Government Abandons NHSX Contact-Tracing App
According to the Mail, the Telegraph, the Guardian, etc., Matt Hancock has finally given up trying to roll out the NHSX contact-tracing app. Instead, the Government will rely on the method that’s been developed by Apple and Google and is already in use in most major European countries. I asked our correspondent, who’s been following this slow-motion car crash since the beginning, to give us his take on this U-turn.
It was over six weeks ago that this site asked, “If the app is being developed by the NHS, will it actually work?” This week we got our told-you-so moment as the Minister for Innovation, Lord Bethell, told the Science and Technology Committee that he was unable to give a date for the launch, admitting: “I won’t hide from you that there are technical challenges with getting the app right.”
Once the mainstay of the Government’s response to COVID-19, with Matt Hancock announcing a June 1st launch in England, the NHSX contact-tracing app is now a festering embarrassment. Lord Bethell blamed the virus itself for not sticking around long enough for a Government-managed IT project to deliver. Apparently, the relatively low prevalence of the virus means “we’re not feeling under great time pressure”. He also blamed the public, which is supposed to be afraid of the virus not the app, saying the public were highly concerned about privacy issues and such-like and this was one reason an app had not been “rushed” out. (Lol.)
So well done to NHSX’s two lead managers, Matthew Gould and Geraint Lewis, who will now be “stepping back”. Job done!
To be fair to the UK Government, they are not the only ones making a mess of delivering a Covid-tracing app. Norway, which I pointed out on May 4th was already in difficulty with its app, has had to delete all the data it’s collected so far. The Norwegian Data Protection Authority ruled the Smittestopp app represented a disproportionate intrusion into users’ privacy. Like the UK Government, Norway shunned the Apple/Google privacy-respecting approach, but is now having second thoughts and could be joining Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Latvia et al in using the decentralised approach. Further afield, a bug in the latest version of Australia’s app means many iPhones have failed to log matches.
If the software wasn’t enough of a problem, researchers from Trinity College Dublin have found that the physics isn’t even being cooperative. All the apps depend on Bluetooth Low Energy radio technology and the understanding that the further away you are from a radio transmitter, the weaker the received signal; inverse square law and all that. So measuring signal strength should be a way to determine proximity to another phone. Great in theory, but in practice the signal can be disrupted by the bag that it’s in, or the person holding the phone, or even where you happen to be. One test in a railway carriage found the signal strength increasing as the separation went beyond two meters because of the way the metallic body of the carriage funnels the signal. In a supermarket, the signal strength could not be used to distinguish between a separation of two metres or less.
Let’s hope they don’t waste any more money on it.
So a Government-managed IT project has failed to deliver and ministers have turned to the private sector for a solution? Who would have thunk it?
File this one under “dog bites man”.
Back in the USSR
There was a funny story in the MailOnline yesterday.
A mix-up on the Government’s new online quarantine form has given the option for travellers entering the UK to declare themselves as being from countries which no longer exist.
Those filling it out on the Home Office’s website were able to claim they were from places such as Czechoslovakia and the USSR – both of which have not existed for almost three decades.
Other options included on the drop-down list were the German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany, which was reunified with West Germany in 1990, Upper Volta, which is now the West African country of Burkina Faso and Southern Rhodesia, which is now part of Zimbabwe.
From Our Welsh Correspondent
Yesterday, I published an email from a reader about the absurdities of trying to view a house in Wales under the present restrictions. But his encounter with the English estate agent ended up being quite pleasant:
Turned out the estate agent who showed us around was a lockdown sceptic! He’s refused furlough, and been working through the lockdown selling houses. We were swapping anti-lockdown stats and facts. (He was impressed when I told him that people under the age of 19 are more likely to perish from trouser-related accidents than COVID-19). And we rounded off a pleasant encounter by bemoaning the fact that our British Bulldog spirit has been usurped by “bloody snowflakes”.
Also, he was chatting to us from about two feet away, and told us we could ignore the “glove-wearing rule”.
Oh, and the house was next to a golf course, open now at last, and about eight golfing old-timers were congregating at the picnic tables near the clubhouse, flouting every law in the Corona-rulebook, regardless of their “vulnerable” status.
At last, some sanity!
Round-Up
And on to the round-up of all the stories I’ve noticed, or which have been been brought to my attention, in the last 24 hours:
- ‘Have the protests proved that Covid-19 risks are being vastly exaggerated?’ – Good piece by Dr Chris von Csefalvay making the same point I did yesterday about the fact that the protests haven’t caused an uptick in infections
- ‘Google tries to censor content it disagrees with‘ – Tucker Carlson on Google’s power to shut down dissent
- ‘Facebook using “fact-checkers” to censor dissent on COVID-19‘ – Good piece in Off-Guardian about Facebook censorship
- ‘Peter Hitchens on the Today programme‘ – Go to the two hour 50 minute point to hear Peter Hitchens talk about how he came to be followed by a mob through the streets of Oxford on Tuesday
- ‘Researchers question policy of closing schools after finding under 20s have low susceptibility to virus‘ – Article in the BMJ about a paper in Nature Medicine that finds people under 20 are half as susceptible to COVID-19 and far less likely to experience clinical symptoms than older age groups: “The results suggest that interventions targeting children, such as school closures, are therefore likely to have limited impact in controlling spreads of COVID-19.”
- ‘Third of English hospital trusts report NO coronavirus patients in past week‘ – Story in the Mail about the disappearance of the virus
- ‘Britain’s “scientific” Covid response is locked in a dangerous lie‘ – Latest column from Sherelle Jacobs in the Telegraph
- ‘Inside Seattle’s Lawless, Self-Declared “Autonomous Zone”‘ – A journalist reports from inside CHAZ. I’m looking forward to the Hollywood comedy in which Sacha Baron-Cohen plays the rapper warlord. Except no Hollywood studio would dare criticise Woke-us Dei and Baron-Cohen is surely going to be cancelled any day now
- ‘After Aunt Jemima, people call to cancel Uncle Ben’s and Mrs. Butterworth’s‘ – First they came for the statues… and now they’re coming for… rice?
- ‘They can’t cancel all of us‘ – Wilfred Reilly in Spiked on how we can fight back against the purges
- ‘What Covid Models Get Wrong‘ – The Wall St Journal‘s editorial board with a reality check for the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation which has issued a new forecast predicting that COVID-19 fatalities will spike over the summer
- ‘Ditch the two-metre rule and reopen all schools in England before the summer holidays‘ – Robust editorial in the Telegraph
- ‘Prince Charles: “We must prevent this crisis from defining the prospects of a generation”‘ – And Prince Charles agrees with the Telegraph
Theme Tune Suggestions From Readers
Three suggestions for theme tunes for this site from readers today: “Patience” by Guns N’ Roses, “Isolation” by John Lennon and “Virtual Insanity” by Jamiroquai.
Small Businesses That Have Reopened
A few weeks ago, Lockdown Sceptics launched a searchable directory of open businesses across the UK. The idea is to celebrate those retail and hospitality businesses that have reopened, as well as help people find out what has opened in their area. But we need your help to build it, so we’ve created a form you can fill out to tell us about those businesses that have opened near you. Now that non-essential shops have reopened – or most of them, anyway – we’re now focusing on pubs, bars, clubs and restaurants, as well as other social venues. Please visit the page and let us know about those brave folk who are doing their bit to get our country back on its feet.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. Bit short today – busy, busy, busy – but it usually takes me several hours, which doesn’t leave much time for other work. If you feel like donating, however small the amount, please click here. Alternatively, you can donate to the Free Speech Union’s litigation fund by clicking here or join the Free Speech Union here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in future updates, email me here. (Note: please don’t email me at any other address.)
And Finally…
A friend of mine – Aidan Hartley – is the Chairman of a new private testing company called Pyser Testing that’s set up shop in the Honourable Artillery Company in the City and I went and got tested on Tuesday. For £48, you can get a pretty reliable antibody test. The tests are administered by ex-Army medics and you get the results back in 10-15 minutes.
For testing experts, it’s a lateral flow rapid antibody test manufactured by CTK Biotech. It hasn’t been officially endorsed by Public Health England, which, to date, has only endorsed the Roche and Abbott antibody tests, but it has been licensed for sale in the UK by MHRA. The same test at a private clinic in Harley Street would cost upwards of £150 and it’s cheaper than the one that was on sale at Superdrug but which has now been withdrawn. You can also get an Abbott test – the gold standard, according to Aidan – but that costs £96 and you have to wait three or four days for the results. All fees are inclusive of VAT.
If you want to book a test, you can do so online here. The plan is to roll it out across the country in due course.
I’ve written about the experience in this week’s Spectator. The stakes were quite high for me, and not just because I wanted to know whether I really had COVID-19, as I think I did back in March. My column begins:
Back in April, the Spectator ran a feature in which the partners of regular contributors wrote about what it was like being stuck in quarantine with the likes of us. What Caroline had to say was not very flattering: “Toby spent the first week of lockdown in bed convinced he had coronavirus. He didn’t. He is a complete hypochondriac at the best of times and this pandemic has sent his anxiety levels through the roof. He was so worried about catching it that the stress led to a bout of shingles, which is what actually laid him up.” Ever since then I have been trying to prove to her that I really did have COVID-19, but without success.
But this is a tale that ends happily, at least for me.
On my way back to the Tube I called Caroline. “Looks like you’re going to be eating humble pie this evening,” I said. She couldn’t believe it. But, sure enough, I’d tested positive for immunoglobulin G. Turns out it wasn’t man flu after all.
“I’m a vegetarian,” she objected.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “There’s no meat in humble pie. It’s full of things that are really good for you.”
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Try as I may, I really cant conjure up any scenario where a firefighter could ‘work from home on an ad-hoc basis,’ unless of course he/she set their own gaff on fire.
Just when you think things can’t get any crazier, up pops something to prove you wrong.
Try pulling this stunt in the private sector.
This is where going back to basic and irrefutable biological facts come into play. Andropause has always been an established thing but it certainly cannot be likened to women’s menopause, with many women suffering hot flashes and night sweats that can impair their quality of life. By the way, I also don’t think women should be taking time off work for the menopause, this seems a relatively new thing. There are many ways in which women can counter the unpleasant effects of menopause, and most do not involve medication. I’ve worked with loads of menopausal women and they each cope in different ways but they never rang in sick over it. Here’s the good old NHS describing the male andropause;
”The “male menopause” (sometimes called the andropause) is an unhelpful term sometimes used in the media.
This label is misleading because it suggests the symptoms are the result of a sudden drop in testosterone in middle age, similar to what occurs in the female menopause. This is not true.
Although testosterone levels fall as men age, the decline is steady at about 1% a year from around the age of 30 to 40, and this is unlikely to cause any problems in itself.
A testosterone deficiency that develops later in life, also known as late-onset hypogonadism, can sometimes be responsible for these symptoms, but in many cases the symptoms are nothing to do with hormones.
Some men develop depression, loss of sex drive, erectile dysfunction, and other physical and emotional symptoms when they reach their late 40s to early 50s.
Other symptoms common in men this age are:
These symptoms can interfere with everyday life and happiness, so it’s important to find the underlying cause and work out what can be done to resolve it.”
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/male-menopause/
Yawn – just as women use menopause (and child-bearing) as excuses for putting on weight! Here’s a revolutionary statement. Men who have large bellies/man boobs/loss of muscle mass are simply eating and/or drinking too much and not getting enough exercise. But, just like women, a lot of them don’t want to hear it.
Yes that’s correct. Why have so many people turned into pathetic snowflakes these days? Take some ownership over your health FGS. Now we’re medicalizing something which even the NHS admits is not related to hormones but has its roots in a myriad of other possible causes, such as what you mention, which certainly sounds like a good place to start. I would also add poorly managed stress as a likely cause. Women seem generally better at opening up to friends and colleagues about stuff, also initiating doctor’s appointments or seeking counseling. Men not so much as they tend to internalise their problems and not speak about their feelings. How can this not impact on physical health at some stage?
All funded by the taxpayer – just add it to the list.
The sooner public services are returned to the competitive, free market, private sector – whence they came – and get these blood-sucking public servants of the public payroll, the better.
And the Conservative branded government will do …… nothing.
Absolute insanity. But then there shouldn’t be any ‘female menopause’ policies either. Menopause is a normal stage of life and, for the vast majority of women there is no reason for menopause to need time off work. I never took a day off during mine, and if some women do have such debilitating symptoms that they are unable to work (appreciate we’re not all the same) then they should simply get a sick note from the doctor.
It is an excuse to start medicating half the population after a certain age. Follow the money.
As a woman, if I went to my gp demanding a prostate check because I am a certain age, I would be laughed out of the surgery. However, if I was male, and went in complaining about the menopause, or, if I was a male who was pretending to be a woman, and demanded some kind of gynaecological check, (to support me in my fantasy/mental illness) I would probably be humoured and treated with sympathy. Wokeness only seems to work in certain directions.
Only because the doc would be sued if he did not take your ideas seriously. It is much easier for the doc to go along with the delusions & pass on the problem to his colleagues.
Watching the people in the market today walking past our local trans with a beard, long hair in a pony tail, a tartan mini skirt high heels & tights none of them gave him a second glance which is why they have to develop ever more extreme plans to be noticed as most are sad and lonely people.
I do wonder if they are hoping that their male patterned baldness will be reversed by taking female hormones. Won’t be able to change the size of their feet though.
Yes you can bet your bottom dollar that the men who have ‘periods’ will also want a piece of the menopause action.
I mean, just because it has “men” in the word, for fluff’s sake!
Is it just a coincidence that all these ‘work when you like it’ policies are in the public sector? When you don’t have to produce the revenues to cover the costs you incur it’s all so easy to waste money.
We are coming to a point where the entire public sector need to lose their jobs. Surely all this is just plain idiocy by people who cannot even do their jobs properly. All of the public services are now useless, yet we still pay? It is time to shut off the money.
Which ‘Charity’ has this nonsense come from..? Stonewall, or someone else.?
This is bollocks isn’t it? Or at least something to do with them.
ha ha ha ah jeezus. ——-Yesterday at the Pharmacist getting a flu jag I was asked was I white, male , mixed race……. de da de da. ——-I said politely “Can I just stop you right there, and can we bypass all of this stuff please”? ——-The lady scrolled down and said “Oh yes there is a bit that says would you prefer not to answer”. I said ” I refuse to answer nonsense like this thankyou”. Then she got on with the job of giving me an injection. There is only one way to STOP this garbage and that is to refuse to indulge their wokery
Always the public services, free from the financial imperative. Spend more, tax more, never mind the cost.
If women can get special treatment then so should men.
It’s about equality.