Boris Keeps Schools in Limbo
Pressure has been increasing on the Prime Minister to tell children and their families when schools can reopen after officials at Public Health England (PHE) decided it would be safe to open primaries after February half term. The Times has more.
Primary schools can safely reopen after half-term if cases keep falling, government health advisers have concluded.
Public Health England (PHE) said that there was now a “strong case” for the return to class, adding more pressure on Boris Johnson to set out a timetable for primary schools to reopen.
Pupils in that age group are “resistant” to wider coronavirus trends and play a small role in spreading infection, a series of comprehensive studies has concluded.
Outbreaks were recorded in 3% of primary schools during the autumn term, with most cases among teachers rather than pupils, PHE found. “Everything we have learnt from the summer half-term and the recent autumn term indicates that they are safe to remain open,” Shamez Ladhani, its Chief Schools Investigator, said. Secondary schools were five times as likely to record outbreaks and much more closely reflect wider infection patterns, suggesting that a later, more phased opening might be necessary.
Mr Johnson promised yesterday to give a further indication on reopening schools “as soon as we can”. Several Tory MPs demanded clear plans for a return before Easter and Labour called for a guarantee that schools would be the first priority for lockdown easing.
Leading paediatricians warn in a letter to the Times today of the “calamitous” impact of closures and say that “anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicidal thoughts are at frightening levels”.
Pressure from backbench MPs, some of whom have endorsed the UsForThem campaign, is mounting, the Sun reports.
Boris Johnson must begin getting children back into classrooms next month, his own MPs and parents demanded last night.
The PM was warned that a swift return was vital to avoid risking “a lost generation” of kids from the country’s poorest families.
The calls came after Health Secretary Matt Hancock hinted teachers will be vaccinated as a priority – but not before Easter.
Tory MPs and parents warned Boris Johnson last night that children risk becoming the “forgotten victims” of the Covid pandemic.
Former Cabinet Minister Esther McVey said “We genuinely seem to have forgotten about schoolchildren.
“They are the pandemic’s forgotten victims. We’ve got to start thinking about their prospects and futures.”
She added: “It’s time to get schools open, to safeguard children’s futures and to make sure we don’t let down an entire generation.”
More MPs spoke out about the ongoing and future harms:
The Essex MP [Robert Halfon] told the Sun: “Long after the coronavirus has gone, our younger children could be mired in a ditch of educational poverty, mental health crises and safeguarding hazards because of the damage of school closures.”
Mansfield MP Ben Bradley said: “Schools must reopen. Each day they’re out of the classroom, the most disadvantaged children are falling behind in their education, and their life chances are poorer as a result.”
Mark Harper, head of the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs, said: “As the PM himself said last August, ‘Keeping our schools closed a moment longer than absolutely necessary is socially intolerable, economically unsustainable and morally indefensible.’”
The Telegraph also urged the Government to set out a timetable for schools reopening.
It is evident that the Government has no more idea when all children might return than anyone else. It is unclear what the official metric is for ending the lockdown and allowing schools to resume normal teaching. Is it the infection rate among teachers who, as Office for National Statistics figures showed yesterday, are no more at risk from Covid than many other walks of life? Is it the propensity of children to pass the virus on to older family members? If that is the case, that risk will persist because children are not to be vaccinated, certainly not for months, if at all. Moreover, if children are passing on the virus within their own families then vaccinating teachers will make little difference to the spread of Covid though it might help create the conditions to reopen schools.
Or is the date for reducing restrictions the point at which the most vulnerable have been vaccinated? This is expected to be mid-February, by which time 13 million vaccines should have been administered to the elderly and sick. Yet doubt is now being cast over this because it is not certain that the vaccine will give sufficient protection. Another metric is pressure on the NHS. Even if infection rates remain high, will controls be eased once it is evident that the vaccine has helped reduce hospitalisations?
We know none of the answers to these questions and Boris Johnson was unable to shed any light when asked yesterday to give an idea when the lockdown might be eased.
Stop Press: Ross Clark reports in the Spectator that the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has not found a conclusive link between schools and the winter resurgence.
Schools were the last institutions to close and can be expected to be the first to reopen. But just how big a part do schools play in the spread of COVID-19? The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has published a review of the evidence from 17 countries and concluded that the reopening of schools cannot be blamed for a resurgence in the virus.
Most countries closed their schools during the first wave of the epidemic in spring 2020. From April 15th, Denmark reopened schools – with social distancing – for two to 12 year olds. There was no increase in cases following this reopening, according to the ECDC. Similarly, South Korea’s phased reopening of schools between April and June was not found to be associated with any sudden rise in paediatric cases.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press 2: The Daily Mail has reported on a survey by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing that, amid much hand-wringing about the safety of teachers, they are far from the highest risk occupation.
Binmen, male lorry drivers and carers are among the groups most at risk of contracting coronavirus, official figures from the Office for National Statistics have revealed.
The report published today found that men in ‘elementary occupations’, including binmen, postmen, cleaners and security staff, had the highest number of deaths from the virus last year, with 699 deaths in this category – a rate of 66.3 deaths per 100,000 people.
They were followed by lorry and bus drivers and others working in transport, where 608 fatalities were recorded.
The report found 139 teachers in primary schools, secondary schools and universities in England and Wales died last year after catching the virus.
Protecting teachers earlier than other vulnerable Brits has been a subject of hot debate in recent weeks with ministers desperate to reopen schools, but the data showed their death risk was no higher than average.
Lorry drivers and binmen faring worse than doctors, nurses, and care workers points towards more complex risk factors than just the sheer amount of human contact (lorry drivers in particular, experience practically none in their day-to-day work).
Stop Press 3: A schoolgirl in Keswick, Cumbria has been spotted in the town square staging a reverse Greta Thunberg-style protest:
Does Charging Travellers for Enforced Hotel Stays Violate WHO Rules?
As the country awaits news later today of the final decision on Australia-style quarantine hotels in the UK, the policy seems likely to go ahead in some form, with the majority of the cabinet in favour of it. However, a reader has been perusing the WHO’s International Health Regulations and thinks that the policy might technically be against the rules if travellers are made to pay for their incarceration.
There have been numerous news reports that the UK may announce mandatory hotel-based isolation for international arrivals and that travellers will have to pay the cost. This would violate the UK’s international obligations, which the WHO describes as a legally binding.
The UK is party to international obligations by virture of its membership in the World Health Organisation and I have heard members of Government say that travellers would be required to pay for the cost of their isolation. This would breach these obligations.
Article 32 of the Regulations requires the state to provide or arrange for adequate food, water and accommodation for travellers who are quarantined or isolated for public health purposes. Article 40 prohibits the state charging for such provision.
There is a limited exclusion from prohibition on charging for persons arriving in the UK to take up temporary or permanent residence. This exclusion would not apply to visitors to the UK nor to UK residents returning to the UK.
WHO International Health Regulations:
Article 32: Treatment of travellers
In implementing health measures under these Regulations, States Parties shall treat travellers with respect for their dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms and minimize any discomfort or distress associated with such measures, including by:
(a) treating all travellers with courtesy and respect;
(b) taking into consideration the gender, sociocultural, ethnic or religious concerns of travellers; and
(c) providing or arranging for adequate food and water, appropriate accommodation and clothing, protection for baggage and other possessions, appropriate medical treatment, means of necessary communication if possible in a language that they can understand and other appropriate assistance for travellers who are quarantined, isolated or subject to medical examinations or other procedures for public health purposes.
Article 40: Charges for health measures regarding travellers
1. Except for travellers seeking temporary or permanent residence, and subject to paragraph 2 of this Article,** no charge shall be made by a State Party pursuant to these Regulations for the following measures for the protection of public health:
(a) any medical examination provided for in these Regulations, or any supplementary examination which may be required by that State Party to ascertain the health status of the traveller examined;
(b) any vaccination or other prophylaxis provided to a traveller on arrival that is not a published requirement or is a requirement published less than 10 days prior to provision of the vaccination or other prophylaxis;
(c) appropriate isolation or quarantine requirements of travellers;
(d) any certificate issued to the traveller specifying the measures applied and the date of application; or
(e) any health measures applied to baggage accompanying the traveller.
** Para 2 allows charging for medical services that are primarily for the benefit of the individual and not for public health reasons. It would not allow charging for isolation.
On the face of it, our contributor seems to have raised a problem the Government appears to be unaware of. But if there are any readers with the relevant legal expertise who think this is too good to be true, please let us know.
Stop Press: The Times reports that even if the policy is given the green light tomorrow, it could take three weeks for the many currently dormant hotels to become fully operational again, particularly with the extra staff and procedures they’ll need to put in place.
Boris Johnson is tomorrow expected to sign off plans to quarantine all travellers at a meeting of the Government’s coronavirus operations committee in an effort to stop the import of variants from abroad.
The Prime Minister said he wanted “maximum possible protection against reinfection from abroad” to prevent new variants from jeopardising the mass vaccination programme.
However, a hotel industry source told the Times that as many as a quarter of the 30-plus hotels around Heathrow were shut at present because of the collapse in passenger demand at Britain’s biggest airport. Some of the remaining hotels have undergone partial closures.
The number of travellers passing through Heathrow was down by 83% last month compared with a year ago.
The source said that it could take two or three weeks to reopen closed hotels – if they were needed – while vital safety procedures were carried out. This includes checks on the water supply to make sure it is free of potentially deadly bacteria and training staff in the latest COVID-19 compliance procedures.
The Price Some Families Will Pay if Britain Imprisons Travellers in ‘Quarantine Hotels’
We are publishing an original article today by Kathrine Jebsen Moore, a freelance writer in Edinburgh. She regularly contributes to Quillette, where she covered the culture wars in the knitting community, and has also written for the Spectator, spiked and New Discourses. It takes the form of a letter written to the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, lamenting the move towards pulling up the drawbridge, and the consequences for her international family:
Dear Priti Patel,
I sympathise with your idea of looking to Australia and New Zealand for inspiration. They have managed to practically eliminate the virus by shutting themselves off from the rest of the world, only allowing natives to return, and when they do, imprisoning them in ‘quarantine hotels’. Britain looks set to achieve, finally, a pandemic success, rolling out the vaccine faster than any other European country. This is of course good news. For most Britons, pulling up the drawbridge is surely a logical next step as life gradually returns to normal. After all, holidays are all but illegal at the moment, so why shouldn’t those who do wish to return from abroad, or indeed venture here, be faced with an extra barrier? The number of visitors is currently around 10,000 a day and it’s hoped that the threat of an enforced quarantine in cheap hotels will get the numbers down. All arrivals are currently expected to quarantine, but with no real way of ensuring that everyone does. That means the risk of new strains of coronavirus arriving with them is still real.
But have a thought for those of us with families divided between different countries. This news feels like yet another blow to our plans to being able to see our family overseas this year. To explain: I arrived in the UK more than 20 years ago as a student. I’m from Norway, which is only a short flight across the North Sea. I’ve settled with my English husband in Scotland, and travelling to Oslo from here is just 20 minutes longer on a plane than flying to London. Pre-pandemic, all our holidays were spent in Norway. We own a house there, in a little town on the Oslo Fjord coast, where our four children have friends, see family, and immerse themselves in Norwegian life. This means skiing in the winter, and swimming and enjoying the warm weather in the summer. My parents have been very grateful that, despite us living abroad, they have seen their grandchildren almost as much as other grandparents whose children reside in the same country.
Worth reading in full.
Antibody Levels May Show Swedish Herd Immunity
Following on from our headline article by Will Jones a couple of days ago about Sweden’s deaths being in line with the European average, the Swedish doctor Sebastian Rushworth MD has published a piece on his site drawing attention to a graph showing the proportion of Swedes with antibodies. He concludes that it shows further evidence that Sweden’s much less draconian strategy was a success.
Here’s a graph that doesn’t get shown in the mass media, and that I’m sure all those who want you to stay fearful of Covid don’t want you to see. It shows the share of the tested population with antibodies to Covid in Sweden week by week, beginning in the 28th week of 2020 (the first week for which the Swedish Public Health Authority provides data on the share of tests coming back positive).
There is so much that is interesting about this graph. Like I said, it begins in Week 28, in other words in early July, which is around the time the first Swedish Covid wave was bottoming out. At the time, I personally thought this was due to enough of the population having developed immunity to covid, but we now know that was wrong. Rather, it was due to seasonality – in other words, summer caused covid to disappear.
The proportion testing positive for antibodies was 15% in early July. It remained stable for a few weeks, and then started to drop, as we would expect, given that the rate of new infections was very low at the time. Your body generally doesn’t keep producing antibodies forever after an infection, rather they wane. Of course, this doesn’t mean immunity is waning, as I discussed on this blog a while back. Although the actively antibody producing cells disappear, memory cells remain, ready to be activated at short notice if you get re-exposed to the pathogen.
After an initial reduction, the proportion with antibodies stabilized at around 10% in August, and stayed that way until October, when it started to rise, in line with the beginning of the second wave. And it’s literally kept rising by a percentage point or two, every week, all autumn and winter so far. In the second week of January 2021, 40% of those tested in Sweden had antibodies to Covid.
Funnily enough, mainstream media has so far shown relatively little interest in publicizing this astounding fact. I’ve been getting most of my statistics from SVT, the Swedish public broadcaster. They had been providing data on the share with antibodies in Stockholm up to a month or two back, when that information discretely disappeared from their website. I wonder why.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: A reader has drawn our attention to a Swedish report on care home deaths in Stockholm, which Dr Rushworth also links to later on in his article. The original Swedish report is here, and our reader has kindly translated and summarised the findings:
A report from care homes in Stockholm with Covid deaths: only 17% died of Covid (dominating cause of death); for 75%, Covid could have been a contributory factor; and for 8% , there was another cause of death entirely. This is the same percentages found in a study of care homes in another part of Sweden published in 2020.
The interesting thing is the description of these three categories describing the types of frail patients in the group. It is highly likely that only the first group were Covid deaths.
The first group (17%), where Covid was the dominating cause of death, had the following features: before getting Covid they were in a stable condition and had few underlying diseases. The actual Covid disease was more often in two phases and the second phase was characterised by high fever and poor oxygen saturation.
In the second group (75%), where Covid was a contributory factor, the individuals where already sickly and frail. The time between the onset of symptoms and death was short, but without dramatic signs.
In the third group (8%), where there was another cause of death, the individuals had already caught Covid and recovered and then got another disease. They had a longer time between the recording of Covid infection and time of death.
Stop Press 2: Ross Clark’s short summary in the Spectator of a new study of how long immunity lasts after infection is also worth a read.
Covid Riots in the Netherlands
The Netherlands adopted a relatively light-touch approach to restrictions last year, and enjoyed a relatively normal summer, but ramped up restrictions last October. In recent days, violent riots have broken out, with protestors objecting to a new curfew law. The Times has more.
Police have warned that the Netherlands could face weeks of rioting after a coronavirus curfew ended in the worst riots for 40 years as delays to vaccinations raised tensions across Europe.
There were over 240 arrests last night as police used tear gas and water cannon to break up demonstrations in Amsterdam and Eindhoven leading to rioting across the country.
Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister, blamed the “criminal violence”, which “has nothing to do with fighting for freedom”, on a “one per cent” minority opposed to lockdown restrictions.
“We are fighting against the virus to regain freedom,” he said. “We are not taking these measures for fun. It is the virus that is depriving us of our freedom.”
The caretaker Prime Minister singled out attacks on a virus testing centre and a hospital for particular criticism after a weekend of violence following the curfew’s introduction on Saturday night.
“It is intolerable. Any normal person can only become aware of this with horror. What has got into these people?” he said to the NOS public broadcaster. “This has nothing to do with protest, this is criminal violence and we will treat it as such.”
Frustration at the curfew, from 9pm to 4.30am and the first such restriction since Nazi occupation, has flared because Dutch infections are down and the country’s vaccination rate is low.
Dutch vaccinations are at some 0.8% compared to an EU average of twice that, while the UK has passed 10%, holding the prospect of a prolonged lockdown.
John Jorritsma, the mayor of Eindhoven, warned the Netherlands could be “on the road to civil war” after what he described as enormous damage in his city.
“This was not a demonstration. This was excessive violence, boredom, idleness. Hooligans came from all over the country, meeting on social media,” he said. “You see that the riots in Eindhoven were imitated in other municipalities. If you set the country on fire in such a way, it looks like we are heading for civil war.”
Police are worried that the violence will continue for “days or weeks” after violence in Eindhoven and Amsterdam spread to other cities including the Hague, Tilburg, Venlo, Helmond, Breda, Arnhem and Apeldoorn.
“It was terrible,” said Hubert Bruls, the Chairman of the National Security Council of Cities and Regions. “This is not a demonstration, I would call this corona hooliganism.”
Rioting broke out on the curfew’s first night, with almost 3,000 fines of €95 and violence in the fishing town of Urk on Saturday where a street testing centre for coronavirus was set on fire.
Koen Simmers, the head of the Dutch police union, said it was the worst rioting since since the squatter protests of 1980 and predicted that the violence was here to stay. “I hope it was a one-off, but I’m afraid it is the harbinger for the coming days and weeks,” he said. “We haven’t seen so much violence in 40 years.”
Worth reading in full.
Any readers in the Netherlands witnessing what is happening on the ground are invited to email us and give us their accounts.
Stop Press: Watch footage of the Dutch riot police abusing protestors.
HART: Health Advisory and Recovery Team
A new group of experts has been set up with the intention of raising the level of debate about lockdowns. They aren’t all lockdown sceptics, but they aim to put the existing measures in proportion and challenge some of the more extreme justifications for the current lockdown. Among their number are a few familiar faces such as Dr John Lee, Prof David Livermore, Joel Smalley, Dr Jonathan Engler, Dr Malcolm Kendrick, Prof David Patton and Prof Gordon Hughes. Their mission statement reads as follows:
HART is a group of highly qualified UK doctors, scientists, economists, psychologists and other academic experts.
Our core aim is to find the common ground between the Government and groups that are concerned about COVID-19 restrictions. The ambition is to bring all sides together and to widen the debate in order to formulate an exit strategy that benefits everyone in society.
Our research has identified a need for public policy to reflect a broader and more balanced approach across a number of key areas, in particular:
– Impact of restrictions across the whole of the healthcare system and on wider society;
– Cost vs benefit of school, college and university closures;
– The mental health impact of the restrictive measures;
– Mass-testing procedures and associated data analysis;
– A full assessment of the psychological impact, on individuals and wider society, of COVID-19 communication policies;
– Safe and effective treatment and prevention/prophylaxis options, in addition to vaccination, to increase survival rates.
Consultations from HART will be founded on scientific, evidence-based principles in the interests of public health. We want to encourage clear, calm and compassionate discussions.
Our experts take a collaborative approach and invite contributions from all sectors and interested groups or communities, at all levels.
HART is a not-for-profit, unincorporated membership association and its consulting members collaborate on an entirely voluntary basis.
The group could be considered an alternative to Independent Sage – a sensible, non-partisan version.
We wish them the best of luck. You can find their site here.
Is Lockdown Scepticism Rational?
What follows is a guest post from a senior scientist.
I was reading Lockdown Sceptics today and how the rhetoric about us sceptics is being ramped up, it really got me questioning whether I am rational. What if they’re right? So I thought I’d write down my own personal reasons as to why I am a lockdown sceptic. I thought I’d share these with you just to check I’m not mad!
There are many reasons and rationales to be sceptical of lockdown as an approach. My own ones grew out of the fact that my working career as a scientist has been mainly spent in drug R&D and, so, I naturally view non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as lockdown, from this point of view. As a result, after the first lockdown, I found myself asking a very simple question: ‘is lockdown good medicine?’
My own answer to this question is ‘no’, but this answer is not a fantastical one based on denying the existence of COVID-19 or any other such nonsense. It is a logical and entirely rational position which I will explain below. It is based on evidence and a bunch of assumptions, most of which are I believe are to a large extent uncontentious.
These uncontentious assumptions are:
1. COVID-19 is a serious new human disease, caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, that can kill people. The disease ‘jumped species’ in Wuhan Province, China and spread globally from there.
2. Doing nothing in the face of this new disease and the resulting pandemic was not an option because, despite some pre-existing immunity to the disease, in the UK a large proportion of the population was naïve to the infection and as a result even a modest infection fatality rate could have resulted in a significant number of deaths.
3. COVID-19 hits older and more vulnerable individuals harder than younger, fitter individuals. As a result, the majority of deaths and serious illness are in the older, sicker population. This doesn’t mean that some younger or otherwise apparently healthy people can’t die or have significant illness, it is just a lot less common in this group.
4. Our responses to COVID-19 breaks into three areas – a) treatments, b) vaccines c) non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs).
5. NPIs, including severe blanket societal restrictions such as lockdowns, aim to limit the spread of coronavirus by breaking chains of infection within the population. NPIs were deployed to help tackle the pandemic with the aim of reducing the burden of disease to healthcare systems and buying time to develop 4a and 4b. As such, as we develop new treatments and vaccines the need for NPIs should reduce.
6. NPIs require behavioural changes within the population and therefore always have consequences.
7. NPIs vary in the severity of these consequences to individuals and society as a whole: at one end of the spectrum are things such as hand washing, in the middle things like banning large gatherings of people and at the other end, forcing individuals to stay home and closing schools and businesses (lockdowns).
8. National deployment of NPIs affects almost everyone in society regardless of age. Some NPIs affect younger people more than older people e.g. closing schools and universities.
9. More severe NPIs can cause damage to both mental and physical health and wellbeing (including deaths). They also produce proportionally greater economic damage. These harms can be, and will be, significant and long-lasting.
There is only one other additional assumption, and this is where my scepticism about lockdowns comes from:
10. There is only weak evidence to support the notion that more severe restrictions result in proportionally more effective disease control. This contention is based on the fact that there are many published papers suggesting little or no relationship between more stringent forms of NPIs (such as lockdowns) and better outcomes. A summary of some published papers can be found here.
I believe that this is probably a classic case of the law of diminishing returns, where more severe restrictions produce little additional benefit over less severe ones and so come with a disproportionally high cost, both to the economy and to the individual and society.
So, if you take onboard 8 and 9 and accept that 10 is to some extent true, then you have to be sceptical of lockdown as an effective intervention because you have to doubt that any gains from imposing more severe NPIs outweigh the harms and negative consequences they cause.
Note: this doesn’t mean that there are no benefits, just that they are marginal gains over less severe restrictions and come with huge costs and risks. In addition, from assumptions 3 and 8 we can further argue that by ignoring the demographics of the disease we don’t focus NPIs on those most likely to benefit from them and, in fact, we impose them on individuals who are very unlikely to benefit. Logically, if you accept assumption 10 to any degree, you are led to the conclusion that the harms and costs of lockdowns outstrip their benefits and that lockdowns are not a viable NPI with which to effectively manage COVID-19 (or any other similar infection). They are bad “medicine”.
Informed Consent: A Former NHS Consultant Writes….
Dr Gary Sidley, a former NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist (and a member of HART), has drawn our attention to a piece he has published on his blog, posing a series of questions about the vaccine that should be considered before making an informed decision on the matter. Here is an excerpt:
In December 2020, accompanied by expressions of unbridled elation from politicians and the mainstream media, the UK began the roll out of a COVID-19 vaccine. This milestone closely followed the announcements of the initial results from three of the front-running drug companies in the vaccine race, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Oxford-AstraZenica, all reporting high levels of efficacy for their new vaccine. The Government’s intention is to offer the jab to the large majority of the UK population, starting with the most vulnerable groups – the elderly and those with underlying health problems.
But is it in everyone’s interest to take the vaccine when the opportunity arises?
Within a civilised society each of us retains the fundamental right to decide whether or not to accept a medical intervention, including the offer of a drug or vaccine. In order for an individual to make an educated and rational judgement, all relevant information – about both the likely benefits and disadvantages of the medicinal chemical – should be made available to the potential recipient. Only by careful consideration of this range of information can a person give ‘informed consent’ to accept the treatment. So with regards to the COVID-19 vaccines, what are the need-to-know facts?
It makes sense for each of us to assess the risks and benefits of accepting the vaccine, taking into account age and current health status. To aid this process, here are five questions to ask when deciding whether to say yay or nay, followed by my attempt to offer the relevant information.
1. If I become infected with SARS-COV-2 virus, what is the actual risk of becoming ill, or dying?
If you contract the SARS-COV-2 virus, there is about a 1-in-5 chance that you will suffer significant COVID-19 symptoms, the large majority of those testing positive showing either no or very mild signs of illness. Considering all age groups together, around 1-in-100 infected people will require hospital treatment and 1-in-750 will require intensive care. For older people (>70 years), the average risk of hospitalisation may be as high as 1-in-20.
Overall, the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of SARS-COV-2 is in the range 0.15 to 0.2%; in other words, for every 1,000 people who contract this virus no more than two people will die. The mortality risk is largely determined by age, the threat growing steadily with advancing years. The average age of those dying is 82 (slightly above normal life expectancy). The IFR for people below the age of 70 is between 0.03 and 0.04%; for every 10,000 people infected, 3 to 4 will die. About 95% of fatalities will have had serious underlying conditions.
For healthy people under the age of 35 the additional fatality risk of contracting SARS-COV-2 is almost zero. Meanwhile, children are as good as bullet proof, with seasonal influenza presenting a much greater risk of mortality to under-15-year-olds.
A useful rule of thumb for understanding age-related risk levels is to remember that contracting SARS-COV-2 virus is like packing a full year’s worth of death risk into a four-week period. Thus, on a child’s 10th birthday the chances of that child not reaching their 11th birthday is vanishingly small; this tiny probability is roughly equivalent to the risk of this 10-year-old dying from a SARS-COV-2 infection. In contrast, an 85-year-old person will typically have a 10% chance of not surviving until their next birthday, and around a 10% risk of dying within four weeks should they contract the virus.
In summary: For healthy people under 50, the risk of serious harm from SARS-COV-2 is vanishingly small, with other threats (for example, cancer and accidents) presenting a greater risk. The risk of the virus for old people is many-fold greater, but even a reasonably-healthy-90-year-old will have over 90% chance of survival.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Unexpected news out of Germany as Der Spiegel reports that Government sources are finding that the AstraZeneca vaccine is only proving 8% effective in the very elderly group which it’s supposed to benefit the most. (Translated from German):
The corona vaccine from the manufacturer AstraZeneca apparently has little effectiveness in older people. As the Handelsblatt reports, citing Government circles, the vaccine is only expected to be effective at 8% in those over 65 years of age. AstraZeneca rejected the reports as “completely inaccurate”, according to Reuters news agency.
The Bild newspaper, however, also citing Government circles, reports that the vaccine should only receive approval from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for people under 65 years of age.
According to the Handelsblatt report, the Federal Ministry of Health is already checking whether the sequence of vaccinations, which is staggered according to age, needs to be adjusted. A statement by the ministry on the possible consequences of the low effectiveness on the Government’s vaccination plan is not available, according to Handelsblatt.
A final result on the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca vaccine is not yet possible, according to the newspaper. In the clinical studies of the pharmaceutical company, older people were apparently relatively poorly represented. The British approval authority MHRA had already noted that meaningful results on the effectiveness of the vaccine could not be determined in these studies.
AstraZeneca is already under pressure because it apparently cannot meet the contractually agreed delivery quantities of the vaccine to the EU. The British-Swedish group announced on Friday that after the approval of its vaccine – which is due to take place this week – it will only deliver 31 million doses instead of 80 million by the end of March.
UPDATE: It’s being reported that the German health ministry has said the 8% figure instead refers to the proportion of 56 to 69-year-olds in the vaccine trials. In a statement, the ministry said: “At first glance it seems that the reports have mixed up two things: about 8% of those tested in the AstraZeneca efficacy study were between 56 and 69… But one cannot deduce an efficacy of only 8% with older people from that.”
Another Patient ‘Disappears Into The System’
After reading the story of a stressful breakdown in communications between a reader and the hospital where his seriously ill mother was being treated that we published yesterday, another reader has got in touch with a similar account.
I have had the same experience as your reader. At the end of December, my 90 year-old sister was taken into hospital with a chest infection. It was extremely difficult to find out how she was or where she was. I too found calls not answered, calls forwarded to wards cut off, or again not answered at all, and numbers for direct lines to wards that were posted on the hospital website no longer in use. But the situation became worse when she recovered and was due to be discharged. As a routine, she was tested for Covid and was found to be positive – a hospital-acquired infection.
The family expected to be kept informed and did not wish to distract busy ward staff, but when after three days we had heard nothing I rang the hospital. It took me two hours to find out where she was, but I was pleased, if surprised, to find they were trying to discharge her, possibly that day. That was a Thursday. We were promised an update. Having heard nothing, the following Monday I rang again and was told by the ward clerk that she was alert and chatty and taking her medicine. When I asked whether she had developed Covid symptoms the ward clerk couldn’t tell me. On Thursday I was again told she was to be discharged when they had heard that her care home was happy to take her back. A hospital social worker later rang me to say that all was well and she would be going back to her care home on Saturday, in two days’ time. On Monday I rang the ward again, to be told, again, that they wanted to discharge her but were waiting to hear from the care home. I rang the care home. Staff there said they were waiting to hear from the hospital. The care home then rang the hospital and I discovered the next day that they, the care home, had managed to get her back.
Three things to note:
– I can confirm that patients do indeed disappear into the system. This was distressing, but my sister is a frail 90-year-old and we have come to terms with the fact that she might not be with us much longer. Imagine, though, if that was your husband or wife, son or daughter, that the ambulance had whisked away.
– Covid was acquired in hospital. Or was it? It was never clear to us whether she actually had Covid or not. What does this mean for official infection statistics?
– The discharge procedure was completely chaotic. This meant my sister was in hospital for five days, possibly even 12 days, longer than necessary. I do not need to point out the extra pressures and increased danger of infection caused by this incompetence.
This too was in Norfolk – the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, where my sister was herself a nurse for many years. Almost, but not quite, without exception, the many staff I spoke to were doing their very best to be as helpful as possible, and it’s true that hospitals have been under enormous pressure in the last month. However, when my sister was previously hospitalised, in August last year, it was almost as difficult to get information. For instance, every phone call to the switchboard was answered with an interminable message about visiting arrangements.
It does seem to be the usual story of a cumbersome and inadequate bureaucracy and extremely poor communication systems working together to make the jobs of the frontline staff and the lives of concerned families as difficult and stressful as possible.
Sceptics Under Fire
We’ve continued to receive responses regarding the “Antivirus: The COVID-19 FAQ” website from readers.
One points out more double standards:
One of your readers very helpfully listed some of the errors made by the WHO, making the point that the Anti-Virus site applies an extraordinary double-standard when attacking the credibility of lockdown sceptics. It is not only the WHO that has escaped the notice of O’Brien et al.
The Q&A section on that site says:
Q. Why are you singling out specific individuals? Do you have some kind of grudge against them?
A. A few people, for whatever reason, have consistently made false claims and bad predictions throughout the Covid pandemic, and have refused to admit when they’ve got it wrong. Some of these people have been very prominent and influential during the pandemic. We try to use their own words to show that many of them are not reliable people to listen to.
But of course they haven’t named and shamed the most consistently false prophets in the debate. Were that the case, Neil Ferguson, Patrick Vallance, Chris Whitty, Anthony Fauci and many more would be included. Had the same standard (or even a lesser standard) been applied to advocates for authoritarian measures, those held up as “The Science” would be more deserving of the attentions of the fact-checkers on the site than the sceptics.
Far from being denounced for their authors’ inaccurate predictions, we see modelling studies by Imperial College presented as evidence against the lockdown sceptics, and described as one of a handful of “high-quality studies” showing that lockdowns “do save lives”. Incidentally, the studies referred to also include an analysis in Nature, but Anti-Virus makes no mention of the fact that that analysis found that “less disruptive and costly NPIs can be as effective as more intrusive, drastic, ones (for example, a national lockdown)”.
We also received a more lengthy critique, taking each of the site’s claims in turn:
It has become noticeable in recent times (since the invention of social media?) that resolving contentious issues has become more about ‘winning’ the argument than about finding the best solution to a real-world problem. The Anti-Virus website is certainly in the former genre, being more about rubbishing the views of a perceived opponent than seriously engaging in discussion of the issues.
Four argument techniques are primarily used by Anti-Virus:
– Straw Man (present opponent’s arguments escalated to absurdity)
– Rubbish opponent’s reputations rather than their arguments
– Categorise opponents with established ‘negative’ words
– Avoid considered debate of the issues when space/time is limited and just go for ‘knockabout’ denigration
Effects of Covid-19
Claim 1: “99.5% survive Covid – we’re overreacting”
Response: A statistical argument which depends on what data you select, its level of supposed accuracy and how you manipulate it. The whole Covid episode shows that opposing points of view (often honestly held) are often based on different ‘facts’. Pointless pursuing as there is no resolution in the discussion time frame as to which (if any) data is ‘true’.
Claim 2: “It’s only as deadly as the flu”
Response: More statistical manipulation! Regardless, the only issue for lockdown sceptics (note, NOT ‘covid sceptics’) is selecting a response to whatever threat level presents itself. This is entirely a matter of human judgement which can never be proved right or wrong as you can never re-run history to explore the alternatives.
Claim 3: “91% of Covid ‘cases’ are false positives”
Response: You can argue for ever on the actual figures. In the military, the key to a successful operation is correctly identifying your objective. The issue (which space here does not allow for development) is whether reducing ‘case’ numbers is a sensible objective. Clearly limiting hospitalisations and ‘excess’ deaths is a sensible objective, but the link to ‘cases’ in general is highly contentious.
Claim 4: “There are no excess deaths”
Response: More statistics! A reasonable participant in the argument would accept that even your opponents would prefer to see no excess deaths. If they are inevitable, calculating any changes are dependent on factors such as the definition of an ‘excess’ death, over what period should you measure it and what would have been the life expectancy for different categories of excess death. In the real world, all these factors are so ambiguous, and the excess death variance between the two positions so relatively small, that it is not an issue to spend too much time on.
Claim 5: “People are dying ‘with’ Covid but not ‘of’ Covid”
Response: Again, this is aimed at a non-existent opponent. Lockdown sceptics are certain there are many deaths ‘by, with or from’ Covid but where they fall in the death league table and how accurately they are classified is not going to have much effect on shaping pandemic policy.
Lockdown Scepticism
Claim 6: “Lockdowns cause more deaths than they prevent”
Response: A good example of Straw Man attack. Raises two issues, both of which cannot be answered with any certainty, but should be considered in a balanced discussion. Firstly, would there have been more or less deaths using a different strategy to lockdown? Cannot be answered unless you have a means of running history twice. You end up falling back on modelling and probabilities which a cynic would say are pseudonyms for guesswork.
Secondly, will the excess deaths caused by delays to non-Covid medical treatment exceed those of Covid? Cannot be answered for several years when its only value would be in shaping response to future pandemics. This is perhaps where all the investigation should be concentrated as we are clearly not going to change course this time round.
Claim 7: “Cases were falling anyway – lockdowns don’t work”
Response: Another Straw Man! Cases have been constantly going up and down throughout the last 11 months with innumerable analysts (journalists, academics, Government ministers) claiming correlation for their preferred factor(s). Correlation is not causation so innumerable mechanisms are cited to explain the connections. Factors that do not fit the required relationship are dismissed as irrelevant. Such is the world we live in, but it is wise to take it all with a pinch of salt, particularly when you consider that even trained statisticians must consider their future employment.
All that can really be said is that no strategy has yet been demonstrated that enables humanity to control/eliminate the endemic virus that Covid has become. The specific examples of smallpox and a few other rare viruses seem unlikely to change that situation in any relevant timescale. What we can do is consider whether our level of self-imposed harm (which is real and measurable) is likely to be worse than the rather speculative guesswork on the nation’s future health. The handling of regular pandemics since WW2 would suggest that our unique experiment is going to be quietly overtaken by time-honoured resolution although it is unlikely that any of the actors will admit to that.
Claim 8: “The Great Barrington Declaration gives a good alternative to lockdown”
Response: Lots of Straw Men here! The Declaration has been expanded in a condemnatory manner to include numerous imagined scenarios which lead to hopeless outcomes. A year ago, proposing what we have done with Lockdown would have been condemned as hopeless. The barriers to implementing the Declaration which Anti-Virus objects to are trivial in comparison.
If anything, the Declaration looks more like the way we have handled pandemics since WW2 so at least has some support from actual evidence. Our present strategy is, at best, a monumental experiment with no prior evidence as to how it will progress or how it will end. Perhaps we imagine that our technological prowess is so great that we have the ability to keep nature under control. A rude awakening awaits any such arrogance!
Keep sending us your responses here, with the subject line “Antivirus”.
Stop Press: We’ve decided to regularly include some of the best pieces endorsing the Government’s lockdown strategy, inspired by J.S. Mill’s famous line: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”
Today, we’re including this article by Alex Morton in CapX, making the most plausible case for the travel restrictions coming in at the moment:
Nothing would give me greater pleasure right now than a holiday somewhere warm. I suspect that this is true of many. But this option has to remain off the table for some time to come. At present, border controls are being discussed in the same breath as school reopening at half term or Easter, or when pubs could serve again. But this totally misses the point: if a vaccine resistant strain arises in the UK then this will undo every single hope of a return to normality – no schools, restaurants, pubs, family visits, offices or anything. We will be back to square one just with a crippled economy and compliance exhaustion.
The success or failure of this Government hinges on how fast the UK returns to normality, with people allowed to behave as usual and Covid deaths and serious cases remaining low. The UK’s success in rolling out vaccines could massively boost this country. But if lax border controls allow a new strain that is vaccine resistant to enter, or escape, there will be severe implications across a number of fronts:
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press 2: Niall McCrae at Unity News Network has written an entertaining piece entitled “The Progressive Death Cult and the Silencing of Lockdown Sceptics” on the virtue signalling of the “blood on their hands” brigade.
Lockdown sceptics have “blood on our hands”, according to the propagandists of Covid terror. The supposedly liberal intelligentsia, the same people who tried to defy democracy after the EU referendum, are now putting the plebs in their place. They must stay at home, muzzle themselves, and forego their leisure pursuits of football, shopping and the pub. Anyone failing to fully comply is recklessly spreading germs and contributing to the daily death toll.
Yet the sceptic need not leave the house to be accused of endangering lives. Toby Young, for example, sits indoors at his computer all day long, but his Lockdown Sceptics website makes him a pariah figure. Lockdown zealots such as Observer writer Nick Cohen and Tory MP Neil O’Brien smear him as a Covid denier.
Under fire last week was Lord Sumption, who got into a futile debate on the BBC television show The Big Questions. The value of life, he said, is not equal, but measured by rational criteria. Health economists use QALY (quality-adjusted life years) to assess the impact of services and treatments. The retired Supreme Court justice wasn’t saying anything radical: in a dilemma between saving a healthy young child and an octogenarian with a debilitating disease, who wouldn’t choose the former?
But Lord Sumption was challenged by a woman with advanced cancer, who accused him of saying that her life is ‘worthless’. Against such raw emoting, no amount of sophisticated ethical reasoning could prevent him from being characterised as callous – thus a typical lockdown sceptic.
Another illustration was in the Mayor of London’s question time on Thursday, when David Kurten probed Sadiq Khan on his promotion of Covid vaccines as safe. They have not been tested on pregnant women or children, Kurten said, but according to the mayor he was categorically wrong. Faced with further contrary facts, Khan resorted to virtuous grandstanding of no relevance to the question, suggesting that Kurten go to a NHS hospital to hear from staff about their heroics. Severe adverse events are likely to be either ignored or accepted as a collateral price worth paying.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press 3: Julia Hartley-Brewer mounted a spirited defence of lockdown scepticism on her talkRADIO show yesterday morning.
Poetry Corner
We get all kinds of contributions sent in to us every day, often drawing our attention to practical matters like news items and new scientific studies, but also personal stories from people suffering all kinds of distress from lockdown’s collateral damage. In light of everything we’ve been publishing on the matter of children’s mental health recently, this one was a hard read:
My 14-year-old godson, whose name I’m going to leave out of this, told me he was barely hanging on a couple of weeks ago. He told me that he didn’t even miss his friends anymore because he’d come to terms with the fact that he’d never see them again. He told me that he’d come to terms with the fact that his life held no possible future worth. He told me that he’d been working on his ‘suicide note’ when he’d written a seven-line poem.
As you can imagine, I was a broken man by this point. In fact, I can barely see my screen as I write this my eyes are so watered.
He’s okay tonight. I know that for sure, because his mum is sleeping in his room, as she has been for the past couple of weeks now, since I told her what he told me. Which I had to do, even though he felt I betrayed his trust and didn’t talk to me for those couple of weeks.
Tonight we had a long chat and he seems to be doing better. He’s forgiven me for talking to his mum. And he shared his poem with me.
It broke my heart all over again.
Once I’d read it, he said something that just epitomises exactly why he is such a formidable young man: “If you think that it will make the slightest bit of difference in one person’s life, knowing that that’s where I was, and that now I’m okay, then I want you to share it with whoever you can.”
So, here it is. (And yes, that is the title he gave it)
Meh
I’m really struggling with the point today,
With getting up, or finding a way.
I’m really struggling to lift myself up,
To smile, to laugh, even play with the pup.
I’m really struggling with all of my work,
Just lying here wondering if I can shirk.
I’m really struggling to see what’s the point.
Round-up
- “When will we be allowed out of lockdown?” – John Redwood MP in his online diary, wondering what the Government’s plan is
- “UN: Covid jobs crisis ‘most severe’ since the 1930s” – BBC reports on the huge job losses due to
Covidthe lockdowns - “January lockdown had 1/3 less national impact on movement than the March shutdown” – Interesting study by Oxford University on the public’s physical movements during each of the lockdowns
- “Mark Drakeford: the failings of an authoritarian windbag” – A disobliging review of the Welsh First Minister’s performance by Austin Williams in Spiked
- “Without an Easter exit plan, we risk getting trapped in everlasting lockdown” – Ross Clark in the Telegraph fears no end to it all
- “Invidious Comparisons” – Donald J. Boudreaux in the American Institute for Economic Research blog on nonsensical statistical juxtapositions used to make points about the pandemic
- “All Hail the Reopening!” – Jeffrey A. Tucker in the same publication describes the sudden change of tone in the U.S. since the election
- “Florida and California took opposite approaches to COVID-19 – but ended up with the same outcome” – A tale of two states. Mary Kekatos in the Daily Mail compares the two approaches
- “COVID-19 aid schemes hit by ‘eye-watering’ levels of fraud, says National Crime Agency official Graeme Biggar” – James Hurley in the Times on the perhaps not very shocking exploitation of the state’s greatest payout scheme in history
- “Manipulative broadcasters’ intrusive reports from hospitals are simply feeding despair” – Janet Daley wonders whether the relentless coverage of distraught hospital staff is making everyone’s mental health even worse
- “What forced hotel quarantine for UK arrivals could look like” – ITV has been to interview a hotelier who is keen to sign up to the scheme – and who can blame her?
- “COVID-19 has torn the threadbare fabric of our governance” – Dan Wincott in the Times takes a look at the wider political ramifications in the UK
- “The Government is threatening to consign holidays to history” – Oliver Smith in the Times is worried we are condemned to a future of ‘staycations’
- “Spain to open by spring says tourist minister – after PM previously said ‘autumn’” – A quick U-turn by the Spanish authorities on when Brits can get back to the country
- “Wuhan doctor: China authorities stopped me sounding alarm on Covid” – Interesting piece in the Guardian by Helen Davidson on the murky origins of the pandemic
- “The day we let COVID-19 spin out of control” – A piece in Stat arguing that asymptomatic transmission wasn’t taken seriously enough at the beginning, though arguments continue on the subject, with Dr Clare Craig and others believing the risk of asymptomatic transmission has been exaggerated
- “Mother admits killing disabled son, 10, while struggling to care for him in lockdown” – Another grim casualty of lockdown
- Update on the Great Reopening – Some information on the proposed mass rebellion slated for this coming Saturday
- Governor Gavin Newsom sets out his rationale for reopening restaurants, bars and cafes in California from next week
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Just two today: “You’re Driving Me Crazy” by The Temperance Seven and “Hotel Hell” by Eric Burdon and The Animals.
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.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
We’ve created a one-stop shop down here for people who want to obtain a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card – because wearing a mask causes them “severe distress”, for instance. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and the Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. And 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.
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 and Prof Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson’s Spectator article about the Danish mask study 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…
On this week’s episode of London Calling, James Delingpole and Toby puzzle over why almost no one is tuning in to the DAVOS talks happening this week, which are all freely available online. Are they shadow-banning themselves so we don’t discover their plans for the Great Reset? Or are they just really really boring?
You can listen to the podcast here and subscribe to it on iTunes here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
They shouldn’t forgive us. I feel like those of us in our 50s have left our parents to rot in care homes and screwed over the younger generations so that we feel “safe.” Of course this doesn’t apply to the sceptics among us.
Add the over 70’s to that list.
Present company exepted of course.
I wonder whether the fact that the U.S. has never elected a President who was born in the 1950s is in some way related to these generational attitudes.
Of course it applies to sceptics when their scepticism is no more than virtue signalling to say “not in my name”, or some other hopeless platitude. In fact I would argue it makes sceptics doubly culpable for seeing the problems but refusing to act. The post-Corona trials will doubtless judge sceptics accordingly.
Those who oppose the crimes are twice as guilty as those who commit the crimes or are wilfully blind. I wonder how this doctrine would be applied in the courts.
This is to wilfully (using your term) misrepresent my point. Many ‘lockdown sceptics’ are failing to actively oppose the government, they simply like to adopt the LS label. Many avowed sceptics regularly defend, justify or even excuse the government’s draconian actions.
Unless scepticism manifests itself in political and social action then it cannot be said to be opposing anything at all; indeed the sceptic’s very lack of action could be seen as negligent at the very least (and this IS an established legal doctrine).
Thus to have the knowledge of the scam being pulled yet fail (for whatever reason) to use this knowledge to prevent the scam is FAR worse than being a lockdown believer/advocate.
You appear to think that words are not political actions, which is a very eccentric doctrine, to say the least.
Words can be deemed to be political actions in some but not all circumstances, a distinction long made in philosophy and literature. Expressions including “deeds, not words” or “talk the talk etc.” arise from this distinction.
Simply stating a general disbelief or disagreement on a like-minded LS comment thread would struggle to be classed as a ‘political act’, while stating anti-lockdown views when standing in the middle of a group of angry lockdown fundamentalists or government defending Tory voters would be different.
Similarly criticising school closures on these pages is not a political act, but the Cumbrian schoolgirl’s placard certainly is.
By extension, if one believes that vaccines are dangerous and can back up that belief, the act of withholding information becomes ethically problematic – even if the current media laws aim to prevent sharing of such info. “I was following orders” (or laws) is not a recognised defence for inaction in the face of a harmful act.
Except the propaganda machine have the youth so thoroughly terrify that they probably will forgive the older generations.
”US”? I didn’t. And I wouldn’t have.
The Netherlands preparing for a 4th night of anti lockdown riots.
Not all windmills, clogs and cheese then.
The trouble is, it’s becoming harder and harder to voice skeptical opinion in the public domain, especially if you’re a high profile commentator, as it’s started to be viewed by many among the orthodox crowd as an “oxygenation” of ideas that might lead to people’s death. Obviously that argument can be turned on its head and applied equally to the lockdown zealots themselves, but the level of media-brainwashing has lead to those people being nearly impossible to convince about the importance of contextualized and long-term thinking. They really have just been plugged into a brain-washing-machine and left on a “spin” cycle!
Does anyone have any more information?
The Great Reopen UK businesses are asked to open – I am not saying anyone should break the law.
Aren’t all businesses essential – contact them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCGI4kurfbY
https://thewhiterose.uk/the-great-reopening-30-january-2021/
https://t.me/thegreatreopening
30th January there is a call for British pubs, restaurants, hospitality to reopen. Just like Italian restaurant and bars are doing
Who’s prepared to fight for their livelihood?
More importantly who’s going to get off their backsides & support them?
You want your pubs back, your social lives…take them!!!
#Reopen #Pubs #restaurants #
If 80 people show up maskless and armed with shovels and pitchforks at each shop, pub, restaurant, bar… all over the Country, this lockdown bullsh*t will be over in an hour. There aren’t enough cops to enforce grand scale civil disobedience! Power in numbers.
I was saddened yesterday to read that over 40 shops have shut permanently because of Lockdown back in the small nice (about 100,000) city I’ve come from and, if Lockdown carries on much longer, there will be over half of them shut permanently by this. This is probably typical and in fact poorer cities and towns are probably doing even worse.
If this goes on all year with some minor tier restrictions over the summer the damage will be horrendous. The Conservative Party believes in enterprise…my arse it does.
If this goes on all year, there will be nothing left to open.
Exactly. And shop and pub owners going on about how they’ll be fined and have their licenses taken…WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF YOU DON’T REOPEN ?? YOU‘LL BE JUST AS CLOSED AND BANKRUPT might as well take a chance and reopen!
New info over on the LDS group over on Gab (scraped from Telegram)
https://gab.com/groups/7848
also
The Grand Reopening https://gab.com/groups/23021
Vaccine injuries and deaths https://gab.com/groups/6054
Britfam https://gab.com/groups/21
Can’t access Telegram.
There is a large group on Telegram here:
https://t.me/THEGREATREOPENING
Also local groups in most areas.
Have problems installing it.
its not just hospitality, its all independant shops and businesses.. there is a telegram group.. its pretty chaotic, a lot of noise.. the main thing to note is the speed at which this national network has evolved, but I think their success may be limited. The idea was that there was an organised and concerted effort to contact all small businesses by postcode and get as many as possible on board. I cant see much of that actually going on in the group I’ve signed up with.
Five Years Since The End Of The Earth
Tony Heller
Fifteen years ago today, Nobel Laureate Al Gore said global warming would burn up the planet in ten years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVCUODGuNcs&list=WL&index=31
Winter of Discontent: Brits Face Power Rationing as Wind Power Output Collapses (again and again)
by stopthesethings
https://stopthesethings.com/2021/01/25/winter-of-discontent-brits-face-power-rationing-as-wind-power-output-collapses-again-and-again/
Brits expecting their thousands of wind turbines to deliver the goods this winter have been disappointed, yet again. While Boris Johnson peddles his delusional plan to run the UK entirely on breezes and bluster, the typical (and wholly expected) collapse in wind power output across Britain this winter provides a taste of things to come. […]
And nobody recycles the blades. They just get dumped in landfills. Super sustainable and environmentally friendly 🙄🙄🙄
They have a short life span and aren’t so Eco friendly afterall.
it’s not about saving the planet, just as the scamdemic is not about saving lives
If we were serious about cutting our CO2 emissions we’d be building lots of nuclear reactors, like France did in the ’70s and ’80s.
I agree. Trouble is, who’s building our reactors? The Chinese. I read they even run some wind farms ffs. We will rue the day.
When David Cameron vetoed EU tariffs on Chinese steel (thus writing off the steel industry not just in Britain but likely in other European countries too: China’s excess steel production was twice the entire EU’s total steel production!) I suspected then that the Tories had entered a Faustian pact with the CCP.
This incidentally knocked me off the fence to vote Remain in 2016, because I believed that Brexit might only be worth it if we used our new-found trading independence to crack down like hell on Chinese imports (and there was then no sign that a Tory government would ever do that).
I’ve often wondered if the motive behind that Faustian bargain was a desire to protect Hinkley Point C from legal action initiated by German or Austrian anti-nukes.
Fusion reactors, not fission. If you must use fission, then use Thorium, not uranium or plutonium.
Right… and people whining about where to put the spent radioactive material? Why, right back wherever came from. It was radioactive when it came OUT of the ground after all!! It’s less so going back in!
Actually the spent fuel is far more dangerous than the fresh fuel, because the fresh fuel’s radiation emissions would be spread over a half-life of roughly a billion years, while that from fission products would be spread over a much shorter half-life (such as the roughly 30 years of caesium-137 or strontium-90).
Many of the more outlandish fears regarding nuclear waste though seem like they’d only be relevant in a case of general civilizational collapse, and in that case nuclear waste would be the least of our concerns!
Not to mention the thousands of tons of concrete left in the earth and the millions of miles of power-lines connecting up these ‘green’ bird-choppers.
Oh, I can imagine an excellent repurposing of those blades…something along the lines of the French Revolution. Though we’d need a jolly big basket!
We’ve been kicking the can down the road on this one for years. It’s a miracle that we haven’t had widespread powercuts before now.
We have. In August 2019 the Hornsea One wind farm went down in very windy weather while they were going for a sustainable energy record. The National Grid even boasted about it. Then they blamed it on the back-up gas stations not coming on quick enough. It disrupted mist of the rail system for days.
Germany would have continual power cuts because of its reliance on ‘renewables’. Only reason it does not is that they take power from CzR to plug the gaps. CzR relies mostly on nuclear power, which it is expanding. Germany’s antinuclear stance is built on a lie.
Nuclear NIMBYs — I guess they take a fair amount of French nuclear power too.
It’s notable that when Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (original architect of the nuclear phaseout policy) left office, he almost immediately got a €500k/year position at Nordstream AG, a company majority-owned by Gazprom and set up to build a pipeline under the Baltic Sea to deliver Gazprom’s gas to Germany. The capacity of this pipeline was just right to deliver sufficient gas to replace the output of Germany’s nuclear reactor fleet.
Traitorous wretch!
You can get the actual data on energy generation and consumption here:
https://gridwatch.co.uk/
Things look tight at the moment, but my optimistic view is that the weather will probably change.
But here’s the thing. When you make everyone work from home our needs go up. So our heating and light is on most days, 3 computers running in work hours. So if somebody had bothered to look at costs of lockdown this should have been at the top of the list. What’s that, you haven’t done that yet?? What a splendid government this is.
You would think so Spikedeel, but in fact the total demand is not much changed from this time last year.
I don’t know that it’s that much less actually. Most heating systems are more efficient if they’re not having to deal with too big of a temperature gradient. So reducing your thermostat setting to 12 C /55F during the day just makes it run more to catch up Later. We have ours at 20C /68 F and wear a sweater. We do have a ground source heat pump which is much more efficient than many other heating and cooling options. Also while working from home you ARE saving gas if you’re not driving to work.
Well, there certainly is enough hot air and bluster coming from Boris and Co. Seriously, though, whenever I hear “green agenda” I think of another meaning of “green” – naivety!
The massive flatulence of the self serving junta running the country is a more reliable source of energy.
Tuvalu was supposed to have sunk beneath the waves by now.
Rather than sinking beneath the waves, it is actually bigger.
I believe Greenland is too!
Yes – and there is no roll-back on the AGW lies, 4 decades on from the start. I used to think the truth will out on that, but the juggernaut still rolls on; will the covid insanity last as long???
I’ve noticed the green agenda seeping through gradually over the years. On the one hand, I’m happy to see useful things being done for the environment such as clearing up waste and producing less junk (looking at you, billions of synthetic masks…). But on the other, I’m doubtful this will make any difference – and in fact may make things worse. The fact that you’d need to flatten forests to make sufficient space for solar panel farms, or disrupt marine and avian life to erect thousands of turbines and rob the Earth of all of its rare materials to produce batteries… hmm… It’s almost as if the green agenda is not so green afteralll…
I think you might be interested in looking into ecomodernism!
I’d say the answer to that one is quite clear. No – they definitely won’t forgive us.
Not in my name!
The poor mother, and the poor child whom she strangled (story linked to above).
Official response:
Olga Freeman had loved and cared for Dylan for many years, but the strain and pressures of her son’s severe and complex special needs had built up and that, combined with her impaired mental health, led to heartbreaking consequences.
What isn’t even mentioned??? Were you eagle-eyed enough to notice?
IT ISN’T AN ELEPHANT IN THIS BLOODY ROOM, IT’S A SODDING DIPLODOCUS.
The lockdownistas should look at that mother in the eye and tell her that the lockdowns have destroyed her and her son’s life.
Of course the cowards won’t do it…..if it saves one life….
New info over on the LDS group over on Gab (scraped from Telegram_
https://gab.com/groups/7848
also
The Grand Reopening https://gab.com/groups/23021
Vaccine injuries and deaths https://gab.com/groups/6054
Britfam https://gab.com/groups/21
Is there a source for that (an Italian newspaper perhaps?) I can see that the Italian PM is resigning, but not sure if that’s connected.. I don’t see any mention of lockdowns though.
Meh. The 14-year-old’s poem atl sums it up. I understand the feeling totally and I’m in my forties. I’m treading water in my career, feeling like I’m a collaborator and a coward because I need the wage to support my family. I have a wonderful family and that gives me purpose- to provide for them, to protect my children, to support my wife. I am also a Christian which gives me something outside myself to look to. But for those who are young, or single or widowed… What is the point? We have to keep the flame of humanity alive. I think it’s as basic and vital as that. We need to make sure that we are saying by our words and actions that there is a point. That there is meaning to life. That each person means something. We are not automatons. We are not mice in a lab. We are not mere pieces of meat to be ordered about and experimented on. We are human beings. We are born free and although flawed and prone to evil we will not let that evil conquer us. Stand up. Stay strong. Fight the battle. Do it today for yourself, your… Read more »
And God is with us, alleluia.
If I had no children I would have been in Tanzania by now, I wouldn’t still be languishing in this shit-hole, waiting to be sent to the gulag
My friend buggered off to Tanzania just before Christmas to escape this shitshow.
I am a widower. I tried hard to commit suicide some months ago when I realised my small company was destroyed by the lockdown. But I survived, I believe due to God’s intervention (a chain of events I won’t describe but were unlikely in the extreme. ). Since then I have become determined to see this thing through, and hopefully live long enough to see the culprits punished.
You were not trying to commit suicide. What you did, was you survived the government’s attempt to MURDER you! I’m so glad you survived. And I hope you understand, you’re not to blame. X
Well said, Jinks!
That’s definitely a more accurate way of looking at it.
Just in case you haven’t heard of this podcast, two vicars against lockdowns, believing (controversially) that churches ought not to shut down. Sorry ‘go online’. I have found it a comfort:
http://irreverend.org.uk/
It is really lonely being anti-lockdown and trying to be a Christian. No one understands.
I note the thing that a reader has found re the State being obliged to cover the cost of “appropriate” accommodation for quarantine purposes for those returning to Britain – but I don’t think that kite will fly. The reason being who defines what is meant by “appropriate” and I can’t somehow see the Government agreeing with what these returning travellers will deem to be “appropriate” standard somehow. Appropriate could well be deemed to mean = well you’ve got a bed (a camp-bed there in some huge impersonal building with all the other travellers). Well you’ve got food (whatever “cheap and cheerful” rubber-bread sandwiches and junk food cereals we care to throw at you). Job done – somewhere to sleep and something to eat – but it won’t be a decent hotel with decent breakfast and there won’t be tv to watch/decent surroundings generally. So that idea isn’t going to be a runner.
Pudding Island? Do I scent a Gerald Durrell fan?
I can never take Laurence seriously because of my mental pictures of Larry.
I’ve only read Esprit de Corps. Laugh out loud funny. Must read some of his other stuff.
Yes, Leslie was a sad case.
I do think that Prospero’s Cell is an absolute gem. I’m intrigued by the story of the fisherman who caught octopuses with love, which Gerald and Lawrence both tell. I wonder if it ever really happened.
Hang on there. Anyone can return to whom £1,500 is easily affordable. It’s only the riff-raff who can’t afford that who “can just get stuffed.”
Riff-raff like me, that is.
Has anyone ascertained if this is just for visitors to the UK? Or will it be for people coming back from holiday (who have probably had to have a test to get on the plane? They cannot mean if I go to Spain for two weeks on an all inclusive I need to book a hotel (aka prison) for two weeks when I get home?
Yes, that’s exactly what they mean.
If you follow up the links to Agenda 21 and the Great Reset, it is quite obvious that they intend to push this (hence the “Green Agenda”) via the removal of the ability of most people to travel. At a stroke, this reduces the “Carbon Footprint” of everyone, but not to our benefit.
They intend that nobody outside “the Elite” will be allowed to travel in private vehicles (railways only for the rest of us, that’s why HS2 is being pushed so hard). Everyone will be forced off the land and into micro-flats, which are already in production. Only the elite will be able to travel in the wild areas of Britain (in what we would refer to as “the countryside”) and all village properties will be re-wilded.
You’ll own nothing (substantial) and the population will be reduced by a combination of bad health and hunger.
None of this is hidden; it’s all there in plain sight. It’s just that people can’t bring themselves to understand how easily this can be forced to happen if a tiny minority hold the financial levers of power.
The way the Fascist beasts keep snatching away the slightest breath of hope reminds me of a novel and a story.
The novel is Ivan Denisovich, where the hero/author says that people who had spent years in the Soviet camps would reach the day of their projected release, only to be told that their sentences had been extended for another ten years.
The story is by Alfred de Vigny. A prisoner of the Inquisition thinks he’s found a way of escape, the night before he is due to be burned alive. At the very last minute, they nab him as they always planned to. And the Inquisitor wraps him in a loving embrace, saying with tender reproach, ‘My son, surely you did not dream of leaving us?’
Apply those psychological torture tactics to 67 million people and you have the Bozo-Dungford-Turdgeon shitshow.
One line from Ivan Denisovich that has always stuck in my mind: “How can a man who is warm understand a man who is cold?”
O who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
Brilliant book
Having been through a 14-day quarantine on arriving in Taiwan in late November (wife visiting her family) I’m not opposed to quarantine programs per se. What does bother me is the hotel aspect of it. In Taiwan you are allowed to quarantine in a hotel if you have no home or at home as long as its facilities are exclusively for your use (no spaces shared with anyone else). My in-laws had a second home in the countryside at which my wife and I quarantined, with them visiting us a couple of times to leave a box of food at the front door. If you don’t have family to do this, the local government will see to it that you get stuff. Now I realize that people have been asked to quarantine at home in the UK but basically don’t bother. Taiwan solved this by putting an app on your moble phone which monitors your location 24/7 and alerts the authorities if you move. Don’t have a mobile? They will lend you one. There have been a number of cases of people who let their batteries die and the phone switch off only to get a visit from the police… Read more »
Its all a bit over the top for something similar to Asian or Hong Kong flu
This is a beautiful piece of understatement.
there shouldn’t be any quarantining at all is the point. the whole thing is complete bollocks.
The idea that we should quarantine people at the border because we are afraid of yet to be found new variants of a reasonably mild endemic respiratory virus is crazy in its entirety.
That’s without even getting into the practicalities and usefulness of such policies when applied in the UK
And to be frank it us a year late. The virus and mutations are already here. If we slammed the door on all Chinese in November 2019 that might have helped but of course nobody was being told about the problem so it can’t have happened. Its just another stupid knee jerk reaction to be seen to be doing something. But are you really doing this to people coming back from holiday? Why are you trying to kill the travel industry? As a certain Mr Rotten once said “No Future, no future!”
Again, they want the travel industry removed by removing the “mass travel” part of it that allows Ryanair to fly people across the world for a tenner. Elites only, when the time comes.
You see, if the elites want to travel in private jets and extreme comfort, the amount of “carbon” used (as if anyone gives a shit) is tiny compared with the all-summer-long mass travel to Spain, Italy, etc. So it’s travel where they want (for them) and two weeks in a boarding house for you.
799 vs over 2 million visitors means the tourist industry is dead. And how many hundreds of thousands have lost their livelihoods and will starve? I’ll bet the number is greater than those dying of Covid…
3rd or is it the 5th night of anti lockdown protests in the Netherlands.
1st comment: I bet the Dutch government hope that the dyke will hold.
2nd comment: How come the MSM are actually reporting it?
Yes, the question of why it is being reported. I think we will find out imminently. My guesses include:
– A prelude to a brutal crackdown to be used as a deterrent.
– A prelude to a false flag operation to demonise the protestors.
It’s the emotional blackmail and the guilt tripping rather than fear that is working here I think. Endless shared photos of exhausted NHS staff (usually pretty young women, doe eyes peeping over their masks) popping up in Facebook feeds pleading with us to do the right thing. It’s horrendous but it works.
Umm, because there are no PS5s in stock, due to covid? I witnessed those “riots” close up.
But I have not seen them interviewing one protester. Only hand wringing politicians. Law breakers, illegal gatherings, etc. Not one, why are you protesting mate?
…especially not in wooden shoes – those things HURT.
Found out from a friend last night that a mutual friend is suicidal
Early 40s, hasn’t worked for a year, no government help, trapped in house with other half who is ‘unhelpful’ to say the least
You can multiply her up by a million
God have mercy on our souls – what have we done?
WE haven’t.We have done our best to combat the criminal insanity. We must and will continue to do so.
and I heard of a 35-year-old whose untreated breast cancer is now terminal….I have yet to hear of a person who died of covid
We don’t know of anyone who has had it never mind died from it.
I had it.
(I get EVERYTHING – just call me the coalmine canary)
It was unpleasant, but then, can’t recall ever really enjoying being sick.
Nevertheless, here I am, replying.
Ergo, not dead.
We haven’t done anything, the politicians have caused this destruction and I hope they burn in hell for an eternity along with the Davos set.
Get them to come on here and have a rant about “them indoors”. It really does help! They are not alone.
Anybody who says these were done because of incompetence is wrong. These are deliberately done destructions. Change of economic(monetary) and social infrastructure(China style social fabric) is being achieved using a lab made nasty virus. Sick but effective. This is what I believe.
The other responses are right, WE haven’t done a thing, it’s our grotesque governments and everyone that’s consenting to this shitshow that have blood on their hands.
As a matter of urgency, talk, meet or whatever you have to do to communicate with your friend, just do it.
My brother-in-law jumped in front of a train 2 days before Christmas, leaving behind a wife and two kids (6,5). Sure, he had other issues due to drink, but he probably wouldn’t have descended into the darkness if he hadn’t lost his business thus facing losing their home etc.
He was the loveliest, most gentle and unassuming man you could wish to meet.
These instigators and collaborators are beyond evil.
Keep listening to your friend. The best of luck for a dreadful, desperate situation.
I will not grieve for the 89 year old who succumbs to a propagandized, overhyped respiratory disease, nor will I point the finger of blame at innocent members of society for “spreading” said disease when a significant number of infections are now picked up in hospital and care settings, and the virus itself is now endemic here in the UK. The collective delirium currently afflicting most of the British public means that they now believe that life can be extended and people can be saved by employing draconian restrictions on our civil liberties. They have completely lost sight of the fact that it is nigh impossible to control infectious, microscopic organisms, and the passing of the aged and comorbid due to seasonal viruses is unfortunately nature’s way. It is the immutable established order – a core tenet of the great circle of life, where the fit and healthy are spared and those who are full of years give way to new life. This new, infantile view of death and the idea that the impossible sacrifices of lockdowns actually “save lives” have been a central part of government brainwashing. It is hugely destructive, it is an egregious lie and openly encourages… Read more »
A noble speech.I bow to you.
Hear, hear!!!!
Thank you! Inspiring words. It may not seem much but 3 friends previously firmly in the Covid absolute fervent belief camp are wavering without any input from me. Science based articles forwarded previously by myself were dismissed as mumbo jumbo however their recent emails are becoming much more quizzical about what the MSM are reporting. Just maybe the tide may be begining to turn.,albeit very slowly. The lack of very few opposite, or questioning at a forensic level, views in MSM is starting to have a negative effect. Interestingly they are becoming partic curious about the ‘Vaccine’ s’ especially the numbers quoted eagerly having it and the take up rate as none of the elderly relatives they themselves know have taken it up.
Simply wonderful words Scotty.
Now please tell me that on the basis of this submission you have just been offered the job as Piffle’s speech writer, then I’ll know we can win this battle.
Damn right brother!
Brilliant. Adding this to my Word document of LS comments.
Me too. I thought I was the only one doing that!
i m glad another fellow comment saver !
my favorite thing these brilliant comments im glad you are saving them i do screen shots that s all i know how to do but c an’ t collect anywhere near all of them . only a few i hope there is a book some day !
Great post, Scotty.
Hear hear
hear hear too!
Very poignant and beautifully articulated.
Rightly or wrongly, I am finding a degree of annoyance in reading LS, as its key initial format of challenging certain narratives, articles etc., with rational opinion, argument or/and evidence, appears to have all but vanished. Increasingly it appears to be a collection of articles from MSM but with no input on the narrative or content of said articles, and thus increasingly appears to supporting the overall output from MSM. In todays, for example, where is the challenge to the graph about deaths in certain occupations – how do the numbers stand as per percentage of the total workforce, were other factors involved, less healthy lifestyle, weight, average age of workforce etc., cut and pasting some graph from the DM, without proposing other thoughtful considerations on its presentation is less than I expect from LS. While on this matter, could you also question your repeated assertion that there was a second wave – are we sure about this? Where are the influenza numbers this year, how much of this wave was based on mass testing and false positives, plus repeated tests on the same individual being included. What has happened to critical thinking which was once the main stalwart of… Read more »
You’ll be back. It’s like the Mafia, you can’t leave.
I was actually out for 30 years and only returned 2 years ago, husband stayed, had intended to return last year, but we delayed it with the advent of covid – fortunately I maintained my Qatari residence status. I am in Doha now, and yes, a better place to be at the moment, and would definitely not be returning to the UK if it wasn’t for the cats – doubt they will even appreciate the sacrifice. Yes, masks needed in shops, though worn as you deem fit, no stasi barking at you. Everything open including restaurants and bars – tables arranged without arrays of perspex and tape, staff incredibly genial which makes everything less of a trial if you do have to wear a mask until seated or need to show your app – track and trace. People are interacting in shops, streets etc., as normal – swerving, shirking and scurrying is non existent. Walking on the Corniche it struck me there was no signage, orders etc., same in shops – almost normal and what a huge relief – it is then you realise how oppressive things have become. Qatar had their track and trace app up and running in… Read more »
Please diarise your experiences upon your return. I am sure that we would be interested.
Don’t you mean the Catholic church?
Catholic Church? Plenty of Christian lockdown sceptics, (and Christian includes of course the Church of Rome). Some of the most sceptical people I know are Catholic. And, incidentally, one of my favourite politicians was a Catholic and Socialist.
The Catholic church I attend each Sunday is the only place I know where sceptics gather in any numbers, fifty or sixty of them spread across two Masses, all ages, no masks, no tape across seats, no floor signs, no one-way systems, no segregation of seating into family bubbles, everyone stopping to chat outside afterwards. Sadly a lot of churches seem to have switched from Christianity to covid zealotry, including the one I used to attend where the hordes of bossy middle-aged women have taken full control, even forcing the priest into retirement because they felt he wasn’t being sufficiently careful, as they saw it.
The analysis, the dissection of the data and the challenges are here in the comments section. I am happy to pick up news stuff 2nd hand from this site it saves my blood pressure from having to read too much MSM news. I have also suspected that the style of this site reflects to need avoid too much attention from the covid zealots who would want to see it shut down. This comments section is so important, our unity and support is so necessary, the real tragedy is if we were to lose this discussion platform.
i feel the same way is like being able to talk to one another here . no where esle have i found that and alosmt eveyone i perosally know is a believer. so this is a lifesaver for me
Agreed. I’m feeling the tone has shifted somewhat to one of trying to placate everyone, or more specifically walking the line of compliance just enough to avoid additional targeting for being a sceptic.
Though there are occasionally useful articles it seems to be a toned down approach to scepticism. I’m really only coming here anymore for the comments section in which I find people of like mind but also a wealth of additional information. The comments are now more interesting and informative than the blog.
Anyway, I think for me it’s time for a break form the site. However, I’ll end on this; I can now see why James D gets so frustrated talking to Toby on their podcast.
I completely agree. It is the comment section and links, articles that are now the real value of this site.
Agreed here too. I skim the main content unless something catches my eye and then jump to the comments for the real content. And likewise a few times through the day I come back to the comments to see what the latest news is.
Definitely…I just go to the comments now….it seems to be where the real analysis takes place such as Rick’s dissection of the death figures.
Yes I feel for James too…on the last one Toby said how much he liked Emily Maitliss ffs.
I’d rather get the news, however bad, from here than from the sewage MSM,
I think you expect too much of Toby and his volunteers. He must feel he is on a daily treadmill!
Many many months ago, when he was off on his jaunt to Venice, and was thinking of ‘some time off’ from the daily updates, I urged him to produce even a blank page, as a coat hook for the BTL community.
He is also taking personal flak for being the poster boy for the LS movement (would that there were such a thing).
Cut the guy some slack!
What is BTL?
below the line — i.e. comments
cheers
Bacon, tomato and lettuce, apparently.
Bizarre triangle love.
That sounds like a rather interesting sandwich!
and guacamole if you’re M&S. And woke. Probably.
How is he coping with it all?
very true what woudl we do wiht out toby having s tarted this great group adn continuing it atmuch cost to himself thank you toby and everyone here commenst adn will ian etc
I write the same nearly every day Hattie – today we have a Daily Mail graph showing ‘deaths from coronavirus’, a completely meaningless title; Something Moore saying how well New Zealand has done, a country with 3 people, 16 light years from anywhere; she adds a ‘halleluliah’ for the fact that Boris has got a vaccine ready; and to top it all we have a fantastic picture of a schoolgirl resistor in Keswick but LS has to append an insult to Greta Thunberg. Can we please have some editorial standards in LS???
Sorry, but insulting Greta is fun. She can’t insult the whole of humanity without getting pushback. She is no longer a (((controlled))) child.
Correct, it is evolving as a depressing read. The comments always restore my sanity.
Well put. I guess the above the line content is being influenced by the mainstream attack on sceptics either consciously or unconsciously. That said, I barely skim the main page these days, I find much more important and interesting content in the comments down here.
Well said Hattie. I barely read the top section anymore its like they are being monitored and are not giving opinions anymore just cherry picking stories. Mostly with a unchallenged viewpoint. This crap about defending Toby against O’Neil. Why? your a big boy do it yourself. If you can’t see his arguments are bullshit cherry picking you probably need to hand over the mantle of LS to someone who will not take this crap and will counter anything like this with more vigour than you are.
I agree with that and have already today on another comment questioned the ‘matey’ reference to what ‘Boris’ is doing as if he is some kind of long lost friend. This man really does have blood on his hands. Deaths from covid in so far as they are correctly diagnosed are an act of nature which has been going on since the start of time. The deaths we are now seeing through suicide and despair are a direct consequence of government policy and have to be seen as such. There is no room for mateyness with these evil scumbags. You might as well be matey about Pol Pot.
It’s probably because there are more and more authors and it is becoming diluted. When Toby wrote the articles is was more sceptical. It has, like many things, expanded too much and become too long. I criticised it last week for appearing to accept that there has been a ‘second wave’. The comments section is where I gain much of the support I desperately need.
I thought that the graphs of deaths of Covid by occupation was annoying. More information needed to put this in perspective. ie. deaths of bin men, teachers, health workers over the last few years. Whether deaths from Covid or with Covid. Such information is probably not available.
Good points.
When you mention closing borders to ‘stop new strains’, it reminds me of when ‘The Science’ (or the Government- not sure which) said that closing the borders would be pointless. That was when we were in ‘flattern the curve’ mode.
Quite.
But, in fairness to Toby and the rest of the LS scribes, if they broadened their scope to include all countervailing evidence and arguments, the site would become unmanageably huge.
I doubt most of you will not be too surprised at what this Italian doctor has to say. Please share.
https://nofakenews.net/2020/08/24/italian-doctor-warns-citizens-about-covid-19-depopulation-vaccine-video/
I suppose the architects of lockdown have done a risk or cost/benefit analysis. Then if deaths due to lockdown outweigh those saved, they can point at the calculations, see what they got right or wrong and we can learn lessons.
Of course if they haven’t done those calculations…
45K or so dead in the UK from the LDs? ‘Excess’ deaths might be excessive due to lack of access to save the bloated, inefficient, socialised and management saturated NHS.
If you stop care for your population, 30% of whom are obese. Don’t be surprised when people start getting ill and dying.
Constitutional rights cannot be trampled underfoot?
They can in this black hole of a country.
Still -encouraging, thank you, NN.
Concentration camps and the NHS
With the predicted introduction of hotel quarantine, the government may have forgotten the NHS is dependent on foreign workers and indeed British citizens, some who have foreign partners but cannot settle here because their income does not meet the government minimum income requirement.
I know one who is an ambulance driver. He goes to look after his British children every few months, with their mother abroad. He is there now and won’t be coming back to the UK with all this going on. Patel and clueless Boris won’t think if that effect, which will be long term, when introducing their new policy.
The collatoral damage is piling up now. There is going to be civil unrest throughout the world. These parasitic globalists have goaded the people into it.
Will Brits actually stand up though? I doubt it! The protests there have been have been relatively small compared to other EU countries. We are not going to win by writing letters – I should know, I have written many with no results at all.
I thought our football hoolies might have stood up to be counted, the amount of banging on they do about WW2, sensitivity to oppressive cultures etc, but no.
I hope once the better weather sets in and the 1 year anniversary of this shitshow. If nothing materialises March/ April i’ll be an eternal pessimist.
Your last sentence needs to stop after the 6th word. I used to think Boris was intelligent but lazy but it takes a particular kind of stupid and weak to have kept this disaster going for so long and to keep adding further to it.
The decrease in population will render it meaningless. 10% population non-British. 8% NHS staff is non-British. Swings and roundabouts.
If you support lockdown, you support every vicious, unfair, illogical, action of ALL our MPS. End this farce. No half measures. No part opening, and part closing of society, schools, businesses, theatres, museums, National Trust, sports clubs, gyms, no limits on travel, no f ing social distancing and no masks!
We need to rename Stockholm syndrome as rather ironically it is one of the only capital in Europe that hasn’t held its citizens captive. Perhaps London syndrome. Endofthefreewest syndrome?
Of course this is quite aside from the objective fact the the handling in Stockholm should held up as THE EXAMPLE.
Job losses from virus 4 times as bad as ’09 financial crisis (apnews.com)
Utterly unsustainable!
You don’t expect our lazy treasonous MPs to care do you. They haven’t lost their jobs, mores the pity!
Take away the UBI er the Furlough payments and that number doubles yet again….9 mn on UBI from the Hindoo’s magic money machine which will mean a lot higher taxation rates starting next year….
This is not job losses due to the virus. The virus did not shut down shops, close pubs, stop people going to work and imprison 60 million well people. That was the government. They are 100% responsible for ALL the fall-out from their idiotic decision.
I couldn’t agree more with Kathrine Moore! I have 2 grandsons in the US that I would have seen last year. Meantime they have grown 20+cm and there is no substitute for time spent with them. I have no grandchildren in NZ, I have 2 children in the US. I am sad and mad!
Our twin grandsons are in Uganda, they try and hug us through the computer zoom screen! Our youngest daughter is in Gulag Cardiff just the other side of the Bristol Channel from us, before Christmas I was looking at getting a boat to go across and pick her up but she was allowed out for Christmas Day but the boat option looks like it might be back on the agenda!
My Mum died last February, I often think I can hear her chortling, ‘clever old me I just got out in the nick of time.
All this supposedly in the name of Public Health!
”Oh, they call it livin’, Baby, someone’s lyin’.”
Thank you Steve. I knew those words from somewhere so I went to look them up. They were from Tom Paxton, a long time favourite of mine. I wonder what he makes of all this? He wrote some great songs, many of them poking fun at the establishment. Think I will go and listen to some of them now!
So sad for children not to be able to see their families in other countries.
What about young children with mothers and fathers in different countries?
I must say I found the entry in John Redwood’s diary, When will we be allowed out of lockdown, depressingly passive. Mr Redwood is an experienced and competent member of parliament. He has an impressive track record, stretching back decades, and substantial influence. Yet he supinely muses on what may be the factors that might influence ministerial decision making. His attitude strikes one as that of a young chid wondering about what their parents will decide on some incomprehensible family matter, rather than one of an influential parliamentarian, who believes parliament ought to be shaping public policy and rigorously holding the executive to account. The attitude of passivity revealed in his diary entry perhaps explains how the dysfunctional groupthink that is driving government decision making on the virus has been able to sustain itself. Such passivity has rendered parliament an irrelevance that has merely looked on whilst a cabal has captured policy making and imposed an authoritarian regime obsessed with a megalomaniacal desire to control nature. Instead of wondering when we might be allowed out of lockdown, members of parliament ought to be denouncing the deprivation of our rights and liberties, and Conservative members ought to be telling Number Ten… Read more »
Redwood is scared of the virus.
He has never struck me as cowardly.
Bravery is a funny thing. My husband has military medals. He has flown under fire in war zones many times. Yet he won’t eat a yoghurt that is a week out of date.
Me, I have minimal fear of bacteria and viruses. But no way would I do his job.
Luckily he’s a bit corona blasé because I’ve convinced him of the facts. Though not as much as me.
Yes I’ve often thought that about the tone of his musings. He writes as though he has no influence even though surely he is a Tory Big Beast as a former leadership contender. Where’s the fire in his belly? It’s all a bit colourless.
He is determined not to be labelled a bastard anymore by shithouse John Major!
I’m sure he’s sharpening his knife on the quiet. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.
Well he is a Tory!
They won’t and we forget at our own peril that they’re the adults of tomorrow who will take charge of our care and purse strings when we’re no longer able to. The future generation can exact their revenge via the two things I just mentioned.
We have been warned.
Oh, Not in my name, do not lump me in the we camp….
I agree. Not in my name too but unfortunately we will be lumped together with the lockdownistas when the younger generation unleash their vengeance in the future.
The problem is, we’ll be lumped in with the criminals, who’ve been complicit in this crime. Not all Germans were Nazis, yet their punishment was collective. We’ll all be labelled sympathisers, if we don’t stop this shit-show.
Exactly. We need to act to cushion whatever damage occurs and now while much of the damage is still reversible.
What was the collective punishment?
If our wonderful government introduces mandatory quarantine for all UK arrivals, I’m assuming this will also apply to all those delegates arriving in June for the G7 summit in Cornwall?! What excuse will they roll out to provide them with exemptions…? Perhaps those arriving on private jets are incapable of transmitting the virus?
What about the Footie stars? You know the tight white short wearers dancing around in the Jan rain and snow, not wearing diapers, not distancing….zero have died across all leagues from CV 19. Zero. Yet they can bounce across borders for their UEFA etc etc and what? No isolation camps for the footie fairies. Have to keep the peasants entertained with bread and circuses. But if you and 5 friends went to the local park to play a kick-around…well, well, well, murderers, spreaders, fascists, drumpfers….etc.
And the peasants still follow football religiously as if it matters. There freedoms are being systematically removed but there more interested in their team’s Saturday formation. Pathetic.
Yes more worried if ‘their team’ wins, than about their world potentially ending….beggars belief, the level of apathy is off the charts. No debate allowed on a proper (Great Barrington) approach, just blindly follow the cult and its high priests.
The Fascists keep Football and Strictly, the mental cosh of the masses.
the opiate of the masses – the 4 “F”s (football, fosters, facebook and f*****g)
Those not already in a relationship before mockdown will struggle to meet people for the latter pursuit.
Yes; Panem et Circenses.
And who is doing their hair?
I think the tattoos offer complete immunity. Or taking the knee. Or having an IQ equal to your shoe size.
“Zero have died across all leagues…” Well, I’m not so sure about that. While you would expect the fit and healthy young men of the PL and its equivalent throughout the world to get over the virus with little more than minor symptoms, there have been some elite players who have suffered C-19 quite badly, including hospitalisation and being put in a coma. I have no idea about lower league footballers, but given that at NL level and below in the English football pyramid, many players are part-time, and many of those could well be in those jobs that are worst affected. I enjoy watching football. I concede it’s a different game these days without spectators, but that has its entertainments, too, as I choose to watch without fake sounds of crowds, and you can hear almost every word shouted. If that makes me a peasant, so be it. Where I live, my team – doing quite well at the moment, thank you very much for asking – is in severe danger of not existing beyond this season, like most others in the same league. Perhaps those of you who follow lower league teams, or who have one in your… Read more »
It will be the usual “rules for thee but not for me”
Hypocrites.
There is a very simple way to deal with O’Brien and his band of nutters
Ask them the question
WHAT IS THE FALSE POSITIVE RATE FOR THE PCR
TEST?
They will go off at a tangent with their hysteria about deaths and grannies
Ask the question again and again
The nearest thing I’ve seen to an answer is when JHB pinned Mandy to the wall and he replied “It’s low”
If he meant low in percentage terms at least we can agree on something
Dr Naomi Wolf just put this out: PCR Lab Visit: Whistleblowers Kevin McKernan, Bobby Malhotra Explain Why COVID Tests are “Garbage”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fznDgRHInM
Dr Naomi Wolf’s interview was really fascinating and very informative. Thanks.
I don’t think O’Brien and his band of nutters know the answer. They deal with slogans and emotion nothing else.
The majority of the population support lockdowns, and therefore support school closures.
Maybe, just maybe, some of them will think the price is too high as their kid’s education and mental health gets flushed down the toilet.
I doubt it, though. Being a virtue signaller makes you feel superior to humanity and common sense.
Child abuse and non science is now scientific and moral…..the Covidiots and their virus cult really are a sad sack of shite…..children now will be terrified of living a normal life.
A lot of people are just apathetic and stupid. They are ready to accept their new normal. It’s only took 11 months and in many cases less to re-condition them.
It’s not just virtue signalling. As they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
My family support lockdowns. Of course the collateral damage is my parents’ business and their grandchildren. But try telling them that they point out that they’re keeping the grandchildren safe and I’m the bad one for wanting people to die.
There’s no point trying to reason with people like that.
I sincerely hope they have very deep pockets especially my sister & brother-in-law. Because there will be hell to pay for them.
I don’t believe any of those polls. Skewed questions and skewed targets.
Also people are not honest but give what they think is the correct answer. As soon as they see their neighbours’ opinions begin to shift they start to say what they’re really thinking.
“their kid’s education and mental health gets flushed down the toilet.” Absolutely. This.
I spoke to someone at Christmas who I know has young people of various ages in the education system; I pointed out that at the rate things are going, their entire future will involve digital education, taught by a digital assistant, with a break for some digital entertainment, looking at digital culture in a digital museum, having experiences with only virtual & digital friends, celebrating a digital birthday & digital Christmas…I think it gave them food for thought…
The only time in history when you don’t need a gun to start a revolution you just need to take off your mask.
Dr David Cook, above, is a splendid fellow but are these really uncontentious assumptions, as he contends? ‘1. COVID-19 is a serious new human disease.’ Not in my humble opinion. It is a new severe common cold coronavirus, of which there are a few (which are not regarded as serious diseases) as pointed out 06 Feb 2020 by a renowned global coronavirus expert present in China at the time of the outbreak. (Prof John Nicholls phone call transcript, Accuweather 06 February) ‘2. Doing nothing in the face of this new disease and the resulting pandemic was not an option.’ Doing nothing was very much an option, because that is what we do in the face of the other endemic common cold coronaviruses, and, as events have shown, that was probably the best option, given how many lives have been and will be cut short by government interventions (evidenced by the Amnesty International Care Homes report) ‘3. COVID-19 hits older and more vulnerable individuals harder than younger, fitter individuals. As a result, the majority of deaths and serious illness are in the older, sicker population. This doesn’t mean that some younger or otherwise apparently healthy people can’t die or have significant… Read more »
yes. doing nothing is always the default best option until you know more. lockdown was a panic
A panic indeed; cause and effect needs to be established by a public inquiry.
Was the panic caused by Imperial College models or were these simply a useful tool to disguise the real cause of panic: a cave in to pressure from the continent; not very Churchillian!
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/22/france-border-coronavirus-uk-141402
Panic based on fake models, fake tests, and flawed dead counts. 2020 was not the worst year ever, not even close for dead counts/1000. Quite normal and within the past 20 year average.
Every year 85 – 90 K will die in the UK from flu-pneum-resp issues. We had maybe 70 K in 2020 with/from CV 19 + 60K from flu-pneu-resp for 130 K.
So yes a bad year for flu esp for >75 yr olds with conditions. That ‘excess’ of maybe 40 K is now offset by the 45 K or so who have died from the LDs. You never see such analysis in the fake news or in the useless gov’t. In other words, we are now killing more people than who are dying from virus related deaths.
Lockdown was also supposed to be temporary! Yet now we are in an impossible situation, the deranged scientists have convinced the megalomaniac politicians that they can ‘do what’s never been done’ and control this year’s common cold virus and we all suffer.
The one thing they could have done and criminally failed to do was to put research money and efforts into developing effective treatments for serious covid. It is now clear that much more could have been done to get such treatments up and running. If anyone has blood on their hands it is those that put all the efforts into dodgy vaccines and ignored life saving treatments.
I totally agree but I can forgive the initial 3 weeks of panic. What I can’t forgive is not seeing the reality of this disease and getting back to normal straight after that.
Most of us complied at first but we were wrong to do so and somehow, I have no idea how, when this is over we need to make sure that a healthy population can never be locked down again for such a relatively mild disease. Ebola it ain’t but it feels as if some people think it is.
nobody should be locked down even for ebola. human rights should be inviolable. if you can’t live free then it’s not really worth living at all.
Agree
Too defensive
He also talks about the “need for NPIs reducing”
I had problems with some of Cook’s statements!
“We are going to have to build more prisons if we are going to detain the rioters and dissenters without trial”
“How are we going to get away with that, if they get a whiff of what we are doing they may decide to get their retaliation in first”
“Yes, and we will need to build them right across the country it’s not as if we could hide what we are doing”
“Ideas anyone?”
“What if we call them isolation hotels? What if we say that they are are only for the selfish bastards who left the country and want to return”
“Who’s going to fund this?”
“Make the inmates pay, after all they are hotels aren’t they?”
Laughs all around
£1,500 for ten days in an hotel is appalling. It’s also deliberate. Boris is seeking to destroy the UK.