The latest model of doom from Government advisory group SAGE appeared yesterday, predicting a ludicrous 10,000 hospital admissions a day in mid-July in a vaccinated population (nearly three times the January peak) because of the Indian variant – and that’s the central scenario. Furthermore, the researchers don’t even think the Indian variant is more deadly or particularly good at evading vaccines. So how do they conclude it will precipitate such a calamity?
Professor Adam Kucharski, a SAGE modeller from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), explains their reasoning:
The issue is that many people have a mental image that we’ve [already] had the biggest possible epidemic waves, whereas we’ve actually had ones that are relatively small compared to what could have happened without control measures in place. Because of these controls, only a fraction of the people who could have got infected in the past year or so have been infected, so they’re still out there. Of course, for many of these people vaccines have now decreased their risk substantially. But a very large number of infections that come with a very small individual level of risk can produce a similar outcome to a smaller epidemic that carries a larger individual level of risk.
Maths whizz Glen Bishop, writing for Lockdown Sceptics, has shown why SAGE’s assumptions are so unrealistic as to produce these highly implausible scenarios. In their central scenario, for example, their assumptions imply that up to half of the UK will be simultaneously infected in one week in mid-July. This is despite the January peak only having around 2% of the population infected at one time, according to the ONS.
Another of the models’ big assumptions, prominent in what Prof Kucharski says above, is that lockdowns and social distancing have successfully suppressed the virus and that it is only because they continue in some form that the flood of infections, hospitalisations and deaths is held back. The latest modelling starkly shows how, even with a high vaccination coverage as in the UK, such an assumption can produce predictions so dire they send twitchy Governments reaching for the lockdown order.
As the SAGE briefing says:
At this point in the vaccine rollout, there are still too few adults vaccinated to prevent a significant resurgence that ultimately could put unsustainable pressure on the NHS, without non-pharmaceutical interventions. … It is a realistic possibility that this new variant of concern could be 50% more transmissible. If [the Indian variant] does have such a large transmission advantage, it is a realistic possibility that progressing with all roadmap steps would lead to a substantial resurgence of hospitalisations.
In fact, there is no evidence (outside models, which are not evidence) that lockdown measures or social distancing have any significant impact on reducing Covid infections or deaths. This is why the states in America which removed their restrictions in March (Texas) or last autumn (Florida) or never imposed them (South Dakota) are doing no worse, and often better, than many states which maintained strict restrictions throughout the winter (see the graph above). Sweden demonstrates a similar point in Europe.
The depressing truth, though, is that sceptics have largely failed to get this basic point across to those in charge and their scientific advisers. It’s not as though the evidence is not there. There are numerous peer-reviewed articles in leading journals that set out the evidence on this, and more keep appearing. Leading scientists have raised their heads to make the evidence-based case.
Graphs like the above, which should by themselves undermine the entire lockdown edifice, are easy to produce. Leading journalists such as Fraser Nelson, writing in one of the leading Tory newspapers, the Telegraph, has pointed repeatedly to the evidence on this. The data is plain for all to see and the voices highlighting it are not marginal or lacking in credibility.
Yet here we are again, with another model built on dubious assumptions and a presumption of lockdown efficacy once more imperilling our liberty. Freedom has never felt so fragile as in these past 14 months, when access to basic liberties has rested on the evidence-free assumptions made by a small group of mathematical modellers whose word seems to be taken as holy writ by those in charge.
Adam Kucharski is on Twitter. So why not ask him (politely!) why, if so many people remain so susceptible to this virus and its variants as to produce such dire predictions, Florida, Texas and South Dakota have fared no worse than places which have imposed or maintained restrictions? I’ve put the graph as the featured image to make it easy to share – just put a link to this article in the tweet and the graph should appear. If you get any answers from him, why not email them to us here.
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Absolute stuffing nut jobs, SAGE. Stop listening to them Boris. I’ll guarantee there won’t be 1,000 deaths a day “with” covid in July, anymore than there was 4,000 deaths a day in January (despite the best efforts of big pharma).
(Hmm, maybe that’s why they were banging on about 4,000 deaths a day – cover for the “vaccine” deaths, expectation management? one wonders what they’re planning now).
FFS – Johnson chooses to ‘listen’. They provide his cover for the Tory police state.
As I’ve said before, politicians choose scientific advisors who tell them what they want to hear. He should still stop listening though.
(Oh and btw, the Jews need, and are entitled to a homeland – in the Levant, not Madagascar or somewhere).
“the Jews need, and are entitled to a homeland”
Why? Since when did a religion/culture entitle any group to another people’s territory on the basis of its genetic mythology?
What a silly idea. Bound to cause problems if anyone was daft enough to try it. Or are you off to try it in – say France … or Spain … or Germany …or Wales … or … or Africa (oops – we did that one in the glorious days of Empire)… ?
Israel was simply invented to divert dispossessed eastern European Jews from the wealthy western nations, and dispose of the pain in the arse that were adherents to the modern (19th century) construct of zionism. Ironically, it is a product of British anti-semitism. Before the British committed the f. up, Palestine was a multi-cultural state.
(And your comment re. politicians and advisors is also a contradiction. Why would they pretend not to ‘listen’ to their picked sycophants)
First thing to be clear about, with the history of the 19th and 20th centuries, is that anti-Zionism is not very different to anti-semitism. I realise a lot of the Momentum mob (for example) don’t accept that – but look at the company they keep! So – some 3,857 years ago, Jacob (Israel) was born. Some 1900 years from then to the destruction of Jerusalem. and the enslavement of his descendants who nonetheless believed in restoration by revolt till 614. Jews. From 1878, Roumanian and Russian Jews started returning to the region. Some Jews never left the Levant after 70. So the people of Israel have had quite a strong connection with the region overf the past 4,000 years or so. If you really don’t know, here are some reasons why Jews are entitled to a homeland in the Levant. They are indigenous, which means they are occupying ancestral lands; share common ancestry with the original occupants of the land (over 90% of Jewish people worldwide can trace their genetics to the Levant; culture and language connected to the Levant; residence in parts of the country; living in the diaspora does not cause one to lose indigenous status. Palestinians, of… Read more »
Can you two please have this discussion somewhere else?
Sorry, I was getting tired of his rants about Israel. I’m done now.
I enjoyed reading, top response 👍🏻
Then why did you bring the subject up?
Because of several comments he made in the comments section for the article on lack of coverage of the London protest. And then his somewhat tetchy response to what I considered a reasonable comment about Johnson and Sage. Perhaps I should have left it, but after all, if people insist on making these comments…
‘Rants’? No – just pointing out an important on-going link concerning the current world of developing police states and totalitarianism. I thought that this would be fairly obvious to those concerned about concepts such as ‘liberty’.
Sorry Annie – you’re right. I will desist from trying to correct these historical/political fantasies about based on biblical fictions gleaned from Hollywood. I’ve complained enough myself about threads being diverted by side issues.
I think any intelligent and informed person comprehends the pointlessness of trying to inform those who have swallowed the above narration laid out above. There is enough on dealing with the similar fantasy and distortion woven around the virus.
Excellent summary, many thanks
Thank you Hugh, there is nothing like confusing people with some facts.
To me, this is much more complex and I am not taking sides here, but your line of argument always struck me as being problematic if, as and when transferred to other places with robbed indigenous populations, like Australia or the USA.
You would also have to agree to hand back e.g. today’s Manhattan to them, if the Native Americans just demanded it.
Would New Yorkers be fine with that, above all NY Jews there?
IMO, it’s impossible to draw a correct and coherent line and find a similarly correct and coherent solution based upon that reasoning.
The so-called United States? absolutely the natives have been short changed, and their legitimate demands should be taken seriously!
Yes. I’ve always felt guilty at how we shot at those nice Luftwaffe pilots when all they were doing was looking for Lebensraum.
Fascinating history lesson, thanks!
But one wonders why the Jews learned so much from Hitler in their dealings with the Palestinians, and now with their own population – the vaccine rollout
And there was me thinking the powerful always grab the land they want. The Romans were particularly good at.
That is the underlying point – this current shit-show is all about power and subjection – where Israel has played a key contemporary role, as can be seen in the close links with the UK establishment and government. It has massive experience of brutal physical and psychological control – as can be seen in the vaccination programme.
Stuffing nut jobs with power.
someone in response to one of the other articles [the one about people being afraid to leave their homes – dear God!!!] referred to the looming mental health crisis. After I read the first paragraph of this article all I could think was that the looming mental health crisis must have already begun among SAGE members.
like enough – who was that adviser on the 2nd Gulf war who ended up dead?
So – the the virus creates a worse impact in July than last April when immunity was lower – when it rapidly declined before any intervention?
I think the medical term is ‘unadulterated bollocks’.
Any chance that SAGE can be abolished? Surely there’s others who can do their job.
I sincerely hope not. Without their ‘job’ this country would be sane.
Poor Paul the octopus, he died. I suppose we can live in hope that his relatives will surface and save the day…and the world.
Bit Watchmen lol
Octopuses need suckers to work effectively.
The thing is, with the PCR tests they can decide how many cases there will be. Then they just have to make up a model to match the number of cases that they are going to produce.
Meanwhile, where do they get all of the cases from? Hardly anyone I know goes for a test these days, and yet the daily cases are still in the thousands. Is it just false positives that they are generating in the hospitals?
According to the published stats (from the government’s website), almost 90% of the published test results are fromTier 2, i.e. “community testing”, with the results being provided by non-NHS labs. A sceptic might argue that it’s in the interests of these commercial labs to keep reporting a high level of positives…
Or just the lying cunts making up the results
It occurred to me this afternoon that if they did 2 things – even for only one week – stopped the testing and stopped the modelling – this “crisis” would be over within days
As I may have posted yesterday, information has never changed anybody’s mind.
https://www.chrbutler.com/information-wont-change-anyones-mind
This is about a priesthood of ‘experts’ trying to maintain the power and control of a technocratic elite.
The way to defeat them is not with information but with repetition of the Feynman line: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
These people are ignorant Rasputins.
Hearts and minds is what wins people over more than facts. That is why they push clever propaganda like “anti-vaxxer” and “vaccine hesitant” and “covid denier” and, of course, “conspiracy theorist”, a phrase popularised by those nice people at the CIA. If people don’t like you, they are not likely to listen to you at the end of the day, however many facts and figures you give them. Heal them, feed them, teach them was the formula of a wise Man.
They aren’t ignorant. They know exactly what they are doing.
Especially regarding the constant fear-mongering…
I look forward to the day when they are brought to account for what they have inflicted upon the country
and they are doing it deliberately and there isn’t a single thing we can do about them other than do our own thing
SAGE aren’t interested in evidence.They see the pathetic ‘road map’ as a challenge to their power and they’re having none of it. If all (?) restrictions are removed in June 21 and nothing happens, they’ll look beyond ridiculous, so the diaperdictator has to be sorted out right away.
You’re quite right. It’s as though they’ve been issued with notice of redundancy.
Some good graphs on here:
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-05-14-colossal-coverup-of-countless-covid-vaccine-coincidences.html
Sobering article, thank you. And very disturbing – especially the deaths of the little children from the experimental jab who had no need of it whatsoever as children are immune from the hyped-up not-particularly- lethal virus. This is murder in broad daylight. I wonder how those parents are feeling now? I bet they were told that the jabs are harmless. Still, who in their right mind would let their children be part of a massive experiment? Perhaps murder by proxy would be more apt.
CNN lying? Surely not!
Evidence such as Texas and Florida will be totally ignored. Bozo, SAGE and most of the Great Unwashed don’t want to hear it. This road to totalitarianism is well and truly set. They won’t let any inconvenient truths stand in their way now. I feel we ( the sceptics) are living in a version of The Matrix, with no way of awakening the blue pill masses. I have never felt so despairing of (most) of my fellow Man ( even that final phrase is now more or less outlawed in the United Wokedom!). Do you ever feel like SCREAMING?!!
Perhaps our fate lies in the hands of Rishi Sunak and whether or not he decides to extend beyond September.
Quick Google search:
Government payment: Until 30 June 2021, for unworked hours, the government will pay 80% of employees’ wages, capped at £2,500 per month (with the cap being proportional to hours not worked). In July 2021, for unworked hours, the government will pay 70% of employees’ wages, capped at £2,187.50. For August and September 2021, for unworked hours, the government grant will cover 60% of employee’s wages, capped at £1,875 per month.
That’s a lot of money still flowing. Sturgeon, Drakeford and SAGE will happily keep closing down swathes of the economy for the good of ‘public health’. And I know folk still on furlough who are very happy with the arrangement.
End the money, kill the lockdown dead?
UBI is just going to replace furlough, there is no end in sight there.
Totalitarians never give up their power willingly, ever.
I have repeated this endlessly, the models are designed to meet the requirements of the customer. The customer wants to have a reason not to proceed with removing constraints AND wants a good justification for renewed ‘vaccinations’ even probably mandated ones AND wants to impose Vax passports on at least 50% of the population to ensure slavery.
I am very suspicious about events in India. It looks likely that the case numbers were clearly a PCR test explosion to cover up a vaccination death peak. The peak looks like its over now as more and more refuse to have the jab.
The timing of this was too good for coincidence given the growing ‘hesitancy’ in the west for the jab now that death/illness numbers are more stark.
Yeah UBI.
But think about it: If you were one of our overlords, after having used furlough/UBI to turn us into your slaves, would you still be happy to pay a decent amount of it to a lot of people, or would you rather pay peanuts to just a few apes?
The MSM propaganda has already turned most people into apes, and the average life expectancy reducing restrictions and NPIs in combo with the gene therapies also serve a purpose here for them, that of the cull.
Seems some people want to live off pocket money.
Pocket money that can be withheld as punishment. And yes, in this analogy Boris is the parent – a scary thought.
India in graph form.
Some states are resuming the use of Invermectin to cut the death rate.
Search for Goa and Invermectin for example.
The usual suspects are out in force on CW when this is mentioned.
It’s an essential part of continuing survival of the myths – the nation is hooked on the addiction. Areal problem for the government.
Yep- been arguing this for a while. We can’t recruit staff because everyone like the free money. The fact that it will all end one day and they’ll be on the scrap heap seems not to matter. I’ve been begging my nephew to sort his CV, get off his backside and get looking for work now, before he gets stampeded when furlough ends but he’s too busy playing on his new PS5, (guess where the £ for that came from?), to think about work right now. I’ve become decidedly less charitable this last few months as I’m sick and tired of working 7 days/week and listening to all the whining, brainwashed muppets.
If the models are predicting so many hospitalisations (not deaths, I see!) regardless of jab status, does that not support the case that there’s no point getting vaxed, since it’ll happen anyway?
Nooooo, “cause without the vaaaaax it would be woooorse and we wouldn’t have the unvaaaaaxed as scaaapegoats, baaaaah.
Data that contradicts the pandemic narrative is ignored, haven’t we figured this out yet?
I don’t recall a large surge in July 2020. We weren’t in lockdown then and masks were mandated only from the end of July, and had no discernible effect on the infection curve.
Indeed. But this is a nation of goldfish in a bowl looking at Johnson’s distorted face.
… and that was last year, ffs – far beyond the reach of the latest headline.
yes – no indian variant to scare the bejaysus out of everybody last year
Oh my, even the useful id*ots editing the DT are starting to see the obvious: that this was never about public health, and that they will never let us off the hook/out of the jar again.
How anyone with an IQ above 50 still cannot grasp this is beyond me, especially in light of the WHO’s recent cementation of all the useless, draconian responses as first and only choices then.
https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2021/05/14/the_world_health_organization_endorses_lockdowns_forever_777027.html
And that’s before the climate change punishments start.
Renowned Prof. Michael Esfeld has made it very clear what was and is really going on and where this will lead: closed societies.
https://dasgoetheanum.com/impfpass-ein-weg-in-die-freiheit-oder-in-die-geschlossene-gesellschaft/
I’m afraid we might be setting ourselves up for a(nother) big fall here. Back last autumn some in the anti-lockdown camp did considerable damage to the cause by appearing to know for certain that there was going to be no winter resurgence of the virus. Then there was one.
We don’t know what is going to happen with this epidemic (and nor do SAGE!). What we do know is that lockdowns are the wrong response.
Please, try to be more cautious and careful this time.
This is very important.
I agree, I think we need to be more cautious in our predictions: Another option is they may end up being right, (but for the wrong reasons) and this will give them greater credibility, but if it’s not realised they’re right for the wrong reasons we could all be coming to the wrong conclusions about the causes and solutions.
This is a misnomer which could be explained by semantics. There is no definition or distinguishable feature between ‘wave’ and ‘resurgence’. Nearly everyone, bar Toby who famously apologised for claiming it over, said there will be a resurgence but distinguishable from an epidemic wave. Yeadon went one step further claiming that the resurgence will primarily be misdiagnosis of other respiratory disease based on the flaws of PCR testing. Either way, the data clearly shows an expected tolerance of resurgence, maybe exacerbated In January by the poor decision of rolling out a vaccine/jab program to the most vulnerable during peak respiratory disease seaso – an error only second to emptying the hospitals during the actual epidemic and refusing care home residents medical attention.
It’s not difficult to predict the next ‘resurgence’ or ‘wave’ in the UK. It’s harder to predict what the interventional programs from the authorities will do or have done till much after the event.
It’s all made up bollox the figures will be whatever the corrupt cunts want them to be.
True, but come on- we aren’t going to get 10,000 cases/day any more than we got 4,000 deaths per day last year. That was an absurd claim that took about 30 seconds to debunk- you simply couldn’t get the case numbers to get that many deaths and yet no one challenged. This nonsense needs challenging!
It’s no good bleating about being unable to get the government to ignore SAGE. You are missing the point. SAGE is an arm of the government propaganda machine. The government doesn’t obey SAGE, SAGE obeys the government.
There was an embarrassing email thread that came to light in Germany, where one of the German regional governments contacted academics with the stated intention that they wanted to receive evidence to support their decision to impose NPIs. The specific wording of the emails reflected the sensitivity of the content, and there was little doubt as to how the sender intended the information to be used. (I’ve just tried to locate this story online but I can’t seem to find it now.) Personally, I have little doubt that the members of SAGE have received similar guidance from UKG.
Re. Groupthink. There are psychologists on the SAGE committee who should be fully aware of the dangers of groupthink. In theory, they should be piping up in every meeting to raise the topic and debate it just in case. Kings College seems to be big on these committees, worth a look to see where their funding comes from.
Unfortunately many psychologists have little training, not even A levels, in a breadth of hard sciences such as physics, chemistry, biology, maths. Therefore they are likely to be incapable of recognising a line of bullshit from the other so-called experts.
SAGE not only needs to be disbanded, legal proceedings and prosecutions of the chief troublemakers should happen.
It seems easy enough to model reality using numbers and equations and can be very good when describing/explaining the past.
It’s not so easy to predict the future. You can take 100 models that try to predict the future using past data and some of them will be right. Most probably won’t be.
Anybody who could accurately predict the future using maths would more than likely be working in finance and raking it in. Everyone else? I’ll accept that they may understand the maths but they probably don’t understand the real world.
We have such a one on a committee in our village. This member insists that we meet on Zoom even though we live less than half a mile from each other, and other village groups have met indoors and without masks! He cannot see the ludicrousness of his demands.
Tell him to do one? Refuse?