Go-Slow BoJo Says Dates Will Not Change, However Good the Data Gets
Despite saying last month that the Government’s lockdown easing strategy will be driven by data not dates, it seems for Boris this only goes one way, and there is no question of better-than-expected data bringing easing forward.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock was out yesterday reiterating the Government’s line and underlining that there would be no faster easing even for areas with almost no Covid at all. The Times has more.
Matt Hancock has rejected calls to ease restrictions early for low-infection areas, citing the failure of last year’s tier system to prevent lockdowns.
Local variations in infection rates are becoming an increasing concern in Government, with cases rising in a fifth of areas while elsewhere they have fallen to extremely low numbers.
Millions of people in England are living in neighbourhoods where there are close to no cases of COVID-19, official figures show.
While areas such as Peterborough, Leicester and Sandwell in the West Midlands have rates of more than 200 per 100,000 people, rates have fallen below 50 per 100,000 in places ranging from Islington in north London to the Isle of Wight.
In very local areas Public Health England does not publish data with fewer than three cases “to protect individuals’ identities”. The latest figures show that 971 of 6,791 “Middle-layer Super Output Areas” (MSOAs) fall into that category.
Ben Bradshaw, MP for Exeter in Devon where rates are 49 per 100,000, asked the Health Secretary: “What will be the justification for keeping my constituents locked down and local businesses closed through Easter and beyond because rates somewhere else happened to be higher?”
Hancock replied: “We obviously had a tiered system over the autumn — one of the challenges we found was people travelling from a part of the country where rates are higher to those where they are lower.”
While the Government may take “a localised approach to outbreaks”, he insisted: “We are going to move down the road map, as a nation, across England.”
Boris Johnson has also insisted that restrictions will not be eased earlier than planned in last week’s road map despite increasingly positive news on vaccination, infections and deaths. But Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, added to pressure on the prime minister when she said that in Scotland “we will be considering if it might be possible to accelerate the exit from lockdown” because of the encouraging data. “I have always said if we can go further and faster, then we will not hesitate to do so,” she said.
It comes to something when Nic Sturge-On is outflanking you on the pace of re-opening.
But is it just political opportunism? That seems likely when you read the extreme measures the First Minister has in store for Scotland. The BBC reports.
The Scottish government hopes to return to the levels system from late April. But if an area is to see restrictions lifted, the number of positive cases will need to be far lower than when the system operated last year. The Government said the more stringent approach was needed because of the new faster-spreading variant of the virus…
The Scottish government’s updated approach is outlined in the its latest strategic framework.
Under the new system, local authorities which have a case rate of more than 150 cases per 100,000 are likely to end up in level four – when only essential shops can open and hospitality must close. The previous threshold for level four was 300 cases per 100,000. Cases will also need to drop to below 50 per 100,000 in a local authority before it will be considered for level two, much lower than the previous rate of 150 per 100,000. That is the level where non-essential journeys outside the authority boundary are allowed and pubs can serve alcohol.
This sounds worryingly like a Zero Covid approach.
Justifying its strategy, the Scottish Government says it is “drawing on World Health Organisation (WHO) advice” from the November 2020 interim guidance document “Considerations for implementing and adjusting public health and social measures in the context of COVID-19“.
Indeed it is. A hitherto under-appreciated document, this interim guidance (which, notably, predates the authorisation of vaccines) is a Zero Covid charter which envisages restrictions continuing until such time as there is “No known transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the preceding 28 days”. Even then it says “robust surveillance” (i.e., test and trace) should continue (forever, apparently) and suggests individuals continue “voluntary physical distancing”. Here are its lowest three “Situational Levels”.
The Scottish Government summarises the WHO’s criteria for easing restrictions as follows:
- Evidence shows that COVID-19 transmission is controlled.
- Sufficient public health and health system capacities are in place to identify, isolate, test and treat all cases, and to trace and quarantine contacts.
- Outbreak risks are minimised in high vulnerability settings, such as long-term care facilities (i.e., nursing homes, rehabilitative and mental health centres) and congregate settings.
- Preventive measures are established in workplaces, with physical distancing, handwashing facilities and respiratory etiquette in place, and potentially thermal monitoring.
- Manage the risk of exporting and importing cases from communities with high-risks of transmission.
- Communities have a voice, are informed, engaged and participatory in the transition.
That’s right – the criteria for easing restrictions include physical distancing in workplaces, the minimisation of outbreak risk in gathering settings, and ongoing invasive surveillance. But hang on a minute – those are the restrictions. When the criteria for easing restrictions are themselves part of the restrictions, you know you’re well and truly ensnared in the circles of hell. Nowhere does the strategic framework specify the criteria for ending all restrictions and surveillance.
The final phase of the framework is: “COVID no longer a significant threat to public health. Maximum vaccine roll out” and “COVID-19 ceases to be a serious threat to public health”. But even then it says: “Some ongoing public health measures likely to remain in place.”
No endpoint is envisaged by the strategic framework or the WHO’s interim guidance when all restrictions will cease and the normality of 2019 will resume.
Stop Press: The Telegraph reports that the fall in Covid deaths in England is running around three weeks ahead of modelling estimates and that some Government advisers are calling for lockdown to be eased more quickly.
Texas Ends All COVID-19 Restrictions
In a move that will boost the hopes of the millions around the world who want and need a return to normality sooner rather than later, the Governor of Texas Greg Abbott yesterday issued an Executive Order lifting the mask mandate in the state and increasing capacity of all businesses and facilities to 100%. The Governor said:
With the medical advancements of vaccines and antibody therapeutic drugs, Texas now has the tools to protect Texans from the virus. We must now do more to restore livelihoods and normalcy for Texans by opening Texas 100%. Make no mistake, COVID-19 has not disappeared, but it is clear from the recoveries, vaccinations, reduced hospitalisations, and safe practices that Texans are using that state mandates are no longer needed. Today’s announcement does not abandon safe practices that Texans have mastered over the past year. Instead, it is a reminder that each person has a role to play in their own personal safety and the safety of others. With this executive order, we are ensuring that all businesses and families in Texas have the freedom to determine their own destiny.
Worth reading in full.
This is a return to normal as far as state mandates and guidance are concerned. A provision for local restrictions by county judges (should Covid hospital occupancy hit a certain level locally) remains in force. But other than that this is Texas returning to normality.
Will it become an international movement as the evidence that such an unwinding does not precipitate mass deaths becomes clear? Let’s hope so, and let’s hope Boris and his advisers are watching.
Test and Trace Finds Almost No Covid in Schools
Biostatistics Professor Jon Deeks, a Senior Researcher in the Institute of Applied Health Research at Birmingham University, has a good Twitter thread on how mass testing in schools appears to be finding no Covid and is a harmful waste of time. We reproduce it here in full.
Testing in schools has been finding close to zilch! Just located the Test and Trace figures for testing in schools. They are on this webpage.
To interpret these results remember all tests give false positives (FP). For Innova, DHSC says about three per 1,000 (0.3%) were FP; in Liverpool it was about one per 1,000 (0.1%). So only event rates above these figures indicate that a test is usefully detecting real cases.
First, primary schools (presume teachers and staff): 2,031,296 tests; 4,232 positives – that is 0.21% – stable for the past month. This is below the 0.3% false positive rate stated for Innova – so many will be false positives.
Now secondary schools: 1,918,823 tests; 2,986 positives – that is 0.16% over two months and has been below 0.1% for the past fortnight. Well below the 0.3% false positive rate stated for Innova – so many will be false positives.
These data make clear (1) all LFT positives MUST be verified by PCR – the Government is risking wrongly putting staff and students unnecessarily in isolation for 10 days. (2) The case that doing this at all will make a difference to cases and spread is less than wafer thin.
– think about the cost (~£10K-£30K per case detected)
– think about the time and effort
– think about children who get stressed by tests and swabs think about what else we could provide to schools
– many harms, unlikely there are going to be benefitsWhy are we doing this?
Stop Press: The Telegraph reports that schools have been telling parents that their children will be banned from class if they do not consent to the tests. Val Mason, headteacher at Hornchurch High School in Havering, wrote to parents saying: “If you do not provide consent your child will not be permitted to return to face-to-face lessons. They will instead be required to complete their work remotely whilst being accommodated on the school site in a separate space.”
Does Vaccination Make You More Susceptible to Covid in the Week After the Jab?
A data analyst sent us the following comments on recent data that suggests Covid vaccines may increase susceptibility to the disease in the days immediately following the jab.
Matt Hancock referenced a Public Health England study on Monday that suggested an 80% reduction in hospitalisations after a single dose of either the Pfizer/BioNTech or AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccines.
Unlike the recent Scotland study (which found around 90% efficacy but excluded the first seven days post-vaccination), the PHE study included data for the week immediately after vaccination.
Significantly, the authors noted a 48% increase in risk of infection 4-9 days after vaccination in the over-80s group treated with the Pfizer mRNA vaccine before January 4th. This is similar to the outcome reported in the FDA Emergency Use Authorisation for the Pfizer vaccine, which found 40% higher “suspected COVID” in the first week after vaccination compared to the control group. The authors of the PHE study explain the increase is likely to reflect the higher risk of exposure in these patients, either in hospital or in care homes. An alternative explanation – that the vaccine itself increased susceptibility – has not been adequately considered. Notable in this regard is that in trials the Pfizer vaccine was found to suppress lymphocyte count in the first few days after treatment (see chart above), potentially increasing susceptibility.
The PHE study employed a “test-negative (TN) case control” design that has become popular in assessing the efficacy of influenza vaccines in recent years. This design has been criticised as being not so much a “trial” as an observational retrospective study with a biased design. In this study, Pillar 2 data from unvaccinated patients is taken from December 8th. In contrast, vaccinated subjects appear to get nine days’ grace in the run up to January 4th. According to symptom trackers and Pillar 2 testing, the majority of vaccinated patients will have started reporting after infections in the community collapsed. The extent to which vaccine efficacy in the over-70s (from January 4th) is assisted by the natural waning of the epidemic after the turn of the year is uncertain.
Given the numerous anecdotal reports of care home outbreaks (see the report from the UK Medical Freedom Alliance) shortly after vaccination across the world, I suggest this data needs further independent scrutiny.
I Think I’m In An Abusive Relationship – With the Government!
We’re publishing an original piece today by Ashton Warhurst, pointing out the disturbing fact that, by the Government’s own definition, “the people of Britain have been trapped in an abusive relationship with its own Government for almost a year, and the only end in sight is the vague suggestion of a maybe”. Ashton begins:
I think I am in an abusive relationship, and I don’t know how to escape. My abuser is too powerful and is intent on turning everyone I know against me, relentlessly trying to convince me that it’s all my fault, that somehow I’m to blame. It seems they’re the ‘good guy’ and I’m just a naïve nobody who doesn’t understand what’s best for me.
The realisation that I might be in an abusive relationship dawned on me when I read the Government’s statutory guidance framework for Controlling or Coercive Behaviour in an Intimate or Family Relationship. This framework, introduced in 2015, presents a list of control behaviours that help lawmakers recognise when a person, such as myself, is in an abusive relationship.
As I read through the list, it’s obvious that my own abuser ticks a disquietingly large majority of these boxes. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, it is my own abuser who wrote the framework.
Worth reading in full.
Lockdown Scepticism Was Never a ‘Fringe’ Viewpoint
Noah Carl has written an excellent piece in Quillette defending scepticism from the charge of being the preserve of extremists and fruitcakes. Here’s the opening:
Whether or not lockdowns are justifiable on public-health grounds, they certainly represent the greatest infringement on civil liberties in modern history. In the UK, lockdowns have contributed to the largest economic contraction in more than 300 years, as well as countless bankruptcies, and a dramatic rise in public borrowing.
This does not mean that lockdowns were the wrong policy, since they might have been necessary to prevent the National Health Service from being overwhelmed with COVID-19 critical-care patients. (And such measures are justified, proponents argue, on the grounds that they prevent infected individuals from harming others by inadvertently transmitting a deadly disease.) But as I will argue below, there’s plenty of evidence that supports those on the other side of this issue, notwithstanding the efforts of politicians, experts, and social-media companies to paint such dissent as marginal or even dangerous.
Worth reading in full.
Government Admits it Has No Evidence For Restrictions
Sir Graham Brady MP asked the Health Secretary to publish the Government’s evidence on transmission risks in the different settings that are affected by lockdown restrictions. The Government’s answer has now been published – and basically admits it currently has no evidence and won’t have any until the summer. By which point all restrictions are envisaged to be gone!
Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of September 2nd 2020 to Question 75983, on Coronavirus: Shops, if he will publish (a) the studies and (b) other research reports that his Department holds on the presence of viable COVID-19 virus in the air in (i) supermarkets, (ii) other large retail settings and (iii) other non-clinical settings. (154773)Tabled on: February 19th 2021
Answer:
Edward Argar:The National Institute for Health Research and UK Research and Innovation jointly awarded over £5.3million for a programme of research of eight projects to understand the routes of transmission of COVID-19 in different environments and groups of people. These projects are 12-15 months in duration and are expected to report findings in the summer of 2021.
The answer was submitted on March 2nd 2021.
So much for being led by “the science”.
Rising From the Ashes
A Lockdown Sceptics reader who lost his job during lockdown has set up a London-based gardening business: Pruners & Shapers. We thought we’d give it a mention. And in case you’re wondering, yes, gardeners are allowed to continue working under the current restrictions in England.
If any other entrepreneurial readers have found themselves in a similar position and would like us to give a boost to their new enterprise, email us here.
COVID-1984
Some more great Party slogans from readers:
IF YOU DON’T HAVE COVID YOU DON’T MATTER
WE’RE DESTROYING YOUR LIFE TO SAVE IT
KISSING KILLS
COMPANY WILL KILL
FRIENDS ARE THE ENEMY
FRONT DOOR IS FAR ENOUGH
SCEPTICISM IS SEDITION
MODELLING IS REALITY
SHAMING IS LOVING
TESTS ARE TRUTH
One from the Theresa May playbook:
LOCKDOWN MEANS LOCKDOWN
And one from ANIMALFARM-19:
ALL CITIZENS ARE EQUAL. BUT IMMUNISED CITIZENS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.
Round-up
- “New variant scare tactics are an own goal” – Allison Pearson in the Telegraph asks: “Our vaccine programme is world-beating and COVID-19 cases are plummeting, so why does the Deputy Chief Medical Officer keep sparking fear?”
- “How much of a threat is the Brazil variant of coronavirus to the UK?” – Michael Le Page in New Scientist says despite reports of fast transmission and reinfection in Brazil the variant “doesn’t seem to be taking off” around the world
- “Brazil and South Africa coronavirus variants could be stopped with just ONE booster jab, Oxford vaccine professor says – and it’s already being made” – The Mail reports on the comments of Professor Andrew Pollard that the UK needs to stop its “obsession” with new variants, while Professor Sharon Peacock suggests the virus might be reaching a “plateau” in its evolution
- “Mutant variations and the danger of lockdowns” – Jemma Moran, Head of Communications for HART, asks in the Critic if lockdowns and social distancing have enabled more dangerous virus variants to thrive
- “You can’t measure the distress of lockdown, so it’s ignored” – Philosopher Dr Frank Palmer writes in the Conservative Woman on a personal note about how his daughter has suffered during the lockdowns
- “Comrades, Roll up your Sleeves!” – Bruce Wallace on Left Lockdown Sceptics says the Socialist Party “has totally capitulated to the bio-security state”
- “Facebook working with police after Dublin protests” – Times report on how the social media company is cooperating with the police to crush lockdown dissent
- “Council granted first closure order of the pandemic” – One brave gym owner had the force of the law brought down on him in Liverpool, reports the Liverpool Express
- “Vaccination passport to unlock Europe for UK tourists” – The EU aims to have its “digital green pass” in place by the end of June, the Times reports
- “France approves AstraZeneca vaccine for over-65s” – The BBC reports on a change of heart from the French authorities after previously saying there was insufficient data to prove its efficacy
- “Budget 2021: Furlough set to be extended – Kwasi Kwarteng” – A signal perhaps that lockdown may not be ending on time, on the BBC. No doubt Neil O’Brien will accuse anyone asking that question of being a “conspiracy theorist”
- “£400m budget bonus for gigs, theatres and galleries” – The Times reports on the great arts giveaway from the Government’s bottomless pockets
- “For and against: Does the UK need to pay down its eye-watering debts?” – Telegraph economics writers Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Jeremy Warner go head-to-head over how much it matters that the Government is living well beyond its means
- “The Futility of the Great Lockdown Melodrama” – Peter Murphy in Quadrant says that “over-reaction dominated the mood of 2020”
- “Simon Dolan’s Another Way” – Watch the new film by the sceptic businessman comparing Sweden’s approach with those of lockdown countries
- “What India sacrificed to fight Covid” – Kavitha Iyer in UnHerd on the awful toll of lockdown on India’s poor
- “Will Lockdown Be the End of ‘Experts’?” – Phill Sacre with an optimistic take on how the next few years will pan out in this Christian reflection on the dangers of technocracy
- “Does Sweden’s higher mortality than other Nordics prove lockdown works? No. Explained in 4 charts” – Read the Twitter thread by Paul Yowell
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Ten today: “Numbers Don’t Lie” by Popcaan, “I Surrender” by Rainbow, “Dead Cities” by The Exploited, “Twisted (Everyday Hurts)” by Skunk Anansie, “How Many More Years” by Howlin’ Wolf, “I Predict A Riot” by Kaiser Chiefs, “Things Can Only Get Better” by Howard Jones, “Tell Me The Truth” by Bonnie Tyler, “Open Up” by Leftfield and Lydon and the latest from Media Bear: “Stick Me Baby 1 More Time“.
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, it’s the news that Dr Seuss has been cancelled by Joe Biden for alleged racism. The Spectator USA looks at how the woke fanatics reached that peculiar conclusion.
The children’s author Theodore Seuss Geisel lived his entire life not just as a staunch progressive, but even as the rather grating variety. To Geisel, the Cold War clash with totalitarian communism was a dispute as flimsy as a debate over how to butter bread. Horton Hears A Who! may declare that “a person’s a person, no matter how small”, but Seuss threatened to sue a pro-life group that took that statement to its logical conclusion. If Bartholomew Cubbins and his 500 hats were around today, at least one of the hats would be a Pussy Hat.
But Seuss’s books were still phenomenally popular. Thousands of schools celebrate March 2nd as Read Across America Day. The date was chosen to mark Geisel’s birth date. But now President Biden has reportedly omitted Seuss from the official list after educational authorities in Loudoun County, Virginia decided the author is, er, problematic.
Seuss drew anti-Japanese caricatures during World War Two. His characters are mostly the colour of the paper they are printed on. His later anti-racism works promote equality and colour-blindness rather than equity and ‘reckoning’. So of course, he probably should be cancelled or at least denounced.
Loudoun County was once the great redoubt of conservatism in Northern Virginia, populated by the refugees of Fairfax, Arlington and DC itself. But the Big Blue Blob fully consumed Loudoun in 2016, and now parents get to enjoy the consequences, like denunciations of beloved children’s authors.
And so, out went a statement from Loudoun’s educators: “As we become more culturally responsive and racially conscious, all building leaders should know that in recent years there has been research revealing racial undertones in the books written and the illustrations drawn by Dr Seuss.”
Research like this on Horton Hears a Who! by two critical race theorists:
Regardless of the intention of the book, the impact is that it reinforces themes of White supremacy, Orientalism, and White saviourism. It positions the Whos in a deficit-based framework as the dominant, paternalistic Horton enacts the White Saviour Industrial Complex… Not only does a White saviour narrative play out within Horton Hears a Who!, Seuss himself is positioned as a White saviour for writing it.
Worth reading in full.
“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.
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…
In a sign of how small the relative impact of Covid is on annual mortality, Lockdown Sceptics reader Mark Ellse has drawn up this chart showing that a woman’s probability of dying in 2020 was still way below that of a man in a normal year. Which can only mean one thing: men need to start living in permanent lockdown to keep them safe from the nasty world out there.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
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Not much of this about.
Daily Telegraph
You made it to spot today Karen.
I am relegated!!!!
Now to read the REAL news
Makes a nice change to see interesting content win the race.
My thoughts exactly.
DavidC
Apologies for using this to pin, but as ATL has ignored it. Reiner Fuellmich’s summary of the level of corruption ongoing in Germany and it’s links to the WHO and the pandemic.
https://foreignaffairsintelligencecouncil.wordpress.com/tag/panic-paper/?fbclid=IwAR2sINgnUqXhflIaU766z223m4DgFQeQHChmXrEh7NFl7a1Ocw-sK6U5Hcw
No problem, great article.
I reckon Genghis would give them a run for top spot in the human rights stakes yes our human rights are as valid today as they were back in his day!
Thanks for posting this. Very important article.
Keep updating this Richy, if you can. Cheers.
How did the ATL miss this?
Selective blindness?
Don’t know, but it was forwarded to them yesterday.
In an attempt to make the world a better place America’s new president takes exception to Dr Seuss children’s books and the publisher promptly joins in the virtue signalling. But, in one of life’s many ironies, it seems the deplorables (TM Hillary Clinton) did not understand, and sales shoot through the roof, pushing Dr Seuss books onto the best seller lists.
The Woke seem to be determined to make satire redundant.
You would have thought they might have remembered what happened when the movie ‘Gone With The Wind’ was criticized last year. It shot to the top of the bestseller lists.
Same way the cancel culture tried to destroy Goya foods because the CEO is an open Trump supporter. Everyone ran out and bought craptons of their products. MyPillow as well. All these „woke“ companies dropped Mike Lindell‘s products. So many people went to the website and ordered pillows that they’re running extra shifts and are still 2 weeks behind in shipping!!
The leverage for outcomes will be attractive to those who are set in outcomes without regard for the principle of the means to achieve them.
In some ways this is also a bandwagon effect.
People align with where the money, leverage, career prospect, power and privileges, and perceived social virtue or credit – from a fear of sense of lack that is without principle or willing to abandon principled honesty, to compensate for – but not truly address and solve – the lack.
Setting the meme of false or negative principles such as the selective worship of grievance, guilt and vengeance by assigning hate targets as ‘social virtue signalling’ can be initiated by funded and supported agents, in the intent to generate a bandwagon effect of its own social momentum.
Imprinting the meme as a leverage for ‘social virtue’ and its corresponding shadow of social exclusion, can be a protection of core narratives from questioning, or the intent to target key elements of the social fabric so as to breakdown social order for ‘regime change’ of ever increasing disorder into increasing controls.
Another example of “go woke, go broke”:
Ben & Jerry’s – 2 for £6 at Waitrose
Still won’t buy any.
I found this. A picture is worth more than many words 😉
Dr Seuss books are the best!!
You have to wonder, sometimes. Let’s not forget that the writer in question was an explicit lefty who pushed his lefty ideas through his work. His attitudes laid the the groundwork for the modern more extreme versions of him, who push cancel culture and antiracist ideology, and are behind this disapproval of his work.
Much like early identity lobbyists worked to create taboos around “racism”, “sexism”, “homophobia” etc, and some of them or their acolytes later fell foul of still more extreme versions of their ideologies – former feminists being cancelled for “transphobia”, or antiracist bigots like Livingstone and Corbyn being attacked as “antisemites”.
In this case, though, the modern extreme leftists in the establishment have managed to promote their predecessor lefty extremist’s posthumous sales by criticising him for insufficiently conforming to modern dogma!
The woke don’t do humour.
The definition of wokeness is basically ‘no humour allowed’.
By banning all humor, Wokism is much like any other fundamentalist creed.
Dr.Seuss was an anti-racist liberal, which is even more ironic, except it’s exactly why the woke Left want his books and others like it cancelled. They are actively promoting racism, specifically anti-white racism. Divide and rule.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tpcW3clYs2w
Tucker: The memory of Dr. Seuss matters more than ever
Furlough extended to Oct – lockdown forever!
Based on this statement from professor pantsdown thinly disguised as Daily Mail commenter ‘TheKindMan’.
What a bell end. 🤦♂️
Other DM commenters seem to
agree with you 64-2.
I’ve never been a Daily Mail reader but I’ve come to love the comments of late. The people seem more based in reality than any Guardian reader. Mind blown.
Telegraph YouTube viewers are not allowed to comment but they make their views plain about Hancock’s efforts yesterday.
(Picture enhanced to reduce early morning alarms).
Daily Mail readers seem to be more sane and clued in than Guardian readers.
Surely he’s just trolling?
I think a lot of DM comments like this are posted to take the piss or to generate as many down votes as possible.
What a moron, that is the exact opposite of how viruses evolve, there’s a simple principle of evolution for pathogens, becoming more dangerous is an evolutionary dead end, killing your host is suicide.
Viruses evolve to become more contagious but less virulent, the more deadly strains simply kill themselves off before they can pass to another host. I have to reiterate most people that Succumb to Covid-19 die of old age or losers in a genetic lottery, cold but true, it’s a fact!
Not all viruses readily mutate.
Shhh, it’s a secret 🤫
Ebola at one end of the scale which is certainly deadly but is rubbish as a virus, the common cold at the other.
Read Jon Rapport’s latest on ebola – if you are willing.
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2021/03/02/ebola-the-new-fake-outbreak/
Pass thanks Binra 🤮
Great comment, tweeted in part here (edited for character limit):
https://twitter.com/Hail__To_You/status/1366996203125100544
If it saves just one bird.
Hahaha!
He’s obviously trolling.
Brilliant.
That reads like an excellent spoof to me.
so funny thank you
STOP it!
A pandemic of insanity has griped the planet Banned Dr. Seuss Books Already Selling For Hundreds Of Dollars On Ebay no need to ask which direction it hangs, Comrades!
Homosexuality Can Be Deemed ‘Mental Disorder’ In China, Says New Court RulingOh, dear that’s a blow for the left.
Maybe its the wrong sort of homosexuality? Oh dear the woke are going to have to heap some spin on this, or just ignore it and deny it. Fake news!!!
My point was it’s not going to sit well with those socialists so infatuated with communist china. As you, they’ll pretend it didn’t happen, they’re good at hypocrisy.
Lack of love can be considered a mental disorder – for the mind can dissociate to spin it it own ‘identity’ rather than extend and share love in the heart. But the dissociating mind uses the term ‘mental disorder’ as a weapon of war, in which ‘corrections’ are punishment or penalty of exclusions or lockdown such as to force loveless compliance. The weaponisation of homosexuality as identity politics, shares the characteristic of raising a self or group identity, above love’s identification, on the basis of justified grievance. While grievances are not truly addressed or healed by denial, nor are they addressed or healed as a claim to power set in vengeance. All identity politicking suffers not from securing the right of human being, for those who are oriented differently, but from its use this as a proxy for social and political levering of change. Where fear and hate seek targets to attack as a way of ‘dumping’ their own issues onto others, there are also those who feed and cultivate the grievance and self-specialness to operate as a proxy for their own agenda, such as ‘colour revolution’. Because the issues are really about fear, hate, guilt and masking, the correction… Read more »
I don’t think we want to go down that rabbit hole my views on sexuality I’m afraid are controversially conservative, not fitting with postmodernist progressive thinking. Sex isn’t love, it has a biological function. I’m afraid i’ve no idea what your reply is about.
You have no idea what I have shared, and you do not want to look at this issue in terms of love or lack of love, or denial of love. Thankyou for your honesty. I have no truck with ‘post-truth’ or post-love’ thinking. You may accept that you are no more than biological function. That is also an expression of your freedom, which determines the rules under which you think. Binary thinking is locked into what it is set against, as if a positive identity by contrast. Polarised breakdown of mind and society is lack of love. Hardly anything I wrote was specific to homosexuality, but if you are fixated in what you are against you will have held it in mind – but at arms length while attempting to read – or deciding not to even risk it. Fear will see its own shadow threat in everyone and everything. This is to say it does not see. This is no less true of the virus or any other narrative taboo. I have nothing against biological functions – but my sense of the Living Biome is not rooted in reductionist and dissociated thinking. “It may shock you to know that… Read more »
I love my dog (probably more than my wife) I don’t have sex with him!
Remember you asked for this!
What limits would you impose on love? Who shouldn’t we have
sexlove with?You are confusing sex with love – not me. I am holding love as the context for communication. Some mistake pleasure for love. They do not know what love is. Be clear as to whether you are talking of love or sex. Limits on love are the expression of fear of love – as a result of similar confusions to yours. Conditional love is permission to love (openly and directly extend and share relationship) when your conditions are met. Your wife may be more demanding than your dog of conditions to be met. I am not interested in your sexual activities, as the determiner of who you are or are not. I meet you as you reveal yourself in word and deed. The fundamental basis of communication and relationship is love. But as I said communication and relationships can be used to GET from by a sense of lack that must seek outside itself. Love is the extension of wholeness of being. Sex is a polarising differentiation of energy and exchange at all levels of our being – not just genitals. When sex is transparent to our being, we hardly notice it. But as I indicated – if we try… Read more »
I thought you’d go quiet after that.
There’s not much that’s a blow to the woke Left.
They’re already ignoring the alleged slavery in Libya and and in China,not to mention China’s ongoing efforts to wipe out the Uighurs.
A bit of anti-LGBT policy won’t bother them. They’ll ignore anything inconvenient.
Not unprecedented. In the 1930s, homosexuality was sometimes termed a “fascist perversion” (Night of the Long Knives etc.). After Ernst Roehm and others were killed in 1934, the then underground Communist Party of Germany rushed out a leaflet calling it “the end of the road for the Nancy Boy government”.
There was also a British left-wing chant in the late 1930s – “Hitler and Mosley, what are they for? Thuggery, buggery, hunger and war!”
I still learn some new every day
I want to hum your last quote to
‘War! What is it good for ?
. . . Absolutely nothin’.
Can’t remember the title.
I read a lot.
Left-wing attitudes to homosexuality were not necessarily favourable in the 1930s and 1940s. A Tsarist-era law criminalising homosexuality was removed when the Soviet government took over, and the Soviet Russian law code made homosexuality between adults legal in 1922, but it was recriminalised in 1933 and often explicitly linked to fascism.
The 1945 Italian film Rome Open City, whose heroes are a Communist militant and a Catholic priest who helps him, implies that the main villains, the German SS chief Bergmann and Ingrid, his assistant, are homosexual.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood – War
And another one bites the dust Hong Kong Authorities Probe Death Of Man Who Received Covid-19 Vaccine
At least he is getting a post mortem.
They will blame the Rona not the experimental drug.
It would be interesting to learn what they find out.
One small step for sceptics New York Legislature Reaches Deal To Repeal Cuomo’s Powers a giant leap to go for zealots.
From ATL
‘I am in an abusive relationship with the government’.
From an original idea by LS reader ConstantBees sometime last year.
BTL is the place to be.
Nothing has changed for a year. People here have been clear eyed about what’s going on. We have been proven right again and again.
It’s nice when people catch up with us but I wish they’d hurry up.
But sadly over the past few months we are being branded as tin foil hat wearing nutters. How did this happen. How can anybody condone lockdown? How can anybody say its right when the vast majority absolutely ignore it when we got nice weather at the weekend? Especially as that twat jvc said do not go out!!! Following the data my arse!! All the Morlocks believe lockdowns work but can simply ignore data from countries fully open! This is like demanding the lottery prize even though you only have two numbers.
Morlocks predate upon those they capture the minds of to herd for their own use. Mind-capture uses language as a weapon instead of as communication and relationship. So I do not choose that, or propagate it as currency of exchange. Pejoratives, put-downs, insults etc are all forms of attack on person. Because you join in it, you suffer it! As ye judge so shall ye be judged is a just statement. The device is clear. Dissent or questioning of a heavily funded and enforced narrative dictate is being walled out. I suggest focusing clearly on the devices and look to why, where and how they work. They need my and our consent! Thanks – but no thanks! We are being offered an altogether different ‘education’ than is officially supplied (or officially shunted online). But only from the willingness to learn. If we love life and freedom, we need learn how it is we give it away or trade it for reactive identity in the baiting of deceits that of course target our profile which is hardly hidden in the era of personal confidences into privately managed Internet. We ‘play’ in their systems that sell, pharm, breed or eat us to… Read more »
We’ve always been branded as tinfoil hat-wearing nutters!
Yer old news we have been in a abusive relationship with our evil “government of occupation” for almost a whole year now and we said this was the case AGES ago, linking the CPS’s own definitions of domestic abuse to back up our wild claims…
Do catch up LDS editorial people, way behind the curve, lame, could do better..
Gates opened his wallet again Brazil Covid-19 variant may reinfect up to 61% of those who recover from virus – study of course the source isn’t referenced, convenient.
It’s worth repeating that we are supposed to worry about three mutant variants thus far.
Kent (England to the world)
South Africa
Brazil
Oxford AZ tested their vaccine in
England
South Africa
Brazil
Yes karen and those trials only involved thoudands of people. Currently the trials are being extended to millions of people in England, so should one expct thousands more sub variants of the kent strain . And if the mRNA vaccines are working in the same way as the AZ vaccines why did those not give rise to variants .
As the article ATL says where is the Swedish variant? Where is the Florida variant? The do have a bad variant in the USA, who would like to guess where they are finding it? Yes good old California!!
I would add that the bio-warfare sub-narrative runs to support Fear of Deadly Contagion. The testing (sic), is the ‘finding’ of fragments of code that are said to be unique to the ‘viruses’ that are themselves re-assembled from fragments of code using computer modelling to ‘put Humpty together again’ – except there is no Humpty – only short code fragments that are non-specific to any actual isolated particle or entity that can be determined to be one thing – or variants of one thing – such as a horse and various breeds of horse. Look to clinical symptoms, not test based cases (sic), and then ask what are all the know causes of such symptoms – not excluding medications and injected substances, toxic exposures and nutritional deficiencies that include the result of concurrent or chronic conditions. Mankind is being led by the Pied Piper into a virtual nightmare, in which imagined and modelled fears, projections – and manipulations of such fears have replaced relational honesty and empirical science. Truth is not at all affected by lies or protected self-illusion, but our awareness of truth can be masked over, distanced and locked away, for an illusion of power, love, freedom, etc.… Read more »
But but but Karenovirus that’s Wacist!
Remember we are not allowed to refer to the big one as Chinese Wuhan Flu, so The Men of Kent (or is it The Kent Men?) the South Africans and the Brazilians will get upset. So shame on you you Wacist.
😳
Nice to read something encouraging about Texas
Before breakfas.
Maybe there’ll be good news about Mississippi
Tonight, before I go down to the chippi.
I thought I just read they did open Mississippi
That may be true
But it won’t do.
It ruins the time
For my rhyme.
I feel so talentless 😜
Take lessons from me.
(It isn’t for free.)
Annie is a poet, and she knows it,
she can make a rhyme, in no time
Careful!, don’t you know that rhyming spreads the virus!!
With Annie’s rhymes
I can forget the times
we live in.
Abuse and fear,
Nothing held dear
the times we live in.
Lead balloon.
Poeting is cheaper than furloughing
If it’s poetry we’re proffering,
Here’s last night’s offering.
Just imagine a Texan’s new joy,
Now that sanity has been employed,
They’ve got rid of the rules,
Which are evil and cruel,
They can now let their hair down and enjoy.
To extend the furlough ‘til this time,
Tells us they’ll be no end to this crime,
Sunak will reveal,
His appalling new deal,
With his plans life will only decline.
But I’d better warn yer
You probably won’t be reading good news any time soon about California
one way plane ticket to texas please – oohh wait we’re imprisoned for everymore and can’t get out our city, never mind the country…
I’ve had an idea…..oooooo actually two ideas…
idea 1: we club together and buy a business in Florida or Texas. Then all travel out there on ‘business’ and don’t come back.
idea 2: we club together buy a bloody plane and the pilots on here can fly us all there privately, no masks etc
Ha good idea – could join ‘freedom airways’ which prof delores is setting up! We could lease a plane and hotels/resorts in various parts of the world and setup an alternative travel business!
Fascinating idea. If I can sell my house I’m in. I was looking at countries where you can ‘buy’ citizenship in exchange for inward investment or buying real estate. Some are quite affordable.
Quite a major breakthrough, I would say. It is a large and important US state.
“When the criteria for easing restrictions are themselves part of the restrictions, you know you’re well and truly ensnared in the circles of hell” i.e. Scotland.
It’s a woke bumper day Harry Potter video game will allow transgender characters, but unsated critics want ‘reparations’ from ‘transphobic’ JK Rowling
*Sigh*
Do soldiers have (deserve) human rights A THIRD of all military personnel are refusing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine with alarmed commanders aiming to make the shot mandatory ‘as soon as possible’
From the comments section:
And that’s the thing, the sheep actually believe medics are knowledgable about vaccines, but who teaches the doctors? Big pharma! Anyone else see a problem here?
Also….I actually am a scientist by training. But did I study immunology? No. Only people who study immunology will learn about the intricacies of the immune system.
And most people don’t become doctors because they are good at or even interested in science. They do it because they want to help people, or it’s a solid respected profession, or their parents were doctors. Often they really struggle with it at school and only get into medical school because they work themselves very hard. And as soon as they get into practice they give up on all scientific curiousity together, apart from a few who do research.
I have a lot of doctor friends. They’re nice people. They work hard. They’re only averagely intelligent for the most part. Which is probably fine for what they do on a day to day basis.
So what makes doctors qualified to opine on a vaccine? Not a lot. They just read the same guff that comes in the package insert that we can all access.
4 years med-school. Only one day training in vaccines, which is nothing more than a glorified sales pitch.
Or they become doctors because it takes longer to become a vet!
A perceptive post, from my experience. (And I’m also a scientist by background.)
I’m sure you are correct in stating that most doctors are not especially intelligent. But I think it goes further than that. There’s a massive difference between intelligence and critical thinking.
In my experience, despite reasonable intelligence, doctors are poor at critical thinking. Hence their views on something like the covid vaccine cannot be regarded as especially informed or valuable.
Quite. They are taught NOT to be critical thinkers. They are taught to make a diagnosis and adopt the prescribed plan of action. Rare is the doctor who has doubts and thinks “maybe I should try something different?”
And they’re also taught to think they are clever and a cut above the rest of us.
I admit that I once used to think doctors would be highly intelligent – what with doing a job that requires LOADS of study to keep oneself apprised of the facts. The day I realised it wasn’t necessary to have Mensa level intelligence etc etc to be a doctor was the day I idly googled what jobs/careers I was deemed capable of (ie at 130 IQ – which is intelligent I know/think it’s top 5%???) and was surprised to see that doctors was on the list. I don’t think I’m putting myself down unduly to say that I would rate someone wanting to be a doctor as needing/having higher level intelligence than that (ie your top 2%???). At that point it struck me as to why some doctors struck me as “bright – but not as bright as I would have expected”.
You also don’t need to have mensa level intelligence to be a skeptic. I don’t and I am. ( Sceptic)
Like you I believed that to become a doctor, teacher etc you needed to be intelligent with a high IQ, I’m now convinced all they have is a good memory.
I certainly knew being a teacher didn’t require high intelligence and that fact got proven by some teacher training students I had as lodgers way back when. The only particularly intelligent teacher I knew of was my father – the rest I came across I rated as average.
I think the reverence for GPs comes from the days when the doctor was one of the pillars of the community, along with the squire, the solicitor and the vicar. Doctors have become part of our cultural tradition and this has been reflected in hundreds of films, TV series and novels over the years. If your baby has a cough, the doctor is called and soon after arrives with his Gladstone bag, stethoscope, intuitive diagnostic ability and reassuring bedside manner. All is well. If you can’t afford the bill, the doctor nods sympathetically and then goes and introduces a local health insurance scheme or draws from the parish relief fund on your behalf. They live in big houses and get called by their noble job title too, unlike, say, a plumber. I was well into adulthood before I began to see them as ordinary, non-specialist practitioners. More recently (but not since last March, obviously), when I accompanied Mrs F. to see our local chap, I was able to observe him looking up the symptoms on the WebMD symptom checker. Oh yes, and a few years previously, his failure to spot what should have been blindingly obvious to a man who’d… Read more »
Arrr Jim Lad, Treasure Island.
I think with an IQ of 130 you would be very bored as GP. More like 120 and a very good work ethic.
This makes me feel better. My SIL is a doctor in Florida (of all places) and back last year I fell out with her when she started going on about people dying all over the place, including a quote if you didn’t wear a mask you would “kill whole families”. At that point I deleted the WhatsApp family group from my phone.
She lost all my respect for her, especially as a doctor. Thick as sh*t.
My brother and his wife (both highly intelligent people – he was a awarded a Double First from Cambridge when First Class Honours degrees were still something to be applauded) moved out of their house in Florida late last year because they became similarly convinced that apocalyptic events there were inevitable. Not living there myself, I can only guess that the press and media must have been in full “wind-up” mode and, presumably, only eased off when Doddery Joe became President.
The many doctors, surgeons and dentists I know are all of a normal level of intelligence.
They are pretty good at what they are doing, often interested in general politics but never too critical about things/the state in general, only about the health system and that they are underpaid, a presumption driven by their exploitation during their early years in business.
They would never question hierarchy or an authority, they live and believe in it and want to climb within it.
They are very much into trying to make as much money as possible and have a huge inferiority complex here in comparison with their lawyer, banker or
entrepreneurial friends.
They were all average pupils and partying but committed students, who went into medicine for the safe money and above all, family tradition and status, which drives them the most, even more than
money (Lions, Rotary etc.).
None of them would ever question the governments pandemic responses or do independent research on masks or the ‘vaccines’- they only read the official leaflets and regurgitate them.
The main character trait they have is, that they are absolutely full of
themselves- the younger (Millennials) the more so.
I believe one of the criticism of lockdown sceptics is that we ignore germ theory. This is nonsense as we all know germs cause illness but it claims we all suffer equally. Not only common sense but science disproves this and this is why 99% of covid deaths occur in those with really bad health problems. While a vaccine can protect you against a specific germ it won’t improve your health or reduce your risk of death. That can only be done by improving one’s health and that will only occur when government asks itself what makes people ill.
“Only people who study immunology will learn about the intricacies of the immune system.”
And the reality, as we’ve had thoroughly rubbed in over the past year, is that immunology is a long way from being a completely understood subject. It’s not like, say, areas of engineering in which we have a sufficiently complete knowledge of how everything works to make clear analyses and predictions, and therefore construct devices that work perfectly very time (provided they are constructed correctly).
It’s incompletely understood and therefore assertions made about immunology even by immunologists are often merely hypotheses, in practice. Same for virology.
Very true
Intelligence is overrated, I am actually surprised to see scientists prioritizing it so highly. What is intelligence anyway, formal education is indoctrination, teaching pupils what & how to think. I have little respect for it, when I was at college I was just bored.
I’m incredibly poor at maths an arithmetic dyslexic, yet the few times i’ve done IQ tests I’ve scored well above my ability LOL. Critical thinking & practical skills are more important I think. But at the end of the day what’s most important for any species is having the skills most suited to the environment you find yourself in. The future looks unpleasant for most of us. Medics really just need a good memory to prescribe pharma.
I’m of the belief applied science is mostly harmful to our species survival.
And if applied science isn’t the threat, those applying it certainly are.
Probably one of the most important factors in becoming a doctor is conforming and working hard. foregoing all the normal stuff young people do, getting drunk, taking drugs, partying, taking risks, going against “the norms”….
No young doctor students probably live in fear of doing something wrong every day that might jeopardise the career they really want, work really hard for and who have paid a huge fat wedge on getting, with all the expectations of their entire extended family willing them to get that GP’s job….
With most doctors, life-long conformity is baked-in. So is total compliance to brainwashing. Evidently.
Pretty much sums up society as a whole. Follow the rules do as the system tells you, the stick & the almost unattainable carrot.
I’ve never really played that game, I’m fairly lazy, have no ambition what’s so ever & couldn’t give a toss about rules & conformity. The only people that tell you they work hard are people that don’t work hard. I have no interest whatsoever in material possessions or owning shit.
In a DM ‘latest comments’ about compulsory vaccines for NHS staff someone said something about
‘Why should they having been forced to take ‘Panorax(sp???) in 20??’.
When I went back to read it again it had disappeared.
Pandemrix? For swine flu…whenever that was. 2010?
I don’t know, hence ? ? ?
i think the military were given a malaria concoction (larium?) back sometime which subsequently gave mental health issues- so they have history of being on the receiving end of dodgy drugs by TPTB
There have been a number of claims which have settled successfully and there are others ongoing against the MoD.
It can cause psychosis in some individuals and there is a safer alternative .
namely our friend hydroxychlorine.
Lack of informed consent means most cases will succeed if causation is established.
Of course the military were used as guinea pigs at Portondown for many years .
Jemma Moran’s piece ATL is excellent.
By her argument, places that have little or no lockdown should have many more cases (in the true sense, not the lying government sense), but much lower mortality.
Is there any way of verifying this, given the dodginess of the data?
The data doesn’t matter. They will always be trumped by the mindset that Alison Pearson describes in The Telegraph, roundup item 1.
New US jobs numbers for Feb 2021 to be released in two days, March 5.
The Corona-Recession rolls on, bringing great destruction and unhappiness in its wake, with no net job-gains in almost six months:
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2021/02/26/all-life-years-matter-on-the-corona-panics-social-and-economic-costs-vs-covid-deaths-in-life-years-lost-terms/#unemployment
Except in no lockdown South Dakota which has the lowest unemployment rate in America.
Sweden is also AFAIK doing well with employment.
What does AFAIK mean please ?
“As far as I know”
Thank you, took me ages to work out LOL when new t’interweb.
Didn’t David Cameron think for ages that it meant “lots of love”😊?
Likewise until context made that unlikely but I’m rather older than Cameron 👴
I still don’t understand LOL. It seems to mean different things depending on context.
I do understand FFS, however.
FFS, Karen! – ROTFLMAO here!
“Everyone may have a job there but they are also dead!”
No, still don’t understand the mindset of a lockdown zealot.
They live in places with lots of dead-end jobs.
In the final calculation of life-years lost to the Corona Phenomenon (Virus Effects + All Other ‘Response’ Effects + all follow-on effects of both), South Dakota and others (Sweden, for one) will come out very well.
Our Pro-Panic friends are stuck deep in a mental-block whereby they cannot see things in terms of life-years lost, the proper measure. Loss of time to unemployment is a form of lost time and therefore lost life.
I’ve pasted your comments here:
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2021/02/26/all-life-years-matter-on-the-corona-panics-social-and-economic-costs-vs-covid-deaths-in-life-years-lost-terms/#comment-47534
But that was always the plan. Be in no doubt! You can’t Build Back Better until you’ve destroyed first.
And the problem is that destroying is easier than building, as the second law of thermodynamics tells us. The destroying might just be followed by more destroying.
Just saw a news article boasting of big GDP gains in Q1 2021 but saying too bad about all those lost jobs not coming back.
Worried about being white? Insufficiently woke? Outraged about the racism of Martin Luther King?
You need JP’s latest video:
https://youtu.be/7LiztqtsIL8
Is it not strange that Martin Luther King’s call for people to be judged by their actions, not the colour of their skin, should be condemned as racist by people who consider themselves to be liberal and progressive?
I’ve always found that odd and I agree with whoever said that if Marti Luther King were alive today he would have been cancelled.
He was, wasn’t he? Cancelled, that is.
And more importantly white Middle class people spreading their version of what racism is. What’s that spinning noise. Oh ignore that its just MLK. I had a dream …..
Think we might all be finding out rather more about Martin Luther King and the caste system in India soon. Reason being I know some of us fear our own country might be due to set up an apartheid system soon – ie Vax Apartheid. It’s a seriously wierd thought imo to wonder whether I might find myself on the receiving end of a form of apartheid in my own country – even though I knew about the apartheid in America and South Africa and had read about the caste system in India (with its Untouchables caste). Definitely some mind-blowing going on here in my mind thinking “ME???!!!! They might subject ME to apartheid in my own country! WTF?” Has plans on good long talk with South African friend of mine soon about what it was like to live in her country – even though she wouldnt have been on the receiving end of it personally (knowing she’s very anti it and I can expect a good analysis of it from her).
Does your job dictate your human rights? NHS staff could be forced to have Covid jab: Radical plan is being considered for thousands of medical staff who turn down the vaccine… but what if they STILL refuse? What they’re saying is your employment takes priority over your humanity, if I recall there’s another word for that, now what is, servant? Serf? No SLAVE! that’s it.
Would be interesting to see the NHS trying to operate without a third of its staff. On top of the ones already sent to moulder in needless self-isolation.
Good point, ya think they’ve thought of that? Could be part of the plan.
That’s when the NHS will really collapse and that’s even before the tsunami of untreated illnesses, mental health issues, effects of domestic violence and substance abuse.
I have wondered whether this sort of thing would be a rather thick end of the wedge actually – as part of privatising the NHS. After all – what would I do if I were an NHS nurse/doctor? That’s right – I’d head straight for the private sector and say “Would you pull that stunt on me?” and if the answer was the correct one (ie that they wouldn’t) = my bag and baggage would be packed and I’d be off to work in said private sector in the blink of an eye. Cue for en masse desertion of the NHS by a lot of their staff…
Not to forget the obvious implications for patients as well. That being that any patients that are anti-vax and have the money to go private will head off there pronto for any treatment they require. For two reasons: an even vaster staff/patient ratio difference between the two sectors and also the fact the staff would be much more likely at a personal level to appreciate that we’d also not have had The Jab and less likely to be awkward about treating us. Basically a Perfect Storm then of one hefty swipe taken from two directions converging at once for both staff and patients to head for the private sector and the NHS could be dealt pretty much a death blow.
Isn’t the private sector more likely to insist you’re jabbed?
If so, then they will be cutting their own throats, but you can’t legislate against stupidity.
What I Don’t understand is why the nhs unions are not all over this? The teachers union are stopping the return to school on much less evidence? Why are they colluding with this harm??
The union leadership will have been bought off.
Or they’re simply in agreement.
Either way the result is the same, but union bosses have a long history of corruption.
Quite a proportion are BAME, they most likely to refuse and on racism grounds more likely to bring a claim, so its not gunna happen.
They should stick by their guns and take the NHS to court if they are being forced.
Long term sick peeps – don’t go back
mental health can stretch it out for 2 years on the sick
Good luck with that if a significant number still refuse.
Or if a group sue the NHS.
Foreign holidays hopes boosted: WHO appears to be warming to ‘vaccine passports’ plan in bid to get world moving again anyone surprised?
Problem, Reaction, ‘Solution’.
Cause problem, manipulate reaction, instigate pre planned solution.
Precisely
Seems strange no, that 160 odd independent countries are all now talking about poison passports. The Elite players playbook anyone? poison boosters are next on the agenda. I hate to think what’s in the playbook for people like us. I know detention and re-education centers.
Shhh Conspiracies don’t exist here at LS.
And people still insist it’s just serial incompetence.
It’s all just one big coincidence….nothing to see here….now move along…
Furlough to September!! Come on, we know where this is headed now. Time to start telling everyone you know what the scam is. Universal Basic Income headed to the UK. All part of the ”Reset”. Absolutely shocking to see an allegedly conservative government complicit in such an evil plan to force mass employment on huge sections of the population, all as part of a larger social re-engineering scheme. Ugly, ugly stuff!
The utter destruction of the economy so it can be built back better.Millions unemployed as they seek to establish their green utopia.
And the millions of unemployed and most others will have no place in their built back better world. Hence the vaccines, that aren’t vaccines.
Hiding the true impact of lockdowns.
Furlough will be turned into UBI. HIndoo magic money man and his machine. Churn churn churn. Will tearful eyes and head lowered will tell the Sheep that taxes must double, triple just like the face diaper wearing. Sheep bleat approval and resume eating their dog shit.
When they start paying people’s UBI in social credits it doesn’t matter does it?
They can pull a few credits out their butts indefinitely to keep the slaves fed on gruel and water. All kinds of “work” can be created for them. Picking up face nappies, managing covid queues, the more able slaves can operate the prisons and detention centres, or “work re-training camps” and if they are really really good they might get lucky and get an actual “job” with G4S or Serco.
I tried to tell my family today. I tried to explain to them about the Fullmich report. They just kept chirruping back “but it says on the news that over 100,000 have died, why do you believe all this stuff you read online?”
Worth including if not done earlier: “Self-harm claims rise by 333% and overdoses are up 120% among 13 to 18-year-olds: The shocking toll of the pandemic on teenagers’ mental health is revealed”
Based on FAIR Health report in US.
True cost of lockdowns and keeping kids away from schools.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9319401/Self-harm-claims-rise-333-overdoses-120-shocking-toll-pandemic-teenagers.html
Anxiety, insomnia, we have the same in our household. Can’t play sports, can’t see friends, can’t go to school. Subject to endless fear mongering. Fucking bastards. That is all the CV fascists are. Fucking bastards.
Sorry to read this. Now I’m in a better position over here in Poland, where rules are relaxed, but I can relate. In the first months of hard lockdown I had similar problems, especially lack of sleep due to being imprisoned after years of being on the road constantly, but thankfully the hard lockdown approach was eased and I’m coping better. Let’s hope this will be the same for all.
I’ve been doing some modelling and it is 10x more accurate than any of Neil Ferguson’s.
If you packed £5 notes into London double deck buses to the tune of the £300bn the Gov has spent so far, then the queue would be about 14 miles long. It would stretch from Downing Street to Heathrow Airport.
By the end of this fiasco then I reckon the queue will circle London clockwise on the M25.
Have you worked out how long the queue would be of people trying to nick those £5 notes?!
Another human rights violation I was cuffed by the Covid stasi… queueing for a coffee: This 51-year-old mother strolled two miles to get some refreshment – but fell foul of the long arm of the law Yet another unlawful arrest! Scenario. Question 1 the corona act provides no power of arrest ? If so on what grounds. They can only issue FPNs. Fact 1. It is not illegal (England) to travel more than 5 miles. Fact 2. It is not illegal to go outside. Fact 3. The Health care act, empowers police to detain people if reasonable suspicion they are infected. Fact 4. You do not have to provide your details to police without reasonable cause. Fact 5. Police conduct not sanctioned by legislation is unlawful! Considering the above, if you are out minding your own business and stopped by police & they ask you for your details you are not obliged to provide them unless police give reasons for their suspicion you are breaking the law. Police: why are you out today Public: exercise. Conversation over, say no more, police only ask questions to prove your guilt! You have a right to remain silent, they can not force you… Read more »
When I was young, we all thought all coppers were bar stewards but as an adult I realised they seemed OK, did a job, arrested and prosecuted criminals.
Now I’m older and wiser, they’re not only bar stewards again,but cnuts.
I watched the aftermath of the peaceful protests in Trafalgar Square August 2020 in which using weapons they brutally attacked middle aged/older people without care or remorse, I was shocked back to reality. They made themselves the publics enemy.
I agressively resisted unlawful arrest, got charged with assaulting 4 police impostors, appeared at the docks Isleworth Crown. All charges dropped, and £5k compensation, without the solicitor having to break a sweat. Took my kids to Disney, Florid. That was 20yrs ago. Happy days!
Perfectly right, but not sure with today’s stasi & SS the courts would find the same verdict. Police are just profound liars, worse than any criminal. If I am ever asked what I have against police, I simply say, they’re dishonest, violent & corrupt, completely untrustworthy.
The cowards wouldn’t get in the box to give evidence against me. Spent the morning loitering in the corridors, instead of doing their job, which pissed me off no end, when the Crown barrister stood up, and said no evidence against me was being offered. Totally corrupt, the bloody lot.
Agree but some forces are worse than others.
I was successfully defended against 3 lying constables and a sergeant by a solicitor who advised me very strongly not to call them liars to the Magistrate.
Very sound advice.
S. Yorks during the miners strikes but nothing to do with that. You might have thought they had better things to do than launch a spurious prosecution on an innocent visitor from London.
40 years ago they arrested my mate Eddie for carrying an offensive weapon at a demo in London.
Said weapon was an Anarchist flag on a pole, duly acquitted as Lawfull protest.
Eddie got his flag back, and his pole.
The reasonable excuse isn’t defined in law. So this idea you can only go out for exercise is bullshit.
Kh have you ever put in a complaint to the independent police complaints commission. Described below on the gov website. You’ve been harassed constantly by the police, and the fact they are harassing your customers is affecting your business and therefore you. They have no legal right to do this. You and your customers are not breaking any laws.
“The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) exists to increase public confidence in the police complaints system in England and Wales. It also investigates serious complaints and allegations of misconduct against the police and handles appeals.”
Do try. These guys are ‘independent’ and I agree with you that these guys are all the same, but it has to stop and maybe this is a chance to take?
I really wish I was closer to you. I’d be round every day supporting you and your business. We have close friends near Bury St Edmunds, if I ever get to see them (they are fully bought up sheep that haven’t gone out since March last year) I promise I will come and see you too!
I gather that from Monday two people from separate bubbles will be permitted to have coffee together on a public bench so the rozzers are getting in there while they’ve got the chance.
It happened to me last March and I wrote to the CC who phoned and apologised. “We looked at the officer’s video and he was wrong in 3 respects.”
They’ve been getting away with these things for years. Did anything ever happen to those officers who shot that Brazilian chap on the tube and then lied about it and tried to cover it up? Not that I ever heard in the press.
I don’t think the guys who actually shot Jean Charles suffered any disciplinary consequences, they were acting on intelligence from their commander and thought they were facing a fanatical suicide bomber.
You might have heard of the commander of the operation though, a certain Cressida Dick. Obviously shooting innocent civilians on the tube is not an impediment to promotion.
I believe the then Director of Public Prosecutions, a certain Keir Starmer, decided with his forensic mind that there was no case to answer. I wonder what happened to him?
They’re only following orders 🤔🤔🤔🤔
Mike Yeadon has been on DT comments BTL today on one of Allison Pearson’s articles. He makes some good points on ‘vaccination’. presumably as it’s in the public domain it’s okay to reproduce on here without asking him?
Pleased to see Mike making a reappearance, but surprised he’s chosen the Torygraph to do it. I replied to a few of his comments the other day. It does appear to be the real him.
I am pretty confident it’s him too – i suppose DT might be a better read than the Mail for him and barely worth commenting in the Grauniad or Times is it? I thought his points about asymptomatic transmission were good too.
Hancock ‘has a plan to instil enthusiasm for the jab among young people who may be vaccine averse’.
Why the hell would you vaccinate the under 30’s. They is zero risk of dying? Why do you think you are vaccinating people? Its only to stop them dying right? So wtf do young people need it for? The vaccinations should be over now. All the high risk and tubbies should be done. So end it now. Hospitalisations are down to nothing so throw open the nhs. Stop testing and boom the virus has gone. Thow away your crutches (masks) and walk back to freedom. Go or wancock let it rip!!
Oh but we have bought enough of the poison to vaccinate every person in the UK 3 times over. They must be used on the people!! It is the duty of the people to ensure that the spaffing of taxpayer moolah is well spent to endorse the government’s decision to engage in said spaffing.
The poison won’t wait till the 6 month booster is due because, you know, Variants of Concern…
Nicola Sturgeon fights for her political life as she slams ‘utterly irresponsible’ calls for her to RESIGN for ‘misleading Scottish people’ – but Gordon Brown says her feud with Alex Salmond is ‘bringing the country down’ It’s the reasonable thing to do Nic, step down, take one for team like a good socialist.
I’m kinda impressed by the comments section,
Listening to the end of Ann interview with some zealot on the radio yesterday who was proposing that remote jungle villages across the world be targeted and given vaccines. He was offering, (Bear Grylls style) to take them himself and that it was the moral duty of like minded explorers to do so.
One caller asked him why the need, especially if the villagers were effectively cut off from the world, and his earnest reply was that they might at some point go to the nearest town or market, and that’s where “the Covid” will be waiting!
Clearly deranged, or maybe just scamming for a publicly funded holiday, but the other point that struck me is this.
Considering the poor living conditions and zero “social distancing” of some places in the world, think the shanty towns of South America, the barrios of Rio, the slums of Johannesburg and Delhi, then following the logic of Covid, shouldn’t millions have died by now?
Yet if we stand too close in a queue at Tesco, or (god forbid) visit grandma, it is almost a certainty that we will be murderers.
What a privileged, selective killer Covid is.
He was on the Jeremy Vine show with the same stuff. Just as in lockdown 1 when they got more and more desperate for stories that were remotely on-topic.
That’s the thing, the virus is intelligent – now it can suss out what socioeconomic class you are.
On a serious note when I ask lockdownistas about why aren’t slum dwellers in India, Philippines, Brazil, South Africa, etc dying in their thousands all I get is tumbleweed.
Yep. It has become akin to gently asking a religious person exactly how all those animals fitted into the Ark.
“They just did ok. I believe it”.
Indeed. Or how did God manage to create the world and everything in it in 7 days?
A day is an era.
When I say that, the zealots usual reply is “Oh they don’t get any travelers visiting those area’s”
Please please please god wipe these idiots out and let the rest of us live in peace.
I’m actually hoping for an asteroid now. Or our new Martian overlords.
The four seasons: Letdown, lockdown, lockdown, lockdown.
Fist bump, or handshake? On what part of the hand does the virus lie?
One day when I am old, And my children come to me, They’ll ask a poignant question When did the world stop being free? ‘Mum, what were you doing, When the world was closing down? Dad, did you stay silent, When they shut the shops in town?’ ‘Did you really clap on doorsteps, And for Captain Tom you cheered? Did you give up Sunday worship, While our freedom disappeared?’ ‘Were you busy watching Netflix, While furlough drained the purse? Did you order endless take-aways, And the ignore the lockdown’s curse?’ ‘Did you ever see a future, Like the one that we are in, When freedom for the masses, Is a memory, growing dim?’ ‘Mum, were you complicit? It’s a question I must ask. Did you speak up or were silenced ? Were you muted by the masks?’ I will tell them of the struggle, To find truth where others lied, I will tell them how I spoke up, And share how hard I tried. I will speak of propaganda, People blinded by their fear, ‘I am sorry’ I will tell them, I watched freedom disappear. It was not for lack of trying, We fought with truth and fact, But the… Read more »
Outstanding! A poem I would have used in my TEFL teaching career, for my advanced class.
That’s brilliant.
I am so scared for my children’s future. They know at least I am against it all, but they also know I am an outlier, what with the nonsense the school pumps into them.
you are right to be scared. you should take them out of the country, while you still can [Africa, South America – the horror will get to them later, maybe even never] – there is no future for them here, and I mean that literally – within 5 years most of us here will be dead. My children are adults, so I can’t take them out of the country, and I have resigned myself to the fact that they have no future. I only hope I die before they do.
Brilliant. Everyday Mr Bart and I count our blessings that we don’t have children. I don’t think it would be fair to infilct this cruel world on a child.
I can see how that would be less stressful. I have nine blessings and every day I pray that they will stand up in their generation and speak for love, truth and hope. The world needs my warrior children, they may be the some of few voices of sanity in the world that they are entering.
We have home educated them and taught them truth and how to find it. We have taught them love and how to share it. We have taught them about hope and where it comes from and how to hold onto it.
I think your children will be OK and turn out well as you have been making an effort to raise them well.
May your tribe increase.
Similarly, we have no grandchildren and are grateful for that.
I have great empathy for all the children and young people caught up in this tyranny and the greatest possible contempt for those perpetrating this dystopian fraud.
I have two nieces and I’m worried about how they will fare in this increasingly dystpoian and tyrannical world. From the photos & videos I see of them they look OK but God knows what’s going on in their minds.
Best poem yet.
Liberty thank a great poem. As a writer of doggerel myself I salute you.
Wonderful-an anthology of antilockdown poems should be published.
Brought me to tears. I’m coming to live with you!
On microbes by Ogden Nash:
Adam had em.
Nuff said?
Even for an atheist naturalist, it’s good enough.
I believe that the title is longer than the poem.
Great fan of old Ogden.
Likewise. A great man, with a magnificent contempt for scansion.
Even Eve
Save the NHS. Become a nurse. Stay home.
The Jemma Moran piece in the roundup is absolutely brilliant. Managed to explain to a thicko like me why Lockdown gives more virulent mutations of the virus an advantage. It should be given much greater prominence.
Yes, very well written and persuasive.
This was linked in the round-up the other day on a similar theme: https://www.pandata.org/dr-knut-wittkowski/
If it is true — and it seems logical to me — then it raises the question of whether the policy makers have deliberately pursued this policy (of promoting more virulent strains via LDs) or done so out of ignorance. Certainly one of Rainer F’s charge sheet.
Not the first time I have come across this argument, but it has certainly not got much of an airing.
Yes everyday is a school day. Described really well and very easy to understand.