Month: July 2020

The Government's Incoherent New Measures in the North Matt Hancock and his SpAds try to get through to Dominic Cummings before the Health Secretary appears on BBC Breakfast I didn't think the Government's management of the pandemic could get any worse, but I was wrong. The measures announced last night, imposing new restrictions in Greater Manchester, East Lancashire and parts of West Yorkshire, are a new low. They were announced by Matt Hancock in a Twitter thread at 9.16pm – no, I'm not making that up. He really did announce restrictions affecting millions of people on Twitter less than three hours before they were due to come into force. Or should that be farce? It's as though Matt Hancock's script is being written by Armando Iannucci, creator of The Thick of It. Oh, and the Government then published the new guidance two hours later – less than an hour before it came into effect – and then published further guidance this morning. Let me see if I can get this straight. In Greater Manchester, Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Hyndburn, Pendle, Rossendale, Bradford, Calderdale and Kirklees, people from one household won't be allowed to meet people from other households in their homes or gardens. That seems relatively clear, but the Government then added the caveat that you are allowed to mix with ...

Second Wave? Virus Has All But Disappeared Your daily reminder that the virus has dwindled away to almost nothing. This graph shows daily triage calls for 19-69 year-olds. Note no uptick during the Hyde Park BLM protests or during the "major incident" on Bournemouth Beach. (Hat tip Alistair Haimes.) Unfortunately, nobody's told the National Trust. Had an amusing email from a reader just back from the Lake District. My girlfriend and I took a trip up to Ambleside last week, arriving the day before Maskgeddon. We were denied an early check-in as the room-cleaning regime at our B&B involved multiple rounds of antibacterial fumigation!The National Trust seems to have completely lost the plot! The day of our first outing, we visited the Aira Force waterfall and parked in one of their car parks near the top of the trail down to the waterfall. As we walked towards the trail, a bedwetter loudly informed me that there was a one-way system on the trails, before we’d even reached the sign. When we got back to the car, I noticed that the Trust has helpfully supplied a hand-sanitiser dispenser embedded in a tree stump near the pay & display machine! Goodness knows how many thousands of lives they’ve already saved with such thoughtful measures!For the rest of the trip I refused to ...

by Guy de la Bédoyère Tom Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises Today (July 29th) I set off with some apprehension for my first masked shopping expedition. I went to my local Asda. As I approached the doors, I saw shoppers emerging and tearing off their masks like Batman after a hard day’s work in Gotham. Once inside I was faintly surprised by the security guard who seemed to be wearing one depicting the mouth of a grimacing large carnivore. Perhaps it was a tactic to suggest how tasty the food is inside. I had by then masked up (using one I had bought at the same shop last week), the very first time I have done so. I’m not in favour of these things at all but I also don’t want to be responsible for placing a shop worker in an uncomfortable position. As it happens, they seem to be a lot better off: maskless and swanning about inhaling and exhaling like swarm of Gupta fish. Or at least that’s what they looked like to me as I unwittingly started the slow process of suffocation. Within seconds I had become aware of a curious sensation: the layer of hot damp air that accumulated around my mouth under the mask, occasionally dispersed by the blissful relief of a ...

Censortech Censorship of Covid dissent reached new heights yesterday with a concerted effort by numerous social media platforms to remove all content relating to the press conference held by America's Frontline Doctors. Not only did Facebook and YouTube remove the videos – and the server hosting the Doctors' website disabled it – but Twitter banned Donald Trump Jr from its platform for 12 hours because he posted a tweet that contained content from the press conference relating to hydroxychloroquine. (You can still see a video of the press conference on Bitchute here.) Dr Stella Immanuel, one of the doctors featured in the video, has been widely ridiculed for her strange beliefs, branded a "witch-doctor" and had her Twitter account deleted. (You can read a transcript of some of her remarks at the press conference here.) According to the BBC, the reason the video has been banned is because it promotes the use of hydroxychloroquine, both as a prophylactic and an effective treatment. The video, a 45-minute livestream of the first day of a "White Coat" summit by the group, was posted to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube by Breitbart and quickly went viral."The virus has a cure, it's called hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and Zithromax," says one of the doctors in the video."You don't need masks. There is a cure. I know they ...

Dead Souls Marc Chagall's illustration for Dead Souls Zugzwang, a reader of Lockdown Sceptics (not his real name, obviously), has written a great essay which I'm publishing today. The opening three paragraphs set the scene: The anti-hero of Gogol’s Dead Souls, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, had his reasons for cultivating the nobility of a provincial Russian backwater, and buying from them, for a nominal sum, those of their serfs who happened to be dead. This saved the vendors an amount of poll tax (which continued to be payable for some time after death) and transformed Chichikov himself into a gentleman proprietor of some 400 serfs, potentially capable of raising a large loan on these assets and eloping (presumably under another name) with the Governor’s daughter.When I first read Gogol, I found the whole idea totally obscure and mystifying, and I’m not sure that he ever spells out in words of one syllable how Chichikov’s business model is supposed to work. There’s a highly respectable view that the whole thing was always intended as pure shaggy-dog, and it’s only fitting that it breaks off in mid-sentence, as an act of Shandyean surrealism.Compared with the COVID-19 mortality statistics, however, Gogol provides us with a paradigm of lucidity. Chichikov had found a way of monetising actual serfs who merely happened to have died. We ...

by Zugzwang Marc Chagall's illustration for Dead Souls The anti-hero of Gogol's Dead Souls, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, had his reasons for cultivating the nobility of a provincial Russian backwater, and buying from them, for a nominal sum, those of their serfs who happened to be dead. This saved the vendors an amount of poll tax (which continued to be payable for some time after death) and transformed Chichikov himself into a gentleman proprietor of some 400 serfs, potentially capable of raising a large loan on these assets and eloping (presumably under another name) with the Governor's daughter. When I first read Gogol, I found the whole idea totally obscure and mystifying, and I'm not sure that he ever spells out in words of one syllable how Chichikov's business model is supposed to work. There's a highly respectable view that the whole thing was always intended as pure shaggy-dog, and it's only fitting that it breaks off in mid-sentence, as an act of Shandyean surrealism. Compared with the COVID-19 mortality statistics, however, Gogol provides us with a paradigm of lucidity. Chichikov had found a way of monetising actual serfs who merely happened to have died. We have a Government agency, Public Health England, which seems to be busy manufacturing statistical deaths, to no purpose that makes even Chichikovian sense. The problem ...

Fatties – You Don't Need to Worry About Dying From Coronavirus Shall I have just one more wafer thin mint? Matt Hancock has written an article for the Telegraph today in which he warns people who are "morbidly obese" that they are at a higher risk of dying from COVID-19. Obesity is one of the greatest long term health challenges that we face as a country.It not only puts a strain on our NHS and care system, but it also piles pressure on our bodies, making us more vulnerable to many diseases, including of course coronavirus.The latest research shows that if you have a BMI of between 30 and 35 your risk of death from coronavirus goes up by at least a quarter.And that nearly 8 per cent of critically ill patients with coronavirus in intensive care are morbidly obese compared at around 3 per cent of the country as a whole. He concludes: If everyone who is overweight lost five pounds it could save the NHS over £100 million over the next five years. And more importantly, given the link between obesity and coronavirus, losing weight could be lifesaving. So just how great is the risk of dying from coronavirus if you're a fatty? According to the latest ONS infection survey data, about one in 2,300 people had COVID-19 in ...

UnHerd Interview With Anders Tegnell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh9wso6bEAc&feature=emb_logo Freddie Sayers, the editor of UnHerd, has done an interview with Anders Tegnell, the architect of Sweden's coronavirus strategy, that's worth watching. Freddie kicks off by asking him whether he thinks Sweden's strategy has been a failure or a success. I think to a great extent it’s been a success. We are now seeing rapidly falling cases, we have continuously had healthcare that has been working, there have been free beds at any given time, never any crowding in the hospitals, we have been able to keep schools open which we think is extremely important, and society fairly open — while still having social distancing in place in a way that means that the spread of the disease has been limited.The failure has of course been the death toll… that has been very much related to the long-term care facilities in Sweden. Now that has improved, we see a lot less cases in those facilities. Tegnell is careful not to claim that Sweden has avoided a lockdown altogether. Rather, it has had a partial lockdown, with the decline in economic and social activity being largely voluntary. In many ways the voluntary measures we put in place in Sweden have been just as effective as complete lockdowns in other countries. So I don’t think complete ...

Boris Johnson is Mistaken About His Mistakes PM: "I didn't have a clue about the virus back in March and I still don't Laura." In an interview with Laura Kuenssberg for the BBC to mark his first anniversary of becoming Prime Minister, Boris Johnson admitted to having made mistakes in his initial response to the pandemic. Unfortunately, they were the wrong mistakes. I think it's fair to say that there are things that we need to learn about how we handled it in the early stages… There will be plenty of opportunities to learn the lessons of what happened.Maybe there were things we could have done differently, and of course there will be time to understand what exactly we could have done, or done differently.We didn’t understand in the way that we would have liked in the first few weeks and months.The single thing that we didn't see at the beginning is the extent to which is was being transmitted asymptomatically from person to person. That wasn't clear to us or to anybody.What people really want to focus on now is what are we doing to prepare for the next phase. Not clear to anybody? What nonsense is this? There was plenty of speculation that the virus could be transmitted by asymptomatic carriers from almost the first moment it was ...

By Guy de la Bédoyère Victorian state premier Daniel Andrews is watching you Speaking as a historian there is little about the lockdown that has surprised me, not least the way in which so many people have blithely accepted the restrictions to their freedoms on the basis that this way they will be saved from a terrible fate. I’m afraid there are too many historical precedents. One of my former colleagues has a nurse for a daughter and she has thrown herself with characteristic zealotry into the role of being the mother of a saint. Not only has she busied herself at her sewing machine churning out scrubs but also proclaimed her righteous joy in the ostentatious wearing of masks. She does this, she says, not because she’s scared, because she isn’t (so she says), but because of her solidarity with the legions of angels in the NHS, “it’s the right thing to do”, and she is doing it for the wider good of the community. She might as well have called the latter Volksgemeinschaft. There is an ominous and crazy religious tone to all this, and she is not alone in exhibiting an inclination to participate in Covid Cult Culture. Masks have rapidly become the symbol of moral superiority, amounting almost to being a badge denoting membership of the ...