Month: September 2020

Rishi Moves into Poll Position In the race to succeed Boris, Rishi Sunak moved into poll position yesterday with a cash giveaway that was widely welcomed in the press. The Telegraph's Camilla Tominey is in no doubt whose star is rising, and whose is falling. "Where's Boris?" is a refrain that has dogged the Prime Minister throughout the coronavirus crisis.It even featured on the front of last week's Spectator, as the magazine he once edited asked: "Where is the man we thought we voted for?"Never has Mr Johnson been more conspicuous by his absence than at Thursday's hugely significant Commons statement by Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor.As Mr Sunak introduced his winter economy plan, which will replace the furlough scheme with a new Job Support Scheme, the Prime Minister (and First Lord of the Treasury) was nowhere to be seen on the front bench.He later emerged at a police station in Northamptonshire (as seen in the video below), where he busied himself meeting new recruits, sitting in a police car with flashing lights and watching a first aid demonstration involving plastic dummies. Worth reading in full, although, according to Christopher Snowdon in the Spectator, Rishi is driving the nation to ruin. Meanwhile, some members of Team Rishi are no longer bothering to conceal which horse they're backing. https://twitter.com/TomTugendhat/status/1309088618372308994 Toby contributed to ...

Did AIDS Hysteria Prefigure Covid Hysteria? Turns out, we're not the champions, my friend Today we're publishing an original contribution to one of the most interesting sections on the right-hand side: "How Have We Responded to Previous Pandemics?" This one is by veteran science and medical correspondent Neville Hodgkinson, who covered the AIDS pandemic for the Sunday Times. He sees depressing parallels between the hysterical over-reaction to that pandemic and the over-reaction to this one, with the same misallocation of resources. Here's an extract: One of the consequences, as now, was a huge misallocation of money to the detriment of genuine medical need. A 1993 report from the University of Northumbria Business School, to which Stewart contributed, found that for each AIDS death, health authorities were spending an average of £290,000 on HIV prevention and research, compared with £50 for each death from heart disease. Many UK health regions had considerably more AIDS workers than patients.Whereas in 1985 a Royal College of Nursing report predicted that one million people in Britain would have AIDS in six years “unless the killer disease is checked”, the actual cumulative, year-on-year, total of AIDS cases by 1990 was still below 5,000. Today, AIDS kills fewer Britons than die from falling down stairs. Even those deaths might have been avoided if the true nature of ...

by Dr Clare Craig FRCPath How many people with ‘flu-like’ illnesses are being mislabelled as Covid? Cases of Covid appear to have surged recently. Hospital admissions for Covid are now also starting to rise. To question how much of this rise is genuinely the result of Covid is to challenge the prevailing narrative, but as a scientist it is essential to ask hard questions. It is critical that we understand when someone is ill, but it is not Covid. We have limited resources for ‘Track and Trace’ and it is important that they are used wisely, especially when real outbreaks occur. Scientists are grappling with what the rate of false positive results are with the current Covid test. The risk of a false positive result comes not only from aspects of the testing process itself but may vary from one population to another. It may even vary over time. Every country has systems of external quality control for their laboratories. A summary has been published of attempts by these bodies to establish the risk of false positive Covid testing from other coronaviruses (one of the causes of the common cold). They tested against two strains of non-Covid coronaviruses. These showed between 0.58% and 0.96% were false positive with Covid testing. With large numbers of tests each day, this level of ...

by Neville Hodgkinson As a veteran medical and science correspondent, I have a special reason for tearing my hair out (what is left of it) at the damage being done to democracy, social cohesion and above all our health by the global hysteria surrounding COVID-19. Similar mistakes were made when hysteria over the immune system failure that came to be called AIDS swept the world during the late 1980s – and 35 years on, the mistakes remain largely unacknowledged and uncorrected, with some of the perpetrators now driving the new panic. I feel especially frustrated because as medical correspondent at The Sunday Times from 1985-89, I helped to spread alarm over AIDS in the first place. Later I spent several years as science correspondent at the same paper, trying to draw attention to efforts by a small group of experts, including top-ranking Nobel prize-winning scientists at the heart of the fight against AIDS, to let us know that the so-called Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was never scientifically established as the cause of the syndrome. These efforts were shouted down almost universally. The HIV theory caused a generation of young people to falsely equate sex with death. Yet no apology, no inquiry by the scientific community, no mass media analysis of how we could have got it so wrong, has ever ...

Take Back Control Brendan O'Neill has written a blistering piece for Spiked in which he urges the British people to take back control – not from Brussels, but from Boris and Dom! We can’t go on like this. We cannot continue to allow the Government to control every aspect of our lives. We cannot idly accept that the state has the right to introduce rules and regulations that dictate everything from how long we can stay in the pub to who we can invite to our weddings. We cannot sit back and watch as government scientists use jumped-up, fact-lite graphs of fear to try to terrify and pacify the populace and prep us for yet another onslaught on our liberties. We cannot just watch and nod as officials shut down more areas of the economy, with a stroke of their pen, plunging Britain further into the worst recession on record. This is not sustainable. Something has to give, something has to break. The only important question right now is this: how can we make sure that happens? I know exactly how he feels. Worth reading in full. A Reply to Tom Chivers Tom Chivers and James Ferguson disagree about the significance of the false positive rate of the PCR test Tom Chivers took a pop at Lockdown Sceptics in UnHerd ...

By James Ferguson James Gilray imagines what would have happened to MPs if Napoleon had successfully invaded Britain: "We come to recover your lost liberties." They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safetyBenjamin Franklin Whilst my note on the false positive rate (FPR) made its way into the corridors of power, the Health Department’s response was at once dismissive but innumerate. Fortunately, not all parliamentarians are so easily fobbed off and one has asked me to prepare a brief, which is why the following is not in the usual format. It appears that the number of amplification cycles used in PCR tests, whether there is any quality control, the false positive rate (for both Pillar 1 and Pillar 2) and the incidence of the disease are all state secrets. However, what is clear is that none of those wielding the controls understand the maths. Both Secretary of State, Matt Hancock (who says the FPR is “under 1%”) and Baroness Harding’s chief medical advisor, Dr Susan Hopkins (definitely less than 1-in-100 and more likely 1-in-1000) believe the FPR is so low as to result in what Hancock calls a “very small proportion of false positives”. In fact, even a FPR as fancifully low as 0.1% (and there is a mass of ...

10pm Curfew? Time For Bed, Prime Minister Stay at home... Go back to work... Stay at home... er... Our hopeless, busted flush of a Prime Minister is going to announce today that pubs and restaurants will have to close by 10pm from Thursday, with table-only service for the foreseeable future. Exceptions to the "rule of six" for weddings and funerals will be eliminated, too. Needless to say, this is to fend off a wholly imaginary "second wave". The Mail does its best to relay Downing Street's spin on this nonsense, although its heart isn't in it. In July, Mr Johnson urged staff to "go back to work if you can" in a bid to prevent city centres becoming ghost towns.But a source told the Mail that employees will be advised to "work from home if you can" during the coming weeks.The restrictions have divided the Cabinet, with Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Business Secretary Alok Sharma both warning about the potential impact on the economy. But a senior Government source insisted all ministers accepted the move was needed to bring the R-rate, which measures how fast the disease is spreading, back under control."The aim is to cause maximum damage to the R and minimal damage to the economy," the source said. "Unless we act now, there will be greater economic damage ...

Unfortunately, the "city of mosques" has become "the city of maskes" as Istanbul pretends to play its part in managing the COVID-19 pandemic. But before fellow sceptics stop reading or cross Istanbul off their Covid bucket list, there is good news. Despite fairly rigid enforcement of "maske, maske!" in shops, public transport and museums, we walked the streets naked – except for our clothes – without challenge or even a second look from the Istanbulis. The face mask here is not considered a virtue signal, rather it is considered a talisman. It does not matter where it is worn, so long as it is worn. Under the nose, under the chin, on the elbow (yes!) and I even saw one person with a mask on the back of his neck. These all seemed acceptable and, in fact, there were plenty of people who, like us, had simply abandoned them. The police were not enforcing mask wearing and were among the worst offenders for not doing so. Our hotel was next to the Karakoy Police station where Istanbul’s finest sat sunning themselves daily, ready to fall asleep at a minute’s notice. They watched us walk past several times a day without comment. In any case, such is the Istanbul love of street eating that in many of the back streets, if ...

Oxford University Scientists Demolish Government Case for Second Lockdown Professor Carl Heneghan and crew at the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine have been working overtime at the weekend pushing back against the Government narrative. The Mail yesterday published their demolition of the Government's paper-thin case for imposing yet more emergency restrictions to try to suppress and eliminate this virus. Entitled "The only 'circuit break' in the pandemic we need now is from the Government’s doom-mongering scientific advisers who specialise in causing panic and little else", they don't hold back. Today, our bewildered Prime Minister and his platoon of inept advisers might as well be using the planets to guide us through this pandemic, so catastrophic and wildly over-the-top are their decisions.Now we look set to repeat the pattern of what happened six months ago when they first panicked the country into shutting down, except that this time it has been given a fancy title – operation ‘circuit break’.Whatever the name, it may be a grave error with terrible consequences for the health of the British people and for the health of the country. How can we possibly be making the same mistake – again?Why is it that the Government is once again in the grip of doom-mongering scientific modellers who specialise in causing panic and little else? They address head-on ...

Government policy is not based on science This research was compiled by a financial researcher and fund manager who wishes to remain anonymous. There are a few main reasons to be optimistic we should end lockdowns and get back to normal.  We know who this coronavirus affects. The median age of death in almost all countries is over 80 with multiple existing conditions. We are failing to protect old people and are locking up the young and imposing social distancing when they have no risk of death. We can protect the vulnerable more intelligently.Most people have immunity due to cross reactivity and cross immunization. The human immune system is not completely helpless against this virus. Herd immunity levels are much lower than people think and the virus appears to follow a Gompertz curve, which correctly anticipates the virus fizzling out.In most countries, Covid deaths were 40-100% higher than a bad flu year. The virus is bad but it is not the Spanish Flu and is most like the Hong Kong flu of 1968 and the Asian flu of 1957.  They were bad, but we never shut the entire world down for those. Flus are deadly, the world is dangerous, and we will all eventually die. But we won’t all die form Covid.    Here is the complete collection of research and links categorized ...