The Times leads with Nicola Sturgeon’s exit plan for Scotland. “The First Minister published a 26-page ‘framework’ for easing the lockdown and discussed plans for reopening schools, businesses and allowing small gatherings,” it reports. Sturgeon didn’t say when this might happen, but argued there should be a “better balance” between tackling the disease and protecting the economy. In addition, Arlene Foster, the First Minister of Northern Ireland, suggested that lockdown restrictions could be eased at a faster pace there than in the rest of the UK. Guernsey has already put an exit strategy in place, with gardeners, mechanics, estate agents and builders returning to work tomorrow. And in an encouraging sign, various senior Tories praised Sturgeon’s initiative, including Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis and former Chancellor George Osborne who said we need to start talking about “the hard trade-offs”.
According to the Telegraph, Boris will return to work next week (as predicted on this site on Tuesday). Will he make an appearance at the Downing Street press conference on Monday and unveil an exit plan? Sturgeon apparently thinks so. After all, why start talking about her own exit strategy yesterday unless she thinks Boris is about to do likewise? She evidently thinks a big announcement is imminent and wants to make it look as though she bounced the dithering Prime Minster into making a decision. She may be wrong of course, but Boris will have to do something to make it clear he’s back in charge. The holding line – that it’s premature to talk about an exit strategy while deaths are still peaking – won’t survive his return to Downing Street. Once Biggles has recovered from his injuries and is back in the cockpit, people will expect action.
But is the general public ready for a phased exit? One of the things I’ve been puzzling over during this crisis is the willingness of freeborn Englishmen to acquiesce to the greatest suspension of their liberties since the Second World War. And not merely acquiesce – most of them think the Government should go even further. According to an opinion poll published last week, only 6% of people think the current restrictions are “too severe”, while 44% think they’re “not severe enough”. James Kirkup, Director of the Social Market Foundation, has tried to unravel this mystery in UnHerd. One of the points he makes is that the 35% of the English electorate who identity as “very strongly English” are also the most authoritarian, according to research done by Paula Sturridge at Bristol University. “The more English you feel, the more likely you are to say that the state and society should tell people what to do, to make them conform and, when they disobey, to punish them harshly,” he writes. You can read his article here.
Thankfully, not everyone has fallen into lockstep with the new orthodoxy. A letter in today’s Telegraph is a reminder of how unimpressed many older people are by the official response to the crisis. Worth quoting in full:
SIR – Russell Lynch (Business, April 22) is right to warn the Government that to prolong lockdown for the over-70s would be “suicidal politics”.
There is widespread “elderly” contempt for the woke-driven pandemic policy: the craven subservience to discredited scientists; insulting war comparisons; deification of the heroic but ill-managed NHS; totalitarian hand-clapping; arrogant directives; officious policing; closing houses of worship; the brute ignorance of Christianity.
If lockdown is not speedily lifted, we 8.8 million “elderly” voters will take our revenge at the general election.
John McEwen
London SW1
There are some encouraging signs that attitudes are beginning to shift more widely. On Monday I noted that my local park in Acton was more crowded than it had been at any time since March 23rd and readers have been reporting similar experiences all week. For instance, one writes: “My eldest son, who lives in Thamesmead, goes out every early evening with his daughter for a walk. He assures me that in the last seven days or so there has been a dramatic increase in cars on the roads, more and more people about – often in groups that are quite clearly made up of children and adults from more than one household, and some evidently visiting other people. Prior to that it was silent with virtually no traffic.”
The Mail picked up on this new mood yesterday, noting that it was the hottest day of the year so far: “Britons all over the UK have ignored lockdown rules today to flock to parks, beaches and promenades as temperatures hit 75F.” The Mail reports that there were long queues outside B&Q stores across the country, as well as the Five Guys hamburger chain, and the AA says journeys were up 10% this week compared to last. If the public are tiring of lockdown it will be hard for the Government to keep it in place, particularly without an exit strategy. And the hot weather looks set to continue:
One sceptical website I’ve neglected to mention until now – and should have flagged up earlier – is COVID-19 In Proportion. It’s full of great graphs such as the one below showing that the the number of deaths in Week 15 of 2020 were lower than they were in some previous flu seasons:
The Media section is also worth looking at, particularly the bit comparing the hysterical alarmism of the BBC News website this week, when the ONS announced that 3,760 had died of COVID-19 in the week ending 10th April, with the home page of the same site on the 13th January 2018 when 3,075 died of respiratory disease. Needless to say, the latter contained nerry a mention of the unusually high death toll. As COVID-19 In Proportion reminds us, the cumulative death toll by the end of Week 15 in 2018 (187, 720) was higher than it was this year (184,960).
And here’s my favourite graph so far. If you take the assumptions that Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College used to predict the death tolls in the UK absent a lockdown (510,000 if we carried on as normal, 250,000 if we continued with mitigation) and use them to model what should have happened in Sweden absent a lockdown, you get the following:
In case you can’t read the small print, the blue area is the daily deaths per 100,000 the Imperial model would have predicted in the “do nothing” scenario, the yellow area is what would have happened if Sweden had stuck with mitigation – which is what it did, obviously – and the red area is the actual number of Swedes who’ve died.
One of the reasons Professor Ferguson estimated such a high death toll in the UK absent a lockdown is because he assumed that <5% of the population had been infected and the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) is ~0.9%. As each day passes, those assumptions look more and more shaky. Yesterday, the results of an antibody study done in New York were published in which 3,000 people were randomly tested at grocery stores and shopping locations across 19 counties in 40 localities. The result? 13.9% tested positive, indicating 2.7 million New Yorkers have already been infected. In New York City the number is 21.2%. (In Stockholm it’s 25%.) And, of course, the higher the number of people infected, the lower the IFR, which is the number of infected divided by the number who’ve died. Mario Cuomo, the Governor of New York, puts the IFR at 0.5%, but in all likelihood it will turn out to be lower.
We’ve heard about the five tests our Government has set before lockdown can be lifted. Arch-sceptic Heather Mac Donald has devised five tests US state governors should set themselves before extending lockdowns. They are:
- How many coronavirus deaths do you expect to avert by the shut-down extension?
- What will your state’s economy look like after another month of enforced stasis?
- How many workers will have lost their jobs?
- How many businesses will have closed for good?
- How many of your state’s young residents, seeking employment for the first time, will be unable to find it?
When I made my original sceptical argument in the Critic last month, I pointed out that an extended lockdown would likely result in a greater loss of life than lifting it. But I was just talking about the UK. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the people who’ll pay the heaviest price for decision of Western governments to sacrifice their economies to keep the virus at bay will be those in the developing world. In this week’s Spectator, Aidan Hartley spells it out:
Starkest of all will be Africa’s economic collapse, wiping out jobs for many of the continent’s 1.2 billion people. Tourism, vital to the conservation of wildlife, forests and monuments, has fallen apart. Mining, oil and gas are close behind. Exports of tea, coffee and cocoa are also being hit hard. Until recently Africa served as a giant nursery, raising migrants to supply cheap labour for rich countries. Every month these workers send money home to their families, and remittances are now the largest source of foreign exchange in many countries. As diaspora Africans fall out of work, these funds are evaporating. In the high-density slums, each breadwinner might feed ten mouths. Nairobi city governor Mike Sonko promised mass distributions of Hennessy cognac because ‘alcohol plays a major role in killing the coronavirus’ — but such clowning aside, slum-dwellers have no cash reserves, nor a welfare state to rescue them. As global supply chains collapse, it becomes horribly clear that out of 54 African states, only Zambia is a net food exporter. Many Africans routinely rely on food aid. For oil-dependent Nigeria’s nearly 200 million people, life is about to get tough.
Another piece worth reading in this week’s Spectator – the 10,000th issue, no less – is Matt Ridley’s. Forget about finding a vaccine, he says, and focus on the treatments: “Within a month or two, one of the 30 or more therapies currently being tested is likely to prove effective and safe.” And there’s my column of course, although it’s not about the virus this week. (I also appeared the Last Orders podcast yesterday with Christopher Snowdon and Tom Slater.)
A bizarre article appeared in the Huffington Post yesterday arguing that it would be a shame if Oxford University wins the race to develop a vaccine because that could be used by knuckle-dragging nationalists as way to belittle the universities of other countries. Written by Emily Cousins, who teaches women’s studies at Oxford, it argues that any triumph for the ancient university “will be used as it has been in the past, to fulfil its political, patriotic function as proof of British excellence”. But as Andrew Neil pointed out on Twitter, if Oxford does develop a vaccine, won’t that in fact be proof of British excellence? After all, Oxford is consistently ranked in the top five universities in the world, often it he top two. You can read her bonkers argument here.
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This article, even just the headline alone, should wipe the smugness right off of Saint Jacinda’s face.
I wish something would !
Sweden said “judge us in a year or two”.
I remember Johan Giesecke, the man employed Tegnell, being interviewed by Sky News Australia (Murdoch owned, vaguely lockdown sceptical at a time when no-one was) talking about the isolationist approach taken by Aus and NZ. Giesecke said something along the lines of “you might think you’re doing well now, but how are you going to get out of it?….well, that’s your problem”.
But Giesecke, Tegnell and all of us at LS/DS are just nutjob conspiracy theorists and granny-killers, we never predicted any of this.
Yes, for me, it was nerve-racking at times being on a contrary side when there was so much societal pressure and such an outright sense of threat. Two years on, I’m glad I stuck with my views, joined the FSU and became a DS donor. LS/DS was a literal lifesaver. I was in absolute despair at what was going on! I also discovered the wonders of The Fandom Menace and all the other anti-woke people on YouTube!
It’s interesting that the friends I’ve remained close to are all lockdown sceptics and we all continued to spend time with each other. The divide even among people over the lockdowns and related restrictions is now bigger than the old remainer-leaver paradigm.
There was huge disobedience though. One of the best moments I had during the lockdowns was when I visited some friends who worked in a hotel. It had just reopened to guests in 2020 while all the track and trace fascism was at its peak. I didn’t have to register my name when I walked into the building, I walked into the bar and the wonderful bar manager shook my and and hugged me and his wife ran over and gave me a hug and a kiss. That was so important, psychologically. And we’re all alive and well! And no one in the surrounding village or any of the guests ever died from COVID-19!
The owner was really good to his staff. He told them that if they couldn’t afford their rent and were struggling with money (no tips to top up pay), they could all move into the hotel for free and use the food and drink for free, since it was going to go past the sell-by dates and have to be got rid of otherwise, so many of the staff lived there together throughout the lockdown!
I feel some sense of schadenfreude towards Ardern. She’s another WEF graduate and was in lockstep with most of her WEF compadres who enthusiastically embraced lockdowns. I feel desperately sorry for the people of New Zealand who are now suffering for the demonstrable utopian totalitarian incompetence of most WEF graduates. I mean, who of any of the known graduates who went into politics hasn’t been authoritarian and incompetent? Merkel enriched her own country, but wrecked the EU and helped drive out the UK, Macron is an authoritarian fool in and out of the closet, tolerated as the least worst choice of president, Trudeau is an intellectual vacuum, Ardern is a failure, Newsom only survived the recall because California is full of crazed Democrats, Matt Hancock eventually was chucked out – albeit for his hypocrisy, not his failure as Health Secretary, Pete Buttigieg is a joke. Only Viktor Orbàn has any credibility…
Totally agree. This shitshow has driven people apart but also brought them together. Funny, we know a sceptical hotel manager who gave some of my family a very warm welcome in covidtard Italy.
You speak for me and many more, DomH75. A terrifying time, in so many ways.
“It’s interesting that the friends I’ve remained close to are all lockdown sceptics”.
Yes, I was afraid of that. These crooks have done a bally good job of dividing families and communities against each other, for me on of their worst crimes. I’m glad some people at least benefitted from the hotel food that holiday makers should have had.
For my part, i feel sorry for the British police officers who went to work in NZ to get back to proper policing – and got landed with her, and this shambles.
Thank you Dom very well put and certainly in those very dark times my daily shot of LS was indeed a life saver and as I’ve said here many times before literally stopped me from going mad. So thank Toby and all at TDS and indeed to all you guys on this platform.
Unfortunately as it’s by no means over we still need each other more than ever.
(Aus??? Surely Oz…).
Prescient indeed!
Those teeth! Damn! They actually look superimposed! Nope, I don’t feel in the slightest bit guilty for mocking this evil creature.
When will the rest of the world get it? It is currently not possible to create a vaccine for a cold. While buying a drink earlier today I overheard some idiot saying to his mate “Just recovered from Covid. Can’t believe it. I’m triple jabbed so thought I was safe”. The guy was a healthy looking twenty something. I couldn’t help it. I turned around and said “You were safe, until you took three shots of an experimental (and this is where I couldn’t resist the finger quotes) ‘vaccine’ that you did not need. You’ve ‘recovered’ (more finger quotes) because you are at no risk from Covid, but you are from the experiment you’ve taken part in”. My intervention, strangely, didn’t appear overly welcome, but we’ve somehow got to get these morons thinking for themselves.
…yes, I don’t start anything but I will not take any crap…and we have to nip any foolishness in the bud….
was proud of Mr Gum today, he went to the local butchers which is quite small, a man was standing outside the door and when my husband tried to get past he said he was next in the q…mr Gum asked him why he wasn’t in the shop, he replied ‘only three are allowed in’….long story short, this man went in when one came out, Mr gum followed him straight in..so he made four!! Then horror of horrors two more came in…Mr Gum said it was marvellous!!
Sadly, even in Yorkshire, some people don’t have commonsense. Of course, he could’ve been one of those “out of towners”…
(I wish I’d overhear stuff like that, sadly I never seem to…).
Is it not the middle of winter in the southern hemisphere? Do respiratory diseases work differently down there?
Dont get me wrong i’m all for a bit of Jacinda bashing but this has a whiff of ‘dog bites man’ journalism about it (standard fare for Mail Online these days). Yes I get the vaccine angle, that they are meant to prevent serious illness and death, but we have known that’s not the case for quite a while now.
Im not being facetious here. Unless we get back to normal thinking that respiratory illness and death increase in winter then there is always the risk that we’ll be bounced back into another lockdown.
No doubt she’s in the “something must be done” club. As an aside, it might be worth asking the undertakers what the level of trade is like in a typical winter. Quite a few family funerals have taken place at that time of year, in my case.
From another part of wintery Southern Hemisphere, positive tests, hospitalisations and deaths continue to drop. Seven day average deaths attributed to covid now about 4 in a population of about 60 mill, in other words nothing. The power of post infectious immunity! Most people have had a cold, but even the previous covidians start with “ the kids brought a cold home from school and gave it to me. Just a cold, not covid”, this without testing (here you have to pay for it). Even the 3 jabbers are displaying no interest in another, many openly saying enough is enough. While I was travelling in UK and Netherlands in june(no vaccine or other covid paperwork requested at any point) all covid rules dropped in SA. This was a turnaround, seemingly due to impending court action brought by civil society organisations, government apparently advised they would lose on medical and legal grounds. People very keen to get on with life. More worried about increasing number of others they know having heart attacks or strokes. Who would have thought?
This virtual slap in the face of Jackie A is most definitely necessary. Of course it is not surprising that a respiratory virus is causing illness and in some cases death in the middle of winter down under.
But NZ was held up to the world, alongside China, as a shining example of how hiding under the bed meant you could “beat the virus”. They were going to keep NZ shut until they had a vaxx and come out completely unscathed and the severe lockdown would have been worth it. All they did was postpone the inevitable and prove the utter, utter failure of both lockdowns and this chemical injection they call a vaccine. This point must absolutely be driven home a million times over, as even now, a corona-infected 4x vaxxed and pfaxlovided US president is being presented as some type of proof that all these measures worked…
Their hubris came back to bit them, basically. It was pride before the fall.
The fact that NZ is now doing worse than Australia, also in the middle of winter, is however important. Either way, the moral of the story is you can’t kick the can down the road forever. Sooner or later, the ferryman wants his money and he’s gonna get it.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/protests-planned-by-brian-tamaki-led-freedom-and-rights-coalition/NVFLLUSGM6TZXWDX3EICRIMBME/
First person to receive compensation for wrongful death caused by AstraZeneca’s covid vaccine speaks out
https://www.newstarget.com/2022-07-22-first-person-compensated-astrazenca-vaccine-death-speaks.html
A 48-year-old rock singer named Zion was killed by AstraZeneca’s covid-19 vaccine and a string of misdiagnoses and medical malpractice in May of 2021. When all was said and done, neurosurgeons at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle linked Zion’s death back to the experimental vaccine. Zion received the vaccine and began suffering from migraines and occipital neuralgia just eight days later. He suffered a serious reaction that was not properly treated, that ultimately led to slurred speech, loss of balance, seizures and a brain bleed.
His fiancée, 38-year-old Vikki Spit, became the first person to receive compensation for wrongful death caused by the controversial covid-19 vaccine.
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…but haven’t we been here before? What will stop this madness?
Because all that will happen is they’ll re-introduce some measures, then the next ‘booster’ and carry on like before!!
I’m so fecking weary with it all…..
Ooh, I thought they might. How’s the “saintly” one doing then? You know, I think some of these WEF types might possibly have quite a hard time when people start to cotton on to their crimes against humanity…
“But the number of deaths being high despite vaccination and the mildness of Omicron does raise serious questions about the effectiveness of vaccination.”
Well I never blow me down with a feather. When are we going to stop pretending these poisonous experimental jabs are doing anyone anywhere any good? Please just STOP.
A phone call with my sister-in-law in Western Australia yielded the information that “New Zealand and Australia have been very strict(!) with their regulations to protect their indigenous populations who are very susceptible to Covid”… She believes that too.
I hadn’t heard that reason before.
She, of course, is quadruple vaccinated and would lockdown at a moment’s notice. Her daughter and family in Melbourne ditto. We won’t be going the Australia anytime soon.
A comp chart expressing their disastrous approach well.
In the UK early on in the pandemic, I remember one SAGE scientist, I think it might have been Edmonds, suggesting that lockdowns would not save any lives just delay the deaths a little to “flatten the curve” and ease pressure on the NHS. As the weeks of lockdown turned into months the narrative changed to the idea that lockdowns “save lives”. In reality they have indirectly contributed to many more deaths. New Zealand tried to hold back the tide but in contrast to wise King Cnut, their Queen was just as unhinged as her courtiers.
I am a compassionate person with bags of humility but Jacinda Ardern is someone who’d I’d pay to see facially paralysed by the Covid vaccine. Sadly I very much doubt she’s ever even had one.
All comes back to this interview with Giesecke in April 2020:
https://unherd.com/thepost/coming-up-epidemiologist-prof-johan-giesecke-shares-lessons-from-sweden/
Indeed, looks like Sweden ultimately won the lockdown debate once and for all.
“Covid death rates have reached record highs in New Zealand as the country faces a new Omicron wave, despite high levels of vaccination.”
versus
“England’s latest Covid outbreak was slowing down a fortnight ago, according to official data from the ONS, as it once again peaks without masks or restrictions.”
I wonder if there is a lesson there for those wanting to learn?
It was predicted that NZ could stay in isolation for ever, that when it did open up the sort of natural immunity to CoV 2 gained in open Countries would be absent from NZ and when the inevitable infections started, they would hit hard.
It also shows just how useless the pseudo-vaccines are compared with natural acquired immunity – not just useless, actually dangerous in increasing vulnerability.
Will ‘lessons be learned’?
Their hubris did not age well at all, it seems. Can you say, “I told you so!”
Meanwhile, in Sweden….