"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.
"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.
"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."
