Month: May 2020

I cannot be alone in noticing the huge gulf between the sympathetic coverage given to the Black Lives Matter protests in the mainstream media and the almost universally hostile coverage of the anti-lockdown protests. Celebrities who were encouraging everyone to remain in their homes until last week are now rushing out to join the protests, including Emily Ratajkowski, Jaz Sinclair, Paris Jackson and Billie Eilish. Not only is this virtue-signalling hypocritical – why is Covid likely to be spread at anti-lockdown protests, but not at Black Lives Matter protests? – it's also irresponsible, given how many of those protests have spiralled out of control into fully-fledged riots in at least 25 cities across America, including Minneapolis, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Louisville, Columbia, Denver, Portland, Milwaukee and Columbus. Those protests have now crossed the Atlantic, with a march through the streets of Peckham yesterday in which demonstrators held up placards reading "Abolish the Police" and "Riot is the language of the unheard". That demo did not become violent or lead to rioting, but more protests are planned in London and other British cities over the coming days. Today, Metro ran an article entitled: "Black Lives Matter: Are protests taking place in the UK and how can you donate?" It included a handy guide to people who want to join those protests, something ...

by Guy de la Bédoyère Peter Openshaw, Professor of Experimental Medicine at Imperial College, popped up on Andrew Marr this morning. His comments included the revealing opinion that “health is the ultimate decider… the ultimate priority”. Presumably what he meant is that it outweighs all other considerations and should come first at the expense of everything else. “We do need to proceed with great, great care at this point.” That sort of bias is quite understandable in a profession, but it’s also precisely why easing the lockdown has to be a political decision. We have all seen to our cost that prioritizing the response to COVID-19 at any price has been at the expense of general healthcare, as well as our economy and social wellbeing. The time has come, perhaps, for some scientists to hold their counsel, rather than carping at the government for going ahead with easing measures. However, Openshaw went on to make some more revealing and interesting observations that show how so many assumptions made about COVID-19 and the recommendation for a lockdown, including the latter’s specific provisions, were based on the false premise that infection rates and related factors would be similar to influenza. Asked about infectivity outdoors, Openshaw said: There have been some quite big surveys done now of where infectivity happens. There’s been mapping ...

Abandon Ridiculous Two-Metre Rule Bob's cartoon in the Telegraph on May 30th 2020 I've written a piece in today's Telegraph entitled: "For the sake of our economy, we need to scrap the absurd two-metre rule." I point out that this and other over-cautious social-distancing rules will mean our economy is permanently stuck in second gear. For most shops, the only way to keep customers six feet apart will be to introduce cumbersome one-way systems and force them to queue up outside. All very well when the only retail outlets we’re talking about are supermarkets and newsagents, but how will people observe that rule on the pavement when there are queues outside every shop?For pubs and restaurants, due to reopen on July 4th, the two-metre rule will mean that many of them can’t resume trading and those that can will be forced to operate at less than 50% capacity. I also point out that there's no scientific basis for the rule. What’s so absurd about this measure, which will decimate the hospitality trade, is that there’s no obvious scientific basis for it and many countries are much more relaxed. In South Korea, for instance, the acceptable distance in 1.4 metres, and in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and France, people are only expected to stay one metre apart.Indeed, the World Health Organisation ...

Lockdown Sceptics contributor Guy de la Bédoyère takes one of his vintage motorcycles out for a spin Did Boris's announcement yesterday that up to six people from different households will be able to gather outside from Monday sound the death knell for the lockdown? It certainly feels that way for those of us who've been out and about on this glorious Summer day. Guy de la Bédoyère, who's contributed many fine things to this site, has sent me a note about a motorcycle ride he took this afternoon. Sounds like things are returning to normal in Middle England... It's another afternoon of piercing sunshine in England on the last Friday of May 2020. The trees are in full leaf, the hedges thick and verdant. It's a day out of one's childhood, a summer day filled with memories of past times. I pull out one of my vintage motorcycles and set off for a short run through the countryside and villages as a break from a day of proof-reading my next book. Immediately I notice a change from other days in recent weeks. I have to wait to turn onto the main road. An endless stream of cars and vans keep me waiting. What's this? For weeks I have been able to turn out almost without bothering to look. As I ...

Financial Times Elides Excess Deaths In UK with Deaths From Coronavirus, Triggers Call For Coup From Ex-SAGE Member Professor Anthony Costello, the former WHO Director and now a member of the "alternative" SAGE, got very over-excited on Twitter earlier today in response to an FT article showing the UK had the highest rate of deaths from the coronavirus pandemic among a group of 19 countries that produce comparable data. According to the article, the UK has registered 59,537 more deaths than usual this year since the week ending March 20th. In Costello's brain, this became: "The FT report the UK has the highest rate of excess COVID19 deaths in the world. 59,537 more deaths than usual with a rate of 891 deaths per million." Costello's tweet set off a chain of responses, each more hysterical than the last, with Robert West, a Professor of Health Psychology at UCL and a former member of the SP1-B subgroup of SAGE, seemingly calling for a coup on the back of it. "We cannot wait until this is 'all over' to find out what is going wrong," he said, referring to Costello's tweet. "But to learn from its mistakes the Government has to admit it is making them. This is something they appear completely unwilling to do. Time for NHS and public health to ...

In Singapore, the only thing that matters is our safety, not our lives. Despite a tiny number of deaths amongst the elderly, and despite evidence from around the world showing the true nature of the virus, Singapore still embarked on a four-week lockdown as late as April 7th. We were told to stay at home, and most businesses and schools were closed. We were fined $300 for stretching out on the grass. An app was circulated for reporting any non-compliance with the rules. A couple of days in, we were banned from leaving the house without a face mask. Adult masks were given freely out, but when I enquired about children’s masks I was told that there were none, and that my children should stay at home. Two weeks in, and cases of COVID-19 in the already-quarantined foreign workers were still increasing, so the government announced a four-week extension of the nationwide lockdown (now until June 1st) and told us we could only go out alone, not with our households – no fines though, so I could still escape with the kids. To date, about 26,000 workers have tested positive out of 325,000. This matters little, because had they done more tests (which they could have done, I’m sure) they would have found more cases. Not one has died. We’re ...

YouTube Censors Me Verboten! A few weeks ago I took part in a discussion about the coronavirus crisis organised by the Institute of Arts and Ideas. The other participants were David Alexander, Professor of Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College London; Anne Johnson, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at University College London; and Michael Levitt, Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Among other things, we discussed the pros and cons of lockdowns and I set out the case against, which is what I'd been invited to do. Afterwards, I extracted a four-minute clip featuring me and Michael Levitt – although he was nodding along enthusiastically to what I was saying rather than speaking – and put it on my YouTube channel, calling it "The Case Against Lockdowns". I also created a two-minute clip and posted that on Twitter which you can see here. This morning at 12.20am I received an email from YouTube which said the following: Hi Toby Young,As you may know, our Community Guidelines describe which content we allow – and don’t allow – on YouTube. Your video The Case Against Lockdowns was flagged to us for review. Upon review, we’ve determined that it violates our guidelines and we’ve removed it from YouTube. As regular readers will know, ...

As we tot up the unintended consequences of lockdowns across the world, it’s worth bearing in mind that the quarantining of entire countries for extended periods of time is a new and untried strategy for managing a pandemic. Historically, there are very few examples of lockdowns being used before. The earliest historical example I can find is Florence in 1631, when an outbreak of the plague killed 12% of the population. More recently, Mexico in 2009, during the first days of an H1N1 influenza outbreak, isolated those suspected of being infected, closed schools, banned public gatherings and cancelled a regional soccer tournament. But those measures weren’t replicated in other countries and Mexico abandoned them after 18 days, partly due to the mounting social and economic costs. We’re often told by lockdown enthusiasts that those US cities that introduced extreme social distancing measures during the Spanish flu pandemic experienced fewer deaths than those that didn’t. But those measures stopped well short of a full lockdown. For instance, in St Louis, which is often held up as a model of how to manage the current pandemic, churches and schools were closed, business hours were restricted and people were ordered to wear mask in public, but the city never issued a stay-at-home order and only cancelled business activity entirely for about forty-eight hours. ...

My European pandemic experience has been a tale of two vastly contrasting cities and countries. In early March, I flew from London to Warsaw, Poland, planning to stay for around ten nights before flying on to Minsk, Belarus. However, on the evening of Friday the 13th (a fitting date), and despite the fact that there were only sixty-eight confirmed cases of the virus in Poland, the Polish government announced a nationwide lockdown. All shops (except supermarkets), cafés, bars, restaurants, universities and schools were to close the following day. All flights and international rail services were suspended. Suddenly, I was stuck in Warsaw. My ten-night stay would turn into seven weeks. The following week, Poland tightened the rules further. Now, you were now only allowed outside if you were an essential worker, or going to buy food or medicine. A week later, the rules were tightened yet further. Amongst other things, there was now a two-metre distancing restriction in public (even for family members), under-18s were not allowed outside unless accompanied by an adult, strict limits were introduced on the number of people allowed inside a supermarket at any one time and it was mandatory to wear disposable gloves to enter a shop, to be supplied by the supermarkets. (Has single-use plastic ever been so popular?!) The army would now assist ...

1. Culturing a Pandemic A useful place to start when trying to understand how societies respond to pandemics is Lowell Carr’s catchily-titled Disaster and the Sequence-pattern Concept of Social Change (1932). According to Carr, the way in which “a community reacts to disaster is… determined by its culture, its morale, its leadership, the speed, scope, complexity and violence of the catastrophe itself.” What’s so interesting about Carr’s list of determinants is that it focuses not just on the obvious natural aspects to a disaster (speed of occurrence, scale of destruction and so on) but also on some of the perhaps less obvious social aspects such as leadership structures within societies experiencing disaster, the cultural values that dominate within such societies and so on. It’s this dual aspect to his thinking that makes the book’s core message so relevant today. If we want to understand how a society responds to disaster, Carr’s suggestion is to treat it not just as a natural phenomenon but as a cultural event too. The UK’s response to COVID-19, for example, has focused on developing an understanding of the virus as a natural, biological object: What is its genetic structure? Is it airborne? Can we create a vaccine? How does it affect the human body? But as Carr suggests, that type of knowledge doesn’t develop in ...