Dominic Cummings has fired off his latest salvo against his former boss ahead of his appearance before MPs to give evidence on May 26th, laying into Boris Johnson and the Government for not locking down sooner, among other complaints.
The disgruntled former chief adviser to the Prime Minister wrote a series of posts on Twitter that began by criticising Sweden’s response before ranging over other issues including human challenge vaccine trials and the transparency of SAGE.
Those of us “obsessed with spreading nonsense on Sweden/lockdowns” are treated to Dom’s “summary evidence on lockdowns”. Unfortunately for him, however, he seems to get his facts from somewhere other than the real world.
Dom takes a shot at the “trade-off argument” – the argument that lockdowns intended to control disease have a lot of downsides. He argues that Taiwan shows how “fast hard effective action [is the] best policy for [the] economy AND for reducing deaths/suffering”, and that “if you REALLY get your act together not only is [the] econ[omy] largely unscathed but life is [close to] normal”. He claims the Government is “totally hostile to learning from East Asia” because they and their advisers believe “Asians all do as they’re told it won’t work here”.
It’s true that East Asian countries have suffered considerably fewer deaths during the pandemic than the countries of Europe and the Americas. But the idea that that is because they imposed lockdowns hard and fast is palpable nonsense. Japan has not imposed a strict lockdown and neither has Taiwan or South Korea (see below). Worth recalling that South Korea has more commonly been lauded for avoiding hard lockdown by being so good at contact tracing, not for being fast to lock down hard. Contact tracing is also very unlikely to be the main reason for South Korea’s epidemic remaining small, but either way there is no basis to Dom’s claim that East Asia’s success is due to hard and fast lockdowns. As for Taiwan’s current “normal”, that involves very tight border restrictions that have been in place since February 6th 2020, and the country has just imposed new restrictions on the capital region Taipei.
Countries with the strictest lockdowns, such as Peru and Chile, have suffered far worse than some with light measures like Sweden. The reasons for the large differences between countries and world regions are not well understood (likely a combination of demographics and prior susceptibility) but there is no evidence the speed and strictness of lockdowns has played an important role. There are now numerous peer-reviewed analyses that come to this conclusion. Dom is known to be a fan of big data and this is big data he should definitely familiarise himself with.
He then moves on to the claim that Sweden had a voluntary lockdown anyway, stating: “Data shows despite no official ‘lockdown’ behaviour changed enormously. The closer your measures are to ‘welding people inside homes’ (per Wuhan at peak) the [much greater] effect on transmission”.
Leaving aside the alarming approval of the Chinese policy of “welding people inside homes”, the claim that “data shows” that Swedes essentially locked themselves down in 2020 is not true. As can be seen below, Swedes did change their behaviour in 2020, but not as much as elsewhere. Use of workplaces, for example, decreased by only around 20-25% in spring 2020, whereas in the UK it dropped by 65%. Residential use increased by about 10% in Sweden, but in the UK it increased by about 25%. Fraser Nelson (who happens to be Dom’s wife Mary Wakefield’s boss – is he one of the “political pundits obsessed with spreading nonsense on Sweden” that Dom has in mind?) – has done a good overview of the data from Sweden in the Spectator.
Dom warms to his theme and says the “nightmare rumbles on” because our lockdowns have been too late and too lax:
If you are going to have to do measures [like] lockdown to avoid health system collapse then the harder/earlier the better & the sooner they can be released. Pseudo ‘lockdowns’ [without] serious enforcement are hopeless: econ[omy] hit & people die anyway, nightmare rumbles on.
Again, though, for someone who loves science and data this shows a striking lack of familiarity with the scientific literature, which has shown time and again that the timing and severity of lockdown measures have no relationship to the size of the epidemic in a country and the number of deaths. Professor Simon Wood has shown that infections were already in decline ahead of all three lockdowns in England, so could not be the cause of the decline. If lockdowns work and enable us to get back to normal, why do we have to keep imposing them, and why does normal never arrive?
By focusing entirely on Sweden Dom also shows he is behind where the conversation is up to as he fails to engage with the experience of American states which have not locked down or have lifted restrictions. Texas, which was accused by President Biden of “Neanderthal thinking” when it lifted its restrictions in early March, recorded a day with zero Covid deaths on Sunday. It can’t be repeated too often that states like South Dakota which imposed no restrictions, Florida, which lifted its restrictions in the autumn, and Texas, which lifted its restrictions in March 2021, have fared no worse than other states which have implemented or continued with various lockdown measures.
Dom is a man with an axe to grind after his ignominious defenestration from Downing Street in November, apparently at the behest of the Prime Minister’s consort. With his latest Twitter rant it is now beyond doubt that he was a lockdown hawk in Downing Street (although, bizarrely, they call themselves the “doves”), pushing for harder, faster and longer restrictions and the imitation of oppressive regimes overseas. Sceptics can be glad there is one less supporter of “welding people in homes” who has the Prime Minister’s ear – though there seem to be no shortage of them, sadly.
Dom still has the potential to do the Government a lot of harm, appealing to the pro-lockdown sentiment in the country that he helped to foster and hammering ministers for not being hawkish dove-ish enough. It’s hard to see how this can be good for lockdown scepticism. But he could at least get his facts right.
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The man is totally bonkers. End of.
Exactly. Quite a few excellent military commanders were bonkers as well. They had the knack, for a while, but their bonkers behaviour would always run into reality in the end.
Yes, and bonkers cost lives…
or create them I suppose, as in bonk-ing?? 🙂
His bonkers stupidity was evident when he was burbling incontinently about education when with the other moron, Gove in the DfE.
He is classic proof of ‘educated’ stupidity. Like Johnson and Gove …. and all the cabinet.
I guess he actually means lockdown for the plebs , but not him if he needs an eye test.
Correlation does not equal causation, and the presence of Mr Cummings on the Vote Leave campaign did not cause it to win, he was simply there when the Remain campaign failed. He is not a political genius, he is someone who seems to think that government can be made to work with the right experts (which seem to be people implementing policies that he approves of).
Johnson and Cummings deserve each other.
He was good at boiling things down to some simple messages in a yes-no campaign. The Covid pandemic called for judgement which these comments just underline he was totally lacking in.
‘and the presence of Mr Cummings on the Vote Leave campaign did not cause it to win,’
You know, I’ve always thought this too – the idea of Dominic Cummings waving his magic wand and single-handedly masterminding the whole Brexit thing – I just suspected was hyped-up nonsense and possibly an attempt by the political establishment (in particular the conservative party) to steal all the glory from the real architect of Brexit … a certain Mr Nigel Farage. However, I’m also inclined to believe that the British public would have voted to leave the EU regardless of who was on the Vote Leave campaign – in fact a comfortable UKIP win two years before in the euro-elections of 2014 was a strong indicator of British intentions if any referendum was held regarding membership of the EU.
The lunatic has left the asylum and is now walking the streets barking at passers by.
A sane society would commit this individual to a mental asylum posthaste.
Swivel-eyed and completely mad.
He’s deeply disliked by the public. It’ll be interesting to see who gets behind him on this.
Cummings is the Johnson ying to Blair’s Campbell yang. Embittered cnuts, both.
I won’t have that sir, wise Cnut knew the limits of government power, and showed that he couldn’t simply command nature by ordering the tide to turn. Please reverse the ‘n’ and ‘u’.
I would, but I’d hate be algorithmed.
Cnuts-Cnuts?
That’s the female of the species.
Probably more d than the m.
Mrs Toad to be comes out well from this rant. If she was urging Toad to fire Dom and his mates, she was right.
This might get interesting. If the upcoming hearings take this ‘lockdown too late’ path them Johnson and SAGE might have to start turning to the scientists they’ve been trying to ridicule over the last year for some assistance on the facts. That’ll be a turn up
There won’t be a hearing, as there won’t be a recognisable nation by then.
Ahh the “Sweden actually locked down” argument which was completly ignored when everyone was crying about how dreadful it would be for Sweden – remember Feargesun’s unherd interview where he confidently predicted deaths would rise.
Sweden, Florida, South Dakota, Texas, they all demonstrate one important thing: in the absence of lockdown this disease will not be the catastrophic disaster that Cummings predicted, and in the absence of catastropy lockdowns can never be justified.
I’m glad this worm has left downing street.
Will Jones is not quoting from “the latest estimates” from the European Commission as he claims. He is quoting from forecasts for 2020 made in the autumn of 2020. Those forecasts turned out to be wrong. If you look at the real latest information from the EC (Spring 2021) you will see that in fact Cummings is (just) correct. Sweden’s economy shrank 2.8 % in 2020, Denmark’s shrank 2.7%.
You credit the EU figures? London Bridge isn’t on rightmove, but I can cut you a deal.
Poland and Hungary plus the rest of Eastern Europe seemed to be doing well on Covid last year…this year they all doing crap. The game isn’t over yet. We’ll see what happens to Denmark and Norway.
Haha Bonkers Barnard in this Twitter thread just reminds me of Russell Crow in the end of A Beautiful Mind
I bet he has an actual wall like this, any suggestions as to what he has on it?!
“I must remember not to believe what I say. I must remember not to believe what I say. I must remember not to believe what I say.”
Maybe Mr Cummings would like us to enslave ethnic minorities and sell their organs to the NHS like China too?
No, but perhaps the whole population?
Probably the unvaccinated, pariahs that we are.
Hmmm – who should I listen to regarding the effectiveness of lockdowns – a former political advisor with the hump and who bears a grudge against his former boss … or the virus pandemic experts around the globe who will tell you now that lockdowns do not work and will prove to be far more deadlier than the disease itself.
Its a tough one to call?
PS: Sweden called it right … the rest of the western world were wrong and they will pay heavily for this dreadful decision for decades to come.
Sweden was and is far too restrictive.
Only Belarus and Tanzania had it right.
And Taiwan is just closing schools…
As for New Zealand’s future, just google North Sentinel Island.
New Zealand will be a new horror movie ‘Planet of the Sheep’.
NZ policy:
Dig a hole.
Pull it in after you.
Pretend it isn’t a hole.
End of.
New Zealand is Howard Hughes * 4,857,178
I did wonder which way Cummings swang on lockdowns. Aside from that I couldn’t give can toss on his opinions.
He is Gove’s dog, so this tells us how Gove thinks.
Why are you calling the nowhere near as bright as he thinks he is goblin “Dom”?
Having read the Cummings tweets I’ve come up with my own recommended book title:
The Bull-Shitters: How the modern world became a playground for mountebanks, lunatics and fanatics and how we can stop the BS.
Among his insane ramblings, Cummings notes, correctly, that:
Starship is ~x1000 performance improvement on shuttle, 1/200 cost & x5 payload
Starship is Space X’s rocket designed to get humans back on the Moon and to Mars for the first time. Space X is owned and led by Elon Musk. Elon Musk is 1000 the man that Cummings is. During the worst of the pandemic he insisted that work on the Starship proceed at full speed and would have nothing to do with furlough. It is people like Musk who get things done (and also warn us about the dangers of AI, by the way). He understands life is about taking on challenges and correctly weighing risk – not hiding at home behind a welded up front door.
No he’s a conman his space rockets are all bs
Showing you know nothing about rockets. His Falcon 9 is the most successful rocket ever. Period, as the Americans say.
Ah but one thing DC is good at it’s reading the room… Making a big play of the atrocities Bojo could have imposed on the UK but chose not to makes the buffoon look like a flipping saint compared to China in the eyes of the deluded herd.
And… I’m convinced he’s still in Bojo’s employ somehow, I don’t believe that entirely stage managed departure through the front door was in any way true – DC simply spotted that as long as he was visible to the public then Bojo’s credibility and popularity were at risk. There was an article in the Daily Fail in May 2020 which reported that DC said he would leave in 6 months… lo and behold.
See also Bojo’s stint in hospital in March last year…
I was about to write much the same.
I see this as theatre. Countering the lockdown pushback argument with the exact opposite to take the heat of his dear friend. I too don’t buy his dismissal from #10. These are slippery fuckers we’re dealing with and none are to be trusted, least of all this weasel; he’s still playing his part.
Nah, they’re having a good old fashioned pissing contest.
Cummings is about to experience what everyone else in Britain has felt over the last year: the awesome power of the state crushing him.
Maybe he works for someone else higher up the food chain.
I’ve read through his tweets – well quickly, they don’t merit much time wasted. Not a mention of the downsides of lockdown, in particular no mention of the dire effects on children. His kids were probably OK – they probably just hired a tutor as rich people did during lockdown (I know a couple who did – I think it was widespread). His simplistic thesis seems to be that if we had welded people in their houses (he’s so mad, I’m not sure he doesn’t mean it literally) then we would have resolved the Covid problem. The useless government of which he was such an important part (he’s no civil servant) had no pandemic plan and could not even organise sufficient PPE. How were they going to organise the feeding of 70 million people in their homes (including the feeding of millions of illegal immigrants who wouldn’t be appearing on any official lists)? He seems to have absolutely no understanding of virology or immunity. I’m not claiming I have any great understanding but it seems obvious to me that people in the Far East have some sort of heightened immunity, probably due to previous SARS infections. The twat cites Taiwan… Read more »
This is the chap who managed to minimise his movement by driving from London to Durham, and had that excursion to wonderful Barnard Castle ‘to test his eyesight’, when he’d supported policies that made such a trip possibly illegal, and whose sole achievement in politics was not being worse than Will Straw CBE, head of the Remain campaign.
The government did have a pandemic plan but they jettisoned it for the new (build back) better plan!
He’s not wrong in that the British public is at least as pliant and obedient as “Asians”. And with much less force and coercion.No need to weld Brits into their homes as they’re quite happy to isolate themselves and rat on anyone else who doesn’t.
True. It has been a shock to me how compliant people are, how fragile our society really is, and how manipulative our politicians have been.
I’m shocked at how easily people are manipulated. Though I guess I shouldn’t be. That is the basis of advertising after all.
I think the man is a psychopath. Even if lockdowns had the claimed effect on transmission of Covid, it doesn’t follow that they are they are moral or proportionate. This is a man that sees only models, papers and power. He doesn’t see people and their dignity.
And on Sweden… how many deaths did the models predict? It was somewhat larger than reality as I remember.
Lockdowns – like all measures taken are a total irrelevancy. Not only because they are ineffective, but because Covid is a big ‘nothing’, contributing little to the normal totals of mortality. It’s scam upon scam upon scam.
Totally correct – he doesn’t seem to even recognise that balance. No mention of the effects on children.
Is this the guy who writes poems to Molech on his blog? No surprise there then…
Dominic Cummings: totalitarian bag of shite.
This is a man broke his own covid rules and then drove his car with his child in it to test his eyesight – I think that says it all.
Actually he didn’t break the rules by driving to Co Durham. Being him, he studied the full text of the regs. rather than relying on summaries in the press, like the rest of us did at that time. I learned something useful from him then. Not here, though.
I think he’s missed one of the essential weaknesses of mandatory lockdowns. .
Yes, Sweden self-limited but so too did the UK. The gains to be had from that ‘last mile’ of mandatory stay-at-home-orders are meagre, destructive, expensive and target those who 1. not at risk 2. are likely to disobey them anyway (quite wisely).
He’s a knob always has been – eos.
We start to see that the Rasputin-type influence this fraud had over Government, and Johnson in particular, was almost completely malign. Maybe Carrie is not all bad after all.
The buck stops with the PM.
Very cynical to use lockdowns to try and get even with the Prime Minister. DC knows perfectly well that the country has been brainwashed into believing the fairy story that ‘we did not lockdown soon enough”. Unfortunately for Boris he jettisoned the original pandemic preparedness plan in favour all this nonsense. Now the nonsense has become the political narrative.
All these people like Cummings and sage dispensed with science in March 2020 and replaced it with data. The problem with this approach is that it lacks any search to find out what is really behind the numbers. For example recently I was communicating with this guy from NZ who honestly believes like Dom lockdown saved his country. He gave a long list of countries in that part of the world which showed how well these countries had done under lockdown. So on the surface lockdown works but when you scratch below the surface and look at things like prior immunity, diet, health and age of population you see lockdown pales into insignificance. This is what science does,it searches for truth and doesn’t just look at the numbers and quite often is counter intuitive.
Great summation in your first sentence.
Cummings and sage are just data junkers who don’t seek truth but what they can get away with and simple put two fingers up to truth.
The unevidenced opinionated bigotry on display from so many over the last 14 months can only be categorised as bovine stupidity.
Denmark looks after its elderly predominantly in the home not in institutions.
So does Greece.
Consequently neither country has had the care home mortality experienced, for example, in this country and Sweden, exacerbated by lethal government interventions.
We have paid a high price for our failure to support the family in this country and elsewhere.
This takes about 5 minutes on the internet to establish, as did the fact that covid 19 is another now endemic seasonal common cold coronavirus.
Seriously, what is wrong with these people?
“Seriously, what is wrong with these people?” Human weakness. Vanity, ambition, evil.