16,000 lives, but they killed about 400,000 people.
"We think for every life that was saved, 25 people were killed, which is a pretty catastrophic result for government policies and interventions. We found massive educational and economic harm from school closures and business closures.
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"When we lay it all out in the paper the bottom line is these policies should never be pursued again. The correct policy in a crisis is to keep from the jump, keep people from panicking, don't stoke panic and don't order."
He added: "What happened in Sweden where they had some of the best outcomes in the entire world in terms of all-cause death.
"They had no non-Covid access, which is to say, they had no increase in deaths from other causes in Sweden, while every other country had substantial non-Covid excess, which can be traced to the policy response."
Anthony Fauci was the face of America's response to the pandemicReutersGBNA host Bev Turner: "One of the things that really struck me during that time was this idea that if we were in a genuine pandemic with very high infection fatality rates, the government would not have to be telling people to stay at home.
"They would be coaxing us out of our house houses in a way to live a normal life because we would voluntarily be staying at home if we felt we were a threat.
"So the idea that the messaging had to be so strong and so fearful and so terrifying, if what we saw around us matched what we were being told, we wouldn't have to be receiving that messaging at all."
Phil Kerpen said that the lockdown had a "catastrophic impact"
GBNA
Fauci received some support from Democratic lawmakers on the subcommittee who suggested Republicans were making irresponsible claims.
"Over the past four years you have been personally targeted by extreme narratives of the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the US government's response to it," Democrat Representative Raul Ruiz said.
In a declassified report released last year, US intelligence agencies found no direct evidence that the virus broke out from a Chinese laboratory.
