Yesterday, Professor Neil Ferguson told the Science and Technology Select Committee in the House of Commons that if the Government had locked down a week earlier, the death toll would be less than half what it is now.
The epidemic was doubling every three to four days before lockdown interventions were introduced.
So, had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half.
But where’s the evidence that the number of people becoming infected was “doubling every three to four days” in the week running up to lockdown?
Numerous analyses – the latest by Simon Wood, a Professor at Bristol University, entitled “Did COVID-19 infections decline before UK lockdown?” – suggest the R number was <1 before the lockdown was imposed. Here’s one of Professor Wood’s graphs, showing the daily infection rate in the lead up to and immediately after lockdown (the red line).
You can read more about Professor Wood’s paper in this blog post by Fraser Nelson.
The same conclusion was reached by Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford, who has long maintained that infections peaked shortly after the Government introduced a raft of social distancing measures on March 16th and were declining by the time the lockdown was imposed on March 23rd. He told the Mail:
The peak of deaths occurred on April 8th, and if you understand that then you work backwards to find the peak of infections.
That would be 21 days before then, right before the point of lockdown.
Far from imposing the lockdown a week earlier, these data suggest it wasn’t necessary to impose it at all. Infections were falling before it was introduced and would have continued to fall, just as they did after peaking in those countries that didn’t impose a lockdown – like Sweden and Belarus – as well as those US states that avoided locking down. As numerous analysts have pointed out, the trajectory of the pandemic has followed almost exactly the same pattern in every country it’s afflicted, regardless of whether or not that country locked down, when it locked down or the severity of the lockdown it imposed.
The reason the media has seized on Neil Ferguson’s statement is because it fits the narrative that the UK’s high Covid death toll is due to Boris Johnson’s “dither and delay” at the beginning of the crisis. This was the narrative set in stone by a Sunday Times article on May 23rd entitled: “22 days of dither and delay on coronavirus that cost thousands of British lives.” A key plank of that case is that the scientists advising the Government were urging the Prime Minister to impose a lockdown long before he did and if only he’d listened to them – to epidemiologists like Professor Ferguson – many unnecessary deaths could have been prevented.
But if you go through the minutes of the SAGE meetings immediately preceding the lockdown decision, there isn’t any evidence that the scientific attendees were urging the Government to impose more severe social distancing measures.
As I’ve blogged about before, the former barrister Paul Chaplin has gone through the SAGE minutes in a lengthy blog post and concluded that placing the entire country under virtual house arrest was not something the Government did at the behest of its scientific advisors. His analysis is compelling.
Chaplin finds plenty of evidence in the minutes that various different containment measures were discussed by SAGE, but at no point before March 23rd did the group recommend the quarantining of the whole population. The measures SAGE considered were home isolation of symptomatic individuals, the isolation of everyone in a symptomatic individual’s household for 14 days and the cocooning of those over 70 and those with underlying health conditions – the three measures introduced by the Government on March 16th.
At no point did SAGE discuss anything resembling a full lockdown. Indeed, SAGE noted at a meeting on March 10th that banning public gatherings would have little effect since most viral transmission occurred in confined spaces, such as within households.
The last SAGE meeting before the lockdown was on March 18th where it was noted that the impact of the social distancing measures introduced thus far would not be known for two or three weeks. The attendees did not at that stage know whether those measures would be sufficient to prevent the NHS’s critical care capacity being overwhelmed and in the absence of more data could not offer any advice on whether additional measures – such as closing bars, restaurants and entertainment centres, and limiting use of indoor workplaces – would be necessary. The only further measure SAGE recommended at that meeting was closing schools.
SAGE advises that the measures already announced should have a significant effect, provided compliance rates are good and in line with the assumptions. Additional measures will be needed if compliance rates are low.
Minutes of the 17th SAGE meeting on COVID-19, March 18th 2020
The attendees discussed locking down London but no conclusion was reached. However, they did say that if additional measures were going to be necessary, it would be better to bring them in sooner rather than later. According to the minutes: “If the interventions are required, it would be better to act early.”
In other words, Boris Johnson and his advisors were not following “the science” when they took the decision to lock down the country on March 23rd – they weren’t acting on any specific recommendations by SAGE. Nor can the Government claim this is one of the options that was discussed at SAGE meetings and it was basing its decision, in part, on SAGE’s analysis of the impact of a full lockdown. That option was not discussed at any of the meetings before March 23rd.
This dovetails with Christopher Snowdon’s analysis of the decision-making in the period leading up to March 23rd published in The Critic on May 28th, although Snowdon only had access to the broad summaries of the SAGE meetings that the Government has released at that point, not the more detailed minutes that were released on May 28th as a result of Simon Dolan’s lawsuit.
Snowdon concluded that the Government’s scientific advisors never explicitly recommended a lockdown; on the contrary, at various stages they recommended against it.
Snowdon says that even Neil Ferguson’s March 16th paper, predicting 510,000 Covid deaths if the Government took no measures to stop the spread of the virus and 250,000 if it stuck with its “mitigation” strategy, stopped short of recommending a full lockdown:
Contrary to popular belief, the infamous study did not call for a full lockdown, nor did it model the effects of a full lockdown. It looked at school closures, social distancing and household quarantine for suspected cases and those living with them. It concluded that the greatest benefit would come from a combination of social distancing and household quarantine, with further benefits likely to come from closing schools, although it conceded that school closures would prevent many people from working.
There is no doubt that Ferguson’s model was impactful. It suggested that hundreds of thousands of people would die from COVID-19 if the Government continued to pursue a policy of mitigation. This put containment back on the table and gave legitimacy to more coercive action from Government, but the measures it recommended did not amount to a full lockdown. Its social distancing recommendations were far from trivial and yet they seem modest after nine weeks of genuine lockdown (the authors anticipated most people still going to work, for example). The only time Ferguson and colleagues use the word “lockdown” in the text is when they are making a distinction between their proposals and an actual lockdown. They implicitly dismiss a lockdown as being too extreme for the UK, saying that their favoured policies are “predicted to have the largest impact, short of a complete lockdown which additionally prevents people going to work”.
Snowdon’s conclusion is remarkably similar to Chaplin’s:
The founding myth of the lockdown is almost the opposite of the truth. Science did not triumph over politics on March 23rd. It would be more accurate to say that the strategy which preceded the lockdown, unpopular though it now is, was based on science whereas the decision to go into lockdown was political.
I emailed Christopher Snowdon when I blogged about this before to see if he’d had a chance to look at the SAGE minutes and he got back to me to say he had and they did indeed corroborate his analysis:
The minutes fully support what I wrote in The Critic. The social distancing measures discussed by SAGE – and modelled separately by Neil Ferguson et al. and John Edmunds et al. – are not well described in the documents, but it is clear that they are more moderate than the lockdown that was introduced on March 23rd. Even at the late stage of mid-March, SAGE was never seriously entertaining a full lockdown, nor did the attendees expect their more modest measures to be in place for more than 12 weeks. To claim otherwise is to rewrite history.
A reader challenged this analysis, claiming that if you look at the minutes from SAGE 18, the meeting which took place on March 23rd, the same day the full lockdown was imposed, it’s clear that the Government was “following the science”.
I took a look and don’t agree. As with the meeting of March 18th, there’s more stuff about not yet being able to assess the impact of the social distancing measures announced on March 16th, not much about them being insufficient: “SAGE noted that social distancing behaviours have been adopted by many but there is uncertainty whether they are being observed at the level required to bring the epidemic within NHS capacity.” However, there is some talk of the effectiveness of those measures: “Footfall in London transport hubs reduced by 80-90% over the weekend, but in retail and food outlets has decreased by a smaller margin.”
There is some other interesting stuff in there, however. For one thing, the attendees seem quite worried about the negative impact on public health of the measures already introduced. “Actuarial analysis is required to estimate deaths caused indirectly by COVID-19, including those caused by the social interventions,” says one of the minutes. (Is this the ONS data that was released on June 5th analysing excess deaths not involving coronavirus?) Another says: “Given the clear links between poverty and long-term ill health, health impacts associated with the economic consequences of interventions also need to be investigated.” And: “In due course, analysis of the effects of the interventions on other causes of death should be undertaken.”
There’s also some evidence that it was beginning to dawn on SAGE that COVID-19 is a predominantly nosocomial disease. There’s a reference to “nosocomial hospital clusters” and one of the action points is “NERVTAG and DSTL to investigate spread of COVID-19 in hospitals”.
Interestingly, the minutes also say that any restrictions on travel into the country “would have a negligible effect on spread”.
And that last minute points to one of the major shortcomings of the scientific advice the Government has received during this crisis. That is, at no point during the beginning of the pandemic did any of the members of the official scientific committees recommend that Britain introduce port-of-entry screening, when it could have actually been effective (unlike now).
Readers of this site will recall my post on May 9th pointing out that the Newly Emerging Respiratory Virus Advisory Group (NERVTAG) considered screening passengers arriving from Wuhan at a meeting on January 13th chaired by Peter Horby, an Oxford professor with links to the World Health Organisation. This is the same Peter Horby who has criticised the Government for easing the lockdown too soon. At this point, seven other countries had introduced temperature screening at airports for visitors from Wuhan. However, the NERVTAG recommendation was that there would be no point in doing this if exit screening at Wuhan airports was already taking place, although they had no evidence it was.
At the next NERVTAG meeting on January 21st, this one attended by Chris Witty and his deputy Jonathan Van-Tam, as well as Professor Neil Ferguson, the boffins were asked to reconsider the question. But again they passed the buck to the Chinese authorities. By now, human-to-human transmission had been confirmed. Nonetheless, NERVTAG’s response was the same.
Neil Ferguson noted that from the modelling perspective, with exit screening in place in China, effectiveness of port-of-entry screening in the UK would be low and potentially only detect those who were not sick before boarding but became sick during the flight. NERVTAG felt there was a lack of clarity on the exit screening process in Wuhan, although it was thought that this process would be robust, and statements had been released by Chinese authorities about stopping febrile passengers from travelling. However, as noted, there were no data on the implementation of this programme.
Minutes of the NERVTAG Wuhan Novel Coronavirus Second Meeting: January 21st 2020
So rather than recommend port-of-entry screening, the assembled brains at NERVTAG decided to trust to the Chinese authorities to screen people leaving the country.
That may count as one of the biggest blunders the British Government and its scientific advisers – notably Professor Ferguson – made. It’s a shame that none of the MPs questioning the Imperial Professor yesterday appeared to be aware of any of this. If they were, they could have pointed out that he was present at the meetings in January when a measure was discussed that really might have saved lives and he recommended against it. Those countries that started screening airline passengers arriving from Wuhan in early January have some of the lowest Covid death tolls of anywhere in the world – Hong Kong (four deaths), Taiwan (7), Singapore (25), Malaysia (118), Thailand (58) and Vietnam (0).
Yesterday, Channel 4 News added its 10 cents to the case against Boris, bringing us what its Health and Social Care Correspondent Victoria Macdonald called an “exclusive”. This was the revelation that a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M), Professor Steve Riley, produced a paper on March 9th saying that unless the Government imposed a full lockdown 1.7 million Britons would die over the next 18 months.
Macdonald acknowledged that she didn’t know if this paper had been circulated to SAGE, let alone shown to anyone in the Government, so it’s hardly a smoking gun.
But if it was circulated, the Government would have been right to dismiss it.
I haven’t seen Professor Riley’s paper, but assuming he was estimating that 80% of the country would be infected over an 18-month period, that means 53,600,000 would become infected. For that to result in 1.7 million deaths – the headline figure in the Channel 4 News report – the virus would have to have an infection fatality rate of >3.2% – higher, even, than the WHO’s initial estimate. If we assume the IFR Professor Riley was working with was 3.25%, that’s nearly 13 times the CDC’s current best estimate of the IFR, which is ~0.26%.
I’m amazed Professor Riley is sharing this forecast with Channel 4 News – if, indeed, that’s how Macdonald got her hands on it. If I was the author of that paper, I’d bury it in a nuclear waste facility at the bottom of the North Sea.
So to summarise:
- Had Boris imposed the lockdown a week earlier it wouldn’t have made any difference to the subsequent Covid death toll since the R number was already falling by the time the lockdown was imposed. Neil Ferguson’s claim that infections were doubling every three or four days in the week leading up to the lockdown is evidence-free political point-scoring.
- Nearly every robust comparative analysis of the rise and fall of the disease in different countries across the world has come to the same conclusion: the pattern is unaffected by whether or not a country imposed a full lockdown, when it imposed it, or how severe it was.
- There is no evidence that the Government’s scientific advisors, acting in their official capacity as members of SAGE and its subgroups, advised the Government to impose a full lockdown before March 23rd.
- The one intervention the Government could have made that really might have saved lives would have been to introduce port-of-entry screening in January. That’s something Neil Ferguson explicitly warned against, preferring to rely on a Communist dictatorship to ensure the safety of the British people.
Round-Up
And on to the round-up of all the stories I’ve noticed, or which have been been brought to my attention, in the last 24 hours:
- ‘Black Lives Matter is now a political party‘ – Tucker Carlson persuasively argues that Black Lives Matter is a political party, perhaps the most powerful one in America at the moment
- ‘UK orchestras may not survive coronavirus pandemic, conductors warn‘ – Sir Simon Rattle and Sir Mark Elder write open letter to the Guardian about challenges musicians face
- ‘Bitcoin Doesn’t Take Sides: Why Apolitical Solutions Are the Internet’s Future‘ – Interesting take by Preston Byrne
- ‘Lockdown was unnecessary, claims German virologist‘ – Professor Hendrik Streeck predicts there will be no second wave
- ‘UK economy is world’s biggest Covid-19 casualty, OECD warns‘ – The Telegraph has an alarming report about just how great the damage done by the lockdown is likely to be
- ‘Why aren’t broadcasters scrutinising Neil Ferguson’s claims?‘ – Ross Clark in the Spectator poses an excellent question
- ‘Towards herd immunity? New data suggests millions of Russians may have Covid-19 antibodies‘ – Interesting report in Russia Today – but it is RT, so treat with caution
Small Businesses That Have Reopened
A few weeks ago, Lockdown Sceptics launched a searchable directory of open businesses across the UK. The idea is to celebrate those retail and hospitality businesses that have reopened, as well as help people find out what has opened in their area. But we need your help to build it, so we’ve created a form you can fill out to tell us about those businesses that have opened near you. Please visit the page and let us know about those brave folk who are doing their bit to get our country back on its feet.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. It takes me many hours every day, which doesn’t leave much time for other work. If you feel like donating, however small the amount, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in future updates, email me here.
And Finally…
Slightly off topic and not funny, but this letter by an anonymous history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, taking issue with some of the claims made by the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the uncritical way in which they’re accepted and regurgitated by American universities, is a must-read. No doubt as soon as his identity is discovered he will be subject to a mobbing and may very well lose his job.
If you want to see a growing list of all those who’ve suffered catastrophic career damage for challenging the orthodoxies of the BLM movement, or because they haven’t genuflected before it with sufficient piety, or because they’re married to someone who’s criticised it (not making that up), click here. It’s up to 21 so far, but to borrow a phrase from Neil Ferguson, it’s growing exponentially. And if you want to donate to the Free Speech Union, which has already gone to bat for one of these people (Stuart Peters, the Manx Radio presenter suspended for questioning the concept of “white privilege”), click here.
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If this study https://virological.org/t/preliminary-analysis-of-sars-cov-2-importation-establishment-of-uk-transmission-lineages/507
(referred to in a James Gallagher article on the BBC site today) is to be believed, early quarantining of arrivals from Wuhan would have made no difference to the spread, as almost all the UK cases came from Italy? Spain and France.
I don’t see how you could stop the virus getting into a country like our’s. Perhaps you could do that in a country as small and remote as New Zealand, but not here. Protect the vulnerable and then let the virus do whatever it does and get population immunity. Then back to normal. No lockdown, no quaratining arrivals. And wasn’t all that obvious from the start?
Indeed, which is why I get so annoyed when I see how smug Jacinda Arden is about ‘eradicating’ the virus in New Zealand, which is probably on of the most geographically remote countries there is and which has more sheep than people, and then the lockdownistas insist that we have to copy NZ and totally eradicate the virus, despite the fact that the UK is a global transport hub and incredibly densely populated.
I am aware that there are Asian countries which are also densely populated and big transport hubs who have managed the virus far better than the UK has but I wonder whether that theory about Asian societies having more cross-immunity from other coronaviruses (e.g. SARS, MERS) has played a part in that. There definitely seems to be an enormous disparity between how the virus has affected the West and the East.
Yes. I agree. Take Japan – they didn’t go full lockdown. They have a huge aged population and lots of young & old households. They have a very low incidence of the disease, despite all their economic and travel contacts with China. There has to be some reason.
Taiwan, Japan and Vietnam have proven – beyond reasonable doubt – that lockdowns didn’t work. A flight ban would have, only if fully enforced with no exceptions. But Boris petrified of the Remainers citing that as proof of his isolationist tendency in the aftermath of Brexit. And that, in a nutshell, is why we are where we are.
We only needed a sensible quarantine policy for new arrivals.
Maybe they just proved that not lying about Covid caused deaths results in fewer numbers of covid caused deaths.
There is: they quarantined all new arrivals to Japan.
… and to Taiwan.
That’s because they all wear masks and whilst the government didn’t mandate lockdown as strictly the people there are more conscientious and reduce they travel voluntarily.
Take a look at the citymapper mobility index. Yes that’s Tokyo, Japan at the top of the list as having the fewest people moving:
https://citymapper.com/cmi
Masks + less travel = less severe outbreak. Simple really.
I think people here are pretty “conscientious” too. It hasn’t worked out that well though, has it?
MERS is mostly in the middle east (you quite often catch it directly from your camel) although they did have an outbreak in South Korea.
SARS1 however will likely give a lot of cross-immunity to SARS2, and there is a possibility that there was more exposure to that in Asia, although it’s likely it was also a global pandemic.
Taiwan are constantly on the lookout for nasty new viruses coming out of China and were aware of it (and telling the WHO who were ignoring them) long before anyone else was. If anyone knows how to actually stop one of these things spreading right at the start it’s them.
But I should add that there are going to be lots of other similar coronaviruses going around that haven’t been specifically identified. Unless a lot of people start dying you don’t notice these things.
The Singapore (and California) study both found cross-reactivity of T cells with SARS2 in about half of people tried at random which would have come from some mix of known and unknown coronaviruses.
So the level of cross-immunity might well be different in different places.
‘you quite often catch it directly from your camel’
Like some STDs, then.
Born in Japan, I live in HK, lived-worked in Asia 40+ years. We’ve also done well in HK, with “Lockdown Lite”. Reasons (my take): We in HK have been very aware of viruses since SARS (2002). Wearing masks and disinfecting public places has continued widely since then. When we heard of Wuhan virus, we quickly upped the mask-wearing, distancing and disinfecting, even before the gov’t took action Government ignored WHO advice and closed borders with mainland. Then with other countries. Japan: They don’t shake hands (they bow, when they meet), they don’t live in multi-generation households (as Italy). I believe this is big reason for their low rates of infection. We never locked down like the UK: only closed bars and gyms and only for a short time. Closed schools. Tested and tracked like crazy. Result: only four deaths, and pretty much zero new cases. We’re always ignored when people look around how well places are doing, I guess because we’re China adjacent, and China = bad these days…. People ought to study how we did it. There’s lessons to learn. By the way, I note no hint of second wave anywhere. (And, btw, the NZ story is silly. It’s… Read more »
Sorry to disagree but Japanese families more often than not do live in multi-generational households, perhaps not so much in the big cities, but often out in the countryside. It
s the eldest childs (plus family of eldest child) responsibility to live with parents and care for them. I (as wife of eldest son) would have had to live with his parents..unfortunately they died young..if we were still over there we would have had his grandmother live with us (as eldest son of eldest son it would have been his responsibility to care for her). I suspect diet, vitamin levels and less obesity have more to do with it.plus honest recording of deaths
maybe the UK is overcounting to justify the lockdown??
And presumably New Zealand has developed no immunity and will forever be looking over their shoulder, waiting for the virus to strike.
I wish you were our PM here in bankrupt NZ. All evidence seems to show that our death rate overall would be the same if borders had stayed open. A full lockdown raises deaths.
The bug probably went away here as 60% had cross immunity and it was summer. If open borders kill why has Belarus not had a holocaust. No extensive serological testing has been done to show that the remaining 40% have not had it.
Very obvious :o)
Yes, as a kiwi and serf suffering under Comrade Ardern’s rule I am very sceptical of travel bans, particularly in economy’s like ours where tourism is 15% of GDP. Surely protection of the elderly and voluntary social distancing is enough?
The IFR of C19 is the same as the flu and itonly kills very sick 80 year olds. All the actual evidence shows it goes away at same rate even with no travel ban as in Belarus etc.
In Scotland we suffer under comrade Sturgeon, at least for you Jacinda is a bit easier on the eye. But I am still royally sick of the Graunitariat touting Ahern as some kind of woke visionary entirely responsible for NZ “beating” covid 19. All the while they are silent about the fascist commander in chief next door, who achieved identical results. Fact is neither had anything to do it, NZ and Oz’s success comes wholly from their geographical isolation, in a Hemisphere opposite to China’s.
because it was summer and everyone’s vit D levels were high. The opposite in the northern hemispehere
Exactly. That’s what Whitty and Vallance were recommending – till the baying MSM took over.
You cannot stop a virus unless you lock people up forever. We need to learn to live with it.
Most people will get over it quickly.
You mean live life anyway as living is risky?
Once you re born only 1 thing is certain – you will at some point die.
Trick is to enjoy to the fullest the time inbetween and make the most of it no matter how short it is.
Once a virus has got into the population, you can’t control it. The chance for that has passed.
I think your comment sums it up. Travel bans do not work once the bug is in.
Belarus has had only 250 C-19 deaths with 10 million people (from 50,000 “reported cases”) yet has had no border shut down. In New Zealand, with five million people, 500 die every year from the flu. No evidence has emerged that the Belarus figures are incorrect.
In other words, therefore, C-19 is less dangerous than the flu. If not named, C-19 would probably not have been noticed.
The maths shows, IMHO, why bans do not work. Bans do not work as it is impossible to “trace” those infected by carriers of an airborne, respiratory virus that starts infecting three days after you get it. Oh – what were the names of those 200 people at the supermarket? In addition 80% of carriers are asymptomatic.
The UK ONS figures indicate that 25% of “C19 deaths” had dementia and a similar percentage was over 86 years of age… A travel ban is not needed as the economic damage is too high given the very low risk of death and very high average age of death. C19 does not scare me.
It seems odd to be looking at Belarus as your paradigm. A dictatorship with the same man in power for 25 years and you’re highlighting how reliable their data is? North Korea is doing really well too.
Also Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine have unilaterally closed the border to Belarus (not that that is easy to enforce). They aren’t releasing these depsite the fact they are opening to other countries around them.
Clearly those governments have less confidence in the Belarusian approach than you – but no doubt you feel better informed.
The less dangerous than the flu trope is ridiculous. The worst flu year in recent years 2014/15 for the UK led to just under 30,000 deaths. We’ve already surpassed that – and what percentage of the population do you think as contracted Covid-19?
It should’ve been stopped at the borders with proactive action but now it needs to be managed with HK, Singpaore, Japan-like precision. Track and trace properly, reduce movement and masks for all.
Well, there have been other flu seasons that were a lot worse than 2014 if you go back a little further. On the evidence so far the present “pandemic” is not orders of magnitude more serious than others in living memory, yet the reaction to it has been unprecedented in the damage it has caused. I think the burden of proof has to be on those who think this virus merits the reaction it has provoked.
I can’t see much correlation between measures taken by various governments and outcomes, beyond those rare cases like NZ who closed their borders and who will need to remain closed forever, and beyond how well the vulnerable were protected as opposed to sent home to infect other vulnerable people.
Not orders of magnitude, but the highest excess mortality since 1918/19. That in a population of which only about 6% have experienced the pathogen in the community. Even if one accepts herd immunity on about 25% (perhaps due to some cross immunity from other past corona virus infections), then the current epidemic is really only about a quarter through. I doubt if it was now left to run its course we would see 4x as many deaths (since we will now protect the most vulnerable much better with testing and quarantine of nursing home residents). But the situation is not really a great one. One of the differences with past influenza epidemics is that we know that there is some previous immunity to infection severity conferred by past influenza infections. Only during a shift in [H]aemagglutinin or [N]euraminidase type (e.g. to H1N1 for swine flu) do things get really squeaky bum time. That does not appear to be true here, but the jury is still out. Most people seem to argue immunity based on their preconceptions of what they want for policy decisions. A long-term study (20 yrs) of the four other endemic coronaviruses in circulation gave a typical… Read more »
“Most people seem to argue immunity based on their preconceptions of what they want for policy decisions.”
I’m sure there’s some truth in that, as it’s natural to want to believe that your preferred course of action will turn out to have less bad consequences than predicted.
But I think a lot of people have different ideas about what is important and what they are prepared to sacrifice, and what they think a country should be prepared to sacrifice, to save a certain number of lives. If this virus had been around since the beginning of time, I tend to think we’d not be taking the approach we are now taking.
Fair point. But what people forget is that very early in the epidemic, this new coronavirus virus could have been that deadly combination of common cold transmissible, but SARS-CoV-1 pathogenic (it is very similar genetically). Faced with that gravity, intervention was absolutely necessary. Now a few months on, SARS-CoV-2 looks much less pathogenic (thank goodness!), but it may well become the fifth circulating endemic coronavirus. For some, it’s definitely more than a cold. For others its nothing more than a modest or even asymptomatic immune challenge. For the other four coronaviruses, there is no lasting immunity, and time between reinfections about 30 months. We’re not even a quarter of the way through that cycle yet. Some perspective is needed. Witty has tried to provide that (if people notice). If this virus had been around forever (like the other four viruses), then we definitely would not be acting as we are now – but much of this really is hindsight (OK only a couple of months but it is very early days). In three years time, we might have become comfortable living with the new virus, are able to manage infections better and protect the vulnerable with either passive immunity… Read more »
Tell that to Matt and Boris!
I was just having a rant about Professor Doom on yesterdays thread so narcissisticly thought I might as well pull it in here:
“Ferguson is as thick as two very short planks.
It’s evident in every absurd statement or prediction that he makes.
It’s not unusual for the odd thicko to make waves in academia but it is odd to do it in a place that has (had?) the prestige of Imperial.
I can only assume that he is a grant winning machine because he sure isn’t there for his insight.
From a comment yesterday and Kendrick has also indicated that this is the case
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2015/06/18/conflict-of-interest-not-just-about-money/
See, this is the problem when you introduce fees into academia and turn them essentially into businesses. You need to balance the books and need more investment to keep attracting students into paying those fees.
When this happens you end up with bad scientists with bad science doing dubious work for external “donors” but hey! They pays the bills!
This is all aside. Ferguson is clearly a fool and the government should never have had him anywhere near Sage.”
At least those of us in the arts can’t influence government policy that much. (In the short term anyway – I apologise profusely for intersectionality)
Scientists are now far too academicised rather than professionalised. Especially when you’re getting yor advisors directly from academia rather than industry.
The problem is that the do nothing model is merely an equation and to argue against it would require disproving the equation.
You could say that 100% of the population would never get infected and the simple counter would be “only if something was done”.
Perhaps this is why Ferguson has been around for so long because it’s just not possible to argue against an equation that has no real meaning in reality.
Exactly. It has echoes of the classic, “But, you can’t prove God ISN’T real….”
One equation to remember regarding science:
observation:theory::10,000:1
As Bill Gates’ viceroy, he is considered a ‘sage’ in equal measure by Imperial and the Johnson regime
NF funded by GAVI and Gates. Could explain a lot.
His grant winning machine is called Bill Gates
Great to hear Toby carpet-bomb Nick Ferrari with evidence and facts on LBC radio this am.
Unfortunately NF clearly remains Lockdown +ve, and I think the problem will be that these folk are not receptive to a message which changes the narrative from one of self-sacrifice ‘we’re all in it together’ to ‘we got this completely wrong’.
“We got this completely wrong. Wrecked our economy. Lopped off 11% of GDP puts millions out of work. Destroyed countless businesses. Condemned cancer patient to death. Hastened the lonely death of many elderly people deprived of contact with their family. And we still ended up with more deaths per million that Sweden or Japan. ” That’s a difficult message isn’t?
The truth can set you free – but it might be painful.
Not surprising from a station that’s just sacked Farage for telling the truth about Black Lives Matter.
Great stuff again Toby. But sadly there is zero cut-through into the MSM.
Virtually all of today’s news leads with positive reaction Boris’ “bubble” policy and the chapter and verse reproduction of Ferguson’s latest doubling down bullshit.
The 5 minutes of so I can bear of the Today programme this morning had Nick Robinson interviewing the Labour health guy – Ashworth about Labours attitude to school closures.
His solution by the way was to open up unused civic facilities as temporary educational facilities – WTAF!
In amongst this however I noticed Robinson tossed in Ferguson’s latest doomsday predictions without any caveats. Seems it’s just become accepted wisdom.
For me it’s anger and despair in equal measure.
I feel the same, what is the point of this analysis when MSM have all the control. They can say anything they want and it becomes true. I think Ferguson should be guillotined, he is a political, ideological non scientist.
Which is why I suggested Toby should seriously consider crowd-funding a new radio (and maybe TV) station – one that can start on the internet. It could provide objective news, a broad range of opinions on all subjects, good music, drama and books, interesting talks etc. A bit like the old Radio 4 before it was made woke and PC-stupid. I really think that crowd funding exercise would raise a million in a month. I’d be happy to put up £100 and I am sure there are at least 10,000 others like me in the country desperate for someone to create a sane media outlet.
As I read your message, I thought, you mean like the BBC is supposed to do. I think that’s a good idea, I’d contribute.
Exactly. We shouldn’t have to pay twice over…but I think people who can afford it and are disgusted by BBC bias would support such a move to create a fair and balanced media.
We don’t have to pay twice over. Stop watching live TV and using the BBC iplayer and you can stop paying the BBC. Seems to me quite a small sacrifice considering.
I’d like an alternative, apart from silence.
I have not had a license for over 10 years and do not have silence. I have the internet. I no longer have netflix but used to I still do have amazon prime. You can even watch most good BBC content which is often made available on these services. I would prefer silence over the BBC news though ! but even then there is plenty outside the MSM to replace it.
As long as you are not watching the BBC content as it is broadcast or on the BBC iplayer you can still watch it on demand on other services without a TV licences. My 3 year old like octonauts which is available on amazon prime and is quite good.
There’s this really cool thing nowadays, OKUK, called the interweb. Or something like that.
Silence is much better for your sanity than BBC news.
Music is pretty good …..
I’m in.
There’s already UK Column
UKColumn, David Icke, Jim Stone, X22 report, Corbett report and a few others I’ve seen over the months and years already try.
‘last american vagabond’ is great on youtube or bitchute )
With respect, using David Icke as a source will immediately discredit your argument in the eyes of the general public. The data published by the ONS, PHE, and respectable scientists is far more credible and speaks for itself. Associating this with Icke (I’m not familiar with your others sources) will push people away. It would push me away.
yes true but if you listen to what he has been saying its all suddenly coming true!
He talks about agenda 21 and agenda30
Has been interviewed by Brian Rose on London Real and the BBC had OFCOM remove the interview from you tube that day so he must be on to something!
Forget the alien stuff but read, watch and research what else he has said over the years then ask how far off the wall he is.
infowars
Not all the MSM …. Certain ones are not changing their stance and we know who they are. Keep an eye out for seemingly out of the blue non lockdown/BLM related front page stories coming out too.
All very very weird until you start digging
To be fair, he should be sacked and forced to spend the rest of his life surviving on Universal Credit and witnessing the fruits of his genius.
Those who have employed him, or who consider employing him in future, should be guillotined.
Nah….Professor Lockdown should be made to re-enact Sisyphus for the rest of his life with the public allowed to pelt him with stones, rotten food, rubbish and milkshakes.
In my most uncharitable moments, he and Hancock should be executed. As the Code of Hammurabi has said “an eye for an eye” and so both of them should pay.
Actually, execution sounds pretty charitable to me, especially compared to your first option.
The MSM, together with the Government, opposition parties and academia are jointly responsible for both the panic surrounding covid and the subsequent lockdown. Once people realise they’ve been “had”, and that their jobs or businesses have gone, that they are now unlikely ever to retire, that their children’s or granchildren’s education has been blighted irreparably, they will be angry. Very angry. Perhaps murderously angry.
There will be reckoning. If not this year, then next. But it will come.
Right.
Who’d have thought, in the days of the Nazis’ glory, that the leaders would one day be un the dock to answer for their crimes? At one time they seemed all-powerful, unconquerable. But a hempen collar fitted their foul necks just fine in the end.
Is there a statue of Ferguson we could chuck in the Thames?
Not yet. Give them time.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52985446
Ignore the story. Thats nothing that was blatantly obvious months ago.
The comments however are a different story. All the top rated comments are livid with the lockdown and its effects now. This was inconceivable a few weeks ago.
A reckoning is a coming.
I often comment on Guido Fawke’s blog. The day after the lockdown was announced, I posted denouncing the lockdown. I don’t think I got a single uptick (not that this bothers me, I don’t post to be loved, only to speak the truth as I see it). People slagged me off: a memorable one was somebody wanting to draw pictures in crayon to “educate” me. Eight weeks later, his view is almost 100% in line with my own (which hasn’t changed). The transformation in so many people is remarkable.
They are waking up. You are right: the reckoning is coming.
Well done Nick. When Boris said we shouldn’t go to the pub, off I went. Hadn’t been intending to, but sometimes one just has to stand up for principles …
Criticising the gov on Guido site is a tough gig. It’s packed to the gunnels with half the cabinet Dominic Cummings and they can practically do no wrong.
I’ve posted aswell and there are a handful of sceptics there but it’s a tough crowd!
I just upticked you. I’ll send you a signed printout if you like!
I remember a story on GF praising Steve Baker’s “barnstorming” (or some such nonsensical word) speech in parliament during the non-debate about the new coronavirus law at the start of all this. I simply commented something like Baker is “worried about a libertarian dystopia, votes to implement it” and was roundly downvoted and even blocked, I think. I used to go to GF regularly but have since given it up since it has become an outright propaganda arm for the government. I popped in the other day and it doesn’t seem to have changed, but I wasn’t there very long.
Ashworth is incable of talking about cv without using the words horrific or terrible.
Words which would be better reserved for describing his shameless fearmongering.
There is increasing coverage in the mainstream media. The Telegraph in particular is full of lockdown scepticism, but I’m increasingly noticing articles elsewhere including one on The Guardian recently (their motive still being to attack Boris and co but from a different angle). It is filtering through, but it will take time.
If it’s finally creeping into the Grad, there may be light at the end of the tunnel.
I am a doctor and I only found this site a few days ago. It is refreshing and reassuring to me to finally see viewpoints such as those posted on this site as the absolute crap we have been fed for months was making me feel very sick. Covid-19 seems to be fizzling out as every virus in history has ever done, despite lock-down rather than because of lock-down – much as many patients get better despite what we do rather that because of what we do!
despite lock-down rather than because of lock-down
Yep, you’ve got it!
Perhaps you could put in a word with my stupid doctor’s surgery which has closed its waiting room and insists on muzzles. Thank God I’m not ill. Well, if I was they’d run a mile.
It’s not the first time I have read that when doctor’s go on strike deaths drop. I recall reading that it has happened two or three times over the years in Germany and I found this today, same in Israel: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127364/ Makes you wonder why, other than for A&E which is really good when you are wheeled into it unconscious on a stretcher after a nasty accident, what the rest of the medical industry is up to? From my experience if you could not be put into the correct tick box, given a pill for life or failing that have something chopped off or cut out then it is stumped. You sound like you are questioning a career that you got into with all good intentions of curing lots of people and doing the best you can and are now questioning how it all works as the overbearing nature of it all takes over and people and individuals become a poor second to the system itself. Apologies in advance if I have got it all wrong on how you are feeling as I’ve made these assumptions on one post on a website but your… Read more »
And, as Michael Flanders remarked in pre-MSM. days, ‘when there are no newspapers, nothing happens.’
Oh I remember Flanders and Swann – they were wonderful! I remember the “nothing happens, it’s marvellous!” remarks too.
National ill-Health Service.
over the last few years I have lost what little faith I ever had in doctors; I feel as if they finish their training and then never keep up to date or change their thoughts about what they were taught. The way they treat diabetics seem to me to be the proof of this, sticking to their advice to just go on and on eating carbs and upping the insulin to compensate for all the terrible consequences, and of course taking insulin for type 2 diabetes is problematic in itself. Statins are another example, in my opinion, over prescribed with bad side effects for some people. Having said that men like Dr Malcolm Kendrick, who has just emailed out his latest blog today about Covid, Dr Jason Fung and Dr Eric Westman are absolutely fantastic.
It’s why I trained in clinical herbalism, so that I could treat my own body if necessary. I try to eat a good diet with proper nutritious food, balanced vitamins and minerals. Lots of outside time, as I have a smallholding and grow my own fruit and veg. I’m not registered with a GP and haven’t seen a doctor for over 20 years. At 65 years old I am luckily still very healthy. This was following a conversation with a hospital consultant, when my mother asked him what was the best way to stay healthy. In all seriousness he replied “stay away from hospitals unless it’s an emergency!”
I do understand that so many doctors truly go into the profession to help, to be kind, to do their best, but sadly the system seems to wear them down in the end.
Many doctors, particularly in the US go by the book – big pharma’s book.
off-guardian is another good site for doctors interviews
Sarah, do please tell us what you have observed as a doctor working through this time – would be interested to hear!
Yes, do, and Toby, please highlight it. It’s important that we hear from doctors whose pbrains have nit been added by NHS poison.
Nice one Toby, but you can’t let the SAGE scientists off that easily. Here are the key excerpts from the March 23rd SAGE meeting that show they were pressing for what we now call lockdown (emphasis added): ‘1. UK case accumulation to date suggests a higher reproduction number than previously anticipated. High rates of compliance for social distancing will be needed to bring the reproduction number below one and to bring cases within NHS capacity. 2. Public polling over the weekend on behaviour indicated significant changes but room for improvement in compliance rates. … Case numbers in London could exceed NHS capacity within the next 10 days on the current trajectory… 21. Key areas for further improvement include reducing contact with friends and family outside the household, and contact in shops and other areas. ACTION: SAGE secretariat to share SAGE paper from behavioural scientists on options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures with CCS and HMG Communications leads.’ I don’t think it’s hard to read between the lines here and see this is a group very worried about where things are going and urging more radical action. I imagine the paper with ‘options for increasing adherence to social distancing’ shared with the government that day may… Read more »
I was going to say something similar. Even though the committee may not have used the words “We recommend lockdown”, they presented such apocalyptic ‘evidence’ that the government felt it had no alternative.
I’m with you. I’m broadly in agreement with Snowdon but think the minuted AFTER March 18th need to be considered. It is likely the SAGE talking heads were also swayed considerably by doctor doom. – They stopped short at recommending full lockdown but the language used here is certainly projecting urgency. Not exactly a call to arms but certainly a polishing of the trumpet in readiness.
And don’t forget that after Cummings pressed for a ‘lockdown’ at the 18 March SAGE meeting (his presence is conveniently not stated, of course) the group did not meet again until 22 March, the day before the ‘lockdown’ announcement:
As hinted at in the SAGE Minutes for 16 and 18 March, the HMG decisions were being made elsewhere. By people who were not following the science.
https://www.paulchaplin.life/blog-original/lockdown-boris-violated-sage-advice
Two separate sources familiar with the meeting said Mr Cummings had pressed for lockdown measures to be introduced more quickly.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8268415/No10-chief-Dominic-Cummings-intervened-SAGE-meeting.html
Johnson’s Top Aide Pushed Scientists to Back U.K. Lockdown
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-28/top-aide-to-u-k-s-johnson-pushed-scientists-to-back-lockdown
Our surmise is that Cummings reports directly to Sedwill. Do not believe that Boris Johnson is in charge of anything now, if he ever was.
Some good points on this thread. Toby and the others are probably narrowly correct when they say SAGE did not, as a minuted conclusion of their meetings, directly propose the lockdown. But that doesn’t mean to say the decision was entirely political. As I’ve posted here before, we need to allow for whatever private discussions the government may have been having with Ferguson and his cohorts. My feeling – no more – is that such private discussions were indeed taking place, and that Ferguson et al were pushing for as draconian measures as possible, up to and including lockdown. (As evidence that Ferguson was advising the government privately, I was struck by Sherelle Jacobs’ Telegraph column last week, 4 June, in which she said Ferguson is still(!) advising No. 10.) Such a scenario would fit with the general drift of SAGE opinion, as illustrated in the quotes Will Jones gives here. As I’ve written here previously, it is clear to me to me that many academics, with direct and indirect links to SAGE, have been entirely happy with the concept of lockdown; and it is difficult to read the Imperial College paper of 16 March and not… Read more »
all the academics happy with lockdown are funded by the Gates Foundation
Imperial to the tune of $288m, LSHTP $363m, etc, PHE $9m, etc
Gates has called for a ‘zero carbon’ world and to vaccinate the whole world and reduce its population. Microsoft is working with the vaccine alliance on surveillance systems and then there is ID2020.org
Yep you got it.
All roads lead back to Bill gates or George Soros.
“by March 23rd they have clearly become super-scared and super-cautious.” But by late April they must have known that the predictions were wildly excessive.
Sherelle Jacobs skewers the government for relying upon Fergie’s dubious modelling.
This is not the first time the public have been sent into a state of alarm by the government (particularly the Scottish devolved govt) and MSM who report models as scientific certainty.
Recent use of models as fact have been the reporting of the climate emergency, the economic impact of Brexit and now Fergie doubling down on his model for the ‘rona.
Whenever these models are held up to closer examination they prove to be only speculation formed in the image of the modellers personal bias.
Or indeed, those who pay the modellers! The ‘science is settled’ mantra of Climate Change of the Blair years was followed closely by the systematic removal of funding and the associated opportunities for academic advancement, for any such scientist who did not agree. Hence the ‘97% of scientists’ agree that Climate Change is man-made – they reside in the same echo chamber of ‘you just have to believe’ to pay the mortgage. But, times change. We now have the 17 year-old daughter of a film producer and singer/actress with no formal education to guide us through Climate Change, so no need for the 97%. Guess what, some of them have turned up in other fields – take a look at the wider ICL research agendas!
Can we please stop use by the term “model” – it is correctly spelt “muddle”.
What is science?
“The Government claimed to be relying on ‘the science’. In practice there is no such a thing. There are competing views from eminent scientists about the nature of the virus, how it is spread and how effective various measures are against it” Comment by Roger Bootle
Yes, but the problem is they only listen to those in the echo chamber and not to people like Wittkowski, Ioannidis, Cahill, Mikovits et al.
Open all Schools immediately.
And so say all of us!
Aye. And with no bollox about s.d.
Yes!
With the proviso – without restrictions.
I just suggested that the school where I teach should have the lightning conductors tested since they represent a greater risk to the pupils’ life than the virus.
I think, and have always thought, that the lockdown was to protect Boris’s image.
This is the guy that “promised” 350 million a week for the NHS.
Not a good luck then if a few months into his Premiership patients start dying on stretchers as the NHS gets swept up by this killer virus (that Boris clearly never understood). So he panicked and ordered the lockdown to be sure that didn’t happen.
Ferguson is just a useful idiot in all this. His hopeless model giving Boris the excuse to order lockdown and make sure that the catastrophic worst case scenario didn’t happen.
Of course it was a drastic over reaction.
But then this what happens when you let a hack journalist with narcissistic disorder run the country. Especially when he has a advisor like Cummings who apparently has a slender grasp of science.
Many people have pointed this out – it was all about the NHS and now its become a full blown religion, any hopes of reforming it will be doomed to failure. Even any future enquiry into this shambolic mess will whitewash any failures that the Church of the NHS presided over this sorry saga.
I think support for the church might plummet soon.
They’ve not really done a great job of keeping deaths per capita low.
They’ve abandoned all other care.
Plus I have a sneaking hunch that the virus was nosocomial and that the early spreaders were consultants coming back from their skiing holidays.
People are immune to evidence and reality it seems. All they have to cling to is their new religion I am not sure they are prepared to let go any time soon regardless. Perhaps I am feeling overly negative at the moment but I see little real reason for hope.
The NHS has been pretty catastrophic for many people well before this yet here we are clapping on command and treating the NHS as some godlike organisation that can do no wrong.
We can only hope that’s going to be the case because I still see a lot of people putting NHS banners on their social media accounts.
And rainbows and nhs stickers in shop and other businesses windows. It’s like thanking a bully for kicking you to the ground.
You’re right, of course. But it’s just people trying to tap into the zeitgeist and get people to like them
There are times I want to do a Captain von Trapp and rip those rainbows away.
I think, and have always thought, that the lockdown was to protect Boris’s image.
That would be a reasonable hypothesis, except we’d then have to believe that much of the rest of the world simultaneously plunged itself into lockdown and economic destruction, in order to protect Boris.
I’m also concerned that the foot-dragging we’re now witnessing regarding our release is not just about face-saving.
The real danger will come from what’s being done by government under cover of covid19. I’m trying to understand information from numerous sources, excluding BBC and msm and government briefings; my gag reflex can’t cope with their propaganda. I spread the fact-based alternate view wherever I can. I give financial support to advocates of the truth such as Toby when I can. The work to overcome this nonsense, I’d even call it wickedness, must continue, must be supported. No time to be a wimp.
This dishonest handling of the ‘pandemic’ begs a number of questions:
Are the problems we now face too great for a democratically elected government to manage?
Do we need a more paternalistic society with technocratic stewardship by neo-Marxist woke ‘managers’?
Will the government just step down to enable this to happen?
If not, can a Marxist mob be mobilised (enabled by woke useful idiots)?
Will mob be prevented or discouraged by police, local government or MSM?
A very good definition of Common Purpose.
Here’s what happens when the “woke” rule:
First this on the 08th June i think:
https://www.city-journal.org/antifa-seattle-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone#.XuFj070FOV0.twitter
Well that didn’t last long did it? By the 10th June:
https://thespectator.info/2020/06/11/antifa-organizer-in-seattles-autonomous-zone-begs-for-vegan-meat-and-soy-to-keep-area-operational-after-homeless-people-take-all-their-food/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/06/seattles-autonomous-zone-first-warlord-local-rapper-raz-simone-takes/
So much for the lovey dove all sweetness and light autonomous zone in Seattle.
Hilarious. Cheered me up, that. 🙂
Pity the MSM are not reporting it.
I try to keep the country’s moral up best I can.
My morals are of course impeccable. My morale is always grateful for a boost though, AG. 🙂
Not wearing my glasses and predictive text got me yet again.
Before I read the second link, it had occurred to me that they’d put themselves in a position where the police could easily just cordon them in and wait for them to capitulate. The police didn’t even need to bother!
Mind you, frankenfood and soy. Poor things, no wonder their intellect is impaired.
Are we not there already, I am not sure what better a job a marxist mob could do to destroy everything and pave the way for totalitarian communist rule. It seems to me that’s what the conservative party is now.
I say as a full on Boris supporter for many years that his leadership vacuum has come as a great disappointment. He should not be trying to maintain this impossible balancing act between saying the virus is deadly but, on the other hand, get back to normal…while he tells us to obey a confusing ever-changing array of rules and while the government demonstrates they will not apply the laws on social distancing and gatherings to Far Left violent protests.
Totally confusing!
The message I think should now be one of stoicism…along the lines of “We have weathered the storm, protected the NHS, now we must face the future with courage and resilience…go forward in a spirit of optimism…We will maintain bans on mass gatherings for some months but for most activity, we urge a return to normality. Now wash your hands.” Something more like that is required now. And really it’s surprising how little Public Health TV advertising there is. There should be upbeat stuff: this is how you protect yourself.
I don’t think we should at this stage be trying to imagine how our politicians can weasel their way out of this – they must be held to account.
After we’ve been freed from dystopia, if you don’t mind.
Don’t you mean: We protected the NHS at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. We also trashed the economy. So wash your hands and get back to work – and be quick about it!
And rescind all the lockdown laws immediately.
Elect a clown, get a circus. The message should be sorry we failed to protect the vulnerable.
As I’ve just tried to post in the Daily Fail’s comments:
Funny that – at the beginning of this pantomime farce they were saying that the lockdown was to slow the spread and save the NHS from being overwhelmed. Then it was to wait for a vaccine. Now it was to cut lives. Sorry you cannot have it all ways. They are talking absolute B@$loc*(s to cover their backs now it’s all falling apart) as the lockdown is killing more people than the 10000 he has quoted and this is just the beginning of the collateral deaths. Look at the ONS breakdown on deaths recently. Total unwarranted and unjustified destruction of the economy and society. When oh when will the Daily mail and the rest of the MSM stop being copy and paste writers (cannot call them journalists anymore) or teleprompter reading talking heads? Where are the independent and challenging and questioning MSM? It’s long gone an dis now just propaganda broadcasting narrative following mouthpieces.
Short answer -NO, there was no science to follow. Just panic and fearmongering.
They keep on shifting the goalposts because they know that this has been an unmitigated disaster. They should have been lifting lockdown and not bothered with antisocial distancing as soon as those reports about the empty Nightingale Hospitals and hospitals being idle started to trickle in and were verified.
But no, they’re content to further trash the economy and store major problems for their beloved NHS because they can’t admit that they panicked and made a colossal mistake.
I reckon they are supporting Gates and Fauci who are in the race to get a vaccine (untested, of course) to help reduce the population. The government gave £8.8 Billion to GAVI – a Gates organisation.
Daily mail tell down right lies ! Shocking paper
It is but fi you can get through the censors on the “umdoderated” comments it’s fun to wind up the trolls and get the real people thinking.
I worked with someone who only comments on the Daily Mirror and only puts in his comments things to delibertly wind everybody up – good on him.
What I would like to know is, where is the second spike, uptick, big increase in Covid cases following the actions by all those selfish and unthinking people who dared to take their family to crowded beaches and parks in the sun two weekends ago?…….
I was listening to Pam Popper yesterday – apparently the Floridians tested almost everyone on one of the smaller beaches (dunno how, they must have taken their details before they allowed them on the beach) at spring break. They found that only ONE was infected with Covid. ONE. And of course they didn’t know where they’d been infected – but if it was beach, you’d expect way more than one, no?
Let’s Hope Ferguson says something ill-advised or insufficiently woke about BLM and is forced to resign. It’s about the best chance there is of knocking this pin-head off his lofty perch.
ICL is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
So is Whitty, Vallance, Fauci, Birx, WHO and many more.
Tell him what you think…his email is on the Imperial College website. I did, he even bothered to reply!
I think i will move to Russia if this nonsense goes on for much longer.
Hilariously, Russia is now less communist the the UK.
exactamundo
My gf lives there. I would say we are now on a par with Russia, however Russia now seems to be opening up a lot faster than the U.K.
I suppose they tore down all the statues already.
Or did they?
I think an alternative planet would be a better option currently.
Also considering just becoming a tramp as it seems preferable to trying to fit in with the inverted morals of modern society.
I know a tramp ( not a good word really, he’s a sweetie) who is living happily through the current junk panic – in a converted NHS ambulance.
There are points at which lockdown and Covid merge as cause of death in my view. A lot of old people who became sick with Covid were being denied the support of their relatives in face to face meetings (screen contact is no substitute for the elderly) because of the lockdown. I think a lot of older people who would have recovered with the support of their families became disconsolate and simply gave up. It might have little effect on the end of year excess deaths figures since they would have been close to death in any case but they might lived a little longer were it not for the lockdown destroying their morale. I’m not suggesting there was any “right” answer here but it is facile to presume that the lockdown “protected” the elderly by depriving them of direct contact with their families.
I’ve seen plenty of very elderly people die in hospital due to neglect by the staff. They often get very disorientated when ill which appears as dementia but they recover when they get back to their house.
A lot of mental confusion in the elderly is actually caused by dehydration.
Yep, that’s something else they don’t bother about in hospital…
Yes, I’ve seen that myself with a relative – (unpalatable) food just being left, no help with spoon-feeding – and I once saw a nurse a criticise a 95 year old for failure to respond to a question shouted across a busy ward! How stupid was that nurse!! Care homes generally offer much, much better care.
I knew a lady who had to go to hospital with advanced Parkinson’s. Nurses dumped meals on her bedside table. ashe couldn’t feed herself. An hour or two later the untouched food would be taken away.
In the end, her husband came in for every meal and fed her.
The NHS is a god a truly worthy of any zombie’s worship.
The night nurses left my elderly mother hanging half out of bed unable to right herself due to her broken hip. Her throat was on the rails of the bed and she could hardly breathe. The three other patients in the room kept buzzing and eventually a nurse popped her head round the door crossly and told them to be quiet, they were in their tea break and would come later! The nurses didn’t help feed my mother or even give her a drink. I had a dreadful fight trying to get mother’s painkilling medication to take with me when I discharged her, but eventually I got her out of there, complete with inoperable broken hip, and took her back to her very lovely nursing home, and helped nurse her for the following 30 days until she passed away. No, I won’t clap for the NHS. Sorry.
Yes. Despair induced in the old folks and the poor families having to stand by helpless.
I’d like to present the preliminary antibody test results from my country, India.
Initial surveys have shown that the covid infection could be 100-200 times more widespread in most of the hotspot areas in Delhi and Mumbai.
CFR in these cities is around 3 percent. Our IFR is somewhere between 0.01 percent and 0.03 percent.
And, we had one of the harshest lockdowns in the world!
https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2020/jun/08/15-30-people-in-containment-areas-exposed-to-covid-19-icmrs-serosurvey-2153893.html
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/11/ignore-neil-fergusons-guesswork-the-post-mortem-covid-19-best/
Ignore Neil Ferguson’s guesswork – the post-mortem on Covid-19 is best left until this is all over
The trouble comes when reporters, or politicians, see one study which suits their purposes and promote it as if it were scientific truth, beyond all challenge. Ferguson’s claim was reported in Wednesday evening’s news bulletins as if it were evidence that the Earth is spherical – that you would have to be loopy to deny it.
There is a still a huge amount we have to learn about Covid-19 and about the success or failure of various measures which have been employed to combat it in different countries. Why, for example, has Japan had such a low death rate when it has neither gone into lockdown nor carried out a huge amount of testing?
But…. It IS all over!!
https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/09/report-over-95-of-uk-covid19-deaths-had-pre-existing-condition/
Over 95% of “COVID Deaths” recorded in England and Wales had potentially serious comorbidities, according to statistics released by NHS England.The latest figures make for pretty stark reading. Or, rather, they would make for stark reading…if they didn’t follow the exact same pattern already shown in other nations around the world.
You can read the full report here. We’re going to focus on the comorbidity stats. Here are the number of deaths where Covid19 was listed as the only cause, split by age:
Just read through the UC Berkeley letter. I agree with almost all of it, though have to say he makes some serious glosses as to causation. But nevertheless, well put. It’s sad he is afraid to speak publicly. You’d think the firing of a ‘person of color’, if he actually is of that background, would be a big no-no at the moment, whatever their views. Of course, then he would just be accused of having internalised the narrative of his oppressors, and be sent to the re-education camp.
America is going to hell in a hard-cart, and like a faithful old pup, we follow our exciting intrepid master to the bitter end, though that end be full of nasty things and pins and glowering eyes in the darkness.
Would love to read it but it seems the thought-police have got there first. Anyone have another link?
https://cloverchronicle.com/2020/06/10/uc-berkeley-history-professors-open-letter-against-blm-police-brutality-and-cultural-orthodoxy/
All of which suggests the virus runs its’ own course, regardless.
16-17% of 4,000 hospital staff have tested positive for antibodies. When is our government going to ‘fess up about the nosocomial transmission of this infection? – each day prevaricating is costing lives and to protect what? – an idea, a policy, a career. Sort it out Boris
https://youtu.be/-TVFFK0pdjI
Basically we could all be walking around with it asymptomatically without even realising (as most people seem to), and it would make fuck all difference to the mythical R because no bugger else would either – and it would also crucially not make a difference to deaths either unless we all decided to spend our leisure time kickin it in the local hospital or care home.
The fact that people still believe breathing around other healthy people is a biohazard is absolute stark staring madness.
Agree. The narrative needs to change to – is the virus endemic yet. Suneptra Gupta mentioned having non-biased risk assessments completed by non-partisan statisticians. I think European nations should have a scientist swap. See what other nations make of our data and vice versa. Knowing our luck we’d get Professor Ferguson sent back ‘return to sender’
The zombies don’t believe that there are any other healthy people.
Rationality levels well below those of the average slug.
I understand that if people have antibodies then they are immune and no longer spread the disease. Hence part of herd immunity
I sent this comment through to Toby earlier as part of a broader piece on email but wanted to add the summary part to the discussion here. Lab Rats… I share the frustrations of many in regard to Lockdown but in listening to the 10 Downing Street press conference yesterday, I recognised for the first time what might really be going on and so I am writing this directly to you in the hope of extending the idea to a wider audience. What has become apparent is that we are not being “led” by the Science – we are being controlled in the name of it and this ties directly into your recent piece regarding the moving flags on the calendar of lockdowns. When Chris Witty made the ad-hoc comment that we are not even half way through this pandemic in yesterday’s briefing, he gave the game away. His added explanation in regard to the bubbles being limited to one other, one-person household, confirmed it. Even though it started in February and peaked in March ( before lockdown) the only reason for suggesting that we are not even halfway through is that they see the need to treat… Read more »
Hmm, I think that is one conspiracy theory too much!
I would not suggest this is a conspiracy – it is simply how (I believe) the scientists consider it “best” to exit lockdown: step-by-step and data driven. There is no doubt that they would want to have the data if possible and unless told otherwise, they will seek to manage us out of this in exactly this manner. Ask SAGE what the effect of unwinding any single measure would be and they will say – that they don’t know as they have no data. Ask them two weeks afterwards they have unwound a measure what the impact HAS been and they will be able to tell you – so long as they can control the “experiment” for other variables.
Your mention of ‘data-driven’ makes me think that Cummings has a hand in all of this as well.
Yes, please see my other post on here about Cumming’s attendance at SAGE meetings.
“ Ask SAGE what the effect of unwinding any single measure would be and they will say – that they don’t know as they have no data.”
Well they have access to some scientists with an apparently very sophisticated model with thousands of lines of code, that attempts to simulate the behaviour of an entire country, on the basis of whose predictions we got into this mess in the first place. So, no, they don’t “know” but previously they “predicted”, and also seem to “know” how many lives they have saved. So wouldn’t it be reasonable to suppose they could use their model to predict the effects of lifting various restrictions? They can’t have it both ways.
The data collected will be thoroughly distorted by the fact that huge numbers of people are ignoring official advice and are probably many steps ahead in their own ‘easing of the lockdown’ than what the scientists are recommending.
Perhaps, but it is all about what can be controlled to produce the best experimental conditions possible. I am sure that the DC issue is seen as a noise factor that led to an uptick in activity but they clearly try and control for that using all of the Apple maps and google data on traffic volumes etc. The idea of variable control would also explain the reasoning behind otherwise indefensible the 14 quarantine nonsense: It is exactly the response one would need to see if you were going through the relax, record, update – rinse and repeat process of easing out of lockdown.
Actually, this brings together 1) one of the reasons that yesterday’s briefing depressed me as much as it did and 2) an exchange I had today with djaustin on yesterday’s page.
I came away from yesterday’s briefing feeling exactly as you did – like a lab rat. It was an interesting insight, I suppose.
Djaustin made a comment in response to my “what the hell is actually going on” post that made it clear that this is the only way that the scientists can behave and the only advice they can give the government (I oversimplify grossly)
So we’re back to following the science.
Problem is, _only_ following the science is a stupid way to run a country.
I don’t disagree with that last point! Scientists can only advise one part of the decision-making. Politicians decide, and should rightly take on other considerations – notably the economy, education, welfare…
Has anyone watched the video of event 201? (the pandemic plan one done last autumn; think that is what it was called?) How does this compare to that?
I worry that this is a dry run for the real thing – and I dread to think what that may be.
They are clearly playing with us, seeing how far we can be pushed – and in some cases the distance is shocking.
You say: ‘the trajectory of the pandemic has followed almost exactly the same pattern in every country it’s afflicted, regardless of whether or not that country locked down, when it locked down or the severity of the lockdown it imposed’. Israeli mathematician Isaac Ben-Israel suggests that the virus follows a 70 day course and disappears in every nation, whatever the measures taken. What reason then lies behind the UK’s second equal rating with Spain under Belgium in the European per capita of population deaths-from-Covid league? Is it down to lack of testing, care home mismanagements, standard of medical care, ethnicity, obesity, underlying health, climate, star sign or a mixture of all the above? Or in the absence of a vaccine or an effective intervention drug, will all nations end up with the same per capita death rate in the end?
That’s a good question and I don’t know the answer. I suspect it has to do with the number of infected people that have entered the country since the beginning of the year (we didn’t impose controls until Monday, remember), as well as the discharging of infected elderly patients from hospitals into care homes, and the lack of treatment available to those infected in care homes. I also suspect we’re more scrupulous about not under-counting “deaths involving coronavirus” than other-countries, and, for that and other reasons, have ended up over-counting.
I think physical fitness obesity etc makes a big difference thsts why we are doing so poorly over half the uk population is overweight or obese
How about over counting the c-19 deaths?
Sweden provides the obvious endemic counterfactual. And most likely a picture of the UK post-lockdown. Low (<100 cases/day) mostly in hospitals and nursing homes, with perhaps 30 deaths/week.
The fundamental problem is you are arguing around figures that are attributed to something that has not been established – namely we know there is a SARS-COV-2 strain (because it was being studied in Wuhan) but we don’t know what it does when in humans. The analogy I give to people is called The Santa Clause [sic] and it is a great demonstration of the difference between science and the ethical application of scientific findings. Say the mayor of London decrees that all houses inside the Circulars (A406) have to re-tile their roofs with expensive non-slip tiles costing £500 per square foot. The reason: so that Santa Claus and his reindeer don’t slip off the roof and cause a health and safety incident and incur the liability of not delivering presents. Now, I expect you’ll probably laugh at this. But just for a moment consider the arguments IF you assume certain qualities about Santa Claus and his reindeer. So let’s assume them. Maybe you don’t need to tile the whole roof, just the chimney? Do you need to worry about reindeer as they fly anyway, so any incident will self-correct? Is it justified to impose such… Read more »
In case TJN doesn’t go to yesterday’s comments but to today’s in answer to their query on the 77th brigade:
Good description of them:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-the-77th-brigade-britains-information-warfare-military
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/british-military-information-war-waged-their-own-population
MP Tobias Ellwood is supposedly the independent oversight of them for the Government but he is actually a reserve Luitenant Colonel in the 77th Brigade so not exactly neutral nor independent is he?
From here:
https://www.forces.net/mental-health/watch-mp-tobias-ellwood-discusses-mental-health-veterans
“A former army officer with the Royal Green Jackets, now a proud reservist with 77th Brigade”
It boggles my mind that this stuff is real. I thought this kind of chicanery was reserved for the ‘security’ services
It appears to be correct. Look at UK Column and their links to Cabinet Office documents. Those who say a coup has taken place are right. The virus, although real, was always planned for. That is why Johnson cannot sort this out. Parliamentary Democracy is as good as over. I’m off now to cook lunch and fashion a new tinfoil hat…
My wife wears a tin foil hat – really, not joking. Works wonders. And no I’m not upset as 10 years of trying to find out why she was ill meant I was on there receiving end of some pretty horrendous “you are a nut” type comments.
She suffers from electromagnetic hypersensitivity so has a special baseball cap with silver material weave through it (a small faraday cage) she wears when she can feel the neighbour turn on his hi-power wifi in every room work from home whatever he uses.
Affects more people than you think but they just put it down to being under the weather or being a bit off or some malaise and so on.
Hi AG, this is really interesting and I meant no offence at all to any real wearers of tinfoil hats.
My good wishes to your wife.
She is getting better but it has been along hard uphill struggle as non-one believes it exists – until they research if for themselves and find out how common the symptoms are.
There are two frequency ranges used by wifi standards at the moment 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz. Have you tried to see if there is any difference between these two frequencies?
Yes, we’ve had the same eperience. Since we turned off the Wifi hub at night, after reading in various places that they can give off harmful emissions, I sleep a lot better. I’m not aware of any hum but I’m probably going deaf anyway.
see wifiinschools.org.uk for info
Thanks, Sam. Useful information – children must be getting a massive wifi overload at the moment (including our grandchildren!) I’ll send this on. . . .
also ssita.org.uk
I use a wired connection but for the wife to read the news on her tablet at night before sleeping I use a Netgear wifi extender by her side of the end. She turns it on, reads what she wants then turns it off.
Simple answer – yes.
yes its the Adey affect, google Ross Adey
why not shield your house from the neighbour?
powerwatch.org.uk have a company that sells paint from Germany
Looked at that and know someone who used it – really cut down the EMFs in his house. Unfortunately with my business destroyed I cannot afford the £3000 or so it would cost to paint just the bedroom to give her somewhere to hide at the moment.
The Memon plug-in, the hat and the blanket she wraps herself in at the moment are working and she has improved drastically in the past 6 months.
What you are trying to do is create a faraday cage. People create them for different purposes for example if you wanted as a DIYer to do some EM testing. Perhaps if you look into DIY faraday cages you might find a cheaper and more effective method then a fancy paint.
Wow. Glad she found something to help mitigate the effects.
Any particular edition of UK column where that info was broadcast?
It was first done about 2 weeks ago and been mentioned nearly every podcast since.
Thanks, AG, you beat me to it! They broadcast every Mon, Weds and Fri at 1pm (UK time). They include lots of notes and references with each show. Yesterday’s edition was particularly good with more on to the Cabinet Office’s coup. Their argument is compelling.
I think were going to need to start deploying the copper foil things are so bad.
Yes: I wish it weren’t so.
And now the 13th Signal Brigade:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/armed-forces-announce-launch-of-first-cyber-regiment-in-major-modernisation
There is a lot of frightening stuff out there that is hard to believe is true, it’s a dark, deep hole you go down if you start digging.
This virus and lockdown just the tip of the iceberg.
Bang right!
The secret squirrels are part of the military. Their acronyms give it away somewhat. 🙂
They are the security services.
I seriously suspect that there are a few of them infesting the Telegraph BTL comments sections.
I suspected the same. Adam Hill is an obvious one.
However, I can’t decide if so many of the Torygraph readers really are so self-righteous and smug, or if it’s young trolls laughing their heads off as they write such revolting bollox.
Thanks AG – I generally do check previous comments threads when they are still live, and have seen your post on that video – strange and disturbing stuff, yet surely not suppressible in the long term?
As an aside, perhaps this site could have a general comments page, not linked to one day’s newsletter, as some of the topics are worthy of being discussed over long period, which they don’t tend to be at present.
I didn’t know about the 77th. Really, on here? We should all be flattered.
One way out would be for the up/down votes being identifiable against posting names (as on The Spectator site). By being able to link votes to actual posters it would be much easier to identify if the votes were by trolls, especially if that voter’s previous comments were also visible. As Toby often says, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
“For example, following the Syria airstrikes, the unit identified that a number of false narratives from alternative news sources were gaining traction online”
I’d love to know what they considered to be “false narratives.” From what I’ve read since, in the Independent newspaper, and other news sites, the false narrative was that it ever happened in the first place.
False = The Independent disagrees.
What is that rag supposed to be independent of, BTW? Common sense,obviously, but what else?
Is a serving MP actually allowed to still remain in the military?
He’s a reservist – the Territorial Army – and yes you can be in the TA and continue your normal work and get paid for the time you go to the parades, exercises, training etc and your employer cannot stop you.
What has happened to the world in 2020?
– All white people are now systemically racist, privileged supremacists that perpetuate the slavery of black people.
– Covid-19 is the deadliest disease known to Mankind. More deadly than cancer, heart disease, obesity, dementia and all road traffic accidents combined.
I mean, really?!
It’s very sad, I was sat in a meeting at work yesterday (actually in an office with other people) and some of the talk came on to people remote working and perhaps some staff who are better working in teams weren’t so suited to remote working and that in future perhaps it would be better to employ people who prefer working on their own.
I was sitting there thinking how can online contact ever replace physical human contact and interaction? For me it just doesn’t work, at least not long term. We’re naturally social beings being forced to live apart from each other.
Makes me feel sad.
Many people meet their spouses at work. That’s going to be impossible if everyone works at home. Maybe that’s the whole idea.
I think it’s depressing too. It can be more productive to work at home, but it’s not something you’d want to do all the time, especially if you’re young and single.
Yes. A lot of people’s social lives are enjoyed with their workmates.
We ate programmed to survive in groups
Iam on my own and really suffering
I am hearing you so you are not alone.
Yup, we are, and I know how you feel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfVunEjeQPQ
At least you’ve got us. Our hearts are with you.
I know it isn’t much, but…
@RWawg I think The UK is being particularly stupid.
Other European countries seem to be pushing to return to normality, here in the UK *we are trying as hard as possible to make the return to normal as slow and complex as possible.
Number waiting over year for NHS treatment trebles
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/number-waiting-over-year-for-nhs-treatment-trebles-288tvfn9m
NHS England released waiting time statistics this morning showing that 11,042 people had been on the waiting list for more than 52 weeks in April, up from 3,097 in March. Overall the number of people on the waiting list fell to 3.94 million, down from 4.2 million a month earlier. This was driven by a sharp drop in referrals.
Only 491,934 people were referred for treatment in April, down 60 per cent from 1.2 million in March. The figure for April last year was 1.7 million.
This might help explain what’s happening to our new national religion. Notice ‘NHS Reset’ is now a brand: https://www.nhsconfed.org/resources/2020/06/getting-the-nhs-back-on-track Edited highlights: A delay in returning to the inspection regime of the CQC to take into account the positive changes that have been achieved as a result of the lighter touch approach to regulation that has been in place during the pandemic. Putting in place an ongoing arrangement with the private sector – this will be vital to provide capacity to respond to the backlog of treatment. A call for assurance that there will be a fully operational and robust test, track and trace system, as well as appropriate supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE),as services are resumed As you are all aware, and incredible as it may seem, according to ‘HMG’ we are still at Alert Level 4 of the ‘Pandemic’, so: Level fourThe virus is not contained, with the R number above one in at least some areas. However, as is the situation now, hospitals would be able to cope with the levels of admissions. Likely response: Nationwide lockdown imposed by the Government, with the vulnerable shielded and those who can work… Read more »
This article https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341832637_All-cause_mortality_during_COVID-19_No_plague_and_a_likely_signature_of_mass_homicide_by_government_response
argues that the coronavirus peak is the result of institutional homicide.
This is grounds for arresting the PM for murder.
Wakefield Police where are you?
The question is whether any minister or advisor in government made that decision, or whether it was Prof. Whitty, or Public Health England.
The same decision was made by various Democrat governors in the U.S., where care home deaths were up to 50% of the total.
There does seem to be a far left agenda at play here. Why is our government instituting the same policies as the far left nutcases in the Democrat party?
Whoever suggested it is reasonably irrelevant. Surely Boris is CEO and carries the can for the decision that was executed.
Is he alive?
I think there should be a a ‘Care homes trial’, and that it should be for murder.
Probably been posted before – but this woman is holding the government to account for care home deaths. High Court tomorrow, apparently.
https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/care-home-deaths/?utm_source=sendinblue&utm_campaign=Update24322078onHelpmeholdthegovernmenttoaccountforCovid-19carehomedeathsJune112020&utm_medium=email
Thing is – blame where blame is due – it was NHS and PHE policy of clearing out beds and sending the virus into care homes that caused the problem. Compounded by care homes – largely private businesses – having staff with no training in disease control. HMG struggles with PPE didn’t help, but they weren’t the root cause of the problem.
That’s basically what I’ve been saying. There is a book called The Shadow Economy that highlights this effect, where the reaction to or even adaptation in preparation of a theorised event, or a small preliminary event, causes more damage than what the theorised event would do.
The example given was that China didn’t need to sell a large amount of US treasuries. It would only need to sell maybe 5% at most. The inferrence of what this means and the risk mitigation would cause a massive sell off from others and hence become a self-fulfilling prophesy. It was wargamed about 10 years ago.
It’s also like that Billy Connolly joke about dogs humping. A dog would hump a bitch, but then another dog would join in, and another. The bitch would crawl out from under and go lie under a tree, all the while the humping mass of dogs gets larger and wilder. So you’d have all thes dogs humping just because.
Thanks for posting this. I’d seen a headline about it on YT last week, but couldn’t find the actual article.
The planet Earth is made of cheese according to Neil Ferguson,although he did admit he had no proper scientific basis for making this claim.Its also not an analysis that has been published in a scientific journal and peer reviewed. Breaking on the BBC now,they’re warning of global catastrophe once the Daily Mail’s forecast summer heatwave begins…….
It would be funny, except …….
Up to 500,000 Welsh rarebits are predicted by his model.
Let’s face it, we’re toast.