Month: December 2020

Parliament to Debate Petition Calling For "No Penalties For Declining Vaccine" The petition on the Parliament website, "Prevent any restrictions on those who refuse a COVID-19 vaccination", has reached over 278,000 signatures and Parliament has announced MPs will debate it on December 14th. You can watch it live on the UK Parliament YouTube channel. The Government response given on September 11th was hardly reassuring, coming with an ominous "however". There are currently no plans to introduce a Covid-19 vaccine in a way that penalises those who do not take up the vaccine. However, the Government will carefully consider all options to improve vaccination rates, should that be necessary. A Lockdown Sceptics reader suggests: "It’s really important ahead of the debate on December 14th that as many people as possible write to their MPs to oppose any coercive measures when it comes to the vaccine, and to ensure the vaccine doesn’t become a requirement for business, travel, employment etc." We quite agree. Time to hit that compose button. Here's the Write To Them link again. A Postcard from Switzerland A Lockdown Sceptics reader has gone to work in Switzerland for the winter, a country which has faced its autumn surge without a new national lockdown. I'm working in the Swiss canton of Valais for the winter season. I was initially going to be ...

Following up with Michael Gove Our headline piece today comes from the senior doctor and regular Lockdown Sceptics contributor. He has done a fact check on Michael Gove's infamous piece in the Times, now that the hospital data for the week it was published are available. On November 28th, Michael Gove wrote an article in the Times claiming that the NHS could soon be entirely overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients occupying every hospital bed including the overflow Nightingale Hospitals. When writing this piece, he would have been aware of the up-to-date bed occupancy figures which are sent out to all hospital CEOs on a daily basis. These figures were not available outside of NHS executive and Government circles. Yesterday (December 3rd) the weekly NHS statistics regarding bed occupancy were published up to December 1st, so the public can now see the data which Gove was privy to when writing his article. I have summarised the highlights below. First, the headline figure of COVID-19 positive patients in English hospitals (Graph 1). Readers can clearly see the downward trends in the North West, North East and the Midlands in the w/e November 28th and flatlining everywhere else. Graph 1 Next, ICU patients (Graph 2). Regular readers will know I favour this metric as it is harder to manipulate than most of the other ...

That Was Quick! REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration News broke yesterday that the UK has approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for widespread use, becoming the first country in the world to do so. The regulator, Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), has said the the jab offers 95% protection against COVID-19 and is safe. The NHS plans to begin the rollout as soon as next week. Indeed, initial batches are on the way and the army stands ready to assist. The speed surprised many, not least as the timing of the decision, on the day on which the tier system came into force, was politically convenient. Ross Clark, in the Spectator, explains how the vaccine could be approved so quickly and details some of the testing: Today’s decision has been possible thanks to the Human Medicines Regulations 2012, which allow Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency to grant temporary emergency use authorisation in circumstances such as this.Even so, eyebrows have been raised at the speed of the MHRA’s decision. In a briefing this lunchtime, Berkeley Phillips, medical director of Pfizer, suggested that regulatory bodies had all the data they needed, but that the MHRA had been prepared to "read the individual chapters of a book" rather than wait for the whole book to be written. The full, published results are still ...

Danny Nemu Would you eat chocolate manufactured by a company that keeps getting prosecuted for false labelling? People keep telling me I’m anti-vax, which is strange as I have been diligently avoiding the subject for years in my writings and talks on medical anthropology. If that category is going to stick, however, regardless of what I write or who I cite, then maybe it is time to tackle the subject head-on. I like to know what I’m putting into my body so I tend to read the labels in the supermarket, and often return things to the shelf if they contain ingredients like palm oil, for example. That doesn’t mean that I’m anti-chox. I’m not totally strict about palm oil anyway. I might eat a Malteser if it rolled my way – but I do have some questions I’d like answered before I roll up my sleeve for a dose of AstraZeneca. Vaccines are a hotly contested area, with bad tempers and bad arguments in abundance, so this article will be scrupulously scientific and militantly anti-vex. We will read labels, court transcripts and journals, and you can come to your own conclusions. Some people may be inoculated already, with systems primed to respond quickly and aggressively to a probing question or unfamiliar suggestion; this intervention is contraindicated for them. Other ...

by Guy de la Bédoyère In one of the early Blackadder episodes the hapless sidekick Percy informs Blackadder, who has been told he has to marry the Spanish Infanta, that he has heard “her eyes are more beautiful” than the “Blue Stone of Galveston”, based on the fact that the Infanta’s eyes are bluer. In the ensuing discussion it emerges that Percy has never seen either and thus has absolutely no sphere of reference for his assertion that one is “slightly less blue” than the other. Blackadder concludes that Percy is as much use as a hole in the head. I know just how he felt. When the pandemic crisis broke, we were all instantly bombarded with figures by scientists and journalists, and almost invariably out of context. They included data that had been measured, and figures that were predicted, most notoriously in the UK the 510,000 prospective deaths put about by Imperial College that played such a large part in the first lockdown. This has carried on remorselessly ever since. It struck me almost immediately right back in March that I had no idea at all what the normal rate of death was in the United Kingdom. Therefore, any statement about deaths from Covid, real or predicted, whether made by a member of SAGE, the Government or a wittering ...

Victory in Spite of the Tiers Boris looks sheepishly at Graham Brady, like a teenager who's just got in from an all-night party being told off by his dad The post-lockdown tier system comes into force today after the Government won the parliamentary vote. Not the result that readers of Lockdown Sceptics would have wanted in an ideal world, but the vote was a damaging blow to the new tier system nevertheless. Only 291 of 650 MPs voted for the Tier system, which means the new restrictions are being brought in without the backing of a majority of MPs. In such circumstances it's going to be difficult to enforce themThe Labour party abstained. Admittedly, a bit spineless of Keir Starmer, but better than voting with the Government55 Tory MPs rebelled, up from 34 on November 4th and Boris's biggest back bench rebellion to date 15 Labour MPs voted against the measures. Sixteen if you count Jeremy Corbyn (independent) For more on the fall-out for the Government, see this analysis by Camilla Tominey in the Telegraph. Here is the list of MPs who voted "No" yesterday: Conservative: Adam Afriyie, Imran Ahmad Khan, Steve Baker (teller), Sir Graham Brady, Andrew Bridgen, Paul Bristow, Sir Christopher Chope, Greg Clark, James Daly, Philip Davies, David Davis, Jonathan Djanogly, Jackie Doyle-Price, Richard Drax, Sir Iain ...

by Ramesh Thakur The evidence for the effectiveness of lockdowns is underwhelming; for the harm they cause to lives, livelihoods, mental health and civil liberties is overwhelming. Neither claim needs further substantiation for readers of this site. Still the relentless march of lockdown folly continues, causing a growing sense of helplessness and despair. What has become clear over the course of the year is just how impervious the lockdownistas are to data, evidence, reason and – yes – even science. Part of the explanation, I suspect, is that Western democracy has been captured by self-absorbed careerists who occupy all key positions in political parties. They have no interest in using power to advance any particular vision or achieve lofty social purposes, which is why the Australian prime minister can reject calls to defend free speech with the dismissive comment that it never created a single job. Nor do many have any experience outside of politics, putting comprehension of the real-world consequences of their decisions beyond them. Even so, the ease with which so many well-established democracies have succumbed to pandemic fearmongering, and surrendered freedoms hard-won over centuries, is astonishing. The sickening video of a pregnant Mum handcuffed in the presence of her child for posting on Facebook about a peaceful, socially-distanced protest in a regional town in Victoria, produced victim-shaming ...

Tories Rebel and Labour Abstains Blower's cartoon in today's Telegraph Parliament will vote today on the Government's new tier system and Labour will abstain. The Independent has more. Labour will abstain in a key vote on Boris Johnson's new COVID-19 tiers. Speaking on Monday night, Sir Keir Starmer said his party was "acting in the national interest" by not opposing the regulations but he said that he had reservations about them. The move is significant because it represents the first time the opposition has failed to back the Government in a vote on COVID-19 regulations. "Coronavirus remains a serious threat to the public's health and that's why Labour accept the need for continued restrictions. We will always act in the national interest, so we will not vote against these restrictions in Parliament tomorrow... However, I remain deeply concerned that Boris Johnson's Government has failed to use this latest lockdown to put a credible health and economic plan in place. We still don't have a functioning testing system, public health messaging is confused, and businesses across the country are crying out for more effective economic support to get them through the winter months. It is short-term Government incompetence that is causing long-term damage to the British economy." Don't get too excited. With the Labour party abstaining, rather than voting no, the ...

To laugh or to cry. It is difficult to know which response is more appropriate to the Government’s attempt to quantify the impact of lockdown, published last night with the title "Analysis of the health, economic and social effects of COVID-19 and the approach to tiering". If you wanted a chuckle, then imagine you had the job of the unfortunate civil servant who had been given the job of cobbling together this strange hotch-potch of information. The document is clearly a rushed job, published with the political aim of persuading the growing number of Conservative MPs who are sceptical about the need for tighter restrictions that they are, in fact, necessary. (There was once a time, not so long ago, when the Civil Service would have demurred from being involved in such a blatantly political operation.) A futile effort, for no self-respecting MP could be persuaded by such a flimsy document. Take its estimates of additional deaths from other diseases. Table 9 of the report looks at the effect on morbidity and mortality of certain conditions – alcohol misuse, road injuries, depressive disorders, and the like. But instead of trying to estimate the actual numbers, the report simply uses up and down arrows to describe the general direction of change that social distancing measures might produce. Is that really the ...