Is London on its Way to Tier 3?
Is London set to join Kent and vast swathes of the North in Tier 3, and see its restaurants and pubs once again close their doors when the Tier system is reviewed on Wednesday? Sadly the answer appears to be “quite likely”. The Telegraph has the story:
It is “inevitable” London will go into Tier 3, health sources say, amid warnings that the latest data on infections in the capital is “catastrophic”. MPs from London and the surrounding areas are due to be briefed on Monday on figures that show the rate of infection is now doubling every four days.
One health source said the latest data was “terrifying”, with rates in the capital worse than those of Liverpool or Manchester when they entered Tier 3, giving the Government little choice but to introduce the harshest restrictions. In spite of some variations between different parts of the capital, he said the London boroughs were seen as “far too interconnected” to each other to be split up.
“The new data makes it likely London will go into Tier 3,” said another Government source, describing the latest figures as “catastrophic”. Another Government insider said: “Boris will be very against putting London in Tier 3. But I think it’s more than 50% likely London will go into Tier 3.”
The move is forecast to cost the economy £3 billion, pushing businesses that have survived thus far to breaking point. The Guardian describes what it could mean for a restaurant owner in Upminster:
Festive lights twinkle on the outside terrace of Upminster’s Osteria Due Amici Italian restaurant with outdoor tables placed beneath heaters, and indoor tables separated by Perspex screens.
Owner Edward Xhetani, 38, has done everything to entice customers and be Covid-compliant. It was due to be fully booked on Friday night. “But if we go into Tier 3, I’m done. That’s the truth. I don’t have a chance,” he said.
At the furthest eastern reach of the District line, Upminster lies in the London borough of Havering, where coronavirus infection rates are among the highest in the capital. Xhetani was banking on pre-Christmas trade. Instead, he faces the prospect of closing down and letting his 20 staff go. Takeaway deliveries, permitted under Tier 3, are not financially viable. “I don’t think we will survive.”
Opposition to the move is growing among Tory MPs, especially those representing London constituencies, with many calling for the city to be split into different tiers. From the Mail on Sunday:
London’s Tory MPs have urged Boris Johnson not to inflict “untold damage” on the capital by moving it into a Tier 3 lockdown this week. In a letter seen by the Mail on Sunday, the MPs urge the Prime Minister to spare the capital because shutting it down would hurt not just Londoners, but “people across the nation” who depend on the “wealth and prosperity generated by our great city”…
In a pre-emptive strike ahead of a review of the capital’s restrictions, six senior Conservatives signed the letter, organised by Harrow East MP Bob Blackman, which warned that many London Tory MPs could vote against the Government’s COVOD-19 [sic] approach when it is reviewed next month if the city is plunged into Tier 3.
Separately, Nickie Aiken, the Conservative MP whose constituency includes the West End, said Tier 3 would be a “disaster” for London and destroy livelihoods.
Mr Blackman said last night he supported the proposal to split London into different tiers, adding: “The least-affected areas should not be governed by the worst-affected areas.” He said he would vote against renewing the current anti-Covid regime next month if London was forced into Tier 3, and warned that many other London Tory MPs would do the same.
However, former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith said it would be a “mistake” to put even some London boroughs into Tier 3. Sir Iain, MP for Chingford and Woodford Green in North-East London, warned that the virus increases in his area were among schoolchildren, not the elderly population more at risk.
And Ms Aiken said the approach of dividing the capital into different restriction zones would be “near impossible to police”.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Business Secretary Alok Sharma have raised concerns over plunging the capital into Tier 3.
The MPs’ letter highlighted the Government’s own estimate last month that 550,000 jobs would have been at risk if London had been put in Tier 3 last month. They warned: “It would be a false choice to pit lives against livelihoods when it comes to deciding which Covid restrictions should apply in London. We believe the Government can both protect lives and livelihoods with a more measured approach of keeping our capital open while also bearing down on this terrible virus.”
Officials have confirmed that London will be treated as a whole, with Matt Hancock stating that “narrow carve-outs” of areas with lower rates of infection often leads to them catching up or overtaking areas with a higher prevalence of COVID-19.
Tim Spector, a leading epidemiologist and the creator of the COVID-19 Symptom Study app, has also warned against putting the capital in Tier 3. From the BMJ:
Speaking at a Royal Society of Medicine event, Spector said, “This on-off business is a total disaster, and we should avoid it. In London the decrease has stopped and is flat or slightly increased. Most of the cases are in north London at the moment. It would be a big mistake if London goes into Tier 3. I think everyone should be coming down a tier and stay somewhere between Tier 1 and 2 until April, when we see the vaccine taking effect.”
Spector said there was a danger that people would engage in risky behaviour if they thought their freedom was about to be curtailed even further. “Drinking and festivities will happen if people think that in two days’ time that is it for another six weeks. It would be madness to do that.”
“We need to think about these tier systems. The whole point should be the capacity of the NHS to deal with it locally. At the moment, according to our data, London has plenty of spare capacity [in hospitals]. We know we aren’t going to get rid of this virus before the vaccine, so we need to make sure the NHS is under control and that people over the age of 60 are not getting it at bad rates and have some clear criteria.”
He said the Government should stop treating people like “cattle” to be led and instead give them better information and trust them to do the right thing. “Just having this league table of who is being relegated and promoted and this on-off effect is madness,” he added. “We need a much more consistent pattern that we can all relate to. If you tell people the truth and what is going on in the area, they will behave responsibly. They need to be part of the discussion not treated as if they are cattle.”
Here, as a point of reference, is the latest critical care bed occupancy numbers from the Spectator’s COVID-19 data tracker.
Stop Press: The data from Tim Spector’s Zoe Covid Symptom study is well worth looking at for a detailed and nuanced picture of rises and falls in cases. The most recent data press release (dated December 11th) presents findings that though cases are rising in Wales and London they are falling in much of the rest of the country:
- There are currently 19,190 daily new symptomatic cases of COVID-19 in the UK on average over the two weeks up to December 6th (excluding care homes). This compares to 20,497 daily new symptomatic cases a week earlier.
- The UK R value is 0.9. Regional R values are: England 0.9, Wales 1.1, Scotland 0.8.
- Age groups: cases in the over-60s that contribute to hospital admissions continue to slowly decrease over time
That press release also provides details of the survey’s new English Tier Dashboard, which uses data from both the app and other publicly available sources to rank regions according to the criteria of the tier system. Commenting, Tim Spector said:
The new English Tier Dashboard aims to provide information to the regions based on the Government’s own criteria. Key parameters in changing tiers is the rates in the over 60s and the percentage of hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients. Currently we have no data that suggests that the NHS in England is at risk of being overwhelmed. Before increasing restrictions I believe a full cost-benefit evaluation should be made, that accounts for other factors such as mental health, the economy and employment. The good news is that in all the key regions, the dashboard is either trending down or staying the same, so things aren’t getting worse.
Worth reading in full.
A Senior Doctor Writes…
The senior medic who’s a regular contributor to Lockdown Sceptics isn’t impressed by the scare-mongering that NHS panjandrums have been doing about the current risks to the service.
Take John Hopson, the CEO of NHS Providers. He produced a Twitter thread on Saturday to publicise a letter he and his deputy, Safron Cordery, have written to the Prime Minister.
Firstly, why is Hopson allowed to give a running commentary in the media about communications to Government? He is employed by the NHS and should not be doing this. Any normal employee would be dismissed for acting in that way.
Or is it just NHS employees who dissent from Covid orthodoxy who are disciplined or fired for speaking out in public?
Hopson and Cordery claim the number of COVID-19 inpatients has increased in the past fortnight – but as you can see from the graphs above, there’s little evidence of that. Their gloomy prognosis depends on trusting the notoriously unreliable community testing data in various hotspots – Essex, Kent, London and parts of Lincolnshire – and predicting that London and the South East and South West are about to witness the same levels of infection and hospital admissions that were seen in parts of the North in September and October.
Number 12 of 18 in Hopson’s interminable twitter rant exposes the real reason behind the NHS pressure on the Government for further lockdown intensification.
That is a tacit acceptance of planning failure – all these problems were entirely predictable (and indeed predicted) in the summer. Hopson and his associates failed to do anything effective about it. They only had five months…
They are clutching at straws to conceal their own incompetence – effectively blaming the public for the problem and implying that locking everyone up again is the only solution.
The rational approach if they are short of beds is to scale back routine work – annoying I know, but that’s less bad than crashing the economy again. NHS executives don’t want to do that because it exposes their woeful inadequacies as managers. They prefer to blame the public – hence a lockdown of convenience. I seriously expect them to play this card each and every winter from now on.
I do know there are current bed problems in London but they are not due to increased Covid admissions on the basis of their own figures released up to 8th Dec.
It’s the usual increased winter admissions from the elderly “acute on chronic” maladies.
Needless to say, Hopson fails to mention the 20% nosocomial spread – mainly among the elderly, spread by infectious staff and patients who have not been properly segregated.
This is a problem of their own making and the shroud waving is a classic NHS management tactic to divert attention and avoid accountability.
Rather than listen to these doom-mongers, the Government should scrap PCR mass testing altogether and replace it with lateral flow tests as a mass screening tool with any positive cases thrown up by LFT verified by a PCR test done in a proper NHS lab (not an ersatz Lighthouse Lab) with a cycle threshold below 35.
Of course, there will be a lot of resistance to that because it would require the DOH to accept it had squandered £22 billion of taxpayers’ money, handing it out to Dominic Cummings’ mates for no proper reason.
How Many People Are Really Dying of COVID-19?
Lockdown Sceptics regular Guy de la Bédoyère has done a cracking piece of analysis of deaths in Week 48 (the w/e November 27th). Guy used to be a statistician in a former life and he’s used those skills to put some of the Government’s alarmist data into perspective.
He points out that comparing deaths in England and Wales in Week 48 to the five-year average, and concluding that they are alarmingly high, is misleading. Why? Because the population of England and Wales has increased and aged in the past five years, so you would expect deaths in Week 48 to be higher than than previous years as a matter of course.
This year, there were 12,456 deaths in England and Wales in Week 48. Sounds a lot, right? But Guy calculates that if you compare deaths this year to deaths in Week 48 in the previous 10 years and allow for population growth and the fact that deaths are increasing at a rate of 1.2% per annum, the number of deaths this year, absent Covid, should have been 11,145. But the ONS would have us believe that 3,040 of the 12,456 registered deaths in Week 48 were due to Covid, implying that had it not been for the dreaded lurgy only 9,416 people would have died. Guy thinks that’s implausible.
Anything less than 9,416 in absolute terms has not been seen in a Week 48 since 2013. When weighted for the lower size of population we can see that Week 48 in 2020 has allegedly seen the lowest death rate from all causes other than COVID-19 for over a decade.
The ONS is thus claiming that 24.4% (1:4) of all deaths in England and Wales in Week 48 were attributable to COVID-19 at a time when, by some extraordinary chance, deaths from all other causes dropped so dramatically that had it not been for COVID-19 we would have been exhorted to dance in the streets for joy at the nosedive in UK deaths to the lowest level for more than a decade, if not longer.
The ONS also claims that the deaths in Week 48 were 20.3% higher than the five-year average. This of course conveniently masks the fact that, as I have shown, there has been an apparent steady increase in the rate of death in Week 48 (and doubtless other weeks) for years. And there’s nothing special about Week 48, I can assure you. Looking at one week in one year on its own is of course potentially flawed, but not when one looks at that week over a much longer period of time. The ONS and SAGE make much of the idea that this year’s figures for many weeks are ‘higher’ than the five-year average. But since, as I have shown, the trend was rising anyway then of course this year’s figures will be ‘higher’ than the average. The question is how much of that rise is attributable to Covid and how much to existing trends.
The alternative way of looking at that is to refute this on the grounds that it is impossible. Therefore, we must consider that whatever remains, however improbable, must be true, which is that the figures have been presented in a way that exacerbates the impression of Covid’s impact.
The 3,040 deaths attributed to COVID-19 by the ONS can be reduced immediately to 1,311. This is achieved by taking the 12,456 recorded deaths for Week 48 and subtracting the deaths we might have expected that week anyway, based on the last 10 years and the mean increase as weighted against a rising population. Since that figure, 11,145 deaths, does not take into account 2020’s attested increase in deaths from suicide, untreated conditions and so on we could theoretically reduce the 1,311 further by assuming at least some of those additional deaths are attributable to non-Covid factors. Deductions could also be made for those whose deaths have been attributed to Covid when in fact they died from something else and/or thanks to false positives (although, to be fair, we may have already stripped them out by reducing the number of Covid deaths in Week 48 from a putative 3,040 to a more realistic 1,311). Needless to say, all these are impossible to unravel and take us into the realms of probability and speculation.
This is a brilliant piece of statistical analysis which demonstrates, pretty persuasively, that the number of people the Government believes is dying from COVID-19 have been greatly exaggerated and that the majority of the deaths ascribed to the virus are due to other causes.
Worth reading in full.
Hey, Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone
With London Mayor Sadiq Khan calling for London schools to close ahead of the looming shift to Tier 3, and Greenwich schools closing already, it is worth highlighting two recently-published articles on children and COVID-19.
The first is from Nature – “How kids’ immune systems can evade COVID-19” – and details the growing body of evidence to explain why young kids account for only a small percentage of infections. It begins by highlighting an interesting point about testing:
One clue that the response of kids to the virus differs from that of adults is that children develop COVID-19 symptoms and antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2 but never test positive for the virus on a standard RT-PCR test. In one study, three children under 10 from the same family developed SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, and two of them even experienced mild symptoms, but none tested positive on RT-PCR, despite being tested 11 times over 28 days while in close contact with their parents, who had tested positive.
It goes on to offer some explanations of the differences between the immune system response to COVID-19 in kids and adults:
Kids’ immune systems seem to be better equipped to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 than those of adults. “They are well adapted and very well equipped to respond to new viruses,” says Donna Farber, an immunologist at Columbia University in New York City…
Farber says the types of antibody children develop offer clues about what is going on. In a study of 32 adults and 47 children aged 18 or younger, she and colleagues found that children mostly produced antibodies aimed at the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which the virus uses to enter cells. Adults generated similar antibodies, but also developed antibodies against the nucleocapsid protein, which is essential for viral replication.
Farber says that the nucleocapsid protein is typically released in significant quantities only when a virus is widespread in the body. The kids lacked nucleocapsid-specific antibodies, which suggests that they aren’t experiencing widespread infection, says Farber. Children’s immune responses seem to be able to eliminate the virus before it replicates in large numbers, she says.
Farber suggests that the reason children can neutralize the virus is that their T-cells are relatively naïve. T-cells are part of the body’s adaptive immune system, which learns to recognize pathogens it encounters over a lifetime. Farber says that because children’s T-cells are mostly untrained, they might have a greater capacity to respond to new viruses. She is studying this phenomenon in more detail.
Meanwhile, there is evidence that when children are exposed to the virus, they receive a smaller dose than adults, because their noses contain fewer ACE2 receptors, which the virus uses to gain access to cells. This might also explain why COVID-19 is less prevalent in children than in adults, say researchers.
The article in Nature is worth reading in full.
The second piece comes from National Geographic and reports on a recent study carried out in Iceland suggesting that: “Kids catch and spread coronavirus half as much as much as adults.”
National Geographic was given exclusive access to the results from an Icelandic study that provides definitive evidence of how much children contribute to coronavirus spread. Researchers with the nation’s Directorate of Health and deCODE genetics, a human-genomics company in Reykjavik, monitored every adult and child in the country who was quarantined after potentially being exposed this spring, using contact tracing and genetic sequencing to trace links between various outbreak clusters. This study found that children under 15 were about half as likely as adults to be infected, and only half as likely as adults to transmit the virus to others. Almost all the coronavirus transmissions to children came from adults.
“They can and do get infected and transmit to others, but they do both less frequently than adults,” says Kári Stefánsson, the chief executive of deCODE.
This analysis is one in a recent flurry of large-scale studies that support the conclusion that infected adults pose a greater danger to children than kids do to adults. These studies could help inform officials who are struggling to decide when, or if, to close schools, knowing that such shutdowns are harming children. In addition to vital academic lessons, schools provide many critical services to communities, so last week, the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that schools should be both “the last settings to close” and “the first to reopen”.
Worth reading in full.
The UK’s COVID-19 Passport Plan
The Spectator’s Steerpike has an interesting piece on the Government’s plans in respect of COVID-19 passports.
On Monday, minister James Cleverly would not say if immunity cards or passports were on the table, as he toured the broadcast studios in the morning. Could the confusion lie in the plans the Government has to issue passports for those who have tested negative for the disease instead?
Mr S has obtained documents which show that the UK’s plans for negative Covid test ‘passports’ have progressed much further than previously thought.
While the Prime Minister merely hinted in late November that so-called “freedom passes” could allow members of the public to be free from restrictions, the documents show that at the beginning of November, the Department of Health was asking businesses to build a “minimum viable product” for the “Covid certification/passport” scheme.
The document explains that: “Negative Covid Test Status Evidence for citizens will be provided if they have obtained a negative COVID-19 test within a specific timeframe in addition to meeting other criteria.”
The Department of Health told those building the passport system that: “The Government wishes to enable workplaces, educational centres, health and social care services and places of business to open to members of the public who have tested negative for COVID-19.”
Steerpike notes that while the DOH has ruled out immunity passports for the vaccinated, it would not take too much to adapt the new system so those who’ve had the jab can also get a “freedom pass”.
From the point of view of a public health official, there’s a certain logic in attaching the passport to a negative test result, rather than to the injection, given that it is still unclear how long immunity from the jab will last, or whether it prevents transmission.
Stop Press: The Government’s intentions on COVID-19 passports may, in any case, end up being overtaken by the country at large. A reader has written in:
I noticed a comment in the current newsletter of a small hotel in Scotland offering “Wildlife Holidays” where we have stayed on occasion in the days pre COVID-19.
“Should a vaccination programme be rolled out in the next few months, then it is likely we will require all guests to have been vaccinated before arrival,” it says.
2020 has undoubtedly have been a hard year for the hotel and they have already put in place a wide range of COVID-19 related “safety” measures which will have had significant cost and massively reduced their occupancy rates. They will be balancing the requirements of both the Government and their customers, and, in respect of the latter, they clearly envisage that their customers will expect the highest possible levels of “safety” and will, on the whole, regard this vaccination requirement positively!
I fear that, whatever the science and whatever Government might say, we are all going to be forced inexorably into a situation where “Vaccination Certificates”, de facto if not de jure, become necessary to lead even a reasonable life in the months (years?) to come.
Stop Press 2: Bill Gates predicts that even with the mass rollout of Covid vaccines, it is still “sadly” appropriate for bars and restaurants to be closed for the next four to six months.
Australia: Surge in Eating Disorders in the Wake of Lockdown
The Sydney Morning Herald has a report on a tragic consequence of the State of Victoria’s response to the coronavirus.
The COVID-19 pandemic and Victoria’s protracted lockdown to contain the virus has triggered a wave of destructive eating disorders in teenagers and young adults, with the demand for treatment overwhelming available services and spilling into hospital wards and emergency rooms.
Christine Morgan, the Chief Executive of the National Mental Health Commission, who advises the Prime Minister on suicide prevention said that data provided by hospitals and support services showed a national surge of between 25% and 50% in presentations for eating disorders across the public health system.
In Victoria, the situation is so dire that some of Melbourne’s leading private practices specialising in eating disorders have been forced to close their doors to new patients.
Kevin Barrow, the chief executive of the Butterfly Foundation which runs a national helpline for people with eating disorders, said a shortage of trained clinicians was aggravating what is likely to be a long-term health consequence for young people.
“If you are in need of care you just can’t get in to see somebody”, Mr Barrow said. “The evidence suggests the earlier you get into treatment, the better chance of recovery. Unfortunately the converse is also true. I think we are going to be dealing with these challenges for quite some time to come.”
Dr Louisa Hoey, a clinical psychologist who consults almost exclusively with people with eating disorders at the Health Psychology Centre in Kew, said that there was a two to three-month waiting list for new patients. She said one of the biggest factors behind the surge in new diagnoses was the loss of social, work and school activities through the pandemic which normally help keep eating disorders in check. “That structure not being there has been overwhelming for people”, she says. “People talked about just feeling suffocated at home.”
Claire Finkelstein, who works as part of a team of psychologists and dietitians specialising in eating disorders at the Nourish, Nature, Thrive clinics in Ivanhoe and Mornington said that her books had been closed to new patients for all but one week this year. “Prior to the pandemic we were already having huge trouble in finding clinicians who wanted to work in this field or had this skill set”, she said. “The treatments we have can be quite effective if they are delivered early. That is really hard to do when there is a bottleneck in the system. That is the tragedy of what is happening at the moment.’’
For those already diagnosed or recovering from eating disorders, the long COVID-19 winter was equally challenging. “It has taken away their capacity to balance their lives”, said Christine Morgan. “For all of us that causes anxiety and distress. For somebody with the psychopathology of an eating disorder it is horror on steroids.’’
Worth reading in full.
Round-up
- “Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine” – A study in the New England Journal of Medicine concluding that, over a median of two months, the Pfizer vaccine has a safety profile similar to that of other viral vaccines
- “When do we start coming out of the COVID-19 mass hysteria” – Michael Fumento asks something we would all like to know for the AIER blog
- “Why distractions are serious issues for guide dogs and their owners, especially during COVID-19” – A report on Sky News on how COVID-19 has affected the blind, whose guide dogs are not trained for two-metre social distancing
- “The truth about that No 10 COVID-19 briefing” – Freddie Sayers in Unherd on the Sunday Times piece which attempted to criticise the Prime Minister for paying too much attention to Gupta, Heneghan and Tegnell and not being sufficiently interventionist in his response to COVID-19. The Sunday Times‘s charges were almost the exact opposite of the truth
- “Blindly following every rule strips us of our humane and caring instincts” – A thought-provoking piece in the Guardian by Nicci Gerard, who founded the John’s Campaign for the right to stay with people with dementia
- “Ho Ho Humbug: Christmas display shut down by police after onlookers break social distancing” – Plug pulled on a spectacular winter wonderland display at a private home in Somerset when it was thought that passers by might be enjoying themselves
- “Why this campaign of terror?” – Never in peacetime has there been such an onslaught of Government propaganda, writes Gillian Dymond in Off-Guardian
- “COVID-19 in Wales: Mass testing a waste of resources” – Report from the BBC on public health official Dr Angela Raffle’s comments on mass testing in Wales
- “Germany to close shops and schools in COVID-19 Christmas lockdown” – The Guardian reports on developments in Germany. Closing bars and restaurants didn’t work, so they’re closing shops and schools as well
- “Essential facts about COVID-19” – A thorough and sceptical summary of COVID-19 on the Watts Up With That blog
- “Find out how many people caught COVID-19 inside your nearest NHS hospital trust” – More than 10,000 people contracted COVID-19 while in hospital for other illnesses. Find out how your local trust performed with this postcode tool in the Telegraph
- “2020 was especially deadly. COVID-19 was not the only culprit” – There have been 356,000 more deaths in the US than normal this year, more than a quarter of them from increased mortality in cases of diabetes, Alzheimer’s, high blood pressure and pneumonia. An interesting feature for the New York Times
- “Claire Craig’s talk on COVID-19 testing and T-cell immunity in children and young people” – Watch Dr Claire Craig’s lecture to a large gathering of concerned parents
- “Princeton Prof tells students America is a ‘settler colonizing nation founded on genocide’” – Professor Ali Valenzuela explains why America is riddled with racism from top to bottom. From Campus Reform
- “Cambridge may have won the battle for free speech, but the war is far from over” – FSU member Zoe Strimpel, in the Telegraph, on the ongoing need for vigilance and care in the battle for freedom of speech
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Two today: “Damage I’ve Done” by The Heads and “Always Looking for The Wave” by Juste Moi.
Love in the Time of Covid
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums, including a dating forum called “Love in a Covid Climate” that has attracted a bit of attention. We have a team of moderators in place to remove spam and deal with the trolls, but sometimes it takes a little while so please bear with us. You have to register to use the Forums, but that should just be a one-time thing. Any problems, email the Lockdown Sceptics webmaster Ian Rons here.
Sharing Stories
Some of you have asked how to link to particular stories on Lockdown Sceptics so you can share it. To do that, click on the headline of a particular story and a link symbol will appear on the right-hand side of the headline. Click on the link and the URL of your page will switch to the URL of that particular story. You can then copy that URL and either email it to your friends or post it on social media. Please do share the stories.
Social Media Accounts
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Woke Gobbledegook
We’ve decided to create a permanent slot down here for woke gobbledegook. Today, we bring you the Falls Church School Board in Virginia, USA and its decision to change the names of Thomas Jefferson Elementary and George Mason High following a community “consultation”. Report from wtop-news.
The Falls Church School Board in Virginia voted 7-0 to change the names of Thomas Jefferson Elementary and George Mason High. Greg Anderson, Chair of the Falls Church School Board said: “After deep and careful consideration of everything I’ve heard and read, I conclude that renaming both schools is in the best interest of our students and a necessary part of our equity work.”
The name change is a School Board initiative that was begun in the summer at the height of social unrest and included a survey of the Falls Church community taken in October. The survey found that 56% of respondents overall asked that the names stay on the schools, including 61% of the parents at Thomas Jefferson Elementary and 57% of the parents at George Mason High.
Although the vote stands in contrast to the survey, the School Board Chairman said the School Board listened to the community. “I considered the survey results and the community discussion that followed, and I revisited our public hearings… I conclude that the public is split, and if you go beyond the simple number, I’ve heard reasoned perspectives from those in favour of retaining the names and from those in favour of changing the names”, Anderson said.
One of the speakers at the meeting, Dr Jennifer Santiago, said she represented the minority voice in the survey and agreed with the Board’s decision.
“While there are many times majority rules works in issues of equity, it is the opposite that is needed”, Santiago said. “If the majority rule worked for traditionally marginalized groups, we would not have systemic racism.”
Former Thomas Jefferson and George Mason student William Henneberg said changing the names against what the majority desires will set a bad precedent for the future. “Do not encourage our students to be victims or to use offense as a means to shut others down”, Henneberg said. “Encourage our children to be critical thinkers.”
Santiago disagreed, saying the majority’s decision-making has ruled for a long time, and its actions are being tackled with the current name-change discussions. “We need to listen very strongly to the minority response to this survey”, Santiago said. “Because the voices making up that number are the ones most negatively affected by the lives and legacies of these two men.”
The report in wtop-news is worth reading in full.
The Washington Examiner is less than impressed by the Board’s decision.
The Falls Church City Public Schools board in Virginia beclowned itself this month by voting unanimously to remove the names of founders Thomas Jefferson and George Mason from an elementary school and a high school, respectively.
The board made the change in open defiance of its own survey showing that 56% of the school community, and more than two-thirds of those who expressed a definite opinion, wanted to keep the names. It also defies fiscal responsibility, with the name changes estimated to cost more than $110,000 to implement.
This pathetic, politically correct pronouncement comes from the same School Board that has not figured out how to hold in-person classes since March, despite mountains of evidence that elementary and secondary schools are not primary locations for spreading the coronavirus. Rather than waste its time on virtue-signalling against dead white males, perhaps the board should worry more about better educating its students.
Also worth reading in full.
Stop Press: We have had a response to the competition announced yesterday for an English translation of the Rhodes Trust’s spectacularly woke tweet. Any more offers? A reminder of what the tweet said:
And here’s the reader’s translation:
Billy-Ray Bellend is a young teacher who works at UBC. He writes fiction and has a very modern outlook on every ism you can imagine. He likes to focus his fiction on the past moulding it into a far better place by removing bits he doesn’t like.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
We’ve created a one-stop shop down here for people who want to buy (or make) a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and it has the advantage of not explicitly claiming you have a disability. But if you have no qualms about that (or you are disabled), you can buy a lanyard from Amazon saying you do have a disability/medical exemption here (takes a while to arrive). The Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. You can get a “Hidden Disability” tag from ebay here and an “exempt” card with lanyard for just £1.99 from Etsy here. And, finally, if you feel obliged to wear a mask but want to signal your disapproval of having to do so, you can get a “sexy world” mask with the Swedish flag on it here.
Don’t forget to sign the petition on the UK Government’s petitions website calling for an end to mandatory face masks in shops here.
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption.
If you’re a shop owner and you want to let your customers know you will not be insisting on face masks or asking them what their reasons for exemption are, you can download a friendly sign to stick in your window here.
And here’s an excellent piece about the ineffectiveness of masks by a Roger W. Koops, who has a doctorate in organic chemistry. See also the Swiss Doctor’s thorough review of the scientific evidence here.
Stop Press: A splendid letter to the editor has just been published in the Irish Times:
Sir, – When exiting Level Five, our Taoiseach updated guidance on masks, saying that the introduction of mask mandates in July had had an incredibly positive effect.
As he did not elaborate, one can only guess as to what metrics allowed him to reach such a conclusion. It couldn’t be the number of COVID-19 cases or mortality rates, as both have increased since July. It couldn’t be improvements in our personal liberty, as we’ve spent months now sampling the various levels. It could only be in terms of compliance, rather than any actual, quantifiable evidence of health benefit, that our Taoiseach could be so pleased with. And if compliance is the measure of success, then it is understandable that he would look for more, asking us to start wearing them outdoors too. In so doing, however, the evidence for mask benefits, already flimsy, is stretched beyond credibility. Perhaps now might be a good time to question rather than comply? – Yours, etc,
The Great Barrington Declaration
The Great Barrington Declaration, a petition started by Professor Martin Kulldorff, Professor Sunetra Gupta and Professor Jay Bhattacharya calling for a strategy of “Focused Protection” (protect the elderly and the vulnerable and let everyone else get on with life), was launched in October and the lockdown zealots have been doing their best to discredit it ever since. If you googled it a week after launch, the top hits were three smear pieces from the Guardian, including: “Herd immunity letter signed by fake experts including ‘Dr Johnny Bananas’.” (Freddie Sayers at UnHerd warned us about this the day before it appeared.) On the bright side, Google UK has stopped shadow banning it, so the actual Declaration now tops the search results – and Toby’s Spectator piece about the attempt to suppress it is among the top hits – although discussion of it has been censored by Reddit. The reason the zealots hate it, of course, is that it gives the lie to their claim that “the science” only supports their strategy. These three scientists are every bit as eminent – more eminent – than the pro-lockdown fanatics so expect no let up in the attacks. (Wikipedia has also done a smear job.)
You can find it here. Please sign it. Now over three quarters of a million signatures.
Update: The authors of the GDB have expanded the FAQs to deal with some of the arguments and smears that have been made against their proposal. Worth reading in full.
Update 2: Many of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration are involved with new UK anti-lockdown campaign Recovery. Find out more and join here.
Update 3: You can watch Sunetra Gupta set out the case for “Focused Protection” here and Jay Bhattacharya make it here.
Update 4: The three GBD authors plus Prof Carl Heneghan of CEBM have launched a new website collateralglobal.org, “a global repository for research into the collateral effects of the COVID-19 lockdown measures”. Follow Collateral Global on Twitter here.
Judicial Reviews Against the Government
There are now so many JRs being brought against the Government and its ministers, we thought we’d include them all in one place down here.
First, there’s the Simon Dolan case. You can see all the latest updates and contribute to that cause here. Alas, he’s now reached the end of the road, with the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear his appeal. Dolan has no regrets. “We forced SAGE to produce its minutes, got the Government to concede it had not lawfully shut schools, and lit the fire on scrutinizing data and information,” he says. “We also believe our findings and evidence, while not considered properly by the judges, will be of use in the inevitable public inquires which will follow and will help history judge the PM, Matt Hancock and their advisers in the light that they deserve.”
Then there’s the Robin Tilbrook case. You can read about that and contribute here.
Then there’s John’s Campaign which is focused specifically on care homes. Find out more about that here.
There’s the GoodLawProject’s Judicial Review of the Government’s award of lucrative PPE contracts to various private companies. You can find out more about that here and contribute to the crowdfunder here.
The Night Time Industries Association has instructed lawyers to JR any further restrictions on restaurants, pubs and bars.
And last but not least there’s the Free Speech Union‘s challenge to Ofcom over its ‘coronavirus guidance’. A High Court judge refused permission for the FSU’s judicial review ;ast week, but the FSU may appeal the decision. Check here for updates.
Samaritans
If you are struggling to cope, please call Samaritans for free on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email jo@samaritans.org or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch. Samaritans is available round the clock, every single day of the year, providing a safe place for anyone struggling to cope, whoever they are, however they feel, whatever life has done to them.
Quotation Corner
We know they are lying. They know they are lying, They know that we know they are lying. We know that they know that we know they are lying. And still they continue to lie.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
Mark Twain
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.
Charles Mackay
They who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions…
Ideology – that is what gives the evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get into the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man, who knows where it hurts, is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialist.
Sir Winston Churchill
If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.
Richard Feynman
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C.S. Lewis
The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.
Albert Camus
We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Carl Sagan
Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Marcus Aurelius
Necessity is the plea for every restriction of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
William Pitt the Younger
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
Joseph Goebbels (attributed)
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
H.L. Mencken
I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
Thomas Paine
Shameless Begging Bit
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And Finally…
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Is there some sort of kudos attached to being first? If so, I might give it a go
…but clearly not today!
Second the best
It’s the equivalent of getting a gold star in Primary School.
Does that mean it’s used to estimate your grades when your exams are cancelled over a decade later?
Gavin Williamson is considering it.
You win a lifetime’s supply of face nappies
London Tier 3 – is there any information available to show if there have been any recent changes to the volume and nature of the testing?
Edit – same question for Wales
Yes, Wales has massively stepped up testing. See the BBC article listed above. But the text of the article is.twisted to suggest that the problem with testing is false negatives, which is clearly not what the expert quoted in the headline believes.A right bit of agitprop.
Dungford affects to believe that testing cures Covid. What he really believes is that testing fires up more terror, which he enjoys.
More testing in Enfield which is in the borough of Havering because of mobile testing units.
Do you know if PCR or lateral flow is being used and are the units targeted at catering for particular groups?
Eh? Enfield is at the northern end of North London. Havering is right out as far as East London goes!
Nevertheless, we all know this is a testing and media pandemic and nothing else. That if you test the population for absolutely anything, you will find some with fragments of whatever it is, inevitably. And there are elements of the media that need to be in the dock in the show trials to follow along with all the Gates shills in Parliament and the ahem “scientific” community…
some parts of Enfield have a Middlesex post code (long story) -not sure how that affects the NHS covid app.
London “cases”
03-12-2020 2,434
04-12-2020 2,896
05-12-2020 2,265
06-12-2020 2,362
07-12-2020 3,644 <—- mass testing starts
08-12-2020 3,534
09-12-2020 3,447
Get tested: Get locked down!
So it’s going down already. Better go easy on that, can’t have the credit being taken away from Tier 3
Yes, for many the penny simply hasn’t dropped, has it.
where are these figures – I can’t find them anywhere and they no longer publish tests by region on the nhs database ?
So close! Was thinking about what to write when Judy’s name popped up first. But I will say that we had friends over for dinner tonight and it was very normal until the Covid shit came up, albeit briefly. I was a bit anxious as I’m quite the loose canon these days and my hubby was concerned about me alienating our friends, but I held myself in check so we’re all good. I concluded that I can deal with friends who can be normal, even if they have partially drunk the Kool Aid. Clearly they’re not insane since they were in my home without taking any “precautions” (not that I would have allowed them), but they do believe there is a pandemic and seem to believe the vaccine will help get us back to normal. To be fair, 95% of the evening was not Covid-related so I can say it was nice having an almost completely normal get together. Off to bed now…
Why not send them an email, saying something along the lines of “I saw this on the internet, what do you make of it?”
https://brandnewtube.com/watch/ask-the-experts-covid-19-vaccine-now-banned-on-youtube-and-facebook_qIsNohSIeSgfz2J.html
Should at least tip them a few inches more towards rationality – if not save their health or even their lives.
SD The video you recommend kicks off with people saying there is no pandemic and the vaccine is not safe. How exactly is this ‘in your face’ message going to go down with Lisa’s friends who believe there is a pandemic and believe in a vaccine???? IMO this will set them back and a softly softly approach would be much more effective.
I’ve decided it’s not up to me to try to save lives, other than those of my immediate family. Everyone who knows me well knows I research the hell out of everything and, if asked, am more than happy to educate. The son of one set of friends works for Apotex (generic drug maker) so they might not take any vaccine hesitancy (putting it mildly) on my part in the spirit in which I intend it. DH and I did say we wouldn’t be taking the vaccine, so any of them could have asked why and opened up that conversation. I won’t lie to anyone, but I have learned to keep my facts to myself unless asked. These are friends of almost 20 years and we live in the country now and don’t want to decimate our social lives! I draw the line at behaving irrationally in my presence, but I’ve decided to put up with behaving normally and thinking irrationally!
Yes, totally crazy that we have come to this extent and walk on eggshells. After spending several hours giving facts and sources (by e-mail) to a married couple, friends of ours, not your typical unskeptikal people, I ended up giving up having an exchange of facts with them.
Until this craziness is over, we have agreed to disagree and won’t see each other. Until then I am considered a neo-nazi and conspiracy theorist: I guess I am not alone in this case…
Oh I sympathise with your predicament. I have lost a very good friend of 20 years who lives in Berlin and teaches art. She wears a mask and all her students too. I suggested this was virtue signalling and had no effect. I forwarded an article from The Critic magazine but she branded it ‘ alt right’ which is ridiculous. My relationship with my son is also soured as he has been patronising about my research into this whole affair. It’s just wrong on so many levels the way this virus has been politicised and these social divisions will likely be permanent.
Yesterday my mother said she didn’t want to hear anything that comes from my right wing media sources. I had simply told her that there have been no excess deaths in Canada for 2020 based on Statistics Canada’s own web site. Stats Can is not some “right wing” source, it’s the freaking government! The very same government that shouldn’t want us to know that there has been no pandemic. I won’t be sending any more facts and data my mom’s way, but we’ll be fine as far as our relationship. I haven’t lost any friends and family yet, but I don’t think I’m out of the woods. If anyone thinks I should be force vaccinated or prevented from living by choosing not to be vaccinated, I’m done with them.
“If anyone thinks I should be force vaccinated or prevented from living by choosing not to be vaccinated, I’m done with them.”
Suggest you just give them some months for reflexion instead, if I may…
These critical, sceptical movements/sites like this one are gaining in readership – and of course you won’t read this in the mainstream media. We are not talking here about a little conspiracy denied by a few lunatics… I am sure the tide will turn. However, until people realise, the media machine and oligarchs will have created the next panic…
We have to keep fighting (in a non-violent way) with ideas, and we will need to have a long memory…
I sympathise.
I’m lucky that my family all agree with me, though MOH gets fed up with me having rants at the radio/tv.
Came across this yesterday, which is a funny video:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b-LHdEUrGa8
How the Media Wants You To Think
and: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_O9ltm_Gml0
Why Small Businesses Should Stay Closed Forever!
When you’re aware of the manipulation and propaganda, it’s impossible not to see it, and to fall for it. If you’re not yet aware, it’s easy to be deceived.
Thank you. When I read forums like these I sometimes have the impression I am doing Group Therapy (positively meant, although I have no experience witht the real thing 😉 ). Funnily enough my son studies in Berlin and we have issues currently, which I kind of sweep under the carpet, saying to myself: “I, too, used to diagree on principle with my old man” (and still do, occasionally…). The very twisted thing here (Germany) is that people who would be in the the “Antifa” camp – like the aforementioned friends – do not criticise – at least not loudly – the government’s drastic measures and new laws, but are – occasionally – organising counter-protests when “Coronasceptics” go on the street. The Antifa (or some of it) does this on the grounds that Coronasceptics do not distance themselves enough from neo-nazis and conspiracy theorists. I have nothing against the Antifa as such. But I currently do have something against the lack of critical thinking… It seems that there are currently two possibilities: 1) People believe there is a pandemic and the government(s) do the right thing(s) OR 2) People believe their government(s) are conning them like never before and use… Read more »
Your attitude is exactly how I’ve decided to be with friends and family. I’ve tried the ‘can you not see what’s going on’ and the please ‘don’t take the vaccine’ approach, and now I’ve decided to do as you’ve outlined in your message. On dark days I think ‘bugger ‘em’, on brighter days I think nicer thoughts.
If anyone asks, I’ll tell them what I know, but if they start with the whole Koolaid nonsense, I’ll change the subject and ask about the dog’s birthday party.
The vaccine passport thing is bizarre. Once the vaccine is generally available, then what would the need be for the ‘passport’ anyway? Anyone worried about the virus will be able to be vaccinated. So why would it matter if a few other people are not? The Scottish hotel owners mentioned in the post, for instance: if the owner of the hotel and his/her staff have been vaccinated, and any elderly or vulnerable guests likewise, why does it matter if a few guests haven’t been? I don’t understand. But then I don’t understand much of what my fellow countrymen have been thinking since March.
Be careful. You’re thinking that this CV19 vaccine works the way vaccines did before 2020. You have to remember that the English language is being changed. Vaccines in 2020 don’t innoculate. Cases in 2020 are not in hospital. And so on.
The biggest change, for me, is that deadly diseases are also mostly asymptomatic. I used to understand the term ‘disease’ as being something that made you ill. Silly me.
And before 2020 once you had a virus you were immune to that particular virus for life. Not anymore it would seem.
Equally bizarre is
‘Mr Steerpike has obtained documents which show that the UK’s plans for negative Covid Passports have progressed . . .’
All a negative test purports to show is that the person was ‘negative’ at the time of the test.
It does not show whether they caught Covid on the way home on the bus.
In same way that having a vehicle M.O.T certificate will not save you from prosecution if an officer stops you and finds a defect the following day.
Those people will never be satisfied and they will never stop thinking of idiotic schemes to continue imposing this bullshit on all of us.
“If only everyone would just STAY HOME we’ll go back to normal” —> informing on neighbours
“If only everyone would just WEAR MASKS we’ll go back to normal” —> verbally abusing non-maskers
“If only everyone would just HAVE THE VACCINE we’ll go back to normal” —> agitate for vaccine passports
Parallel universe. When will they realise?
Nigella is on tonight isn’t she?
When this starts happening we need a lot of people to email the venue to say “I was hoping to book but I am not going to be injected with a rushed vaccine so you lose “
No need to wait. Bombard the twats with emails and keep doing it until their business becomes unviable.
Yes, and leave similar comments on the likes of Trip Advisor and their social media pages too. They may well rethink if it looks like their over zealous policies will lose them business.
Good post, but I have tried this and just get the reply “Our Head Office has laid the rules down and they’re not going away anytime soon.”
So I suppose they’ll just have to learn the hard way, then.
Absolutely. I have told every business that I would’ve visited but now avoid that it’s because of their restrictions/heavy handed treatment and NOT any fear I have of the virus.
If we don’t tell them then how can we assume they know?
i’m going to try telling the gestapo like,maybe is new , manager of the grocery store i was almost thrown out of- that i won t be shopping there till no masks mayeb never again because of their insane no mask no entry stupid rule but not sure have enough courage , i have the conviction at least will try for more courage , am inspired by everyone here.
a good friend offered to shop for me but i feel like that’s a weasles way out
id only been going there once every 3 weeks anyway and only wore a thin scarf never a horrid mask love the term face nappy have read here .
Shareholders who are invested in this technology are rubbing their hands waiting for their dividends. Governments get to control us with a Chinese style social credit system
Money and control
This isn’t about a virus.
It isn’t about a vaccine.
It’s all about the “passport” and government control of our lives.
It’s 95% about the vaccine and the vaccine is about global population reduction. They want rid of 95% of us and the control is only for the 5% who have been spared the cull.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. The vaccines and the endless boosters will slowly kill us over many years so it’s not too obvious. They also steralise
As yesterday’s meme was saying: Imagine a virus so dangerous they have to force you to take a vaccine, and you have to get tested to know you have it.
They know that many of us are not buying their secondhand horse apples.
Good morning to you too!
Not so dangerous
Risk of catching coronavirus from a family member you live with is just 17% and only one in three people pass it on to their spouse, study finds
Researchers analyzed 54 studies with more 77,000 participants reporting household secondary transmission of coronavirus
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-9051691/Risk-catching-coronavirus-family-member-live-just-16-6.html
from Telegraph Our Global Health deputy editor Anne Gulland has asked the World Health Organization about the new strain of Covid-19 discussed by Matt Hancock, the UK health secretary, today.
Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead says there is “no evidence so far” that the new strain of Covid “behaves differently”.
Has anyone had a go at raising a petition to stop the use of PCR as the primary means of testing?
From our Senior Doctor in today’s editorial:
” … the Government should scrap PCR mass testing altogether and replace it with lateral flow tests as a mass screening tool with any positive cases thrown up by LFT verified by a PCR test done in a proper NHS lab (not an ersatz Lighthouse Lab) with a cycle threshold below 35″
I think I am more inclined to raise a petition to halt all routine testing for a disease that seems to me to be, for most people, a jumped up drama merchant of a respiratory virus, much in the same league as flu and colds. Testing for this sort of respiratory disease should be reserved for special situations like Hospitals, Care Homes and peripatetic care workers and needs to be done to a very high standard with any positive result being backed up by a secondary test as used to be the norm for health screening.
Just back to my unending Tier 3 prison from a delightful prison-break holiday in Tier 2 land. Took the small people and enjoyed: cafes! Soft play! Zoo! Family gatherings with lots of hugging! (Ahem.) The children were almost as excited as me.
Hate to say it, but I wonder whether London being slammed into Tier 3 isn’t a good thing: it may open some more eyes to the madness.
As I crossed back into West Yorkshire last night there was a big sign over the deserted motorway saying “Avoid Non-Essential Travel”. Fortunately kids were asleep so I could swear fruitily at it.
Second paragraph mirror my thoughts precisely, tough though that might be on our London readers.
It is truly pathetic that Tory London M.Ps only start to get upset about tiers when their own constituents are threatened with t3 having blithely condemned millions up north to the same a couple of weeks ago.
Absolutely. “It will be so devastating,”they all cry. What do they think it’s been like for the northern cities and market towns, and beautiful little village pubs that have been hammered for months now? I’m a southerner who moved north and could scream at the ignorance of the Londoners I left behind.
The vast majority of London has Labour MPs, the ones who advocate harsher lockdowns and couldn’t give a stuff about knife crime and the turning of the capital into a Ghost Town.
Now they’re only starting to stir because economic Armageddon is staring at them in the face.
I’m a Londoner but these lockdownistas and their MPs in Islington, Hampstead, Highgate,Kensington, Richmond, etc. deserve everything they get.
Shan’t have any sympathy for them when they get a taste of their own medicine.
Tier 3 in London will make no difference in terms of attitudes, judging from conversations on the street. The London public seems to be pretty firmly separated into “it’s all a bloody nonsense” and “it’s a shame, but if only the government had never let us out of our houses in the first place, maybe things would be better”. First group is bigger, in my experience, but I can’t see either group having their minds changed by going up a tier.
I don’t think you can make a moral case for London staying in tier 2 if you accept that swathes of the country should be in tier 3. I just don’t think you can make a moral case for any of the country being in any tier in the first place.
I used to like seeing the Welcome to Quebec highway sign on my return from Toronto. Now it has been replaced by ‘Maximum Alert!’
Breaking news Welsh Government vaccine rollout update ‘ We are pleased to announce that over 3,000 people had been vaccinated by Friday We praise these selfless, loyal, patriots. In recognition of their commitment we are today granting a special dispensation to the vaccinated From midnight the vaccinated will be allowed to wear a smear of strawberry jam on their foreheads This will allow the vaccinated to signal to others that they have been vaccinated and thereby provide reassurance to the yet to be vaccinated This dispensation is obviously open to abuse by far right wingers and vaccine deniers so we we will be making some minor amendments to the Covid Laws to prevent this FROM MIDNIGHT 1 All stocks of strawberry jam, both domestic and retail must be surrendered to government officials 2 It will be a criminal offence for the unvaccinated to posses strawberry jam 3 Police will have powers to arrest anyone they suspect of committing a JRO (Jam related offence) 4 Police will have power to detain JRO suspects for up to a year without charge 5 Police will be granted powers to enter homes without a warrant to search for strawberry jam The locations of JDC’s… Read more »
I have fair skin. Do you think I can get away with using Raspberrry?
Certainly not. Raspberry jam contains pips which are known to harbour up to a trillion coronaviruses per pip. What’s the use of getting your snake oil if you then cheat on your Mark of Virtue and put others in a jam?
I believe the correct term is pith, which is of course, what is being taken.
You could choke on a pip. There must be a jam risk assessment with a view to banning it altogether for ordinary people.
Quite. It should be jelly only, no jam.
According to the science, it must be jelly, cos jam don’t shake like that.
A friend of a friend knows someone who got a long pip-related condition. Their nose bunged up and they couldn’t stop blowing raspberries.
It’s OK, I’ve got it sussed. Since I like the combination of Strawbury jam and Marmite, I propose to combine the two and place that on my forehead. Given the appearence of such a concoction it is guaranteed that nobody is going to go near me, so no need for the vaccine.
police will misunderstand the regulations completely and arrest people for marmalade and marmite offences
I read that in a welsh accent, it was even funnier
JROs – genius!
If London being plunged into Tier 3 just before Christmas doesn’t create a new army of staunch anti-lockdown business owners, employees and concerned customers, then there really isn’t much hope going into 2021.
The question is, will those affected simply keel over and die or fight and go down in a blaze of glory? I know what I’d rather do.
Totally agree!
Agree. I’ve been despairing at many of my colleagues who despite the threat of Tier 3 and looming redundancy are still moaning about people not following the rules and think that the vaccine is the magic bullet that will be the solution to our problems. Am just waiting the right time to mention infertility and Bell’s Palsy.
And businesses in London should find their backbone and fight back against these restrictions. Its depressing to see swathes of Oxford Street and Regent Street among others with shops, pubs and restaurants closed never to reopen again.
If they all found their collective backbone and challenged the police to fine them & attempt to shut them down, that would confuse the hell out of the authorities and keep them busy for the next 50,000 years.
Largest transfer of wealth and we are welcoming it apparently.
No one wants to be the first to put their head up to call it out.
The silence is indeed deafening. These businesses who refuse to fight back deserve to go bust.
It might be interesting to see what happens in January as I suspect a lot of commercial rents fall due for payment in advance at the end of this month.
It may be the last straw for some businesses.
It’s all very good to be given furlough staff income but that’s reduced now and London rents in particular have been high for commercial properties.
I suspect that more and more shops will be unable to pay their rent come the New Year. Furlough has been nothing but a sticking plaster as more businesses go bust or lay off workers.
Well said. I’ve long suspected that they were expecting to benefit from small businesses going under. Trouble is, that seems to have backfired as the large chains are not exactly in good shape either.
As we all know, the smaller and more local the shop, the more likely it us to treat you like a human being. Yes, I know there are many exceptions, but the big chain stores are generally worse. Probably they never thought of their customers as real people, even before the bollox started.
And a lot of the foreign owned chains are some of the worst. The likes of Zara, Bimba y Lola, Gap deserve to go bust for their over zealous enforcement of the regulations.
I’m sure that will be foremost in mind among Weatherspoons board members as a second tranche of small pubs go under leaving them the pick of new, already licenced, sites at rock bottom prices.
That won’t surprise me but I don’t think Weatherspoons will be in a position to benefit either. None of them will.
Spoons aren’t interested in small pubs -they need large premises. Of course if a town had 10 pubs plus a Spoons and 6 of the small pubs go under, Spoons will get more business.That said I do like the Spoons choice of beer and prices.
Wetherspoons prices vary according to competition in the area they are in.
I feel it is a moment for Tim Martin to lead Weatherspoons in a lockdown refuseniks revolution, they are big enough to give the health tyrants a run for their money.
Already in hand. See my post later.
The owner of the Wetherspoons chain of pubs is fighting back – but it is true that a lot of others are conspicuous by their absence. I don’t get it – because, if I were a business owner, then I would be conscious of my responsibilities to my staff to keep their income coming in as best I could.
The problem with big businesses (speaking as an insider working for a multinational corporate) is twofold: firstly, the biggest businesses, the ones with the clout to be heard, tend to have significant cash reserves and so can ride things out. And the pain of redundancies in the service of cost cutting doesn’t translate into executive pain. Meanwhile, the execs will not suffer, because the shareholders who hold they key to their future employment will make many allowances for company performance “during the pandemic.” And then the expectation is that they will be well positioned to benefit significantly from the bounce back, not least because of the number of small business competitors who will have ceased to exist.
Secondly, it’s in their perceived self interest to virtue signal as loudly as possible, because they believe that their profile in terms of ‘corporate social responsibility’ is vital to the future commercial success of the business. Heaven forbid they should be seen as advocates for killing granny.
Excellent analysis Matt. I think you have it spot on there. The top brass are very insulated and will bullshit the shareholders (they do that every year!) who will be too gormless to see through it. Also CSR is the new ROCE now and counts for more in many circles. Big business is fully on board with virtue signalling and has no time for the maximisation of shareholder value objective….even into the long term now.
Because the big business will survive and flourish as their small competitors go bust.
I am surpised many businesses have not fought back. One thing businesses should have raised a fuss about what the justitifiation for closing their businesses. The supposed justification for closing businesses was that if staff and customers were in close proximity they might infect each other. This didn’t apply to many businesses which were forced to close. Clothes shops, electrical shops, bookshops, museums and galleries are often very big, don’t have many customers in at the same time and it is very easy for customers to stay far apart from each other even with a large number of customers. Small shops can only hold a small number of customers. My town had a branch of Peacocks which has since closed and I was the only customer if I went in. In hotels the customers stay in seperate rooms and only mix at breakfast time and this doesn’t happen in hotels which don’t serve breakast. Businesses should have fought against closure on the basis it was unlikely customers and staff would infect each other. In another post I highlighted an issue with lockdown rules is that they take a blunt one size fits all when forcing businesses to close. If I… Read more »
Mr Bart & I went to Two Tree Island yesterday for a spot of bird watching. Although the weather wasn’t great, we enjoyed out walk and seeing wading birds. There weren’t that many people either and it was almost like it was 2019 all over again.
Except for one woman who walked past me wearing a muzzle.
AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!
Thankfully our day ended on a positive note when we stopped by a fishmonger who gave us superb service despite us being muzzle free.
It wasn’t a woman, it was a sheeple. And you ought to have been sooooo grateful that even out there in the wilds, she was determined to protect you from her poisonous germs.
To the point of poisoning herself by breathing in her recycled air. Genius!
Yes I am sure that was at the forefront of her mind.
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Back on the top of the podium!
I know that some readers and commenters here are living with people who have bought and believe the COVID-19 government narrative.
This book, “Combatting Cult Mind Control”, was written to help.
Admittedly the book is aimed at helping free people from religious cults. But I’m sure most of us would agree that there’s a religious-like fervour in the behaviours of many of those around us with regards to CV19. However, it explains the psychology of cultists and what should be done to free them.
‘updates on organizations that he alleges practice mind control.’
So, I guess he has added UK Govt (and many other govts), PHE, BBC, etc. to the list. Seriously.
I would just like to say that as a Scot, I hope the hotel mentioned above looking for visitors to have a vaccine to visit them, goes under. As I hope all businesses that perpetrate this nonsense also go under.
This is the same as 9/11 get people scared and put in measures and in a few years they will forget what it was like and indeed beg for their own enslavement. I have no time for these gullible eejits.
You raise a good point. I hope such numpties take a long walk off a hort pier.
I’m tired of being nice to others who aren’t nice to the likes of me. Perhaps shaming those wearing masks etc will give them a taste of their own medicine.
that will be particularly relevant for supermarkets. Quite how their front line workers have not been affected by covid is a mystery.
The virus decided at the beginning it would be unfair to attack supermarket workers.
Is it just another one of the many idiosyncrasies of the ephemeral Sars-cov-2 coronavirus?
Seriously though, the main reason for the wellbeing of supermarket staff, is that they are generally far too young to have been nobbled by the dodgy flu vaccines which predispose the not so lucky recipients to whatever Covid-19 actually is (flu?) and more.
Being very senior and/or chronically ill are two ways of “qualifying” for the extra powerful super-duper flu jab, which delivers even worse prospects for health than its regular partner.
They must (secretly) be dropping like flies. Why else would Bill Gates be insisting that all bars and restaurants in US close for six months. (Is the bloke just a teeny bit of a megalomaniac or what?)
Or the other way around… people like us frequenting only businesses that did not have vaccinations / do not insist on vaccinations (such as the silly business mentioned in the article)
Perhaps we should start a directory of these places so we can email en masse
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55296774
Brand new hospital opened last month. They have diverted emergency A&E admissions from the other hospitals in the region to this one. Already playing the “let’s blame Covid” game.
The very fact anyone iss listening to Bill Gates is beyond me.
He is a prized c*nt and deserves his place in hell.
Along with others like him, do you honestly think a y of these types will get a vaccine for this? Haha hahaha. If you do then just keep running towards the cliff.
Bill doesn’t mind if pubs and bars go sadlibankrupt.
I imagine he last went into a bar when he was about 20 and though he was very daring having two pints.
He’s probably never been to a Bar/Pub in his life.
Many people still think that he’s a good guy and wants to help.
They don’t understand the term eugenicist.
He and the rest of his globalist buddies want most of us dead. So he and his globalist buddies can be the richest people in the world…on an empty planet.
One ‘excuse’ for Gates lack of empathy is , he has Aspergers, no real excuse, but the autistic live in a different, strange world.
The tories used to just kick the poor and disabled. Now they fuck over business owners.
Having said that, I wish I had bid for a PPE contract. All those millions they were so keen to throw away in a bid to tank the economy for the great reset…
2020.. Blobjob and his wife-beater dad and teenage girlfriend Princess slut nut and the Klaus EU mob continue to torture the UK population and let’s-pretend Brexit.
Don’t miss the Grauniad article listed above. That someone should argue, in such a hysterical rag, that Covid rules (sometimes at least) are directly counter to every decent human instinct is quite a landmark.
It’s a good one agree. And the Off-Graun one is a not to be missed read as well.
Reasons to be cheerful 2,001: A “track and tracer” ( surely the lowest form of collaborating low life on the planet) says ” The public must take their share of the blame, blah,blah, etc because 70% of those we try to contact refuse to answer their phones”.
Set me up for the day, that has!
70% sanity – at least a glimmer of it!
And don’t forget, Annie, that only 11% of people when told to self isolate actually do so.
Probably because it shows as number withheld. Certainly I don’t answer these calls unless I a, expecting a call from a known source who withholds the number.
It’s astonishing how thick they are, isn’t it – well, maybe not – thinking “We can just phone people, and they are bound to answer” In fact, I think I’ll just phone Boris now and tell him…
It begs the question as to why they bothered getting tested in the first place.
They are probably contacts of people who tested positive or who were so stupid to give their correct details for T&T. Or someone gave a false phone number and it happens to be a correct number, just for someone else.
Many have no choice.
Thos who do have choice are morons!
Just adding to some of Guy de la Bodayere’s stats.
Of the roughly 12-1300 excess deaths in week 48, how many were caused by people not getting proper treatment on the NHS ?
Well as an indicator for week 48 according to the NHS figures, there were 92,618 Emergency Department attendances compared to 187,909 for week 48 in 2019, a decrease of over 50%. Now either these people were wasting their time or there’s a huge amount of deaths created by ‘Project Fear’.
Back in April and May when we had deaths double the average figure it was clear these were big numbers and that there was a problem of some sort. But now people seem to be alarmed when our death rate vears a bit from the average but I thought that was what averages were about? sometimes up, sometimes down and you end up with an average. You cannot keep chasing the average, if the current rate of deaths was below average you are not going to kill people off to chase the average (or at least I hope we have not come to that). In a few weeks we leave 2020 behind and start a new year, the 5 year average will then include 2020 and so it is possible that 2021 could have some weeks below the 5 year average.
Public Health Policy should be looking at long term death trends and considering if they teach us anything about Public Health Policy but dramatic Government intervention should not happen until we get to the sort of death figures we saw for a few weeks in spring 2020.
Alex Belfied youtube has a good take on the various anti lockdown protests on Saturday
With all due respect to Tim Spector how exactly are you “tracking” Covid with an app? How can a person tell if their symptoms are flu, cold, sore throat or Covid?
Has this app been used in previous years?
The fundamental problem with Covid19 is the conflation of it with similar ailments causing mass delusion of a deadly disease.
So it’s great hearing about respiratory conditions being tracked but frankly how the fuck is that useful?
I have never understood this either. While I welcome Spector’s recent contributions to the non-debate I don’t feel that basing estimates on self-reported symptoms is any improvement on testing of any type without clinical assessment.
I agree. We have already since many years a surveillance system of respiratory diseases through GPs which has been running for years(See Oxford Groups reports). It makes much more sense to use a system where you can compare previous years. Spector’s system is just a hyped up new system where the actual users are a select part of the population and we have no idea how representative they are. They must have an Iphone and thus automatically less elderly or people who for different reasons are not connected. That must be a bias in collecting data. Then we don’t know whether the users are more hypochondriacal or not. In short, the accuracy of data, the risk of bias and no historical data makes this much less useful. Even if it shows things which suits your agenda should not be a reason to rely on it. This is just another hyped up technology tool. Probably be branded reactionary but the whole pandemic response incl. modelling has been based upon a hyper technology response in all aspects. This has been due to a younger generation of decision makers grown up with infantile computer games, narrow minded social media frame work and lacking… Read more »
Apparently one can choose between 23! symptoms.
Is being stupid a symptom? How do you identify that?
This Hotel mentioned needs to be named (and any others doing the same). It needs pointing out to them that this vaccine does not currently prevent a person of being infected and passing on the virus to someone else. So what excatly is the point of excluding those who don’t have it? Indeed those who don’t have it are likely to be more careful.. Also what about people who can’t have vaccines due to health and other reasons- they are being discriminatory. A letter needs to be sent also stating that they will be named (and shamed). It should be done with all behaving in this way..
Newlyweds need not apply.
Certainly not if they want to have children.
Exactly what I was about to post……does this mean all families with young children cant stay either.
How stunning and brave of them! Or they could have said “we won’t be enforcing any of this shite. If need be customers can sign waivers so that the council and insurance people get off our backs. But make no mistake we believe in normalcy”
No one with autoimmune disease will be able to stay there. Particularly if they are on immunosuppressants and would consider themselves at risk when exposed to those virus- shedding vaccinated people.
Signing their own death warrant with virtue signalling stuff like that…
Heartbreaking to read the story about the restaurant in Upminster, it’s where I grew up.
I’ve e-mailed Santa for one of these for Christmas (which I’ve postponed until Midsummer).
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/12/christmas-toys-covid19-spain-portugal/
My little sheeple.
Love that😁
Speechless!
“Anyone unsure what’s the extent of excess deaths in autumn/winter arising from SARS-CoV-2 should read this by Jonathan Engler. Spoiler: there aren’t any.
Surely that’s impossible if we’re on the m…”
A thread from @MichaelYeadon3
https://threader.app/thread/1338267113794973697
“Let’s listen closely to this right honourable member, who expresses so well the responses of many of us, me included, to what is happening to this nation.
https://youtu.be/y6FRcufY13c…”
A thread from @MichaelYeadon3
https://threader.app/thread/1338228792301658114
Inspiring speech!
The UK’s COVID-19 Passport Plan… Spect. article
… none the wiser about the real purpose behind the CommonPass ?
Just a snip-it from a US investigation
Karp and Thiel say they had two overarching ambitions for Palantir early on. The first was to make software that could help keep the country safe from terrorism. The second was to prove that there was a technological solution to the challenge of balancing public safety and civil liberties—a “Hegelian” aspiration, as Karp puts it. Although political opposites, they both feared that personal privacy would be a casualty of the war on terrorism. . .
To that end, Palantir’s software was created with two primary security features: Users are able to access only information they are authorized to view, and the software generates an audit trail that, among other things, indicates if someone has tried to obtain material off-limits to them.
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/12/investigative-series/palantirs-tiberius-race-and-the-public-health-panopticon/
Entertainly robust piece by Jonathan Barr today. Maybe he’s finding his voice.
First the worst