Don’t You Dare Enjoy the Sunshine
Yesterday, the R Rate was as low as it has ever been; infections, hospitalisations and deaths were continuing to drop; and Brits were told not to relax. MailOnline has the details.
Jonathan Van-Tam tonight urged Britons not to “relax” as the UK heads into a glorious weekend with the first warm weather for months, warning that “this is not a battle that we have won yet”.
The Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England brought stern warnings to tonight’s Downing Street press conference when he told the public: “Do not wreck this now.”
Coronavirus cases are rising in dozens of parts of England, around one in five and mainly in the Midlands and the North, Professor Van-Tam said, and people must continue to follow lockdown rules for as long as they are in place.
He called for the UK to “hold our nerve” and added: “I do worry that people think it’s all over. The more they think that when it’s not, the greater the headwind they’re going to give to the vaccine programme and the more at risk will become the milestones set on the road map.”
His “sobering” warnings came as data show that Britain’s Covid outbreak is still firmly in retreat, with a catalogue of official figures today piling even more pressure on Boris Johnson to relax lockdown sooner.
Department of Health bosses recorded another 8,523 coronavirus infections and 345 deaths – with both measures down by roughly a third week-on-week. More than 520,000 vaccines were also dished out, with nearly 19.2 million Britons now vaccinated.
No 10’s top scientific advisory panel SAGE estimated the R rate – the average number of people each Covid patient infects – is still at the lowest level since records began in June, staying between 0.6 and 0.9.
Separate statistics from one of the country’s most respected surveillance studies showed England’s outbreak has nearly halved in size over the last fortnight. Office for National Statistics experts estimated 373,700 people would test positive for the virus on any given day in the week ending February 19th, or one in 145 residents. In comparison, the figure was almost 700,000 two weeks ago.
But a weekly report from a symptom-tracking app today warned daily cases had risen 3% in a week, to 9,545 in the seven-day spell ending February 21st. SAGE also estimated the R rate has crept up slightly in the South East, North West and the Midlands but insisted the figure is still below the crucial level of one.
Despite the troubling trend, one leading scientist today urged Britons “not to panic” because hospitalisations and Covid deaths were still falling – and said Number 10 was still on track to lift restrictions “sooner rather than later” because the UK is in a similar position to last May.
Professor Tim Spector, the King’s College London epidemiologist who is behind the app, added: “The difference this time is, while the variants may be more infectious, we have a vaccine that works and the older age groups are largely protected.”
Worth reading in full.
Over in the Spectator, Ross Clark comments on the deceleration in the decline of infections reported at the press conference.
But why should the decline in new infections be slowing down? There are several possible explanations. It is likely that people are beginning to tire of lockdown and are beginning to circulate, even to break the rules, a little more than they were in January. Then there is the weather: the week before last was especially cold; it may be that the virus was better able to spread in those conditions.
Today’s instalment of the Office of National Statistics’ infection survey seems to confirm that the prevalence of Covid infection has fallen in recent weeks. However, it only goes up to February 19th. Over the seven days to that date, it estimates that 373,000 people in England were infected with Covid – equating to 0.69% of the population. In the previous week, it estimated that 0.88% were infected. During the worst week – January 3rd to 9th– it was 2.08%.
Overall, the decline in deaths and hospitalisations seems to be much faster during the second wave than it was during the first wave. As far as infections are concerned, it is much harder to tell, because there was a huge ramp-up in the number of tests being performed last April. There is nothing in the figures so far to suggest that the Government’s plans for lifting lockdown and reopening society should be at risk.
Could it be that people are beginning to break the rules a little more? The Telegraph reports new ONS data on compliance with Social Distancing rules.
People are less likely to adhere to social distancing measures as increasing numbers are vaccinated, Government figures suggest.
Office for National Statistics (ONS) data analysing the social impact of Covid during the period from February 17th to 21st found compliance with most measures to stop the spread remained high, with the proportions reporting always or often washing their hands after returning home (89%) and using a face covering (96%) unchanged from the previous week.
However, researchers found that 86% of adults reported always or often maintaining social distance when meeting people outside their support bubble – lower than last week, when it stood at 91%.
The lower compliance comes as personal happiness levels have begun to increase and a growing number of people receive Covid jabs amid a decline in vaccine scepticism.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Tim Spector makes a good point about the slowing decline in cases.
What is the Truth About Covid Deaths?
The Daily Mail has splashed on mounting concerns about doctors wrongly putting “novel coronavirus” as the cause of death on death certificates when it’s blindingly obvious to the relatives of those who’ve died that their death had nothing to do with Covid.
Grieving families last night said deaths had been wrongly certified as COVID-19.
Demanding an inquiry, top medical experts and MPs also insisted they were “certain” that too many fatalities were being blamed on the virus.
One funeral director said it was “a national scandal”. The claims are part of a Daily Mail investigation that raises serious questions over the spiralling death toll.
More than 100 readers wrote heartbreaking letters following a moving article by Bel Mooney last Saturday. She revealed the death of her 99-year-old father, who suffered from dementia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, was recorded as coronavirus.
Dozens expressed similar frustrations that the causes of death of elderly and already-unwell relatives had been wrongly attributed. Eight of the families who wrote to the Daily Mail have successfully urged doctors to change causes of death previously recorded as COVID-19.
Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on coronavirus, said: “The Government should call a public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic immediately with an interim investigation into all Covid deaths that should report as soon as possible.”
Tory MP Paul Bristow, a member of the Commons health committee, said: “It’s almost certain that a number of deaths have been wrongly attributed to COVID-19.
“Not only has this skewed figures when data has been so important in deciding how we respond to the pandemic, it has caused distress and anxiety for relatives.
“Whether we have received the most appropriate figures should definitely be considered in any future inquiry.”
A funeral director in the North West told the Mail: “The way Covid has been recorded and reported is a national scandal and a thorough enquiry should be opened immediately.”
Medical experts have cited pressure on doctors to include COVID-19 as a cause of death because it was last year ruled a ‘notifiable disease’, meaning any case needs to be reported officially.
Professor Clare Gerada, former chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said: “When this all comes out in the wash, we will find out we have over-recorded COVID-19 as a cause of death.”
Richard Vautrey, who chairs the British Medical Association’s GP committee, said the toll may have been overstated at the beginning of the pandemic when testing was not widely available and “cause of death would have been based on best judgement of clinical symptoms”.
A Department of Health spokesman said: “We are confident the death statistics are robust and provide an accurate picture of those who have sadly died from the virus. The guidance to doctors completing a medical certificate of cause of death explains they are expected to state cause of death to the best of their medical knowledge and belief.”
Worth reading in full.
It’s great to see a national newspaper finally digging into this story.
Why Has Boris Thrown the Hospitality Sector to the Wolves?
As with the lockdown, so with the Roadmap: few industries can have suffered more than hospitality from the Government’s cack-handed attempts to minimise the COVID-19 death toll. Pubs will not be allowed to open until April 12th, and even then only to offer an outdoor service. Johnnie Arkwright, who runs a visitor attraction called Hatton Country World in Warwick – as well as a local pub – feels that the sector has been thrown to the wolves. This is his statement to the local media,
Not being allowed to open the ‘Outside’ areas of rural attractions and pubs at the end of March in time for Easter is a major financial blow for many desperately stretched small hospitality businesses; and it’s down to serious anomalies in the PM’s Roadmap to Lift Lockdown.
It must be a nonsense to let playgrounds in public parks stay open throughout Lockdown, after-school activities to proceed from March 8th, amateur contact sports like football with 22 players to start on March 29th and then to continue to ban family groups from the ‘Outside’ areas of rural attractions and pubs until the middle of April.
Under the proposals, the Great Outdoors, with all its fresh air and space to socially distance, can only open at the same time as higher risk ‘Enclosed Areas’ like non-essential shops and gyms in the middle of April.
Even drive-in Cinemas are banned till then, despite the fact that families never even get out of their cars – surely, no reason for them not to be open now!
And, actually, why on Earth keep shops closed for another seven weeks when Garden Centres have remained open throughout the current lockdown?
None of us want another false dawn again, but when we at Hatton Country World were allowed to open last summer, we entertained well over a thousand people a day without a single COVID-19 case by taking sensible precautions – pre-booking so we could Track and Trace, restricting numbers, maximum family groups of six, not opening enclosed areas, taking temperatures, installing social distance markers, hand sanitiser points, and so on .
That, of course, was before the more vulnerable elements of our society were all vaccinated in the brilliant initiative that has put the UK at the forefront of the Western world.
Frankly, the chances of small family groups catching COVID-19 in an outdoor environment is minimal anyway.
As for pubs and restaurants – we all understand why packed boozers and boogying nightclubs need to wait. But keeping the inside of food-led pubs and restaurants with table service closed for another three months – really?
The hospitality sector has been closed for eight of the last 12 months – we’re all right on the edge. The detail of this blanket plan has not been properly thought through, and more businesses will close completely unnecessarily unless changes to the plan are made.
With closures come, of course, job losses – mostly the under-25s and school leavers who staff the hospitality sector, the same young people who have already been hit so hard by the pandemic for which they will also be paying most of their lives.
Let’s pray that Parliament makes the Government see sense.
The More Stringent the Lockdown, the Higher the Covid Death Toll
Last week brought the news that Britain’s Covid response was ranked among the toughest in the world by researchers at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. Only two countries ranked higher on the school’s stringency index – Lebanon and Venezuela. What does that tell us about the effectiveness of our national response? One Lockdown Sceptics reader with a head for numbers has analysed this data against their reported cases and deaths and made a striking observation:
Anecdote is not data, so the recent revelation that the UK has among the harshest anti-Covid policies but also among the highest Covid case and death rates does not prove that lockdowns (and the other fun response measures) are useless. It’s more meaningful actually to look at the whole of the data on national policy responses and COVID incidence/harm.
The Oxford University Blavatnik School’s index of COVID-19 policy ‘stringency’ (comprising 18 policy indicators) covers over 180 countries, ranking stringency on a scale 0 to 100. The UK was 81 on February 23rd. At worldometers there are data on Covid cases, deaths and tests for 220 countries or so.
By aligning these two data bases together – mainly leaving out countries where the Blavatnik School doesn’t have policy data – the correlation between policy rigour and Covid cases/deaths can be calculated. Now, we all know “correlation isn’t causation”. Indeed, the British Journal of Medicine only goes so far as saying correlation “is used in everyday life to denote some form of association”. And the ‘correlation coefficient’ measures the strength of this association, on a scale from -1 (perfect negative; one variable moves opposite the other perfectly) to +1 (perfect positive; one variable moves in tandem with the other perfectly).
The correlation coefficients I calculated are also ‘good’ for only one point in time – I’m simply looking at the association of the latest known data we have on Covid harm and anti-Covid policy. This could be improved by looking at average values since Covid began, but it’s a good enough place to start.
Now you’d expect, if you’d been listening to ‘the science’ for a whole year, that the association between Covid harm and policy response would be negative, wouldn’t you, i.e., the more draconian the policy, the better the Covid outcome. You’d be wrong.
The correlation coefficients with policy stringency are: +0.35 with COVID cases and +0.38 with COVID deaths! On the face of it – data remember, not anecdote – the harsher the anti-Covid regime the worse the Covid harm.
Is this significant? Well, in a purely statistical sense, yes. There are tables to check, and on the basis of a sample size of 170 countries used here, correlations of 0.35 and 0.38 are indeed ‘significant’ (handsomely so).
A couple of pictures might save a thousand or two words. Quite clearly ‘the experts’ have deployed a scatter gun to fight Covid. Policy stringency varies from Somalia at 2.8 (413 cases per million, 14 deaths per million according to Worldometers) to Lebanon at 93 (54,324 cases per million and 677 deaths)
But through this scatter, the ‘association’ between policy and COVID harm is not ‘linear’. Above stringency of around 60, increases in policy bloody-mindedness are associated with faster rises in Covid cases and deaths.
The takeaway, as it were, is demand ‘cold turkey’; let’s do a Somalia and watch Covid cases and deaths go zero-wards.
A Response to Ian Dunt’s Anti-Sceptic Screed by a Law Professor
Yesterday’s round-up linked to a piece by Ian Dunt, arguing, that lockdown scepticism is “an ethical abyss”. There follows a response by Dr David McGrogan, Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School
Ian Dunt describes lockdown scepticism as “an ethical abyss” in a recent article – “a testament,” he puts it, “to how certain commentators and politicians will allow their need for attention to overrule even the most rudimentary of moral standards.”
This is, of course, kneejerk mainstream opinion: lockdown sceptics are immoral because they don’t care about grannies dying. It is also complete nonsense on its face, as we all know: one could just as readily respond that lockdown zealots are immoral because they don’t care about children’s futures or about cancer patients or about the death of liberal democracy. That doesn’t ultimately get us very far. It has been my argument since March 2020 that the main argument against lockdowns is that they actually make ethical conduct impossible. Indeed, they deprive human beings of that most fundamental characteristic of humanity: the ability to make ethical choices of one’s own. In that sense, they represent the complete absence or negation of ‘ethics’ properly understood. So the phrase “ethical abyss” is absolutely on the money – the perfect descriptor of the lockdown movement.
Michel Foucault once said that “freedom is the ontological condition of ethics”. That is a fancy French post-structuralist’s way of saying that ethics cannot exist without freedom. What does this mean? Very simply, if you are being forced to ‘do the right thing’, or you just do so to comply with the law or social expectation, then you can hardly be said to be acting ethically. You are just doing what you’re told, or what you’re ‘supposed’ to do, and that isn’t the exercise of any genuine sort of ethics. The only time you can properly be described as acting ethically is when you have a choice to do two or more things, and you make that choice in reference to ethical standards of your own. To simplify things rather, Adam and Eve were not acting ethically in the garden of Eden – until they had the choice to eat the forbidden fruit or not.
Foucault did not dismiss the difficulty of all of this. How does one generate one’s own ethical standards, and exercise choice on that basis? How does one cultivate in oneself the propensity to act ethically? These are not easy questions to answer, but they are not impossible ones, and indeed Foucault was attempting to chart a path to genuine self-actualising ethics before his untimely death. What he was clear about was that the whole enterprise was contingent on acting freely. “Freedom is a practice,” he once said in an interview. You have to do it. In doing it, in acting freely, and in reflecting on what it is doing, one can develop within oneself the propensity to act in light of ethical standards of one’s own. The two things go hand in hand: ethics do not exist without freedom; freedom is ethics’ ontological condition.
The lockdown movement is responsible for many great crimes but the greatest might be depriving people of their moral agency – depriving them of the capacity to make ethical choices. Our ethics have been determined for us. In taking our freedom away from us, the Government has taken away our capacity to develop ethically, indeed to act ethically at all. We do not exercise our own judgment about risk and the harms we might do to others – choosing to stay at home, choosing to limit social interactions, choosing to wear a mask if we think it important. We act mostly only in reference to ‘the rules’.
Lockdown zealots like Ian Dunt will say that this is all to the good, because people can’t possibly be trusted to behave ethically (or at least with the ‘right’ ethics) if left to their own devices. They will have parties, they will hug their grannies, they will watch football matches, and they will kill people as a result. Maybe, maybe not, but what we can really be sure of is that their capacity to exercise genuine ethical conduct, on Foucault’s terms, will wither and die on the vine the longer lockdownism prevails. They will become ever more dependent on predetermined ethical standards, selected for them, and ever less able to develop that most essential of human capacities, the ability to determine one’s own moral fate. How, when this lockdown is over, will people ever revert to the position of acting, not in reference to what the government says is permissible, but in reference to their own ethical standards? How will children grow into fully formed adults if they can’t exercise ethical choices of their own? How will our society recover when the State has imposed its own ethics in between every single one of us in such an intrusive way, and for so long?
This is the real enormity of what lockdowns are doing. This is the real ethical abyss.
The Ne Plus Ultra of Zero-Zealotry
In an article for the New Statesman, Professor Gabriel Scally argues that it is not too late to pursue a Zero Covid strategy. Guy de la Bédoyère, historian and Lockdown Sceptics regular, felt that this prime example of Zero Covid absurdity required a response on these pages, and so here it is.
Those of us contribute to and read Lockdown Sceptics have had the opportunity to consider a wide range of views. There’s been a healthy debate. I’ve tried to steer something of a middle course in an effort to find common ground that might help us get out of this mess.
I’ll lay my cards on the table. I am going to be vaccinated as soon as I can. That is my choice, and I am glad that it is my choice.
I accept for example that in order to protect other people I needed to learn to drive and to have a driving licence to prove it. Similarly, I accept the normal passport as a means of proving who I am and protecting me and everyone else from maniacs and others not entitled to come to this country. I also accept that there are consequences of making choices. If I choose not to have a driving licence, then I would have to accept I cannot drive on a public road. And I doubt if anyone would want me to. If I chose freely not to have a passport then I would not be allowed to travel. So, I have no problem with the notion of vaccine choice as another facet of choice with consequences. I grew up at a time when large numbers of children had polio, a disease that gradually dwindled away as a result of the vaccine program.
That is all about freedom of choice. However, occasionally something pops up that is so horrifying it sends a chill down my spine, and freedom of choice is at the heart of it.
I have just opened the latest edition of New Statesman and found myself reading an article by Professor Gabriel Scally, President of the Epidemiology and Public Health section of the Royal Society of Medicine. The article, which extols the virtues of Zero Covid, is a portal into the level of insanity evolving behind closed doors among some of the scientific community.
In this extraordinary piece of zero-zealotry Scally is pleased to point out that many of the countries which have dealt with the pandemic ‘effectively’ are islands. Oblivious to the vastly differing population sizes and profiles, and geographical locations, he lumps them together with the success achieved by one-party states in other geographical settings like Thailand and Vietnam (where the median age is lower, and the incidence of obesity is also lower). One has an instant sense of where this is going.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: It was reported yesterday that the UK’s Coronavirus ‘alert’ level has been lowered from level five to four, as the risk in all four nations that the NHS could be overwhelmed has receded. One reader posed an interesting question: Given that Zero Covid is apparently not the policy of the British Government, one must assume that it is accepted that there will continue to be some transmission. Does that mean that the alert level can never sink below ‘two’ and that there will therefore forever be some level of minimal social distancing and enhanced tracing?
An Incredible Berk of Staggering Ignorance
Today we’re publish a new essay by Dr Sinéad Murphy, a Research Associate in Philosophy at Newcastle University and regular contributor to Lockdown Sceptics. Here she responds to a recent video by Owen Jones, whose title “The Deniers” tells you everything you need to know about its contents. Dr Murphy sees in Jones’s supreme confidence and unmannerliness, an illustration of the ‘Covid Differend’, a concept devised by Michel Foucault to describe an impasse between two sides in a dispute that is irresolvable.
Over a week ago, the journalist Owen Jones posted a video on his YouTube channel. Its title: “The Deniers.”
I have not been a reader of Jones’s writings nor a viewer of his videos, but I have been aware of his relatively high profile as an opinion columnist and an interviewer. Nothing could have prepared me for his performance in “The Deniers”.
Jones’s demeanour in this video is that of a bad-tempered child who, from the safety of his mother’s skirts, entertains himself by taunting his chosen targets – he pulls faces, he calls names, and he mocks the objects of his petulance with hand gestures and sarcasm of the most puerile variety.
Jones’s victims are professional people – just like him. Among them: Professor Karol Sikora, former Chief of the Cancer Programme of the World Health Organisation; Professor Sunetra Gupta, Chair of Theoretical Epidemiology at University of Oxford; Professor Carl Heneghan, Director of University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and Editor-in-Chief of the British Medical Journal’s Evidence-Based Medicine provision; and Dr Michael Yeadon, former Head of Allergy and Respiratory Research at Pfizer Global.
These are the people – the ‘Deniers’ – at whom Jones makes his faces and levels his taunts. More than once, he uses his hands to place notional quotation marks around Karol Sikora’s academic title. What is this to suggest? That Karol Sikora is not a professor, or not a real one, or not a good one? Jones all but spits the word “oncologist” in his description of Sikora’s area of scientific practice, with the caveat that there’s “nothing wrong with that” and that “we all have our opinions”. Nothing wrong with world-renowned expertise in the treatment of cancer? The medical opinions of a leading cancer specialist, neither better nor worse than those of anyone else?
The ignorance of Jones’s opinionating, let alone its unmannerliness, is staggering. That any one of his targets would address him in this way is inconceivable – every convention of professional conduct is against it.
So as to rise to something better than mere scorn at this degrading display, I began to consider the question: What is it that has given Owen Jones such assuredness, such an implicit sense of immunity from censure, that he puts himself abroad in this way – so full of his own opinions, so lacking in respect, so unmoderated, so misjudged? If it is the style of a mean-spirited child sticking out his tongue from behind his mother’s skirts, then from what does Jones’s extraordinary sense of security stem? Whence his heady experience of standing on ground that is so protected from counter-argument or criticism that he can throw aside established forms of reasonable and respectful exchange of ideas and indulge himself in childish antics?
Worth reading in full.
COVID-1984
We are continuing to get some great slogans for COVID-1984. Here are a few of the best.
ISOLATION IS COMMUNITY
LOVE IS FEAR
SILENCE IS ELOQUENCE
DISTANCE IS CLOSENESS
BREATHING IS SELFISHNESS
SANITY IS ACCEPTING ABSURDITY
TO LEAD IS TO FOLLOW
TO HUG IS TO HATE
MASKS ARE FREEDOM
VACCINATION IS LIBERATION
And one reader thought Shakespeare said it all
FAIR IS FOUL AND FOUL IS FAIR
Round-up
- “Workers will be flocking back to their offices in a few short months” – Boris does not think we will be working from home forever, according to the Daily Mail
- “Single Pfizer vaccine dose could be enough for people who have had Covid, studies show” – The Telegraph reports on new research which suggests that one jab may be enough
- “Medical reversals – when doctors hurt patients” – In his latest blog, Sebastian Rushworth takes a look at medical history and and the damage done by doctors over the centuries
- “TD wrote letter for Dublin couple’s home extension works during Level 5 lockdown” – According to the Irish Independent, a Dublin couple gained the support of a Fianna Fáil TD to build a home extension during a level 5 lockdown but the work had to stop when a neighbour called the Gardaí
- “Coronavirus Fact-Check #10: Why ‘new cases’ are plummeting” – OffGuardian wonders if the credit should go to the World Health Organisation’s new PCR test guidelines
- “Angela Merkel faces lockdown rebellion as German regions loosen Covid restrictions” – The Chancellor is losing control as regional Governments move to ease restrictions, reports the Telegraph
- “And you thought Johnson’s roadmap was slow . . .” – Just take a look at Scotland’s says Gary Oliver in the Conservative Woman
- “Dear Head Teacher – why my child will not be wearing a mask” – Writing in the Conservative Woman, Sonia Elijah makes things clear for the staff at her child’s school
- “How to beat the permanent Covidocracy” – Michael Fumento writes for AIER about trying to reason with people besieged by Covid horror stories so that Covidocracy does not become permanent
- “Why does the pandemic seem to be hitting some countries harder than others?” – Writing for the New Yorker, Siddhartha Mukherjee investigates the difference in death rates between rich nations and poor nations and asks what it can tell us about global health
- “The Wolfson Prize 2021” – This year the Wolfson prize is looking for ideas to help create hospitals that work better for patients. Got an idea? Why not enter? First price is worth £250,000
- “I can’t teach children if they have to wear masks” – Watch David Perks, the first headmaster to defy guidance on face masks in the classroom, speak to Martin Daubney on Unlocked TV
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Eleven today: “Minority” by Subhumans, “If The Kids Are United” by Sham 69, “Questions” by Manfred Mann, “Same Old Blues” by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, “Shadow of a Doubt” by Sonic Youth, “On My Radio” by Selecter, “Everything’s Ruined” by Faith No More, “Down Down” by Status Quo, “Hey Hey Bad News” by Bad News, “Virtual Insanity” by Jamiroquai and “Help!” by the Beatles.
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 Lockdown Sceptics here.
Sharing Stories
Some of you have asked how to link to particular stories on Lockdown Sceptics so you can share it. To do that, click on the headline of a particular story and a link symbol will appear on the right-hand side of the headline. Click on the link and the URL of your page will switch to the URL of that particular story. You can then copy that URL and either email it to your friends or post it on social media. Please do share the stories.
Social Media Accounts
You can follow Lockdown Sceptics on our social media accounts which are updated throughout the day. To follow us on Facebook, click here; to follow us on Twitter, click here; to follow us on Instagram, click here; to follow us on Parler, click here; and to follow us on MeWe, click here.
Woke Gobbledegook
We’ve decided to create a permanent slot down here for woke gobbledegook. Today, we bring you la langue française, which, if some of the woker voices in France have their way, will become even harder for us rosbifs to get our tongues around. Happily this looks unlikely. Anthony Peregrine has the details for the Telegraph.
In some dim and distant future, leisure travel to France might once again become possible. Those wishing to take advantage in order, among other things, to brush up their French should be holding their breaths right now. They should be hoping that France’s simmering campaign to promote “inclusive writing” falls flat, and falls flat fast. Irregular French verbs are, they will know, enough of a challenge already, without the added headache of tangling with a woke revision of the language.
Granted, the signs are promising. More than 60 French MPs have this week tabled a proposition to stop France’s vast, heaving public administration from using “gender inclusive” words. Former PM Edouard Philippe had already ordered something along these lines, but it seems the message needs ramming home more firmly. The MPs, drawn both from Emmanuel Macron’s party and the conservative Republicans, are to have the draft law debated in the French parliament in coming weeks…
Standard French – you know, a world language for a couple of millennia and still spoken by more than 300 million people in France and beyond – holds that a group of neighbours be termed by the masculine “voisins”. That is the case even if the vast majority are women, even if they are all women except for one man. The feminine version of the word, “voisines”, is only used if there’s no male among the group. L’écriture inclusive would correct this gender “imbalance” with things apparently called middots. The word would thus be rendered “voisin.e.s”, thus covering masculine and feminine. Yes. Really. Everyone would be happy. Or, to put it another way, half a dozen zealots would be very happy indeed.
Apart from being visibly bonkers, and unpronounceable, the change would mangle the language into incomprehensibility. Among very many objections, one concerns adjectives. In France, as you know, these agree with the gender of the noun they describe. Thus we wouldn’t be stopping at vandalising the word “voisins”. We’d have to corrupt any accompanying adjective, too. So “kind neighbours” – presently “voisins gentils” – would become “voisin.e.s gentil.le.s”. Good luck with getting your tonsils round that. And you can imagine how great it’s going to look on the pages of a novel. It will improve Flaubert no end.
A further complication is that France has no neutral “they”. The third person plural pronoun is gender sensitive. If you want to say “they”, you have to specify whether the people or things indicated are masculine or feminine: in other words, “ils” or “elles”. Take the neighbours. Having established they’re kind, we now learn they are organising a street party. How do we tackle that? “I.elle.s organisent une fête de rue”? Is that even sayable ?
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Douglas Murray takes a look at the ‘cancellation’ of Professor Gregory Clark in UnHerd, who was unable to give a lecture at Glasgow University’s Adam Smith Business School because of its title: “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A Lineage of 400,000 Individuals 1750-2020 Shows Genetics Determines Most Social Outcomes.” What is the woke mob so scared of, asks Murray?
Stop Press 2: “Putin has weaponised western wokery – and Amnesty has been fooled,” says John Lloyd in CapX, referring to the case of Alexei Navalny, and the way attention was drawn to his Nationalist views.
“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.
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.
Stop Press: At the press conference yesterday, Dr Susan Hopkins, the Chief Medical Advisor to Public Health England, warned against forcing primary school children to wear masks, the Daily Mail reports.
A top Public Health England adviser said experts were “very strongly” against advising coverings for primary-age youngsters.
Dr Susan Hopkins told last night’s Downing Street press conference: “This is for two reasons.
“One is that they can have difficulties wearing them and keeping them on all day.
“The second part is that it is really important that they can see facial expressions in order to develop their communication and language skills.”
Dr Hopkins added that other risk-reducing measures were in place instead, as well as plans to test the families of primary school pupils when they return to class.
Stop Press 2: At the CPAC conference in Florida, hosts were booed for asking guests to wear masks.
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. In February, Facebook deleted the GBD’s page because it “goes against our community standards”. 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, although that case, too, has been refused permission to proceed. There’s still one more thing that can be tried. You can read about that and contribute here.
The GoodLawProject and three MPs – Debbie Abrahams, Caroline Lucas and Layla Moran – brought a Judicial Review against Matt Hancock for failing to publish details of lucrative contracts awarded by his department and it was upheld. The Court ruled Hancock had acted unlawfully.
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.
Scottish Church leaders from a range of Christian denominations have launched legal action, supported by the Christian Legal Centre against the Scottish Government’s attempt to close churches in Scotland for the first time since the the Stuart kings in the 17th century. The church leaders emphasised it is a disproportionate step, and one which has serious implications for freedom of religion.” Further information available here.
There’s the class action lawsuit being brought by Dr Reiner Fuellmich and his team in various countries against “the manufacturers and sellers of the defective product, PCR tests”. Dr Fuellmich explains the lawsuit in this video. Dr Fuellmich has also served cease and desist papers on Professor Christian Drosten, co-author of the Corman-Drosten paper which was the first and WHO-recommended PCR protocol for detection of SARS-CoV-2. That paper, which was pivotal to the roll out of mass PCR testing, was submitted to the journal Eurosurveillance on January 21st and accepted following peer review on January 22nd. The paper has been critically reviewed here by Pieter Borger and colleagues, who also submitted a retraction request, which was rejected in February.
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…
The World Economic Forum has released a video celebrating the impact of the lockdowns on cities. No, you didn’t read that wrong. The WEF likes the fact that there are fewer cars driving round, fewer planes in the sky and fewer people on the street. Oh, and less “ambient noise”.
They really are psychopaths, aren’t they?
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Wheyhey first for a long time
…And?
DavidC
And??
Oh, you’re back are you? I didn’t downvote you and I’m not going to grace you with one either.
DavidC
I don’t give a toss about the down votes. All this ‘Look at me, I’m first!’ is pathetic. It’s childish. If anyone has a good comment and it happens to be first then fine, I don’t have a problem with that.
DavidC
You miserable turd.
If you’re one of the people who downvoted me then I’m grateful that you have at least got the balls to identify yourself unlike the others. Thank you. Come on you others, identify yourselves!
I come to this site to read the great stuff that LS publishes. I also come to this site to comment on stuff I know something about, Microbiology and science. I do not come to this site to read childish self proclamatory stuff (‘Oooh, look at me, I’m first!’) or childish ad hominem attacks. If that makes me a ‘miserable turd’ – an ad hominem attack – which incidentally is a physical impossibility as I am not a turd, then so be it, albeit I might be miserable tonight.
DavidC
David, I think it’s just a bit of fun stuff for the first poster of the day. With respect, maybe you need to lighten up a bit. It doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom here- we like to have some laughs and banter too.
Nymeria,
I appreciate your courteous response for which I thank you.
I’ve been on this site from its early days, commenting for long enough that I consider myself one of the ‘we’ and, for sure, I’ve engaged with some of the laughs and banter of which a lot from the LS commenters is of a very high standard. I just find the ‘I’m the first, look at me!’ quite irritating. Maybe it’s just got me on an off day.
Anyway, thank you again for your courteousness.
DavidC
Well, for what it’s worth, I don’t think you deserved the personal insult. We all have our off days. Most of mine are more off than on 🙂
OK last night here in Phuket I went to watch the turtles hatching on the local beach. There were hundreds of people there sitting or standing quietly on the beach. NO antisocial distancing and only about 25% wearing masks.
When the turtles were released there was a massive surge of people to see them and everyone was literally shoulder to shoulder – bit like rush hour used to be on the tube.
It was great to see everyone out and about but unfortunately in the crush i didn’t see the hatchlings, so very disappointing.
A good atmosphere and everyone obeyed the rules – phones on silent, talk quietly and no flash on the camera. These rules I was happy to follow.
I trust you all kept Socially Distanced from the turtles.
And that somebody ensured that the hatchlings kept six feet apart on their perilous dash to the sea. Stay safe, and all that.
They stay safe by weight of numbers and crowding together so any predators can only catch a tiny minority of them before the rest reach the sea.
Then they’ve got it all WRONG. By crowding together, they’re spreading the virus and killing their Turtle Grannies.
And how socially irresponsible is that?
You may have something in that – I don’t know.
Their hatching coincides with a full moon and high tide. High tide last night 10.09pm First one appeared at 10.20 – I always marvel at nature and her timings.
I laugh when puny humans think they can dictate to Mother Nature. 🤣🤣🤣
Had to – area cordoned off. From what i could see on some-ones selfie-stick the turtles obviously didn’t think the 2m rule apples to them.
“I’ll get my carapace”
FTFY.
They probably engage in turtling – not dogging, turtling.
Oh this fills my heart with JOY!
Watched a turtle crawl out to lay her eggs 60 years ago. A local scooped up most of the eggs, the rules are probably different now but there are still turtles.
What for? To eat?
Yes but the other 4nests that I am aware of are also closely monitored to stop the locals eating the eggs.
Sounds great! Am jealous!
From ATL
‘Jonathan Van-Tamm tonight urged Britons not to relax as the UK heads into a glorious weekend . . .’
You’ve missed the bus mate, as reported yesterday our urban riverside leisure hub was full of people of all types out enjoying the sunshine, strolling about in a normal fashion in the place where they usually go when they can’t make it to the beach even though all the leisure and retail outlets were closed.
Only the very local oldies wore masks and Illegal group bench sitting was widespread, some had even brought their own coffee for that very purpose.
A later Covidiot report on Local Live (mirror group news) makes it clear that this went on for hours with the police nowhere to be seen.
GOOD! AND AS AN OLDIE MYSELF (72), I DESPISE YOUR VERY LOCAL ONES.
The very local oldies emerge from shielding in the sheltered housing units in the area, masked up and pŕobably horrified by the vast numbers of visiting city folk as they head for the not very nice convenience store for supplies.
We have them too, except that our local zombies are mostly squat, beady-eyed,spiteful, middle-aged hausfraus, slinking malevolently out of Tesco’s and spitting venom at anybody who dares to enjoy a bit of sun and seaside.
Round my rural village it is the male of the species who are the most vicious on social media, mostly ones who are still going to work on building sites etc. They are spitting with envy at those they perceive to be sat at home being paid on furlough,whilst they are toiling as usual. They can’t understand why people are fed up with masks,as they don’t wear them on site, and are critical of teenagers who dare to gather in little groups. Selfish!
Not to mention – that in this area (West Wales) there have been some episodes of local zombies staging barricades by roads into the area and/or putting up their own “Keep Out” signs should anyone dare to venture across that line on the map surrounding the area they regard as “theirs”. Not to mention all the virtue-signallers on local Facebook pages doing the Internet equivalent.
Eliza, I’ve just sent you a private message on the Forum, pls respond!
The sight of that twat as the first picture pissed me off. Reading the idiotic article pissed me off even more. Why are we still printing this bollocks? We all know its wrong. So remember December? Can’t do anything till the stupid R rate is down and infections down. Yep done that. Let’s not talk about that and celebrate. Point two we must protect the nhs. Okay hospitalisation down deaths down too. Let’s not mention this either just tell us what we can’t do. Stay at home. WHY? How about you just STFU and let us get on with our lives. Stop doing 600k tests a day and the disease will dissappear. The old folk are not going to die according to you so SET US FREE.
Me too, who gives a shit what that ugly twat has to say somebody please kill him
my local park is so busy it needs a one way system-covid or no covid
Cheers to your sensible police force!
Nine mile walk today in glorious sunshine plus a picnic. Does Van Tamm not realise that it is over.
How to get a lockdowner to question things, in three easy steps:
1 – Ask “What do you think would’ve happened if the virus had spread unchecked for a year?”
2 – After they recite the apocalypse, ask “Can you think of any scenario in which it would go unnoticed?”
3 – After they answer no, casually mention that Spanish researchers found it in sewage samples from March 2019
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v1.full.pdf
Excellent
The bloody Daily Mail and their obsession with Woke Harry and Sparkles. The ‘My relative didn’t die of Covid’ story has already been moved down their home page.
I really hope the Mail keep at this one and more people see that at least one cat is out of the bag with regard to the Regime fiddling the numbers. We really need this to snowball.
I first came across falsification of Covid deaths about 4 weeks into lockdown 1.
A nanny (key worker because her clients were medics) whose sister suffered a stillbirth.
This was initially put down as a Covid death, the family were able to get that changed but only because the Father In Law was ‘someone high in the military’.
I have come across more than a dozen others from the relatives, friends and care workers of the deceased.
In the Mail comments Speed2005 asks why the government would do this, 40+ readers tell him/her why.
To cover up the carnage in care homes.
I believe some of the “testing positive in the last 28 days, etc” have included suicides and gun shot wounds.
Reminds me of a true story I heard years ago.
An expert witness was being cross-examined in court:
Counsel: And how can you be so sure that Mr Xx was dead at that particular time?
Witness: Because his brain was in a jar of preservative on my desk.
It goes on; ‘Yes, but are you really sure he was dead?’. ‘Well, now you mention it, I suppose he could be practising law as a barrister somewhere’.
Yes – I found out a friend had an old neighbour who’s death (in a care home) had been registered falsely as C19. Such details were being collected by someone behind LDS at the time, but we haven’t heard any more about it since.
As I understand it there is nothing the care home can do to alter a Covid death designation even though it might put the name of Cain on the business and destroy confidence in the local community.
My first clue to the lies was within the first 4 weeks because of falsification on the death certificate.
My daughters friends dad had a heart attack first week of lockdown, after he was admitted they test him for covid he tests positive he had NO symptoms of covid.
On the day he gets released from hospital, he went to bed earlier than his wife, she said she didn’t feel OK and when he got up in the morning he found his wife dead in her chair.
Covid was put on the death certificate , she was never tested for covid and there was no post mortem done but she is one of the 11 in Ayrshire and Arran that in 2020 died of covid, not with.
The are only 10 months too late but better late than never eh? Carl Hennighan was telling them this in May but they chose to ignore it because it did not fit the narrative. Has the tide turned?
Why, to get 19 million people and counting to take a poison. Worked a treat.
Do not underestimate the VAST numbers of people who still get the physical paper rag delivered to their doorstep. THEY will not miss that front page!
And still more who will see the headline on newsagents stands.
Yes we do. It’s great to see articles like that. It gives us some hope.
Best rated comment on the DM story is now
About time! This is a total scandal. 5408 upticks 111 downticks
It is on their front page in the print edition, so cannot be downgraded there.
Thanks to all who posted. 🙂
Yes, having it on a million front pages of the DM print edition is brilliant.
I notice the Mirror is now running the story; great stuff.
At 4am yesterday morning they blew up the local ATM
The scene is now guarded by a fat female dwarf PCSO with a severe attitude problem
A metaphor for the country
Not joke news this time, Cecil?
I do hope the thief sanitised his hands before he planted the charge.
Obviously carried out by cash point lockdown sceptics.
The thief was only following WEF example and attempting to create a cashless society for everyone else but himself.
Queue “you’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_PX1cVuaVA
Au contraire Mr Van Tam
People do not believe it’s over, it’s just dawned on them that it never started
Oh that is TRUE!
Exactly. People are now slowly realised that they’ve been had.
Some of the Covid zealots begining to see the light, about 11 months later than some of us here. For many of them it will be too late though, they have taken the Covid lethal injection and are now just a time bomb, quietly ticking away.
Yep. They were slow on the uptake and now that some of them have had the vaccine it will be interesting what their reaction will be when they succumb to the nasty side effects later.
2020 was a strange year for me. For most people it wasn’t that different but think back to April. Back then, you may recall, was a large spike in the death rates of the very old – it came and went very quickly and by the summer it had all but been forgotten about as people went about their daily lives. But back in April, for a few weeks, people were really worried, not just here but in many countries all over the world. Now strangely enough, this was due to a virus that came from a so-called ‘wet market’ in China and in the City of Wuhan, where they ‘locked down’, something only a completely totalitarian state could do and would never happen in the West. No way we’d stand for it: literally the people were ordered to stay in their houses and could only leave once a week to go shopping. But I was worried – I could see as well as everyone else that there was a cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, which had 3700 mainly elderly people on it, and this damn virus had ravaged the ship yet only 7 people had died. I estimated that the… Read more »
You write brilliantly Laurence.
Thank you – very much appreciated.
Excellent stuff. Yesterday I was musing that this whole thing feels like one of those science fiction tropes, where a small decision sends us down an alternative time line and some intrepid souls try to find the occasion and go back to reset it… best done most recently in The Orville Season 2. If only someone could restore us to the correct timeline!
I was saying then, “locking down” a cruise ship and stop the spread of infection is useless with staff still living in crowded space, having to produce food and move around the ship.
In response to Guy’s excellent article – one part troubles me: “So, I have no problem with the notion of vaccine choice as another facet of choice with consequences.”. The problem here is that we are dealing with a globally endemic disease, not an unsafe driver. These are two vastly different things. It only makes sense (as we do in animal health) to require vaccination and proof thereof where the person is traveling between a country with endemic disease and one that has no community spread, such as travel between the world and New Zealand. Sending a dog from South Africa to the USA is as simple as popping the dog on a plane with only it’s normal vaccine certificate. Sending the dog to a Rabies free country (UK) is another matter entirely – months long waiting, vaccination, titer testing etc awaits the traveller. And so it should be, Rabies kills 99.9%, the opposite of SARS CoV2 and a country free of it, should remain so even though vaccination is 100% preventative. So, no Guy, vaccination certificates for people moving between endemic areas make no sense at all to any virologist,infectious disease expert, sane epidemiologist and veterinarians. There is nothing… Read more »
Brilliant takedown!! I will be quoting this!
Covidiots always equate Rabies and Smallpox with an experimental RNA drug….there is no relationship they are completely different types of ‘medicine’. mRNA is untested, unproven, does not stop transmission and is therefore quite useless. The 60 yr flu vaxx is likewise useless with an effective rate of maybe 10-30% in some minority of the population. This is proven every year with even the Fake News headlines asking ‘why did the flu vaxx fail again?’. The reason is that flu viruses have hundreds of thousands if not millions of instantiations and differences based on their hosts. You are chasing ghosts with a flu vaxx.
mRNA is no longer untested.
It has now been tested worldwide on millions of people.
Just as they wanted.
It is in the testing phase!
We do not have any long term results yet. And the short term speak for themselves it is not a good idea.
Yes, well written and I couldn’t agree more. I only liked once but the like box gave you 8 up ticks and I think this statement deserves them all.
That’s because 7 other readers ticked it since you last opened this posting page.
Van Tam opens his mouth without thinking of the consequences. Last night at the presser, he told a member of the public, who had asked, “I’ve had the Vax, can I go out?” “No”, said the great SAGE, “You must still stay home.” Even after almost all the elderly and the vulnerable have been jabbed, this idiot says it’s not safe.
People are starting to not buy this; they are starting to see through it. Yes, they are still wearing masks, but more and more are out and about, and this weekend begins the “change”.
This is my hope.
As the weather improves, I reckon the number of people who will ignore the “rules” will increase “exponentially” (to use their favourite word). The regime will counter with threats of pushing back the opening up dates, but this will just anger people more, and more people will ignore the rules.
More stories like the Mail questioning death certs will be published; more people will question the regime, and rule-breaking will increase. More threats, more rule-breaking, and on and on it will go.
I hope.
I hope so too but maybe a bit forlornly
We must get a fat lady to sing. And have plenty of fat-lady understudies in reserve.
Oh God no! Not MORE NHS nurse TikToks ….
Frau Merkel maybe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbbrcaQmdJ0
NSWE – Not Safe While Eating
not sure if the Belgian minister of health can sing
And we need more and more people to take matters into their own hands. It ain’t over until WE say it’s over.
Indeed, what’s the point of the arm-banger if it does not protect you to any significant degree? Even fairly stupid people might see through that one.
”it’s proving impossible to get the “case” rate below the false positive rate? ”
They have been hoisted on their own petard with this, they have now managed to ramp up the daily testing figure to around 3/4 million tests, I’ve no idea where all these tests are coming from but yesterday they reported 731410 tests and 8523 +ve test results. My shaky maths makes that a +ve test rate of 1.165% which given the dodgy mature of the sampling and analysis I would imagine that the +ve test number is close to the level of statistical significance?
can we conclude they have altered the ct since January?
They’re probably using Dominion voting machines to make up the daily test numbers.
OH DEAR. STOP.
OH DEAR AGAIN STOP I WAS TRYING TO MAKE A JOKE STOP IS ANYBODY ELSE HERE OLD ENOUGH TO SEE THE POINT STOP.
‘That’s 18 words Mrs. Annie so 1/6 please’
And I want one of those fancy greetings forms.
“And for the same money you can put in an extra “Woof.”
“But that would make no sense.”
😆
Oh god that’s awful. I hate that man
(Oh, chapeau!)
stop don’t stop stop
Annie,
That might have been a bit obscure for anyone without grey hair!
Don’t ever stop stop.
COMMA GAIN
That’s a cue for the members to move to GAB of MeWe.
Hi KH – do you know where this screen grab came from – I’ve tried looking on Fox News and can’t find anything yet. Just want to try and find out more about it. Ta
Thank you! 🙂
David McGrogan’s piece ATL is excellent.
New 1984 slogan: LOCKDOWN KILLS ETHICS.
You need to stay home, wear your face mask and keep social distancing until they will have the vaxx passport in place. Then you will be free. Welcome to Gulag Britain where lockdowns are forever.
I’m sick and tired of international comparisons involving Covvicorpse counts.
There’s no international agreement as to what constitutes a Covvideath, so any comparison is meaningless.
I have some chalk, you have some cheese, I have more chalk than you have cheese, so my rate of chalkicheese is higher than yours. Big deal.
One of the features of this hoo-haa has been the presentation of death figures with no context and no comparison with other years. Before this all started I had no idea how many people died each day in the UK but I do now and yet I am afraid many of the public still do not know and are thus scared of any death figures without really knowing why.
Even BBC journalist Sarah Montague on the news the other day got exasperated with 2 ‘experts’ when she tried to pin them down as to what is an acceptable level of deaths? but she could not get a straight answer.
If we are going to have the Government taking draconian actions with regard to Public Health then they need to set criteria for death levels below which such actions cannot be justified. Personally i think we are well below that figure now in the UK, but I cannot see this Government taking such decisive action.
In any case, there’s NO level of Covvideaths that justifies totalitarian diktat.
Your last three words prompt the thought that the original plunge into lockdown tyranny wasn’t a decisive action at all. It was a panicked jellywobble.
Comes after decades of spin doctors and focus groups by all parties.
About 1500 died every day in the UK pre Covid. They have made a crisis out of a normal occurrence and the people fell for it with help from the Media without whose help the government couldn’t have got away with it.
Don’t forget the Government couldnt have got away with it – if we didn’t (in the main) have the Internet. They couldn’t have done a Lockdown on us if we didn’t usually have computers these days. Smartphones have also been quite a bonus to be used against us. I plead guilty (obviously) to having a computer myself and, if I could, would do one of those “going back into history to change the future” and have a meet-up with the founder of the Internet (who, I gather, incidentally is on our side).
Dead right. No internet, no lockdown. Period.
I was talking to a highly educated but utterly dim covidian aquaintance about this just before Christmas. She said what a Godsend the internet had been and how would we ever have coped with lockdown without it? I said I thought the answer would be quite obvious: lockdown simply wouldn’t have been possible. There would have been no working from home, no online education, no online shopping, no zoom, no email, no social media, no Netflix etc etc . Lockdown just wouldn’t have been an option so it wouldn’t have happened. Just like it didn’t happen during the HK ‘flu epidemic of 1968-69 and yet, strangely, the world carried on turning. She was surprised to hear about that, even though she is in her late seventies. But then she was surprised to hear about the bad ‘flu winter of 2017-18 with all the ‘overwhelmed NHS’ stories on the front pages, so I was probably wasting my time.
Hopefully you made her think.
Lack of context is completely intentional.
That is one of the simplest and most effective ways to lie with statistics.
Thanks for chalkicheese, stealing that!
U R welcome!
EXACTLY!
How to make a quick buck: start a social media platform allowing free speech. Sit back and wait for your Bill Gates paycheck
The point is that at last an MSM newspaper with 1.1million readers had the question on its front page, if only for a while, and that its readership are overwhelmingly aware.
Maybe they have been analysing the comments on their own articles.They have been overwhelmingly sceptical for months and they can see which way the wind is blowing.
I actually think the road map is Johnson’s Berlin Wall moment.
All everyone heard is freedom by June.No one was listening to the caveats.
I kind of do not get the Berlin Wall reference.
So are we now in the summer, when thousands camped in the gardens of Czech, Hungarian, Bulgarian embassies, while the governments negotiated their fate?
I hope we will start the Monday protest marches soon!!
And if God is kind and sends us good weather (I pray for it nightly!) then people will just do what they want without waiting for “permission” from on high. Much easier to lock people down when it is cold and miserable – far harder when the sun is shining and everyone wants to go to the beach!! I went for a walk yesterday along the coast. Not what you would describe as a beauty spot per se but there was a cast of thousands out and about – GREAT to see.
Here you go
the MSM always wants to be on the side that’s winning. The Brexit poll was a case in point. The Daily Mail was to an extent sitting on the fence during the campaign. The MoS gave chapter and verse every week before the poll on how people like Dominic Cummings were operating.
The MSM wasn’t sitting on the fence. It was recruited (as per SAGE minutes) to ramp up the fear. The UK has a massive propaganda budget, which is currently £4 billion over budget. It pays for the likes of Integrity Initiative, 77 Brigade, Bellingcrap, etc to attack anyone opposing the USUK regimes’ policies.
I’ve been bitterly disappointed in many public figures over their reaction to CoViD, but not Owen Jones. I always knew he was a small-minded, insecure prick.
Or indeed a small pricked insecure mind.
hey go easy on those with wee pricks 😉
Give yourself a laugh and check the comments.
Perhaps a petty prick? Or even prick petit?
He has been calling anything that moves a fascist for years.The moment we have a real fascist government then he calls on it to be more fascist.
You are right though,there are many political commentators who i will never listen to again.
Just been trying to find the video, planning to report it, would it be nice if YT takes one of his videos down…
Noticed his hair style resembling Boris more and more as weeks go by.
Probably can’t find a barber and will not break lockdown to do so.
Why rake iver the same old guff? Because it’s all they got.
Guy de la Bédoyère: “I accept for example that in order to protect other people I needed to learn to drive and to have a driving licence to prove it. Similarly, I accept the normal passport as a means of proving who I am and protecting me and everyone else from maniacs and others not entitled to come to this country. I also accept that there are consequences of making choices. If I choose not to have a driving licence, then I would have to accept I cannot drive on a public road.” Wow Guy, this is your inner authoritarian just leaking out for all to see! First of all, I’m not bothered whether you have the vaccine or not – as you rightly say, it’s your choice. You come across as a highly educated academic sort, so I’m baffled why you think the vaccine “protects others” – it doesn’t. In fact, no vaccine trial has yet presented any data providing any evidence of sterilising immunity which would be considered the gold standard for any vaccine. So then, your vaccine (a misnomer in the case of the Pfizer jab which is actually an experimental gene therapy) is at best alleviating… Read more »
This is the vaccine propaganda. It’s always been the vaccine propaganda. Except – like many, many things throughout this nightmare, like how we record deaths and how we treat people with mental health and how we actually run the NHS – it is now fully exposed for all to see. Out of crisis comes opportunity. The opportunity to expose fraud. Just like the financial crisis. We won’t get duped again.
Well said. I’m often surprised when well educated people make dumb statements. I don’t think they can do as much research as some of us.
We’ll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgement of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song
I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
The Who (not The WHO)
It’s stunning that this man doesn’t get the terrible precedent that would be set with vaccine passports and how their implementation would ultimately justify the lockdowns he has been, apparently, so dead set against all this time.
I just can’t get my head around how many mental midgets get a public voice.
Another piece of controlled opposition fuck off posh boy cunt.
Not only wrong, but obnoxious with it. You should be in government.
The first para refers explicitly to ordinary travel passports. When Guy mentions their contribution to national security by keeping out “maniacs,” I take him to mean potential terrorists.
I am disappointed, however, that yet another respected sceptic has now chosen to support the vaxx programme, especially with such uncharacteristically flimsy justification.
He’s justifying it to himself, but hopefully the jab will see him off.
I get better ‘philosophy’ from the blokes who come around keeping my house upright and heated.
Surely, the ‘consequences’ that I have to face as someone who won’t be getting vaccinated are perfectly obvious and straightorward: I won’t have the protection against the coronavirus that the vaccinated have (or we’re told they have it). That’s the disadvantage, and it’s a disadvantage I’m perfectly happy to accept, just as I have the disadvantage of not being allowed to drive because I’ve never obtained a driving licence. No sane person would suggest that the lack of a driving licence should also bar me from going abroad or attending a rock concert.
I had to leave the local ‘support group’ on Facebook last April when people started saying how wonderful it was to hear birdsong. I signed of with a link to Thurber’s The Day the Dam Broke. Smug, sanctimonious pot banging psychopaths.
When the government loses the Daily Mail, they’ve lost the people. Whatever you think of it, it’s the People’s Paper. This is OVER!!
Except… it isn’t. As this falls apart (and I think it will all collapse faster than we imagine) people are going to start waking up from the illusion very quickly. They will start “snapping too“ as if coming around from a hypnotist’s control. (Because that is basically what they’ve been under!) They are going to be upset, confused and angry. I know “we” are upset and angry – not so much confused, more very, very angry – and I know I’ve said it often on here before, about forgiveness, and the feeling has been very UNFORGIVING, BUT… we will NOT progress if we berate people or taunt them for their behaviour. And that includes some of our leaders and journalists… most of whom have been just as misled as everyone else. We have to use compassion, forgiveness and understanding. Remember, they have been victims of a military grade psychological war. They fell foul of bullets we dodged. Just be kind.
Weeeeeell – they didn’t have to deliberately step in front if the firing squad, did they?
Ceaușescu balcony moments coming up for several pols with luck, Australian tennis booing was the first trickle of the flood let’s hope.
This is the moment when the crowd start booing, not just a few catcalls rather a massive roar.
h/t Carl Vernon youtube
But Annie… read the brilliant blog by Dr. Gary Sidley. They were hypnotised into stepping there by the EXPERT behavioural insights team.
BIT crowd need to join SAGE @ Nuremberg 2.
Doh.
Au contraire, you are the one righteous person that might save horrible Saffron Walden from being consumed by fire from heaven.
It must be awful. And I remember the well-kept streets, the flourishing shops, the friendly, bustling Saturday market, browsing for an hour or more in the historic Sun Inn (converted into a delightfully convoluted second-hand bookshop), and, of course, the café where I enjoyed so many coffee-and-teacakes after my shopping. All presided over by the glorious church, often ringing with a wedding peal.
Truly the Devil has been at work.
It was the Sun Inn that housed the Saffron Walden debates, which preceded the Putney debates. Ah, the days when brave and honest men debated wisely, eloquently, respectfully and rationally over the nature of freedom.
If it’s the same guy, he was the high point of my Saturdays.
Darlings and sweethearts, that’s the one!
Your council needs putting in a bear pit with some very, very hungry bears.
Our market in BSE gave that up very soon.
Sadly a lot of stalls are not here, maybe they are not allowed?
In autumn they banned stall holders from parking their vans behind the stall, we lost at least 4 due to that, and very good ones, too. It wasn’t a problem, but the council claimed they needed the space to put the stalls further apart. There was quite a few people who complained to the council.
We now have a lot of “food trucks”, very popular with our Americans, and last Saturday it was nearly impossible to walk through that section as people stood “sd” to wait for food or order.
When I first moved here the market was well known and coaches would come for a day out, bringing trade to local pubs and cafes as well. Now it is half the size it used to be.
To right my friend you appear to have been a target for the covid Marshalls you should show no compassion for the bastards, hard working businesses hounded for no reason, it’s payback time for Traitors..
I think there’s a difference between the scared witless that CnC is defending and the horrible jobsworths encountered by KH. Discernment is key.
No compassion should be shown for Traitors if I can see through the lies and bullshit there’s no excuse for any one else, these people who have gone along with this shit show are weak feeble human beings,who hopefully will pay the price for there compliance and total disregard for freedom and democracy..
There are a hardcore of criminals in the regime who know exactly what they have done.For them there should be no forgiveness but the majority of the population who have gone along with this,have been subjected to a psychological attack by a government,who have used behavioural scientists and the army against them using the full force of the modern media.
On the other hand the plebs have mostly been unemployed and locked out of life as we also have, yet haven’t in all that time sought out any alternative views, though WE have. A quick glance through GooTube would’ve been enough for goodness sake….
We haven’t won anything yet.Im sure the government has a few new variants and apocalyptic models up its sleeve.
I believe it’s policy it’s to delay reopening as long as it is able,and if it can get to Autumn,it can then ramp up the fear again, with natural seasonal respiratory diseases.
My fear too. These evil bastards know they got it totally wrong (my belief is still massive cock up followed by prolonged arse covering conspiracy). They will keep the narrative going as long as they possibly can to avoid the day of reckoning. One swallow in the Daily Mail does not make a summer. Lots of people are much too highly invested in this to let it die without a fight.
I’m hoping for a good Spring and Summer that should put this Scam to bed once and for all.
Exactly. You have stared at evil in the face and tried to fight it as much as you can.
You raised good points and I will not go out of my way to taunt or berate people but I will find it hard to forgive and forget. As I’ve said several times, if people want to go “let bygones be bygones” I will give them short shrift.
Family and friends are the worst. They have treated me like a leper with some accusing me of wanting people to die and being called names like “covidiot.” They may apologise but the damage has been done.
I know I will sound bad here but there will be a degree of schadenfreude on my part if they get hit with tax rises or their pensions lose in value. Or they have to clear up the mess inflicted on their children due to this shit show.
This should be voiced as I Told You So… no need to argue at that point
I absolutely agree with you and I feel no inclination to forgive or forget the self-righteousness, the arrogance and the plain bloody rudeness from people I once got along with pretty well.
Thank you for this. Just what I’ve been trying to say all along.
Everyone has had the same internet to find real information. I don’t buy this „oh I was brainwashed“ excuse. They CHOOSE to watch the mainstream media. They CHOOSE to swallow all the bullsh*t. Real information IS available. We realized back in April last year that this was bogus.
And it’s only going to kill a half-billion people, mostly children and adults in developing nations. That’s the trade-off these satanic luciferians think is acceptable. In fact, they’re probably disappointed it’s not more, and with these murderous biological agents being forced on everyone, who can say what the cost of life lost will actually be?
I think half a billion in the developing world is very optimistic. I would reverse that: I think at the end of this there will be half a billion left in the ENTIRE world – that’s the plan, anyway
I’ve seen that mini video on YouTube with graphs of actual and projected population by country. But the reason I don’t give them much mindspace is because I noticed that the population of the UK was put at WAY lower than it actually is, but the very next thing I saw was the population of various African countries down as round about the same and, in one or two cases, down as a bit higher in fact. At that point I thought “Somebody is trying to make a racist point – and a rather different way round to normal – but it is still racist.”. Obviously it would not be acceptable to say “You can keep all your population – but we’ve got to lose a lot of ours”.
As per the Georgia Guidestones. Of course, anything over 500 million plus deaths, is something these creatures drool over. But it still won’t be enough, by their reckoning.
I.e.l.le.s sont fo.u.lle.s ces Français.e.s.
What will happen when the woke Germans get going, with their three genders?
It is already bad with using the male and female word or /in.
For example Freund/in (friend), even where sometimes you could do the /, they write the whole words Mit meinen Freund/ meiner Freundin getroffen.
Or when you could use the neutral plural, Journalisten, it is Journalist und Journalistinnen.
mit meinem Freund
Seemed a heavy regurgitation of the news rags today…
Jonathan Barr.
(like a bird that flew) through the fog and filthy air
Macduff’s sword broke in our prep school performance but he still killed the gloomy Scotsman (heroic stuff).
And his head was brought in on a pike.
I remember a Ngaio Marsh story about a performance in which the head brought in was a real one.
Good stuff.
That Van-Tam could suggest people DON’T spend their entire weekend outside enjoying the sunshine when we all CRITICALLY need a boost of Vitamin D (which has been proved to help people ward of colds INCLUDING Covid ones) is nothing short of criminal.
Yes the stay indoor orders to combat that spreads overwhelmingly, if not totally indoors is insane. No surprise to me the shutdowns, especially the winter versions are such a total and abject fail.
The best protection is to be outside more, unless you pull up the drawbridge never let anyone in the house and never go shopping.
As long as when you are indoors you keep the windows open to the let the covid out or is it in or is for fresh air, anyway, keep those windows open
I’m not sure we can make Vitamin D yet in the UK, it’s only February and the Sun is still quite low in the sky, but this does not make Van Tam any less of a tit
We can’t make vitamin D yet but think of all the other benefits of fresh air and exercise. If we get fitter and less weighty those lifestyle diseases will drop off faster than a virus can say boo!
Too early for vit-D manufacture but the fresh oxygen is therapeutic and seeing the spring flowers is a tonic.
I do not want to criticise your comment, but the sun is not strong enough at this time of year to induce Vit D production, according to science, at this time of year.
Still, people should be encouraged to go out and enjoy the sunshine as it will lift spirits as the light will still have an impact.
This is the point, every fucking thing they advise or order is anti physical and mental health, the crap beggars belief
Morning. It’s a lovely day in Kent, so I’m going outdoors to wreck this now.
Scally is a nutter, way beyond David Icke but he get’s regular air time on the MSM. The desire for such an authoritarian future burns bright in many who believe they will be on the elite side of the line. From so called journalists, police, council leaders, teachers etc. Our local council offices are out of bounds other than for a junta of 100 leaders. The building has a capacity for thousands but anybody outside the elite is persona non grata.
That is why the likes of Scally and Ferguscum, are not generally seen like a David Icke. The desire to be the dictator spreads far more than just the chief pig dictator himself. So these mini dictators are more than ready to spread the fear.
If Scally was cast as an SS Officer in a movie, he’d fit the role perfectly.
He’s a joyless, anti-human, medtech fascist. In a healthy society, people like Scally, Van Tam and Michie would be under constant supervision and certainly not allowed access to media platforms. None of them looks like they have seen sunshine for years.
There is a danger happiness levels may increase. The H rate is currently at one. One happy person transmits their happiness to another person. This may lead to a smile and in a worst case scenario, a chuckle and then we’ll all be getting our titters out!
Titter-ye-not
The virus dies on human happiness.