Month: January 2021

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes details of the Govt's estimate of the collateral damage (over 100,000 non-Covid deaths), a reader's account of his mask battle with the NHS and a dodgy YouGov poll.

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes a stout defence of Sir Desmond Swayne, more on whether the Govt can force you to pay for Quarantining and a blistering attack on Sam Bowman's pro-Government propaganda.

By Timon Wapenaar Sam Bowman with two contributors to Anti-Virus, his anti-lockdown sceptics website A piece in the New Statesman by Sam Bowman which ostensibly aims to debunk the “eight biggest Covid-sceptic myths” presents us with a pot-pourri of Twitter-troll inspired overripe low hanging fruit. No serious lockdown critic has ever framed the argument in the way Bowman represents it. Has Sunetra Gupta ever said that “we are overreacting to a virus which 99.5% of people will survive”? I doubt it. A Google search for “Sunetra Gupta” and the exact phrase “we are overreacting” yields Bowman's own article as the first hit, and only five other hits in total, none of which contained the damning quote.  Likewise, there is not one lockdown sceptic of stature who says that “we aren't seeing excess deaths”, or that “we're witnessing a 'casedemic' of false positives from doing too many tests”. While there are assertions made about both excess deaths and a ‘casedemic’, their nature is much, much more nuanced than Bowman would have us believe. Indeed, his phrasing of the ‘casedemic’ is absolutely absurd. How on earth could any opponent worth arguing with believe something as patently stupid as “more tests result in more false positives”? He obviously hasn't read or listened to Heneghan, or Jefferson, or Yeadon, or McKernan. Or Levitt, or Gupta, ...

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes details of the Gov's "phased" exit plan, the real reason the NHS is under pressure (mismanagement) as revealed by a nurse and a blistering defence of Sir Desmond Swayne

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes a take down of Devi Sridhar by philosophy lecturer Sinéad Murphy, a personal request from Julia Hartley-Brewer and a critique of Boris's decision not to reopen schools.

by Sinéad Murphy Devi Sridhar Following her appearance on Newsnight on Friday January 22nd, Devi Sridhar, Professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, tweeted this: https://twitter.com/devisridhar/status/1353002258779299845?s=20 During the past year, those of us opposed to Government lockdowns have repeatedly asked this question: What has disarmed the populations of apparently democratic societies that they have so quietly accepted the suspension of their freedoms? Devi Sridhar’s tweet – banal as it is – contains all the ingredients for an answer to this question. 2020 did seem, as it unfolded, to impose a sudden reversal of established freedoms. But the surreptitious erosion of those freedoms had, in fact, long been observed. In 1999, for example, the French magazine, Tiqqun, published a short text entitled Preliminary Materials For A Theory Of The Young-Girl, which sketched an outline of the emergent citizen of Western democratic societies, who willingly participates in and perpetuates their own oppression at the hands of global corporate governance, actively consenting to “the molecular diffusion of constraint into everyday life” and to the “immuno-disarmament of bodies”. The Tiqqun text summarized this acquiescent citizen as the “Young-Girl”. The descriptor has met with objections for its alleged misogyny. But it applies to men as well as to women, and to the old as well as to the young, only seeking to ...

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes a rebuttal of Sam Bowman's pro-Government propaganda, a Postcard from Bangkok and another harrowing tale of someone's mum lost in the labyrinth of the NHS.

By Guy de la Bédoyère (‘Where are we going?’) It’s worth starting by reminding ourselves that the situation we are now would have been unimaginable even as late as last September. All the privations and sacrifices of the previous six months were weathered by the majority of the population on the basis of various promises and undertakings made by the Government and its scientific advisers. Far from getting better, as we all now know to our costs the crisis has become far worse and there seems to be no end in sight. Of course, at this stage blaming the Government or indeed anyone else for how we got here is pointless. It achieves nothing. Castigating Boris Johnson or Neil Ferguson now for the decisions made in 2020 is as futile as the efforts of Neil O’Brien and his friends to pin our present malaise on the shoulders of anyone who has dared to question how we reached this point. It’s a waste of energy and, more to the point, achieves nothing except to try and find a scapegoat for a natural disaster nobody and no government was ever going to be able to tackle without a hideous level of collateral damage. The truth is that the crisis was out of control long before anyone knew there was a crisis to ...

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes numerous reasons why schools should re-open, a report that charging people to stay at Quarantine Hotels could be illegal and an original piece by Kathrine Jebson Moore.

by Kathrine Jebsen Moore Dear Priti Patel, I sympathise with your idea of looking to Australia and New Zealand for inspiration. They have managed to practically eliminate the virus by shutting themselves off from the rest of the world, only allowing natives to return, and when they do, imprisoning them in 'quarantine hotels'. Britain looks set to achieve, finally, a pandemic success, rolling out the vaccine faster than any other European country. This is of course good news. For most Britons, pulling up the drawbridge is surely a logical next step as life gradually returns to normal. After all, holidays are all but illegal at the moment, so why shouldn’t those who do wish to return from abroad, or indeed venture here, be faced with an extra barrier? The number of visitors is currently around 10,000 a day and it’s hoped that the threat of an enforced quarantine in cheap hotels will get the numbers down. All arrivals are currently expected to quarantine, but with no real way of ensuring that everyone does. That means the risk of new strains of coronavirus arriving with them is still real. But have a thought for those of us with families divided between different countries. This news feels like yet another blow to our plans to being able to see our family overseas ...