Government to Close Schools Again
The Government has announced targeted school closures for England in an attempt to control the spread of the virus (though it’s unlikely to help much, as Toby explained yesterday). The Telegraph has the details.
One million primary school pupils will not return to classrooms as planned next term as Boris Johnson unveiled sweeping school closures and warned more could follow.
The Prime Minister said that in order to combat the spread of the new coronavirus variant, the majority of secondary school pupils will now stay at home until “at least” January 18th, two weeks after term was supposed to start. Those in exam years 11 and 13 will return on January 11th.
Only the children of key workers and vulnerable children will go back on January 4th, the scheduled start date. It means the staggered start to term which had previously been announced will be moved back by a week.
Primary schools in “high infection areas”, estimated to affect one million pupils, will also close for the first time since the spring for at least two weeks as Mr Johnson said “even tougher action” was needed because of the “sheer pace” of the rising infections.
The Prime Minister said there was no guarantee that the January 18th return date would not slip further, as the latest data on infection rates would be reviewed at that point.
He added: “I want to stress that, depending on the spread of the disease, it may be necessary to take further action in their cases as well.”
The announcement came as three quarters of the population of England were quarantined in Tier 4 as of this morning, with the rest of the country left in the scarcely less restrictive Tier 3, creating a new national lockdown in all but name.
My own area, Warwick District, was one of those included in Tier 4. Which makes perfect sense when you look at the latest ZOE app data for reported symptomatic Covid.
567 out of a population of 143,753. That’s a burning epidemic right there.
Stop Press: In Sarah Vine’s column in yesterday’s Daily Mail she opposed school closures, saying “it’s madness to treat our schools like nail bars or nightclubs“. Yet her husband Michael Gove is reported to have sided with Matt Hancock and opposed Gavin Williamson’s efforts to keep schools open. Trouble in paradise?
Coronavirus Pandemic Returns UK to Mortality Levels Not Seen Since… er… 2008
The UK reported a further 981 Covid deaths yesterday as the Christmas reporting delay caught up with us. Ross Clark popped up in MailOnline to put the figures into context.
Britain has an elderly population compared with many countries and large numbers of people die every day.
In England and Wales in 2019, for example, 530,841 people died – an average of 1,454 every day or “four jumbo jet” loads, to use the alarmist comparison favoured by much of the pro-lockdown commentariat.
While COVID-19 is, of course, a serious disease, many of those who have died from it were close to the end of their lives in any case. If it hadn’t been COVID-19, it might well have been another infectious disease – flu or pneumonia – which dealt the final blow.
Covid has killed some “healthy” people who did not have underlying conditions, but it has done so in relatively small numbers. Until 4pm on December 23rd, 47,750 people had died of COVID-19 in English hospitals, but fewer than 2,000 of these had no pre-existing medical condition.
These figures, from NHS England, exclude people who have died at home or in nursing homes.
Among those who died, 26% were already suffering from diabetes, 17% had dementia, 16% chronic pulmonary disease, 16% chronic kidney disease and 14% heart disease. Moreover, not all “Covid” deaths were really caused by the disease.
The Government’s definition of a Covid death is someone who has died from any cause within 28 days of testing positive for COVID-19.
You could be struck by a bus three weeks after a positive test and still be reported as a Covid death.
Of all deaths, 54% – some 27,000 – were among the over-80s. Only about 3,600 victims were under 60 and just 388 of these had no pre-existing condition.
When looking at overall mortality it’s important to take into account that the population is both growing and ageing.
The Office for National Statistics says that in the week to December 11th there were 12,292 deaths registered in England and Wales – 14% above the five-year average.
Yet the population is growing and ageing – the number of over-70s is increasing by around 2% a year – so, all things being equal, we should expect more people to die. More enlightening is the “Mortality Monitor” published by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, which adjusts the mortality rate to take account of a growing and ageing population.
Its figures show that mortality in England and Wales in the first 50 weeks of this year was 12.3% higher than in the same period of 2019, but only 6.9% higher than the average for the past 10 years.
It is only 3% higher than in the worst of those years – 2010 – and it is slightly lower than it was in 2008.
In other words, we have been through a pandemic which has closed down large parts of the economy and led to us being locked down in our homes for weeks on end – and yet, after all that, it has really just returned us to the mortality rate of 12 years ago.
The new ONS figures out yesterday show that excess mortality continued to decrease in the week ending December 18th, down to 12.5%. This is despite the number of deaths and Covid deaths increasing on the previous week, since the five-year average increased by a greater amount (this time of year often sees a surge in deaths).
Ross’s piece appeared as data leaked to the Health Service Journal and reported in the Mail showed that ICUs in London, the South East and the East of England are now operating above maximum capacity, meaning staff must be redeployed to manage demand. Essex declared a “major incident”.
Just over a week ago on December 20th, NHS figures showed ICUs operating below average, as Lockdown Sceptics reported on Monday, meaning this has been a sharp rise, suggesting London and the South East are now experiencing similar outbreaks to those seen in northern areas a few weeks ago. An NHS spokesperson said:
The NHS has tried and tested plans in place to manage significant pressure either from high COVID-19 infection rates or non-Covid winter demands and this has always included mutual aid practices whereby hospitals work together to manage admissions.
While the NHS is opening more beds in places like London to care for the most unwell patients, it is vital that people continue to follow government guidance and do everything possible to reduce transmission of the virus.
The Telegraph in an editorial asks why the NHS is not better prepared for this anticipated increase in winter demand.
If the NHS is on the cusp of being overrun, the public is entitled to know why it is not better prepared. Imposing another lockdown, or indeed the burdensome Tier 4 measures much of the country is already labouring under, is not a small matter but an economic and social calamity that will compound the damage already done by months of restrictions. There were no shortage of predictions that the virus would return after the summer. Even the arrival of a new variant of COVID-19 was foreseeable.
Nightingale hospitals, intended to provide extra capacity, stand empty or are being dismantled, supposedly because of a shortage of staff. But if the country faces such an emergency that businesses need to be forcibly closed and individuals stripped of their liberties, why have not more efforts been made to call thousands of retired doctors into service or put student nurses on to wards?
Why indeed. Is lockdown now the preferred Government policy for managing the annual winter beds crisis? Let’s hope not.
Stop Press: A doctor who volunteered to come out of retirement to help explained on Twitter that the NHS asked retirees like her to produce 20 “certificates” that they didn’t have as a condition of hiring them. One of them was proof that they’d received the requisite training in “equality and diversity”. You couldn’t make it up.
Oxford Vaccine Approved
The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine was approved by the MHRA yesterday and will be given to the first patients on Monday. BBC News has more.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has been approved for use in the UK, with the first doses due to be given on Monday.
There will be 530,000 doses available from next week, and vaccination centres will now start inviting patients to come and get the jab.
Priority groups for immunisation have already been identified, starting with care home residents, the over-80s, and health and care workers.
The Government’s vaccine strategy has shifted in light of the announcement.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has authorised two full doses of the Oxford vaccine, with the second dose to be given four to 12 weeks after the first.
The immunisation campaign will now shift to giving as many people as possible their first dose of vaccine with a second dose following within that period.
When the Pfizer-BioNTech jab rollout began, the aim was to give the second dose after three weeks.
But based on advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, the aim now is to give as many vulnerable people some protection from COVID-19, irrespective of the jab they are given.
The Oxford vaccine is easier to store and distribute, as it can be kept at normal fridge temperature unlike the Pfizer-BioNTech jab that has to be kept at -70C.
There is also more confidence about supply as it is UK-made, whereas the Pfizer-BioNTech jab has to be shipped in from Belgium.
Pregnant and breastfeeding women can now take either of the two approved coronavirus vaccines “when the potential benefits outweigh the risks”, experts said at an MHRA news conference.
The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine can also now be administered to people with a wide range of food and medicine allergies, but people allergic to ingredients in the vaccine should not take it.
Dr June Raine, chief executive of the MHRA, told the briefing that “no corners have been cut” in assessing the safety and effectiveness of the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab.
The questions about dosage and effectiveness are said to have been resolved, though details are as yet unpublished.
Trials showed two full doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab were 95% effective at preventing infection, while the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine showed 62% effectiveness – although even in cases where people were infected, there were no cases of serious illness needing hospital treatment.
Trials of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine also showed that when people were given a half dose then a full dose, effectiveness hit 90%.
But there was not enough clear data to approve the half-dose, full-dose idea.
However, unpublished data suggests that leaving a longer gap between the first and second doses increases the overall effectiveness of the jab – in the sub-group given the vaccine this way it was found to be 70% effective after the first dose.
All the vaccines are expected to be equally effective against the new variants of the virus that have emerged.
It’s a strange one this Oxford vaccine. First the trial dosages were botched and greater efficacy was claimed for an experimental dose. Then that claim was scrapped but a similar claim is now being made, in retrospect, for a greater gap between doses. How does this pass the strict safety standards for trials for new vaccines and drugs? Perhaps the mystery will be solved when the full data is published.
Also noteworthy is that the greater efficacy of 70% is claimed for 12 week spacing, yet the approval is for four to 12 week spacing, suggesting the increase in efficacy is not regarded as crucial when set against speed of rollout.
Stop Press: The EU has yet to be convinced about the Oxford vaccine. Pharmaceutical Technology has more.
The European Medicines Authority (EMA) has said that the drug maker AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford’s COVID-19 vaccine may not be approved in January next year.
Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad quoted the EMA deputy executive director Noel Wathion as saying: “They have not even filed an application with us yet. Not even enough to warrant a conditional marketing licence.
“We need additional data about the quality of the vaccine. And, after that, the company has to formally apply.”
Lest We Forget
We’re publishing another brilliant piece today by Sinead Murphy, a philosophy lecturer at Newcastle University. She looks back at the year gone by and concludes that we’ve lost sight of the difference between life and death – we’ve redefined life as non-death, forgetting all the things that made life worth living. Here is the opening section about one of the most haunting images from 2020.
It’s that time of year when we name the best and worst. Competition is stiff, on one side of the equation at least. How many worsts there have been, each hardly conceivable before it was suddenly real.
But there was a worst of all. In October in Milton Keynes. Two brothers moved to the side of their grieving mother, putting their arms around her shoulders as she sat before the box containing their dead father’s remains, only to be reminded by an official from the crematorium that they were not permitted to be within six feet of their mother during the ceremony – as if she had been lowered into the grave as their father was being raised onto the pyre.
It is the simplest of mourning rituals, a consoling arm around the shoulders. A fragment of a ritual, really. And yet it too has been made to retreat before the march of Health and Safety, those twin murderers of the last vestiges of our arts of living and dying.
Worth reading in full.
“I Work For Test and Trace and I’m Making Just One or Two Calls Per Hour”
After our devastating piece from a Test and Trace contact tracer working for one of Serco’s sub-contractors back in October, another contact tracer has got in touch to tell us how little she has had to do recently despite the surge in “cases”. The following piece is anonymous as contact tracers are required to sign non-disclosure agreements.
When I started working for Test and Trace in May, little did I know I’d end up a ‘lockdown sceptic’.
I think readers would be most interested in recent events in the Test and Trace saga. As a previously written article from one of my colleagues from Tier 3 (nothing to do with lockdown Tiers) has already highlighted, the many problems of contact tracing and the antiquated NHS system seem to be more about confusing and harassing the public with incorrect isolation advice, rather than helping them.
I work as a Tier 2 Contact Tracer; my job is to call people who have tested positive, but have failed to complete the online form that is sent to them by text and email to ask about their contacts.
With 40,000+ people now testing positive every day, you would think I would be very busy, but, in fact, I am making just 1.5 calls per hour – most people don’t answer the phone, so I can go hours without speaking to anyone. This would lead you to believe that all those positive cases must be completing their online forms, but I think that would be highly unlikely, because I’ve also worked on Tier 3 calls and it’s obvious that people can’t be bothered to answer the phone, let alone fill in a lengthy form (which takes about 30 minutes to complete) about all their contacts and activities in the run up to testing positive.
I must question why, on November 24th, Serco employed 500+ more Contact Tracers, when we were so quiet? Did the Government know about the new variant before December and want to be prepared? Does someone in Government have a finger or two in the lucrative Test and Trace programme? Or might a more worrying explanation be that thousands of details of positive cases are being lost in the system somewhere, and not making it on to the call list? The managers don’t seem to know what’s going on, but it’s time to question why billions of pounds are being paid to Serco to employ Contact Tracers, who are only making a handful of calls a day.
In addition to the questions we have over the accuracy of PCR and Lateral flow testing, just where is the data to show that any of this is working? I don’t want to talk myself out of a job because, without it, I wouldn’t be able to pay the bills, but I’m starting to feel like a fraud.
Woman Arrested For Filming Inside Empty Hospital
A woman has been arrested for filming inside a hospital to show how empty it is. Summit News has the story.
A woman in the UK was arrested by police after she filmed a video inside an almost completely empty hospital and posted it online.
The clip shows the woman walking through virtually empty corridors and filming empty wards at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital.
“This is a disgrace… it is so dead… all the people in our country desperately waiting for treatment, cancer treatment, heart disease, honestly this is making me so angry,” she states as she films a row of empty waiting chairs.
The woman expressed shock at how quiet the hospital was, saying she expected there to be “a few more people around, there’s absolutely nobody”.
According to reports, a 46 year-old woman was subsequently arrested by police for filming the video and has been charged on suspicion of a public order offence.
“The woman has been bailed to return to police on January 21st, with conditions that she cannot enter any NHS premises or the grounds of any such premises, unless in the case of an emergency or to attend a pre-arranged NHS appointment,” said a statement by Gloucestershire Police.
UPDATE: A reader whose wife works in the hospital has got in touch to say the area filmed is always empty on a Sunday as it is a “Monday to Friday” area which is nothing to do with Covid – a Physiotherapy outpatients unit or similar.
An NHS Consultant Surgeon Writes…
A consultant surgeon at an NHS trust in the North East has got in touch to say he agrees with yesterday’s analysis by Lockdown Sceptics‘s resident Doctor that this winter is little different to last winter, at least in his hospital.
ITU at the moment is full (10 Covid, six non-Covid). That said, this is not necessarily unusual for this time of the year. ITU was full last year and in previous years.
Daily Covid admissions and discharge rates are pretty much on par (between 10 to 15 in both directions), but Covid inpatients are rising and now occupy 50% of the acute beds.
Of 194 Covid patients, 10 are in ICU and ventilated, 10 on high pressure masks (non-invasive ventilation), and 20 to 30 on oxygen on the wards. The rest are ambulant and don’t require particular care. They either cannot be discharged back to nursing homes as they still test positive, don’t want to go back home for fear of infecting someone else, have social reasons for wanting to stay in hospital, or have been given an in-hospital diagnosis of Covid and don’t want to leave in case they develop respiratory problems, i.e. they came in for something else but have subsequently tested positive while in hospital. Essentially, the bulk of in-hospital beds occupied by “Covid” patients are not there out of medical necessity or a requirement for acute care. They are in hospital due to other factors.
Now this is not necessarily something novel. It happens all the time. Not all patients who are admitted to hospital need to be admitted or need to stay for the length of time they are inpatients for. This is a routine problem, particularly in winter. But the staff are gradually being ground down, both psychologically due to the heightened perception of crisis and physically as more and more staff are self-isolating, catching Covid, etc. In addition, this year a letter was sent to 140ish staff as they were deemed high risk and told to self-isolate. This has exacerbated the staffing problem.
Some of the factors mentioned – such as social care aspects preventing discharge and the lack of care home beds – are chronic issues and unrelated to Covid (we get this every year and it is worse during the winter months). But Covid has added another layer of complexity, leading to “bed blocking”. As your doctor rightly points out, ICU and non-invasive ventilation or oxygen requirements are par for the course and no worse than at the real peak in April.
During the initial spike in April/May, “bed blocking” did not happen as patients were sent back to nursing homes without tests, patients were encouraged to go home and self-isolate, hospitals were generally emptied and much activity had stopped. We also had a lot less nosocomial (hospital acquired) Covid.
I don’t have an explanation as to why hospital acquired infections have increased a lot, as in up to 30% of Covid inpatients at the time of writing. (Thirty per cent of those are said to be “asymptomatic”, but that is another story). But when half the beds are presumably filled with patients who have Covid, this must increase the viral load in the building. That is however an assumption for which I have no proof.
Stop Press: James Melville has produced a great Twitter thread comparing our current NHS crisis with previous years. Turns out, a winter NHS “crisis” is an annual event.
I Remember, I Remember (Updated)
A poem by Lockdown Sceptics reader Adam March.
I remember, I remember,
Once living in a place
Where I could do my weekly shop
Without a covered face
And even share a greeting
With a handshake or a hug
Or have a conversation
With my mates down at the pub.
I remember, I remember,
Those Yuletides and New Years
That glowed with joy and merriment
And laughter – without Tiers.
We’d mingle free of test-and-trace
Recording where we’ve been
And see our ageing loved ones
With no window in-between.
I remember, I remember,
How all our leaders lied
And threatened us, and bullied us,
To keep us all inside.
And if we keep complying
Out of ignorance and fear
We’ll have no more than memories
Of all we once held dear.
Let’s Hear It For The Disruptors
We’re publishing a good piece today by a dairy farmer and former sales director in the food sector who has gone on a journey that’s probably typical of many of the people who end up reading Lockdown Sceptics. Here’s an excerpt.
When the pandemic started, I tuned in religiously to the daily Government briefings, I stuck to the lockdown rules and I logged on to Worldometer and FT Coronavirus websites. But I lost heart as the Government and SAGE released increasingly implausible forecasts and the daily briefings became an utterly pointless exercise in ritual humiliation of the hapless Matt Hancock. Why were the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg and Sky’s Beth Rigby obsessing about tactical failings over PPE and contact tracing without challenging the overarching strategy? Hugh Grant, in the days when he was writing for Horse and Hound, would have provided more insight. The Government were being allowed to implement policy without showing their workings. They produced neither analysis of the impact of their interventions nor of the appalling human and economic consequences of lockdown’s collateral damage. I started looking elsewhere.
Freddie Sayer’s fascinating interview with Johan Giesecke (from 1995-2005 the State Epidemiologist for Sweden) on Unherd (“pushing back against the herd mentality” NB not herd immunity) was my first off-piste experience and it gave me a taste for fresh powder. The Spectator’s James Delingpole introduced me to Dr Mike Yeadon in his Delingpod, and Toby Young created an outlet for alternative views in the form of this blog. On talkRADIO, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Mike Graham and Dan Wooton gave doubters, including the irrepressible Peter Hitchens, a platform on the airwaves. As a centrist Remainer, these were unexpected bedfellows. My friend, super intelligent and early obsessive, Brian, shared data, video clips and articles. I learnt about SOAs, FPRs and ASMRs; I swotted up on Gompertz curves and “dry tinder”; and… I ventured on to Twitter.
I struck early gold with David Paton (@cricketwyvern). Professor of Industrial Economics at the University of Nottingham, Paton was the first person to re-state deaths by the date they occurred rather than when they were reported – this made a huge difference to the shape of the curves and our understanding of the path of the virus. It was Paton’s analysis that clearly showed that placing Liverpool, Nottingham, Manchester and other northern towns in tiers in October/November was not responsible for the fall in hospital cases and deaths. I check his numbers every day. I also keep an eye on Pandemics Data Analytics (@PanData19) who provides global in-depth data and graphic analysis, and Dr Clare Craig (@clarecraigpath) of this parish.
But most of my Twitter time goes to Ivor Cummins (@FatEmperor) and Joel Smalley (@RealJoelSmalley). Smalley is a data scientist specialising in multivariate time-series and stochastic analysis; whatever that is, he is brilliant at turning complicated data into clear and intelligible information and it is often his data that Cummins uses. If you do only one thing after reading this article, look at this slide on Smalley’s pinned tweet, which overlays Government interventions against Covid deaths.
Worth reading in full.
Round-up
- “What is left to say?” – Excellent summary from Dr Malcolm Kendrick of where we are now, with a good look at what overall mortality figures tell us
- “Covid: The Illusion of Control” – A piece on a similar theme from the Swiss Doctor
- “Do we finally have an answer on Covid immunity?” – Ross Clark in the Spectator on a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine that finds reinfection very rare (and always asymptomatic). It also found almost half of positive PCR “cases” were asymptomatic
- “Effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19: A Tale of Three Models” – Pre-print from Prof John Ioannidis and team concluding: “Inferences on effects of NPIs are non-robust and highly sensitive to model specification. Claimed benefits of lockdown appear grossly exaggerated”
- “Knowing Right From Wrong” – Sandy Szwarc writes in Crit Large about the problematic ethics of deliberately scaring people over their health. See also her piece in AIER on “The Astonishing Psychological Cost of Lockdown“
- “Covid and Biblical Principles: Safety” – Phill Sacre says according to the Bible the pursuit of safety must be proportionate to enjoying life
- “Wuhan’s Covid Cases May Have Been 10 Times Higher, Study Shows” – Bloomberg reports on an antibody study in Wuhan that finds 4.4% prevalence. No mention of T-cells though, and the report implausibly credits China as having “contained the coronavirus, with sporadic flareups since April snuffed out through aggressive contract tracing and quickly testing millions of people in a matter of days”
- “Congressman-elect Luke Letlow suffered a heart attack following operation” – The New York Post reports that the tragic story of the death of the 41 year-old newly elected member of Congress “with Covid” was not actually a death from Covid, despite how it has been spun by the media
- “Mysterious Disappearance Of Flu In San Diego Prompted Call For Audit Of COVID Records” – Tyler Durden in Zero Hedge on the suspected misattribution of deaths in America
- “The Government needs an alternative source of expertise to help ministers identify and put the right questions to SAGE to ascertain whether they are on the money or a hundred miles from it” – Sir Desmond Swayne MP tweets his latest speech in the Commons. Well worth a listen, as always
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Nine today: “I’ll Break Out Again Tonight” by Willie Nelson, “Worst Year Of My Life” by Wild Swans, “Never To Be Forgotten Kinda Year” by Dan Bern, “There Ain’t Gonna Be No Party” by Ronnie Fields, “Tell Me When It’s Over” by The Dream Syndicate, “Something Must Break” by Joy Division, “You can’t do that” by the Beatles, “I’m going slightly mad” by Queen and “Welcome to my nightmare” by Alice Cooper.
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 as well as post comments below the line, 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
You can follow Lockdown Sceptics on our social media accounts which are updated throughout the day. To follow us on Facebook, click here; to follow us on Twitter, click here; to follow us on Instagram, click here; to follow us on Parler, click here; and to follow us on MeWe, click here.
Woke Gobbledegook
We’ve decided to create a permanent slot down here for woke gobbledegook. Today, an entire glossary, courtesy of Victor Davis Hanson in National Review. Here’s a taste.
“Cultural appropriation.” This adjective-noun phrase must include contextualisation to be an effective tool in the anti-racism effort.
It does not mean, as the ignorant may infer from its dictionary entries, merely “the adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity.”
Asian Americans do not appropriate “white” or “European” culture by ballet dancing or playing the violin; “whites” or “Europeans” surely do appropriate Asian culture by using non-Asian actors in Japanese kabuki dance-drama.
For non-African Americans, dreadlocks or playing jazz are cultural appropriations; dying darker hair blond is not. A black opera soprano is hardly a cultural appropriationist. Wearing a poncho, if one is a non-Mexican-American citizen, is cultural theft; a Mexican-American citizen wearing a tuxedo is not.
Only a trained cultural appropriationist can determine such felonies through a variety of benchmarks. Usually the crime is defined as appropriation by a victimising majority from a victimised minority. Acceptable appropriation is a victimised minority appropriating from a victimising majority. A secondary exegesis would add that only the theft of the valuable culture of the minority is a felony, while the occasional use of the dross of the majority is not.
“Diversity.” This term does not include false-consciousness efforts to vary representation by class backgrounds, ideologies, age, or politics. In current Wokespeak, it instead refers mostly to race and sex (see “Race, class, and gender”), or in practical terms, a generic 30% of the population self-identified as non-white – or even 70% if inclusive of non-male non-whites.
“Diversity” has relegated “affirmative action” – the older white/black binary that called for reparatory “action” to redress centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, and institutionalized prejudice against African Americans – to the Wokespoke dustbin.
“Diversity” avoids the complications arising out of past actionable grievances, or worries about the overrepresentation or underrepresentation of particular tribes, or the class or wealth of the victimised non-white.
The recalibrated racially and ethnically victimised have grown from 12% to 30% of the population and need not worry whether they might lose advantageous classifications, should their income and net worth approximate or exceed that of the majority oppressive class.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: At Lockdown Sceptics we have been worried for some time about the lack of certain kinds of expertise on SAGE. But our minds have been put at ease by the discovery that Professor Iyiola Solanke of Leeds University is a member of SPI-B (Independent Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours). Professor Solanke specialises in research into race and racism, anti-discrimination law and intersectional discrimination.
“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. Another reader has created an Android app which displays “I am exempt from wearing a face mask” on your phone. Only 99p, and he’s even said he’ll donate half the money to Lockdown Sceptics, so everyone wins.
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.
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 GBD 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. Sign up to the newsletter here.
Judicial Reviews Against the Government
There are now so many legal cases being brought against the Government and its ministers we thought we’d include them all in one place down here.
The Simon Dolan case has now reached the end of the road.
The current lead case is the Robin Tilbrook case which challenges whether the Lockdown Regulations are constitutional. 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 and Runnymede Trust’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.
And last but not least there was the Free Speech Union‘s challenge to Ofcom over its ‘coronavirus guidance’. A High Court judge refused permission for the FSU’s judicial review on December 9th and the FSU has decided not to appeal the decision because Ofcom has conceded most of the points it was making. Check here for details.
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.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the past 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. Doing these daily updates is hard work (although we have help from lots of people, mainly in the form of readers sending us stories and links). If you feel like donating, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links we should include in future updates, email us here. (Don’t assume we’ll pick them up in the comments.)
And Finally…
We thought we’d publish a page from Google Analytics showing the steadily rising traffic that Lockdown Sceptics has been attracting since its launch. The early peak in May was due to Mike Hearn’s first Code Review of Ferguson’s model, but we surpassed that in September and peaked for a second time in October, thanks largely to Mike Yeadon’s first pieces for the site. In total, Lockdown Sceptics has had 8,834,733 pageviews since its launch eight months ago. Not too shabby.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
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For the Fallen To mark the last day of 2020, this post is dedicated to all those whose lives and livelihoods have been lost, diminished or tainted by our nascent, deeply illiberal and socially, economically and psychologically destructive lockdown societies; for all those whose jobs and businesses have been destroyed; those whose medical conditions have been left undiagnosed; those whose cancers have been left untreated whilst the government ‘saves the NHS;’ those whose aspirations have been crushed; whose financial lifelines and supports have been laughed at, ripped up and thrown to the wolves by well-paid, cosseted and conceited scientific bureaucrats; those who’ve seen loved ones die long before their time at the hands of rescheduled and/or cancelled NHS appointments; for those citizens out on the streets exercising their democratic right to protest against lockdown who’ve been roughed up by the police; for the young woman in Victoria State, Australia, strangled to the floor by a policeman for the ‘crime’ of not wearing a mask; for the heavily pregnant woman led away from her home in handcuffs on a charge of promoting an anti-lockdown event on a Facebook page; for all those who’ve been fined for upholding the most basic tenets… Read more »
Amen!
New Tiers Eve –
Furious Sir Desmond Swayne condemns Boris Johnson’s lockdown chaos: Christmas ghost!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NC3mr2WRa8
Look at how many MPs are there to listen to this condemnation – the chamber is practically empty and none of the main players are present.
Local elections are apparently still going ahead – make sure you spoil your paper with a written message that you do not support a deeply corrupted rigged system.
I can’t see that useless blather is going to change much.
Quite the reverse.
You could add the woman arrested at home for the crime of filming ‘nothing happening’ at Gloucester Royal Infirmary.
Videos posted by Northumbrian Nomad late yesterday.
And it was on suspicion of a public order offence. Not a violation of lockdown rules. Not a violation of curfews. Not a violation of social distancing. (Not that any of those rules exist.) But on “public order offence”… She disturbed the “public order”… Because that’s what they’re afraid of. The people waking up and breaking the tyrannical order that was imposed on us.
My early morning was somewhat cheered by watching a couple of vids about Savonarola and the Bonfire of the Vanities.
In the absence of an effective government in medieval Florence the old miseryguts lied about having Divine revelations about the wicked sins of the population and how they should make pointless sacrifices to avoid the wrath of God.
The people followed him for quite a while until they very suddenly tired of it all at which point they turned on him.
Here’s hoping.
Ah, just a year before the end of the middle ages (according to my Harmsworth encyclopaedia). An age that was probably rather more humane than our current tiers of hell. I’m pretty sure people would’ve been allowed to comfort their grieving mother at a funeral. And they had proper epidemics in those days.
Tom Wolfe’s book highly recommended as is his even more relevant Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970, brilliantly prescient). I feel the Carthaginians sacrificing (finally) their own children (rather than the children of the poor they had paid for) to Ba’al Hammon is a more likely precedent. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-really-did-sacrifice-their-children
We can only hope that we will have our Savonarola moment!
We need a political opportunist like Johnson yo come along, tell the truth and dislodge him from power.
I haven’t seen that person yet. Where are they?
There is also the Xhosa cattle killing movement:
https://anti-empire.com/the-xhosa-cattle-killing-movement-the-forerunners-of-the-lockdown-fanatics/
“To the end, true believers never renounced their faith. They simply starved to death, blaming the failure of the prophecy on the doubts of non-believers”
Slightly out of date, but how did Camerons “Bonfire” of quangos go?
Don’t know. Did he give them more money?
The Snitch that stole Freedom.
We are living in a very dangerous country now, with no freedom to express the truth.
I truly weep for thought of the future.
Yes, it’s far more serious than most people are prepared to admit to themselves.
I’d like to know who it was that alerted the police in the first place and what their complaint was. I see in the replies to the videos on Twatter has one or two deeply unpleasant pro-lockdown zealots who boast that the woman is not so cocky now that she has been arrested; no acknowledgement of the reason she was [wrongfully] arrested.
As for the police – this is effectively the same tactic as what they’ve been seen doing at anti-lockdown protests: pouncing on people at random and hitting them hard. It’s a shock tactic to drive fear into the broader population.
This was appalling behaviour by our new politicised Police. There was no offence (I have checked the Public Order Act 1986). I hope the lady concerned sues for wrongful arrest.
There should be a public outcry about this, but there won’t be.
Is this something the FSU might take up?
There won’t be a public outcry because the BBC and Sky won’t report it.
For convenience:
Woman films empty Gloucester Royal Infirmary:
https://twitter.com/Yeadoncampaign/status/1344297371547672577?s=20
Woman is arrested in her own home for filming empty Gloucester Royal Infirmary:
https://twitter.com/Teqmock/status/1344277606594699271?s=20
Thank you for bringing our attention to this in the first place – I wasted no time in sending the links to my Coronafied dad, who insisted on having all the windows open during Christmas Day and that we all social distance. It almost ruined what will undoubtedly be our last Christmas celebration, since next year it will likely be completely outlawed.
I asked him in the email if he can point me in the direction of a mainstream news outlet that is reporting the story of this woman being arrested in her own home for showing the truth about our hospitals.
A similar video has just been posted showing another empty hospital – the guy recording it is a legend, standing up to the bullying police who, suspiciously, are standing at the entrance:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1344670876516626432
Known as GRH locally 🙂 My wife retired from GRH two years ago, Debbie Hicks filmed herself in Physio outpatients, the shop and cafe , all of which are shut on Sundays when she was there. She later went into A+E waiting room, went outside Cardiology outpatients. I am a lockdown sceptic, but all she has done is show her ignorance of how GRH functions. I deplore her arrest, presumably to try and shut her up, but supporting her weakens our case for stopping lockdown, since she is obviously talking bollocks (to anyone who actually knows the hospital.
A & E is always empty on a Sunday – really?, you sounded plausible until you came out with that one.
A bit harsh. But it seems to be the case. I regret we got off on the wrong footing in this case.
Amen, amen.
Every conniving zombie, every horrible Covid thug, every evil, corrupt totalitarian oppressor, should be made to read this out loud, ten times a day, until they know it by heart: what they have done.
The Bozzer: “We’re having our cake and eating it”.
I leave my fellow sceptics to comment, I’ve lost the will to live (temporary)
Some one else appears to have eaten my cake.
I don’t like dried fruit anyway and as the Bozzer must be the biggest “fruit cake” in the history of the world, I haven’t changed my mind.
Thank you
Hear! Hear!!!
I was lost for words as well!
A wonderful post, thank you. Balm for the soul. Sums up what we all feel here but are unable to say with such eloquence.
Every member of SAGE, every member of the Cabinet, and every member of Parliament should be made to read it.
Lets all send it to our MPs, if Fred is ok with that.
Thank you for that.
I seem to have something in my eye as it’s watering slightly and I may need to blow my nose, excuse me a moment….
Well composed , sums up where we are now ! Many more people in a far worse position due to lockdowns than the virus , We need to get LS into the mainstream asap ! How can we help Toby to do it ??..
Fred, when this madness ends and those monsters (no other word will do) are held to account, your words will go down in history alongside Churchill’s speeches,the American declaration of independence and the Gettysburg address.
To think that the MSM and the collaborators call us sceptics conspiracy theorists and ill informed selfish morons who are guilty of “appalling” behaviour.
Very moving post thank you..
The best cri de coeur I’ve heard for a very long time. Thank you Fred (I’ve quoted it verbatim on Guido Fawkes website, btw).
Beautifully put, my friend. Every single day my heart goes out to the countless victims of this regime’s disastrous and monstrous diktats.
Well said. It made me cry
Terrific post, Fred.
Agree with all of the above, superb!
Me too. Heartbreaking
It’s all a bit strange, isn’t it…? A vaccine that, in my ignorant opinion, sounds a lot like CRISPR… And who is world leader in CRISPR? Yep, that’s right. China. And this vaccine is pushed heavily in western countries only… No mention of vaccinating Africa, or the middle east, or Asia… A vaccination campaign promoted by people with a history of eugenics and population control. The same people that have been pushing this pandemic on us. The same people that have been lobbying for years for uncontrolled migration into Europe and for population replacement… And the biggest beneficiaries? China, again. Funny how these things seem to tie together… It wouldn’t surprise me if this vaccine will lead to decreased fertility. Not a lot. Just enough to place it a little bit under replacement rate. 1.9 or 1.8. And it will be hidden by the much higher migrant reproduction rate. And most governments have conveniently stopped reporting these kinds of statistics broken down by race or ethnicity. Sure, i am probably wrong. All i know is that if this is what they were actually doing, they would act and behave exactly like they are currently. Hope you had a good Christmas.… Read more »
The only people who will have a great New Years Eve are those who flagrantly breach the impositions of hancock the mental gimp by joining together for Illegal house parties and good luck to them.
If any of the residents of other flats in my building do so I will knock on their door at 5 to midnight with a bottle in hand.
Karen, if you can get to Ilkley, you’re welcome to join me.
Thank you for inciting me to flout tosser hancocks silly rules but at my age I don’t travel well.
My brother in law is transporting his various mates to his house in the back of his transit van, to fool the stasi.
In the 1970s me and my mates used to get taken home from Thursday evening swim club in the back of someone’s uncles Evening Standard van, via the chippy.
The uncle would get arrested these days but it never did us any harm.
We used to transport people back to the Valley from Hollywood in the trunk (boot), We stopped once in awhile to make sure they were okay.
We can at least make a start in going after the eugenicist, callous, profit-driven pharmaceutical companies that want to take over our lives. I’ve said for some time that if people learn nothing else from this tragedy, I hope they learn at least that there’s no such thing as “the science”.
Our Christmas wasn’t so bad despite everything, and we managed to have our carol singalong yesterday. Ten of us conspirators gathered in a house from 5 or 6 different households, forgetting about masks/social distancing/no touching and all the other Orwellian nonsense for the evening, belting out carols. It really made me feel human again.
Now to decide if I will still go on my bird watching trip in the “tier 4” North. And what to do if I have trouble with the authorities over it. Am I really likely to be stopped by the police? And what the hell is tier 5?
Hi Hugh, I’ve just been to the Highlands and back (from West Yorkshire). I carry 2 pieces of paper – if an officer pulls me over, the first says “sorry I have lost my voice. I have a valid reason for travel to do with mental health. I am afraid I cannot tell you any more.” The second says “I cannot accept that fixed penalty. Here is my address should you wish to take this further.”
That’s brilliant!! I’m taking your idea!
Tier 5 is the one that comes before tiers 6, 7, 8 . . . .
Gee, they can count to 8.
There is a human race,my dear friend but no other, outside of the Olympics that is. Your racist rhetoric has got in the way of the valid point you almost made.
I don’t particularly agree with much of what Cristi said (though the Chinese seem to have played us for fools) but where’s the racism?
“There is a human race,my dear friend but no other, outside of the Olympics that is.“
There clearly are such things as races, as everyone not in the grip of political indoctrination to the contrary recognises, much as they recognise night and day. Even the medical profession routinely recognises it every day when they address genetics-based racial differences in susceptibility to various medical conditions such as sickle cell anemia.
Why do you seek to pretend otherwise? Can you not just discuss issues around race and “racism” rationally and honestly? Or ignore them, if you find them too uncomfortable to discuss honestly and openly? The reasonable scope for discussion would be around whether and to what degree the incontrovertible facts of race has any particular importance, and what the mechanisms might be. Arguing that its significance in most areas is limited or even non-existent is one valid extreme position. Flat denial is just irrational.
The real issue of interest, though, is how so many came to have been indoctrinated into the self-evidently counter-factual dogma that you espoused there. For that we have to look at decades of indoctrination in all cultures of the US sphere, especially, via media and education.
What racist rhetoric?
And i find it kinda funny that i make no mention of race, but here you are, talking about race. Why are you so obsessed with race? Are you assuming all migrants have a particular race? That sounds kinda racist to me
Most likely the trigger was your reference to migration and reproduction rate. Obviously that can as easily be a reference to culture as to race, but antiracist dogmatists tend to have a knee-jerk response to anything relating to migration.
Political protection of mass immigration was, after all, one of the primary driving forces behind the C20th indoctrination in antiracist dogmas, pushed by the left for political advantage and by big business in order to undercut indigenous labour and conservatism.
One race, The Human Race.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9Oi8iJH7m0
Style Council, the 80s, A Gospel.
This is absurd. A ‘racist’ is someone who discriminates against others *based on their race* and/or the belief that (the ‘racist’) is superior based on the characteristic of race.
1. Nothing Cristi said would qualify as ‘racist’.
2. On your own terms, there’s no race other than the human race, so how on earth could Cristi, a human being, discriminate on the basis of another’s humanity? If the Chinese (note here that Cristi did not single out ‘the Chinese’ as a people) are not a race but part of a wider human race then what does it mean to accuse Cristi of engaging in ‘racist rhetoric’? Is Cristi somehow ‘anti-human’?
3. On (2), your argument is both absurd and self-defeating.
Why have you brought racism into this discussion?
Your bigoted conspiracy theory bs is a massive hindrance to the antilockdown cause. You can think what you like but please express it somewhere else, not here.
I swear these people know nothing about tactics or optics
I don’t particularly agree with much of what Cristi said (though the Chinese seem to have played us for fools) but where’s the bigotry?
And where should such theories be expressed but in the comments section of a website run and paid for by the founder of the Free Speech Union?
If you disagree with the post, say why, rather than advocating censorship.
I tend to agree such theories are a hindrance, but I don’t see anything wrong with them being discussed here among people who largely agree on the wrongness of lockdowns but disagree on what’s behind it. The audiences are different.
Perhaps if Cristi had said the CCP rather than The Chinese it would have been less divisive.
Perhaps
I think “The Chinese” in general is fairly obvious shorthand for “The Chinese state” – AKA the CCP
Interpreting the post as some kind of racial slur on Chinese people seems disingenuous
I never said “the Chinese”. I said China, which is a country. A political state. Not a people.
Oops, sorry.
Anyway, I can’t see how any reasonable person could characterise your post as racist or bigoted.
I never said “the Chinese”. I never said “the Chinese people”. I said “China”.
Can’t you see how pathetically sensitive we have become as a people not to offend? He said absolutely nothing to warrant such a response. Political correctness was instilled in us in advance of the Great Reset so we’d be more obedient. I find it amazing that we’re so damned compliant – especially people on this site.
The Taiwanese and HK are after all ethnically Chinese, though perhaps people would be assumed to take it for granted that he wasn’t referring to them.
Your bigoted bs is a massive hinderance to any sort of conversation one might have. You can think what you like but please express it somewhere else, not here.
What we do here is openly discus issues. If you have any issue with what i said, you are more than welcome to point it out and we can discuss. But when you come here with vague bs, accusing me of implausible acts, not pointing to anything specific, your comment is a waste of time and space.
You remind me of the sort the BBC ushers into their Question Time audience to try and give the sense that the country as a whole agrees with political correctness. You don’t have the authority to censor others because you don’t agree with them – our tyrannical government are doing a fine job snuffing out freedom of speech without your help.
Do not comply!
Blimey, hancock acted just in time.
Waking up in tier 3 to find that TWO elderly people have sadlidied of the Covid in just Two days in an NHS region of barely 1.8 million souls.
Of?
I was sloppy, it actually says ‘covid deaths’.
Was there ever any doubt?
Resource for letters of liability to your G.P /vaccine administer should you wish to take the jab under duress (or just put them on notice)
Also one formulated for employers
https://freedomtaker.com/
A tad lengthy, can most certainly be edited/adapted for UK purposes with minimal fuss
Enjoy
Thanks for that Crystal
Anger In Aylesbury. Bucks Herald.
“Aylesbury resident’s anger grows as
‘Anti lockdown’ protesters gather maskless in market square.
The protesters plan to gather (at midday) every Monday until lockdowns are lifted” (Bingo – Own Goal).
“Just yesterday a group of 20 or 30 gathered without masks in the square” (since when has anyone been required to wear masks outdoors?)
“This is as the UK recorded a whopping 41,385 new cases” (‘whopping’ ?)
“The protesters are claiming that the virus is a ‘hoax’ made up to infringe on civil liberties” (strawman).
“Yesterday a local person who did not wish to be named said
‘A group of 20-30 unmasked and un-socially-distanced people blocked Market Street to protest the ‘draconian’ government response to a ‘hoax’ virus”
(Normal people don’t say ‘protest the . . .’, they say ‘protest against the . . .’ unless you are a journalist or an American.)
“While, of course, the right to free speech must be defended” (here we go)
“The pointed lack of mask wearing and social distancing etc. and etc.”
Outdoor masks coming soon folks.
As soon as they roll out the school testing and spike the numbers again…masks outside for sure. Once again the plot to this B movie is pretty predictable.
Make sure you’ve all got your lanyards ready. And before someone says we don’t need lanyards to remain maskless, I completely agree. However, once ‘they’ mandate masks outdoors the sheeple will feel empowered beyond all reason to attack the maskless.
It will be like something straight out of a zombie film; ie, any one who moves different, acts different, looks different will instantly become noticed and a target for a full blown Karen attack, of which I suspect there will be an increase.
The zombies disgust me far more than the parasitic politicians…at least you know the latter are a bunch of conmen selling snake oil. The former have given up every scrap of dignity to cower from the sniffles. Pathetic.
Yep. At least with the politicians you know what you’re getting and if you’re cynical and wise then you’re aware that politicians actually hold the people they’re supposed to serve in contempt.
With the zombies they can spin it as being “caring” and wanting to keep you “safe” but that caring face is only skin deep. The ugly face is underneath and their real selves.
I agree that if outdoor maskurbation becomes compulsory wearing lanyards would be sensible, within stores most people know that they are on CCTV.
“Maskurbation should be voluntary “.
That’s a T- shirt slogan!
New Tiers Eve – Furious Sir Desmond Swayne condemns Boris Johnson’s lockdown chaos: Christmas ghost!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NC3mr2WRa8
Sir Desmond is complaining about the government abusing parliamentary process.
The Times is warning that they are using Brexit legislation to enable the same thing.
Everything this government does evades scrutiny.
They already have used sweeping powers without seeking parliamentary approval. These people will never be satisfied.
From the main article
‘Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail says “It’s madness to treat our schools like nail bars”.
They are not, in tier 3 Personal Care businesses remain open, presumably that includes nailbars, hair extensions and tanning salons.
and so the massive LIE continues! Asymptomatic people do not spread the virus:
Asymptomatic transmission is biologically implausible ~ Dr Michael Yeaon ~
If we were really in the middle of a deadly pandemic why would it be necessary for the government to lie in advertising and why does a deadly pandemic need an advertising campaign.
well, a large proportion of our gifted, state-schooled woof are (only) qualified for nail bars, or tattoo parlours. Cut Mr Vine some slack!
Probably posted yesterday but I was busy so didn’t read the comments.
Latest Ons death rates for the past six weeks for England and Wales, just over 1000 up on the first six weeks of the year.
182 a week up out of 60 odd million.
So death rates are basically the same as January at the moment, considering we have had 30,000 plus covid cases a day for weeks on end, kind of sums up the massive overreaction.
Social media and MSM led snowflake pandemic with a weak and Lilly livered government. Gross incompetence and wasting hundreds of billions which could have been spent on sorting out better care homes and overall elderly care, looking after our pensioners rather than wasting on apps, tracing and every other level of stupid.
My view for well over six months, really since the start.
Prior to March this year I had no idea how many people died on average and so it has been a strange 9 months as I have become an avid follower of death data! The general public are completely spooked by any mention of death and so really any death figures need to be presented in perspective and context but this is rarely done. Working in wildlife conservation one of the measures of population success is stable or growing populations, which involves comparing births and deaths. The ONS have published live birth figures for the first 9 months of 2020, the full years figures will not be out until Jan/Feb 2021 but even so the prediction is that by the end of 2020, despite all the ‘covid deaths’, there will have been between 10,000 to 20.000 more live births than registered deaths in England & Wales. With my conservation hat on this is an indication of a stable and slightly increasing population. As a pandemic this makes Covid compare stangely with Spanish flu which caused a dip in population numbers and the Black Death which devastated populations. Governments should react to the overall long term trends and comparisons not the… Read more »
This virus that’s been going round will have little or no impact on long term population trends.
I should add that there have been rather a lot of dead births as well, and probably even more this year with all the unhinged restrictions we’ve been suffering. Those of us who worry about that sort of thing may find it a strange fact that there have been well over twice as many dead births as (officially claimed) cv deaths and no one bats an eyelid. Yet we have a virus going around that causes less excess deaths than in 2008 and suddenly we have to lose a slew of basic human rights…
Well, good night.
120k stillbirths ? I have no idea if that is high or not but I previously reported how, at the beginning of lockdown, the sister of a young woman suffered a stillbirth.
She found that the cause of death was given as Covid and it was only because the father in law was ‘someone in the military’ that the family were able to get this changed.
The ONS report that the still birth rate for the first 9 months of 2020 is 3.9 per 1000 live births. Their comment on live births is;
Based on birth notification data, in the first three quarters (Jan to Sept) of 2020, there were 464,437 live births in England and Wales;
For the record, over 200k killed or died naturally before (or during) birth last year. Just saying, like…
But it’s the “daily scary figures” that have traction with a selfish and cowardly proportion of the public.
From May onwards it was obviously a vanity project for BJ, Hancock and the doom goblins of Sage. Lots of publicity, power and money in it for them.
It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. A lot of noise yesterday, but as shown above one piece of real data stands out, from the ONS stats published in the morning: Week 51 population and age adjusted excess deaths: 501. Week 18 ended 17th April population and age adjusted excess deaths: 10,979.* In other words, there’s very little going on: forget the new variants, the schools are being closed for no reason, the government should spend on the NHS some of the £320bn it’s wasted on repairing the disaster it’s created – there were more beds occupied in December 2018 than now. The government is a complete disgrace and their press conferences should be a laughing stock. Over the year as a whole, excess deaths are around 25-30,000, 5-6%, and that includes all the deaths of those that couldn’t or were too scared to use the NHS. Detail: Total deaths England and Wales week 51: 13,011, average of last 5 years: 11,548. Excess deaths for week 1,463, adjusted for population growth and ageing (my calculation based on 8.33% growth in over 70 population): 501 Compare this to the worst week of… Read more »
Week 18 excess deaths 11k
Week 51 excess deaths 500
Yet fergusob, handjob and bozo still telling us it’s worse than in March-April and co-opting medics and hack journos to confirm it.
The post below by Colin being a classic example
The worst week of the year coincided with the worst air pollution the south of England has witnessed for years – and my posts on Facebook and other social media at the time were taken down at a time when elderly people were being taken into hospital suffering from a respiratory illness.. it’s so strange that this has been ignored as it must have had at least a partial effect on the high number of excess deaths.
I believe there is something in that. Modern medicine is almost totally dominated by the Pasteur Germ Theory, with nasty bacteria and viruses making us ill. But the absolute proof for it is shakier than most doctors would care to admit. It also has less explanatory power than they like to think too. Bechamp’s Terrain Theory is largely discredited by modern medicine but it has some explanatory power. It sees viruses and bacteria as an outcome of illness rather than a root cause. Adherents of that approach would then point to high pollution levels in northern Italy and Wuhan as reasons for the April epidemics there. They might claim specific one off climate related events as triggers too. This approach could then be applied more fully to look for explanations that are not fully based on virus transmission between humans. However, to even suggest this is considered heresy by modern medicine. However, most orthodoxies are wrong. My suspicion is that there is far more sense in Terrain Theory than modern medicine cares to acknowledge. For example, the underlying reason for seasonality of the flu virus is still not understood. Terrain Theory would look for different seasonal related reasons that affect… Read more »
Well they do afmit it sometimes, there was that little girl who died from an asthma attack “caused” by air pollution from the south circular.
It’s much the same with “genetic” diseases which strangely change in incidence, there must be environmental factors affecting expression of the genes.
Ivor Cummins has commented that most of the afflicted in Northern Italy had catastrophically low Vit D levels, which has a huge effect on thenbodies ability to fight off deleterious conditions possibly including air pollution.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BD_96ybTMNE
While I am unable to dispute any of the facts stated in this article, it is so packed with panic triggers and well-targeted button pushing that as a writer and editor myself, I suspect that it has been written by a committee, or worse, an AI program : https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/coronavirus-nhs-hospitals-doctors-nurses-covid-b1780398.html
Probably used one for March and added a few seasonal pointers.I saw an interview on Sky last night with a nurse saying all most the same things.Its a script they are reading from.
The government did not have the right to take away our liberty to protect a failing state institution,we should never forget that
Yes, didn’t think of recycled button-pushing. That would explain the « masked author » … or did the photographer not have a zoom lens that day, and had to take the photo from 1 yard distance ?
Watching Sky news I felt if I had been transported back 9 months.This is the big push to ensure take up of the vaccine.
That point is put across with the subtlety of a sledgehammer at the end of the article
BBC R4 yesterday spent 45 minutes following the 9am news rehashing all the early Covid horror stories including tearful frontline workers and relatives of the sadlidied even though it was becoming clear that most would have died this year anyway.
Couldn’t sleep last night and scrolled through R4 to find sth to listen to. To my horror I found a program “How to vaccinate the world”, interview by Tim Hartford with Bill Gates.
As I said, I wanted to sleep, so did not listen to it.
An old program, as at this time of year they recycle content.
Can’t believe we’re already at the end of the year but still no end with this living nightmare on sight.
Sinead Murphy’s article is spot on and well worth reading. I think what I’ve found really upsetting this year is how my mental health has taken a battering and realising what the people I know can be like when push comes to shove – callous, cruel, insensitive and false.
To be civil and professional with them will take every fibre of my being.
Of course my own work troubles aren’t over as after the New Year we will learn who gets the chop. And given how the government is reluctant to open everything up which will mean that very likely there will be more redundancies in the pipeline.
As I’ve said before, it will be our scared duty to remind a great many people of their cruelty, cowardice and allowing this tyranny to happen. They should never be allowed to forget how they aided and abetted all this.
Mankind took thousands of years to get from the Stone Age through to the Enlightenment and beyond.
And about a week to go all the way back again.
Good riddance to 2020. God knows what’s coming in 2021.
We got almost 3 months of freedom at the beginning of 2020. No guarantee we even get that in 2021.
Some people may have seen the video of the woman filming Gloucestershire Royal Hospital. According to this article she has been arrested.
Woman arrested in connection with video filmed at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital – Gloucestershire Live
The video can be seen here.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1344298301051568131
How and at what point is the infectious variant or strain determined for those who have tested positive?
Can this be done for lateral flow tests?
The government charts include the words “new variant compatible” for the series. I don’t know exactly what this means, but it does imply to me that it is a guesstimate. Possibly related to one of the PCR target RNA strands bring absent in the new strain. Maybe someone with more knowledge can comment.
Some people may have seen the video of the woman filming Gloucestershire Royal Hospital. According to this article she has been arrested.
I can’t post a link, but check out GloucestershireLive and search for “Woman arrested”. Also search Summit News “A woman in the UK was arrested”
She’ s been bailed to 21st January. Here’s the offending video. https://www.bitchute.com/video/RK2SX9mBwDI5/
I looked at it . The place is totally deserted.The video has had over 200 thousands viewers already. Perhaps if the muffinheads at Gloucester Police had not been so silly, it would not have attracted so much interest.
Now there’s a thought. Could it be that embedded in Gloucester police station there is a sceptic inspector who saw a chance to strike a blow for sanity?
Oh yes, the Streisand Effect
Been exactly the same at my major regional hospital for weeks despite them not closing whole departments to utilize as ITU as they did in March-April.
A few days ago I posted some pictures of retail units that have closed since lockdown.
In the Shopping Centre there are complete strips of empty units mostly former hospitality outlets but I didn’t photograph those.
The Centre is owned by Land Securities and I expected to be harassed by Security Guards if I took said photos or at least be recorded on CCTV.
From the main article
The anonymous Track’n’Trace operative says “it’s obvious most people can’t be bothered to pick up the phone . . .”
Not exactly, most people make a conscious decision not to answer ‘unidentified caller’ because they know it is most likely to be Track’n’Trace and they don’t want to be told to self isolate because of a passing contact with someone who might or might not have the Covid of which they are not really scared anyway.
“Problems Of Medical Martial Law Part 27”
The numbers are on public record and can easily be pre-blocked
The T&T person said the people not answering the phone are the ones having had a test.
So they obviously do not want to make live miserable for their contacts. Wonders why they did a test in the first place, unless their employer or a school “forced” it on them.
Why are my comments being deleted?
I’ve seen people mention missing comments but often they have found them again.
I doubt there’s censorship – lots of posts here that would probably be deleted elsewhere for violating many rules are left to stand here – the people who run this site believe in free speech.
Try posting again?
Waht were you posting?
The BMJ has a research paper which shows a positive correlation between flu jab recipients at the beginning of this year and ‘covid’ deaths – this could be correlation rather than causation as many elderly people are probably more likely to have a flu jab and to be victims of flu fatalities – or there could be some more sinister side to this.. anyone else seen / heard this?
Saw that on the Bernician website too
https://thebernician.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d15706cafc460fd76074a0069&id=8c64f9510a&e=f858d86c41
I believe that repeated flu vaccinations for a period of 4 or 5 years raises the risk of dementia by a massive amount. Strange that when someone dies shortly after a vaccination the excuse is that ‘were old’ and yet they don’t say the same when they die of flu. Many, myself included, think that vaccination for the elderly is inappropriate as their immune systems aren’t robust. This leads to autoimmune problems.I wonder if they will count those dying after a Covid-19 vaccine as a Covid-19 death? Lol!
Recent flu jabs and the pneumonia jab was one theory for the high death rate in Italy.
These are compulsory in Italy for anyone over 60.
Predicted long ago, and this was one of the reasons.
Happening now in Mexico from what I understand with peopel dying from covid 2 or 3 days after getting this year’s flu jab.
So far only anecdotal stories from famillies three, trying to find a “news” source with it in.
£ from one extended family in 1 week is a bit more than coincidence.
Most of the population will forget how to socialise.
Anyone know what’s happening with that class action headed by the German-American lawyer Dr Reiner Fuellmich, supported by Dr Yeadon and others?
He gave an interview to Bittel TV in German (and I believe other journalists) on the 24th December. They were expecting to present a case in Canada on behalf of a Canadian business to court and a judge will decide if it is worth being heard in a full trial. Will probably happen beginning of January.
Justice system is very slow.
Ok, thanks. Hopefully we’ll get updates on here.
I thought he had posted a writ or something on Drosten?
I think you mean the Eurojournal article demanding he retract his statements about the efficiency of the PCR Test. I am not sure if he was involved in that.
The Independent Corona Ausschuss, which he is part of, gathered a lot of evidence relating to that.
There are several quite high profile activists in German speaking countries who have made public demands on Drosten to justify/prove his statements.
He has been very quiet recently, not even doing his podcast.
Thanks – it’s so hard to keep up at times!
Drosten does seem to be a weak point in all this, so I hope someone is pushing it hard.
What day did this site linked that summary to that recent study casting doubt on asymptomatic transmission?
Bart. Are you looking for this article: Has the Evidence of Asymptomatic Spread of COVID-19 been Significantly Overstated?by Dr Clare Craig FRCPath and Jonathan Engler MBChB LLB
Not sure what day it was. I put in a search for Asymptomatic Transmission in the search box top RH of the page and that is what popped up.Hope this helps.
That’s the one. Cheers
Thought I’d tweak Bryan Adams’ classic to reflect our current situation…
I bought my first real six string
Shops closed so I ordered online
All to save Hancock’s NHS
In the summer of Tier 69
Me and some guys from school
Spoke on Zoom and we tried real hard
Jimmy died, Jody took an overdose
I should’ve known, we’d never get far
Oh, when I look back now
That summer seemed to last forever
And because I had no choice
I had to get the jab from Pfizer
Those were the worst days of my life
Ain’t no use in complainin’
When you’ve no job to go back to
Spent my evenings queuing up for soup
Because I couldn’t pay for food, yeah
Standing on your mama’s porch
You told me you’d stay masked forever
Oh, and when you bleached your hands
I guess you were never that clever
Those were the worst days of my life
Well done. Canadiana. I remember that song well. I would guess Bryan is a lockdown sceptic. He has a brain.
That’s excellent
The Pig Dictator says Easter. His Liar in Chief says 2022
He said it would be inhuman to cancel Christmas.2 days later he did.I don’t believe either of them.This is the new normal we were promised.
He will say anything. As James Delingpole describes him: “…Johnson’s tone, unfortunately, is — for all the cheery bluster — essentially one of vacillation, procrastination, deviousness, mendacity, cowardice, egoism and, always but always, his prioritisation of the needs of his penis above everything else.”
I am incapable of understanding what women see in him.
Or anyone else, for that matter
Wouldn’t trust any of them. They’re liars all of them.
This will never stop until some politicians get the rope.
I suggest the leader of each party – just to be fair
and Blair obviously
Malcom McKendrick’ article today in the update is very worth reading in full and the conclusion that all SD has been absolutely of no value. But then the reality of London and SE, with 110 % overcapacity due to the seasonal surge is a reality. Think about all the money saved if we didn’t have the LD? Just take the meaningless mass testing costing 12 billion pounds would have been better spent increasing the ICU capacity and also good investment for the future. The hard fact is that -10% GDP has achieved nothing. If we have followed the flu pandemic guidelines 2019 this money could have been spent wisely.
This was the pollution level in London and the south east during the peak of covid deaths- the graph looks remarkably similar to the April peak we are shown in the briefings but no reference to this is ever made and very similar trends can be seen in Italy and Spain.
Can you explain what AQI is and is there one particularly dangerous pollutant or is it the combination that’s significant?
It makes sense that pollutants would affect respiratory disease and be dangerous if for example, someone had pre-existing heart disease. I’d like to know more.
AQI is Air Quality Index
I have decided to mess with their heads. I tell them I have converted and the handy cock was right all the time. I tell them I’m going to have all the vaccines as soon as I can. I have that guy from The Great Escape working on false papers for me
I’m going into deep cover and intend to infiltrate the Branch Covidians
Two Daily Mail stories, side by side:
“The Oxford AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine is as close to a miracle as medicine ever gets”
next to
“Having the vaccine doesn’t mean vulnerable pensioners can act with ‘wild abandon and go off to the bingo halls’ says Deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam, still unknown whether jabs stopped people passing disease to others”
The vaccine is only a miracle for Big Pharma.
Sod off!
You should read the comments on the Van-Tam article.
eg. ‘How patronising. He’s old. Does he go to bingo halls?’
Yes, because that is the idea you should be taking from the dick head’s statement. This is why we are where we are.
They need to be careful – people have put up with a lot and expect results – once they realise that nothing has got better, they will feel rightly they have been had
I shall be politely declining his offer and trying not to drown myself the next time I sail under Kingsferry Bridge not dying of boredom in some bingo hall.
Utter contempt for the elderly. I am a pensioner and wouldn’t go near a bingo hall!!!! What a condescending twat. This reinforces my view that, once you are no longer working, they want you dead.
Have you framed your DNR certificate yet? Waiting eagerly for mine.
I’d actually ask for one if I could ever see a doctor again.
Frankly if got got covid (again) the last place I’d go is a hospital. In fact if anything else goes wrong I’m quite prepared to die in my own bed rather than put up with the NHS
“The Oxford AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine is as close to a miracle as medicine ever gets”
According to ?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/12/30/vaccine-delivery-plan-can-turn-2021-year-renewal/#comment
I notice Tesco are now offering to inject the vaccine. How desperate are the government to get this jab into people? This is all rather odd, there is never any desperation to inject the usual flu jabs!
The government has dug themselves into such a deep hole, the only way out without loosing face is mass vaccination.
Absolutely. They are betting the house, the farmland and uncle Seth’s new red tractor on this one…
Agree, collateral damage stacking up making it harder and harder to keep up the lies.
Yes – when people say they ”smell a rat” – I always think of a ”Race Against Time”.
Tesco!!! So you can shop there for a loaf of bread and get the doom elixir stuck in your arm as well?
Crusty roll and the Broth of Abominable Things.
Keep digging until they end up in China. Where they belong.
Perhaps you get double clubcard points with it?
If ASDA do it as well perhaps they do it in your posterior and then you could rub it in with that ridiculous ASDA bottom pat.
Every little helps!
My brother had rabies jabs in his stomach in Quetta before the dog in question was caught and a post mortem conducted, pretty painful.
Not sure this is correct. I don’t think the Government has approached Tesco -it is the other way round -and why wouldn’t a commercial organisation seek out a money making opportunity? They got the gig for this years flu jab. No clubcard points as the shopper doesn’t pay.
BOGOF ?
I suspect this is the government trying to cover their backs because if something goes horribly wrong then its Tesco who will be sued not the government.
This is fascism disguised as a health policy. Mussolini defined fascism as the merger of state and corporate power. There’s never been so much corporate power exercised in western countries as we now see exercised by the pharmaceutical industry, the heirs of IG Farben,.
The Twilght Of Sovereignty, 1992 book by Walter Wristum then CEO of Citicorp.
Predicts the redundancy of national sovereignty and the coming of ‘market democracy’ as high tech means big business is better able to deliver what people want rather than cumbersome political democracy which will whither on the vine along with politicians.
During the Brexit debate I was labelled a right winger. In vain I pointed out that left wing luminaries like Noam Chomsky were pointing to the dangers of hidden transnational corporate governance and had been doing so for decades.
Oligarchical Collectivism
Neo Liberals need to get the rope
There is no other option at this point given what they have done
Lasso them first. Like they do in the Rodeo.
Perhaps we should invite Amazon yto take over the UK.
At least the trains would run on time.
(Apologies to Mussolini).