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I was the Constitution Party candidate for Wisconsin State Attorney General in 2018 and have since relocated to Minnesota. I am writing in response to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s May 14 online article, “Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down Wisconsin’s stay-at-home order that closed businesses to limit spread of coronavirus.”

In the article, an attorney who also accused the justices of legislating from the bench said, “This action will inevitably lead to more sickness and more death.”

This has become the accusation used against anyone who wanted to end a state lockdown. What the Journal and the attorney suggested in the article was a half-truth at best, and everything implied was false.

The court’s action will likely, or “inevitably” if you prefer, enable more of the healthy citizens of Wisconsin to get the virus and to develop immunity if they choose to leave their homes. Ending the lockdown was in no way a call for people at high risk to expose themselves to the virus and become sick and die. Those people can continue to social distance and isolate themselves if they choose to do so.

Ending the stay-at-home order did not force anyone to do anything, unlike the orders which forced people to leave their jobs and lose their businesses and stay in their homes to stew in their fear.

When most of the people who get the virus are asymptomatic, and most who become sick fully recover, the accusers’ concern that the court’s action would inevitably lead to more deaths is evidence of ignorance at best.

Regardless, ending the lockdowns could not possibly cause as many deaths as the lockdowns in themselves have and will continue to cause. The deaths caused by the lockdowns are real, not some prediction used to maintain the public’s level of fear.

To stop the spread of a virus requires herd immunity of 60 to 70 percent. This is reached when healthy people get the virus and their immune system fights it, preferably in conjunction with a vaccine for high-risk people.

The lockdowns reduced the healthy population the virus could work its way through which would result in herd immunity. This enabled later waves of the virus, which “will inevitably lead to more sickness and death.”

People ordered to leave their jobs and lose their businesses lived under fear and stress which wore down their immune systems, putting them at higher risk for those later waves of the virus which “will inevitably lead to more sickness and death.”

The decisions to lock down, quarantining healthy children and “nonessential” workers, were not “based on science.” The lockdowns were political decisions. The first governors and mayors who ordered lockdowns did so to prevent overburdening medical systems – because they had not prepared for a pandemic as they should have. Then other governors wanted to be seen “doing something,” so those lemmings ordered lockdowns too. They wanted to do something, so they quarantined healthy kids and “nonessential” workers, rather than high-risk people in long-term care facilities.

Not locking down those facilities first “inevitably led to more sickness and death,” resulting in over 80 percent of COVID-19 deaths in Minnesota occurring in those facilities to date.

If we had not gone into lockdowns the virus may have already circulated through the population. Ending the lockdown in Wisconsin has enabled them to move forward toward achieving herd immunity. That is the grownups’ goal in this.

The lockdowns have caused another Depression, and many Americans “will inevitably” become collateral deaths in the “war against COVID-19.” Those are real deaths, and they have already begun with suicides and escalating alcohol and drug use and domestic abuse; and more people “will inevitably” die because of undiagnosed and untreated cancers, heart diseases and other conditions.

We are in a global recession, at least, which the lockdowns in America contributed to, along with the lockdowns implemented by governments around the world. The global economy is shrinking, impacting food trade and distribution and UN organizations are warning that millions of people are beginning to face starvation. Those people “will inevitably” starve to death, after they watch their children starve.

While I usually find defending Republicans a bit distasteful, criticizing Republicans for ending lockdowns which should not have happened in the first place and implying that they are causing deaths is disgusting.

Terry A. Larson

Alexandria, MN