“Don’t Put Children’s Lives on Hold” – Ofsted Head
Amanda Spielman, HM Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills, has written a powerful opinion piece for today’s Sunday Telegraph urging the Government not to close schools indefinitely.
There is a real consensus that schools should be the last places to close and the first to re-open, and having argued for this since last spring, I welcome it. Because it is increasingly clear that children’s lives can’t just be put on hold while we wait for vaccination programmes to take effect, and for waves of infection to subside. We cannot furlough young people’s learning or their wider development.
The longer the pandemic continues, the more true this is. Ofsted’s work in recent months has shown the cumulative effect of prolonged disruption on many children. We found some younger children had forgotten how to hold a pencil or use a knife and fork, and had regressed in basic language and numbers. In older children, we noted increases in eating disorders and self-harm, and anti-social behaviour problems at some schools. Social media and online gaming replaced in-person interaction more than ever before during lockdown, with all the risks that brings. Children are more sedentary and less fit.
Some commentators suggested that this reflected failures of parenting. And pre-pandemic I have, for example, expressed concern about the increasing numbers of children starting school in nappies and without the most basic social skills.
Yet we must recognise that families have been severely disrupted. The support for parents that normally comes from grandparents, other family members and from friends is largely cut off by Covid restrictions. In much of the country playgrounds and other community facilities like swimming pools have been closed too. Many of the specialist services for children with health and education needs are suspended or very limited. All this is making the job of parenting harder than usual.
In fact the disruption to schooling has shown us quite how important schools are in our society. Schools exist precisely because we collectively believe that there are things that all children should learn but which we cannot expect all parents to teach. In them teachers don’t just teach, they also create the environment in which children willingly learn even the things they don’t know they need to learn, and get satisfaction from it. They are also a powerful equaliser: while children are at school, the disparities in the circumstances of their home lives are minimised.
When children are forced into remote education by Covid, these disparities aren’t just about family income or deprivation, or even about having laptops and good broadband. Our work has shown how much parents’ capacity to support remote education can vary depending on their jobs and their other caring responsibilities, such as for younger children. Even for children with stable and supportive homes, good access to technology and dedicated teachers, learning outside the classroom has been patchy. Surveys of both teachers and parents reveal the difficulty of keeping children engaged with online work, motivating them to get up at school time, and knowing whether they are actually learning when they do tune in.
Lastly, when we remove schools from the picture, not only does learning suffer, but risks of abuse, neglect or exploitation increase. Schools have become society’s collective eyes and ears, keeping a caring watch over those who need it most. Teachers are often the first to spot signs of things going wrong at home.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The NEU, Britain’s largest teachers union, has urged its members not to return to work tomorrow – although, it also says they should be “available” to teach vulnerable children and children of key workers. How can they be “available” to those children if they don’t return to work?
Stop Press 2: Another teachers union, the NASUWT, has written to Gavin Williamson demanding that all schools close.
Scrap GCSEs and A-Levels, Say 2000 Headteachers
As night follows day, headteachers are now demanding that GCSEs and A-levels be scrapped again this year. Why? To protect their staff from being infected with a virus that, if you’re under-70 and healthy, is less deadly than seasonal flu. (For chapter and verse on that stat, see the Stop Press beneath this post.) The Sunday Times has more.
Head teachers have warned that GCSE and A-level exams cannot go ahead this summer after plans for reopening schools for the spring term were thrown into chaos.
Most primary schools in England are due to open tomorrow, followed by a phased start for secondary schools a week later with GCSE and A-level pupils returning first. The Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, still insists that teenagers must sit the national exams.
However, a network of 2,000 head teachers in 80 local authorities will today insist that teachers, pupils and parents should not be put at risk of contracting COVID-19 in order to protect the GCSE and A-level timetables.
“Wider public health, pupil and staff safety should be prioritised ahead of examinations,” said the head teachers from the WorthLess? campaign group.
“Public safety should not be risked or driven by an inflexible pursuit of GCSE and A-levels.”
Not worth reading in full, unless you want to end up beating your head against the wall.
Are there “Wards Full of Children” in English Hospitals?
A tweet from Radio Live 5 containing an extract from an interview on New Year’s Day with a nursing matron went viral yesterday, clocking up over two million views. The nurse, Laura Duffel, claimed to have a ward full of children with Covid at her hospital. The interview was widely cited by lockdown zealots looking for a reason to close all schools across the country. Mary Bousted, joint head of the National Education Union, quote-Tweeted it, adding: “This is incredibly serious.”
But is it true? I asked the senior doctor who writes regularly for Lockdown Sceptics to investigate.
On New Years Day, Adrian Chiles interviewed Laura Duffel on Radio 5 live. I understand Ms Duffel is a nursing matron at Kings College Hospital.
Ms Duffel said that her hospital has ‘a whole ward’ full of children with acute Covid and that her colleagues in other Trusts are in the same position. This is a very alarming statement. Coming from such a senior nurse, it demands to be taken seriously as it marks a significant change from the previously known disease profile.
Children can be affected by Covid in unusual ways – the most alarming is a hyperacute vasculitic syndrome, similar to a disease called Kawasaki syndrome. This can make children quite ill. They can also develop respiratory symptoms like adults although hitherto this has been uncommon except in vulnerable patients like cystic fibrotics, or children on active chemotherapy for cancers. Such sick children tend to be admitted to specialist paediatric hospitals, particularly if they have underlying complex medical conditions.
I have reviewed at the latest figures from Kings College Hospital reported on December 29th.
On December 29th there were 474 Covid inpatients at Kings.
433 patients were in adult beds. A further 41 were in ICU beds (total 474)
If there had been any children with Covid in the hospital on December 29th, one would expect the total number of reported Covid patients to be greater than 474 to reflect the balance of patients in paediatric beds. So, if we assume the figures are accurate, there were no children suffering from acute Covid in Kings on December 29th.
If that is the case, it implies that a “whole ward” of children suffering from acute Covid were admitted at one London Hospital between December 29th and December 31st. A ward normally holds 20 to 30 patients. Truly alarming news.
For comparison, the 389-bed Great Ormond Street Hospital, London’s premier paediatric hospital, had six Covid inpatients on December 19th with one in a mechanically ventilated bed. The highest number of patients in GOSH was 11 reported on December 23rd.
Birmingham Women and Children’s Hospital reported 11 Covid inpatients on December 29th – it’s unclear how many of these patients were children.
Alder Hey paediatric Hospital in Liverpool had zero Covid inpatients.
I have been unable to find any other commentary or official data either from the UK or elsewhere in Europe or the US suggesting that hospitals have seen a dramatic upsurge in acute paediatric admissions with Covid-related symptoms. Nor have I heard this from other hospitals on the medical grapevine.
To put the known Covid risk to children into context, the ONS death statistics show that in the whole of 2020, there were 19 deaths in patients under 19 years old where COVID was mentioned on the death certificate out of 76,669 total Covid deaths (0.025%). Of these patients, 11 were aged 15-19 (essentially young adults). There have been eight deaths of children aged between 0 and 14 years – 0.01% of the total.
If Kings College has had 20 or so otherwise healthy children admitted with acute Covid in the last 48 hrs, and other hospitals in London have had similar admissions, this is something the nation needs to be aware of.
Of course, there may be misunderstandings here. The figures released from King’s on December 29th may not include paediatric wards for example, so there may in fact have been a substantial number of Covid positive children in King’s not obvious in the figures.
I am aware that some hospitals have converted their children’s intensive care units for adult patients, so perhaps a paediatric ICU full of adult patients has been misconstrued as a “ward full of children”.
Maybe Ms Duffel’s definition of “a whole ward” is substantially less than 20 patients. Or possibly her definition of a child with Covid may not imply a very sick patient, but a child admitted for another reason who has tested positive but is actually asymptomatic for Covid – as almost all children are.
Or maybe there is another explanation.
Either way, I think the public deserve to know.
Stop Press: An article by an anonymous 32 year-old trainee paediatrician at a London hospital on the Telegraph‘s website yesterday afternoon said the hospital was expecting to admit fewer children this winter than last winter.
Stop Press 2: The BBC has distanced itself from the interview, quoting numerous paediatricians saying there’s been no increase in children being admitted to hospital with Covid.
Stop Press 3: Damian Roland, a Paediatric Emergency Medicine Consultant and Honorary Associate Professor at Leicester University, described the Radio 5 Live tweet as “misinformation”.
The Failed Strategy of Lockdown Sceptics: We Appealed to Reason, not Emotion
There follows a guest post by Dr David McGrogan, Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. A painful read for people in our camp, but hard to disagree with. I’ve given it a permanent slot on the right-hand side under “Are Sceptical Voices Being Suppressed?”, but it’s so good I’m publishing it in full below.
It must surely now be evident to all of us ‘sceptics’ that we have failed. Despite our efforts, the message simply has not got through. While there is clearly a sizeable minority of the population who feel as we do, it really is only a minority. This has been brought home to me very strongly while away visiting family over Christmas. While most of my relatives and old friends have been happy to meet up, they are simply uninterested in getting to the bottom of what has happened over the past year. If the virus comes up in conversation at all, it is only in reference to overcrowded hospitals, discussed with sad shakes of the head and much tut-tutting.
We have to face facts: most people simply accept the mainstream narrative, and with the prospect of the magic spell of a vaccine in the offing, there is little incentive for them to change their minds. The thinking of the great majority of our fellow citizens can be summarised as: a few more months of this and then it will be spring, things will be back to normal, and we can forget about all of this.
Why is it that so few of our fellow citizens seem willing to even listen to arguments which we find so convincing? There are undoubtedly lots of reasons, but I think it is at least in part due simply to a failure of strategy on the part of sceptics. That is, we have made arguments that are either factual or which appeal to our love of liberty. Neither of them has had much traction amongst the populace.
First, the problem of making the factual case. I am an academic, somebody who discusses ideas and encourages students to investigate and debate facts for a living. So this has been a very bitter pill for me to swallow indeed. But the reality is that most people are just not actually interested in finding out the truth for themselves. They are much more interested in conforming with what they perceive to be what one could call the ‘moral truth’ – the prevailing moral norm. The prevailing moral norm of 2020 is: lockdowns are the ethically right thing to do because they keep vulnerable people safe. To argue against that moral norm is, by definition, both immoral and abnormal. This is the most salient factor in governing behaviour in our society right now.
Lockdown sceptics have made all kinds of important, well-reasoned, fact-based arguments against the lockdowns and other restrictions that have been imposed upon us. The problem of ‘deaths with’ COVID-19; the many issues with the accuracy of PCR tests; the overinflation of the IFR; the comparisons to other diseases; the excess death charts; the fact that the NHS is always nearly overwhelmed every year. None of it has cut through, because most people just don’t respond to fact-based argument. They respond to what they consider to be the moral truth. More importantly, they really don’t respond to fact-based argument if that would mean owning up to being immoral and abnormal. If in order to change your mind you have to become a pariah, then human psychology 101 provides a quick answer: you won’t change your mind.
Second – and this is an even bitterer pill, perhaps the bitterest of all – we have the failure of our liberty-based arguments. We have made all kinds of appeals to freedom and civil liberties during the past year. But the brute fact is that most people apparently couldn’t give two hoots about freedom when the chips are down. Security and safety are what matter. The moral truth for our compatriots is not that the Government rode roughshod over our liberties this year. The moral truth for them is that the Government justifiably deprived us of our liberties to keep us safe – and we’re grateful for it. We can bemoan this and debate the reasons for it all we like. But it’s the world in which we live.
Our task now, then, is to lick our wounds and think about strategy for the next time this all happens. This pandemic is over biologically and will soon be over politically. I fully expect Hancock, Gove, Johnson and their cronies to ride a wave of optimism into the summer that will give them the only thing they really want, the only thing they really crave – a boost in the opinion polls. But there will be other crises like it. New viruses will emerge or be discovered – it has happened enough times since the SARS outbreak of the early 2000s to demonstrate that is an inevitability. We have to be ready. And we have to be ready not just with facts and statistics or arguments in defence of liberty (although those are of course important). We have to be ready with a moral truth of our own.
What we need to emphasise, in other words, is not reason, or not reason alone, but emotion. We quite clearly live in an emotional age – one in which “don’t kill granny” is a more effective argument than any Ivor Cummins video. So emotion has to be emphasised. What do lockdowns mean emotionally? They mean suicides. They mean depression and anxiety. They mean school closures which harm children’s life chances. They mean rising inequality. They mean cancelled hospital treatments. They mean poverty and economic devastation in the developing world. They mean lack of hugs and family and social warmth. It is not that we haven’t talked about all of these things. But we haven’t talked about them enough. We have to acknowledge that while we have all manner of fantastic knock-down factual arguments and statements of principle against all of this nonsense, people aren’t interested to hear them: nobody wants to be knocked-down, fantastically or otherwise. People want to conform with what they perceive to be a moral truth. So we have to set about generating that. We have to start talking not about numbers or rights, but about the human tragedy that lockdown has created. We need stories about real people, real sadness, real misery, real illness. It’s not charts, graphs, numbers or science that will convince people. It’s establishing a moral truth that matters.
Early on the in pandemic, the television news was almost nothing but emotion. Stories about young people, children, and key workers getting sick and dying. People weren’t interested in ‘the science’. They were interested in how awful the virus was and how scared they were of something happening to them or a loved one. How different things might be now if there had also been regular stories in the news about people who had lost a loved one due to a failure to get medical treatment, people sent into downward spirals of depression due to social deprivation or job loss, children whose development has been damaged by lack of education or socialisation, people with severe mental health problems deprived of face to face treatment, and so on? Maybe this is the sort of thing that is now required, in recognition that this war has been lost, but that others will follow.
Stop Press: A new study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests the reason those of us who question lockdown restrictions are treated with such contempt is because efforts to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 have become moralised. That is, people don’t assess the efforts of governments and scientists to mitigate the impact of the virus as they would any other policy, weighing up the costs and benefits. Rather, they regard the minimisation of loss from COVID-19 as a moral imperative that outweighs all other considerations. Ethan Yang has written an interesting comment piece on this study for the AIER blog.
Karol Sikora: Sceptic of the Week
Owen Jones launched a vicious attack on Professor Karol Sikora in the Guardian a couple of days ago. His sin? To be a lockdown sceptic. That’s “dangerous”, according to Jones, who has been an enthusiast for placing the entire country under house arrest since March. Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked, has written a rebuttal.
It isn’t only COVID-19 that is mutating. So is cancel culture. This nasty strain of censorship is spreading, intensifying, becoming ever-more poisonous and harmful to the body politic. The more coronavirus spreads, the more the virus of cancellation spreads too, with packs of censors and neo-Stalinists now demanding the silencing and punishment of anybody who deviates even slightly from the consensus on COVID-19. Just consider the current efforts to destroy the reputation of Karol Sikora.
Professor Sikora is the cancer expert who has been questioning the Covid consensus for the past few months. He has queried the need for harsh lockdowns and kicked up a necessary fuss over the NHS’s suspension of various forms of medical treatment, including for cancer. In the fog of fear about COVID-19, Sikora has shone a light of hope. We’ll get through it, he says. Don’t live in dread, he counsels. Let normal life, and normal medical treatment, continue as much as possible, he’s advised. Has he always been right? Of course not. Show me the man who has. He suggested there wouldn’t be a second wave. In May he said that, come August, things will be ‘virtually back to normal’. That was wrong. String him up! Get out your rotten tomatoes. Pelt this speechcriminal who made a prediction that was not correct.
For the supposed crime of not being entirely right about the course coronavirus would take, Professor Sikora is now public enemy No1 in the eyes of the lockdown fanatics. Leading the mob, as is so often the case these days, is Guardian columnist Owen Jones. From the very start of the Covid crisis, Mr Jones, like many other privileged millennial leftists, has relished the authoritarianism of the lockdown. In March he expressed delight at being ‘placed under house arrest along with millions of people under a police state by a right-wing Tory government’. Yes, if you are well-off, middle class, capable of working from home and cancer-free, lockdown was probably a riot. For other people, however, it wasn’t. Professor Sikora’s chief sin was to express this truth – to say that lockdown will exact a wicked toll on many people – and now privileged beneficiaries of lockdown like Mr Jones are out to destroy him for it.
O’Neill concludes by reminding us how important free speech is – particularly during a national crisis.
Dissent is always good; but in an era of unprecedented authoritarianism it becomes essential. When officialdom assumes control over every aspect of our lives – our social lives, our family lives, whether we can go to work, even whether we can leave the house – then it is absolutely right to question things, constantly, unflinchingly. No one should ever feel comfortable with the suspension of freedom. They should be talking about it and challenging it every hour of every day. Whether their challenges are ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ is not the most important thing here – the most important thing is that we maintain a culture of criticism in response to the most extraordinary climate of authoritarianism any of us has ever experienced.
Dogma is the enemy of progress. Dissent – however irritating the police, the government and the Guardian might find it – is the guarantor of progress. It is the means through which all of us, including society more broadly, entertain the possibility that we are wrong. That lockdown is a mistake, that giving teenagers puberty-blockers is an error, that the Earth is not in fact at the centre of the solar system. Dogma protects even immoral policies and incorrect thinking from criticism by demonising dissenters; dissent, on the other hand, helps to shine a light on the wrongness of certain political strategies or ideological beliefs by encouraging criticism and scrutiny. Even where dissenters are wrong, factually, the climate they help to create is of enormous benefit to society and to mankind.
We must defend freedom of speech in this crisis. Our lives are locked down – and many people accept that as a temporary measure – but our minds should never be locked down. Free thought and free speech are the great guards – our only guards, in fact – against the ossification of public debate and the creation of new, potentially damaging orthodoxies and policies. If we allow free thinking to die alongside the economy, millions of people’s jobs and those cancer patients who were neglected for months on end, then society will be the poorer for a very, very long time. So carry on, Positive Professor. Dissent is now the duty of every individual who wants to ensure that freedom is still breathing when this cursed lockdown is lifted.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt came to the defence of Karol Sikora, Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan and Mike Yeadon on Twitter in response to a Tweet that relied on data about Covid hospital admissions to purportedly show the second wave is bigger than the first. In fact, if you measure the impact of each wave in terms of excess deaths, the second wave is far, far smaller.
Round-up
- “I got Covid for Christmas. I’m not going to lie, it was quite scary” – Jeremy Clarkson tells of his bout with the virus in his Sunday Times column
- “Lockdown pups sent packing by families with no time for walkies” – What are people like? A dog is not just for lockdown…
- “Guess where Professor Lockdown got his ideas … China’s police state” – Peter Hitchens lambasts Neil Ferguson in his Mail on Sunday column
- “Barbadians demand Love Island star Zara Holland and her boyfriend are thrown in jail for flouting Covid laws” – After the boyfriend tested positive, the couple tried to flee the island
- “Jeremy Corbyn’s brother Piers is in trouble AGAIN – for the second time in 2021” – Piers Corbyn has been arrested twice in 2021 for participating in anti-lockdown protests
- “Piers Corbyn announces he is running for London Mayor” – Undeterred, Piers is taking on Sadiq Khan in May
- “Why does the press continue to swallow Government spin on Covid?” – Michael Curzon in Bournbrook Magazine asks a pertinent question
- “Britain Opens Door to Mix-and-Match Vaccinations, Worrying Experts” – Alarming story in the New York Times claiming the Government is going to mix and match different vaccines, giving people the first dose of one then a second dose of another
- “The New York Times‘s UK vaccine clickbait” – Debunking of the above story by Steerpike in the Spectator
- “Some healthcare workers refuse to take COVID-19 vaccine, even with priority access” – The LA Times has interviewed some heathcare workers who aren’t going to take the vaccine
- “UK can lead the world in 2021 with a pioneering lockdown exit plan” – Janet Daley in the Telegraph sets out her exit plan
- “With the worst possible PM at the worst possible time, Britain’s got no chance of a happy new year” – a cheery New Year message from
the GrinchAlastair Campbell in the Sydney Morning Herald - “Bojo Tweets Praise for the Great Reset. Strap in Everyone, 2021 is Going to be a Wild Ride” – James Delingpole reads rather a lot into Boris Johnson’s use of the phrase “build back better”
- “Vitamin D and Viral Special with Dr. David Grimes et al” – Ivor Cummins’s podcast
- Dr Thomas Aigner, a Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Tuebingen, has resigned from the Academy of Sciences in Mainz in protest at its support for Germany’s lockdown policy
- “Proof Of Vaccination Will Be ‘Essential’ In Ontario: Health Minister” – The Huffington Post reveals that Ontario residents who choose not to receive the COVID-19 vaccine could face certain restrictions
- “Protestors flood Toronto streets, demand end to lockdowns” – The Post-Millennial reports on a protest in Toronto yesterday
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Four today: “Everybody Knows” by Leonard Cohen, “Stop Playing With My Mind” by Daniel Bovie and Roy Rox, “No Time For Tears” by Little Mix and “The Waiting” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Love in the Time of Covid
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums, including a dating forum called “Love in a Covid Climate” that has attracted a bit of attention. We have a team of moderators in place to remove spam and deal with the trolls, but sometimes it takes a little while so please bear with us. You have to register to use the Forums as well as post comments below the line, but that should just be a one-time thing. Any problems, email the Lockdown Sceptics webmaster Ian Rons here.
Sharing Stories
Some of you have asked how to link to particular stories on Lockdown Sceptics so you can share it. To do that, click on the headline of a particular story and a link symbol will appear on the right-hand side of the headline. Click on the link and the URL of your page will switch to the URL of that particular story. You can then copy that URL and either email it to your friends or post it on social media. Please do share the stories.
Social Media Accounts
You can follow Lockdown Sceptics on our social media accounts which are updated throughout the day. To follow us on Facebook, click here; to follow us on Twitter, click here; to follow us on Instagram, click here; to follow us on Parler, click here; and to follow us on MeWe, click here.
Woke Gobbledegook
We’ve decided to create a permanent slot down here for woke gobbledegook. Today, we bring you the reaction of woke viewers to the BBC’s screening of Grease on Boxing Day. The Mail on Sunday has more.
In the film’s final scenes, student Sandy ditches her good- girl image for skin-tight PVC trousers and takes up smoking so she can impress Danny.
It prompted one outraged Twitter user to write: “Grease is far too sexist and overly white and should be banned from the screen. It is nearly 2021 after all.”
Another furious viewer complained: “Grease sucks on so many levels and the message is pure misogyny.”
A third user agreed, saying: “Grease is just the most sexist piece of s***.”
One scene that caused particular offence to youthful viewers was when Putzie, one of Danny’s friends in the T-Birds gang, positioned himself on the floor to look up the skirts of two female students at the fictional Rydell High School.
Other viewers complained about the lyric “Did she put up a fight?” in the hit song “Summer Nights”, when Danny describes seducing Sandy.
“So turns out Grease is actually pretty rapey,” wrote one aghast viewer, while another said: “Misogynistic, sexist and a bit rapey.”
Sensitive viewers also targeted female characters for criticism.
Rizzo was accused of being a bully when she ridiculed Sandy’s good-girl image as she sang “Look At Me I’m Sandra D” in front of her friends in the Pink Ladies gang at a slumber party.
Others were angry that Rizzo was ‘slut-shamed’ for sleeping with various men, particularly when she had sex with T-Bird Kenickie without a condom.
After thinking she might be pregnant, Rizzo was ostracised, prompting the character, as played by Stockard Channing, to sing about the reaction: “There are worse things I could do than go with a boy or two.”
The ‘snowflakes’ were also unimpressed with Vince Fontaine, the radio announcer who hosted the dance-off at Rydell High.
As the character flirted with Pink Lady Marty, he told all dancers that there were no same-sex couples.
The film is, after all, set in 1958 – 45 years before homosexuality was universally decriminalised across the United States.
Nevertheless, the glaring lack of LGBT awareness angered one young Twitter user, who complained: “All couples must be boy/girl? Well Grease, shove your homophobia.”
Another simply wrote: “Grease peak of homophobia.”
The lack of non-white faces in the cast angered some.
One went so far as to question the broadcaster’s decision to air the film and expressed surprise that it was shown without a disclaimer.
One viewer wrote: “I caught the end of Grease, the movie, and noticed there were no black actors or pupils at the high school.”
Another added: “Watched Grease on the BBC, surprised they let it go, full of white people.”
On and on it goes. It’s just as well the BBC didn’t show Zulu instead.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Mail on Sunday‘s Arts Correspondent lambasts BBC comedians for celebrating our departure from the European Union by insulting Nigel Farage and comparing Brexit to cancer.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
We’ve created a one-stop shop down here for people who want to buy (or make) a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and it has the advantage of not explicitly claiming you have a disability. But if you have no qualms about that (or you are disabled), you can buy a lanyard from Amazon saying you do have a disability/medical exemption here (takes a while to arrive). The Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. You can get a “Hidden Disability” tag from ebay here and an “exempt” card with lanyard for just £1.99 from Etsy here. And, finally, if you feel obliged to wear a mask but want to signal your disapproval of having to do so, you can get a “sexy world” mask with the Swedish flag on it here.
Don’t forget to sign the petition on the UK Government’s petitions website calling for an end to mandatory face masks in shops here.
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption. Another reader has created an Android app which displays “I am exempt from wearing a face mask” on your phone. Only 99p, and he’s even said he’ll donate half the money to Lockdown Sceptics, so everyone wins.
If you’re a shop owner and you want to let your customers know you will not be insisting on face masks or asking them what their reasons for exemption are, you can download a friendly sign to stick in your window here.
And here’s an excellent piece about the ineffectiveness of masks by a Roger W. Koops, who has a doctorate in organic chemistry. See also the Swiss Doctor’s thorough review of the scientific evidence here.
The Great Barrington Declaration
The Great Barrington Declaration, a petition started by Professor Martin Kulldorff, Professor Sunetra Gupta and Professor Jay Bhattacharya calling for a strategy of “Focused Protection” (protect the elderly and the vulnerable and let everyone else get on with life), was launched in October and the lockdown zealots have been doing their best to discredit it ever since. If you googled it a week after launch, the top hits were three smear pieces from the Guardian, including: “Herd immunity letter signed by fake experts including ‘Dr Johnny Bananas’.” (Freddie Sayers at UnHerd warned us about this the day before it appeared.) On the bright side, Google UK has stopped shadow banning it, so the actual Declaration now tops the search results – and my Spectator piece about the attempt to suppress it is among the top hits – although discussion of it has been censored by Reddit. The reason the zealots hate it, of course, is that it gives the lie to their claim that “the science” only supports their strategy. These three scientists are every bit as eminent – more eminent – than the pro-lockdown fanatics so expect no let up in the attacks. (Wikipedia has also done a smear job.)
You can find it here. Please sign it. Now over three quarters of a million signatures.
Update: The authors of the GBD have expanded the FAQs to deal with some of the arguments and smears that have been made against their proposal. Worth reading in full.
Update 2: Many of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration are involved with new UK anti-lockdown campaign Recovery. Find out more and join here.
Update 3: You can watch Sunetra Gupta set out the case for “Focused Protection” here and Jay Bhattacharya make it here.
Update 4: The three GBD authors plus Prof Carl Heneghan of CEBM have launched a new website collateralglobal.org, “a global repository for research into the collateral effects of the COVID-19 lockdown measures”. Follow Collateral Global on Twitter here. Sign up to the newsletter here.
Judicial Reviews Against the Government
There are now so many legal cases being brought against the Government and its ministers we thought we’d include them all in one place down here.
The Simon Dolan case has now reached the end of the road. But the cause has been taken up by PCR Claims. Check out their website here.
The current lead case is the Robin Tilbrook case which challenges whether the Lockdown Regulations are constitutional. You can read about that and contribute here.
Then there’s John’s Campaign which is focused specifically on care homes. Find out more about that here.
There’s the GoodLawProject and Runnymede Trust’s Judicial Review of the Government’s award of lucrative PPE contracts to various private companies. You can find out more about that here and contribute to the crowdfunder here.
And last but not least there was the Free Speech Union‘s challenge to Ofcom over its ‘coronavirus guidance’. A High Court judge refused permission for the FSU’s judicial review on December 9th and the FSU has decided not to appeal the decision because Ofcom has conceded most of the points it was making. Check here for details.
Samaritans
If you are struggling to cope, please call Samaritans for free on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email [email protected] or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch. Samaritans is available round the clock, every single day of the year, providing a safe place for anyone struggling to cope, whoever they are, however they feel, whatever life has done to them.
Shameless Begging Bit
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And Finally…
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
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I’ve argued from the start that lockdowns would kill more people than the virus and tried to appeal to peoples compassion but it does not work, the government trumped compassion with fear. People do not care about suffering they cannot see, they only care about their own suffering, their own fear. That’s why so many lockdown zealots break the rules. Solipsism on motion, society does not exist.
That teenage girl should starve herself in her bedroom, the young man should jump but not make a splash. The mother with a lump in her breast should stop complaining, the old mans heart condition does not exist because I cannot see it, the couple who have lost their business can take ‘free cash’ and the little girl locked up with her abuser should keep taking it for the team. If the mantra ‘don’t kill granny’ was heartfelt where was the public outcry when we found out she was locked in solitary with a DNR notice attached to her bed?
That said, time is against the Government. The longer this goes on the more people will know someone who has suffered from the lockdowns and self interest will turn. Keep it up, we… Read more »
And notice (as I am sure you have, NN) that this is the ASSISTANT Director. £74K! How much is the actual Director being paid? You will notice the terminology here. Being paid. NOT earning.
There is a mis-diagnosis going on. Why does Lockdown Sceptics continue to think that the government is the primary driver of lockdown policy and propaganda. It was the news media, chiefly the BBC, with it’s relentless push from day one that created the conditions for lockdown and continues to do. Boris the clueless (no policy vision beyond Brexit [it didn’t take a genius to pick the winning side before the referendum] and net zero carbon [he takes his cue from the media – therefore he was a disaster waiting to happen]) followed what he thought was public opinion, that is the panic created by the BBC.
Piers Morgan too surely?
Thank you, makes sense, stopped TV in 2006 so the few clips I see elsewhere seem insane.
My thoughts – the local newspaper that allegedly said “we are as independent as our budget allows us to be” (and think the money and influence of big pharma and their proxies on the msm); And newspapers always have an ey on what their readers want – they will not set out on a campaign if they are not confident their readers are with them (I suppose why the DM, with its base of people in small businesses is more sceptical).
This deserves to be discussed more fully in tomorrow’s btl – I’m off to bed.
I have a lot of sympathy with this but I think that the real situation is more complex than this. It is customary to divided the state into four parts, or ‘estates’. The first estate used to be the aristocracy but is now best understood as the Government. The second estate is the Church. The third estate is the people and the fourth estate is the press or the MSM,
It seems to me that the first, second and fourth estates have declared war on the people. The first estate by enacting laws inimical to the interest of the people; the second estate by a complete failure to give a prophetic voice to the government and the MSM; a voice that SHOULD be like an Old Testament Prophet. This is a criminal dereliction of duty and ALL christian denominations are guilty of this, not only the Church of England. The fourth estate has, by relentless propaganda, failed to present facts in an even and unbiased way, something which has been used by the Government for its own ends. The second estate, the church has also been complicit by its silence.
Which of these CAUSED the other I cannot say. In… Read more »
Absolutely disgusting that Steve Hayes was threatened with getting no treatment for his broken hip if he didn’t have a covid test. Someone please tell me the can’t do that?
If it turns out that excess UK deaths are in fact lower than in 2008 (and that Belarus has a lower rate of excess deaths than in the UK), someone should pay for all this nonsense.
Well yes. For a start, Belarus will be made to pay for being a source of embarrassment.
Weren’t they trying that with Sweden earlier this (or last) year?
Ongoing
“impairment to concentration, mental activity and mental well-being in 68% of subjects”
Working an absolute treat then, and exactly as intended, although they will be disappointed that this percentage is not higher.
This must also be happening in the general population, and might go some way to explaining why many observers on here have noticed people sinking deeper and deeper into the brainwashing at such an alarming rate.
Create your own sheeple!
I suppose they didn’t find any lives had been saved….
In a moment of lucidity, my anxiety evaporated and allowed me to see that we are in the middle of the greatest false narrative of all time. Quite stupendously ambitious, and equally mad.
Indeed!
Wondering if it’s not an attempt by the modern robber barons, with the help of their main supplier, to steal not only all the money but the USA itself. Soon Proconsul Harris will be taking the knee to Emperor Xi.
Thermageddon was a dry run.
Presumably this will have been flagged on LS previously, but I seem to have missed it. Unherd have their eyes opened a little more about harsh reality by Glenn Greenwald.
Plenty of issues with Greenwald politically, but on freedom of speech he absolutely gets it, and as someone with a lot of tech contacts he’s in the right place to sound the alarm. Sayers is bright but far too conformist (which he pretty much admits outright in this interview).
Glenn Greenwald: Big Tech is censoring Covid debate
Many people here will only have realised in the last 24 hours that there has beeen a developing constitutional crisis over the fraudulent US election results. Biden’s victory was a totally illegal scam.
Some may be aware of a tape of a conversation between Trump and the Secretary of State in Georgia responsible for the election in his state. The MSM, including the BBC, are of course misrepresenting this trying to make out Trump is illegitimately exerting pressure to get a legitimate result cancelled.
I would recommend people go on Tracy Beanz Twitter. Tracy takes you through the FULL transcript.
What emerges is that Trump has some damning evidence in his locker. He is clearly going to release this before the 6 Jan Congressional session to decide whether to validate the Electoral College votes.
So, expect an interesting week as the BBC and other MSM struggle to interpret the evidence of fraud as evidence of Trump’s culpability.
Let’s hope the good guys, or at least the better guys, win. Lotta smoke, could be a fire somewhere.
Shurely the Beeb aren’t giving misleading, out of context information are they?
I was wondering why they only gave thisone brief quote rather than the wider context. What is up with these people?
They should “shield the vulnerable” by giving them jobs in supermarkets.
Oh very good 👍
For those interested, here is a really good summary of the so-called vaccine trials and what “safe” and “effective” really mean (hint: not very much). This should be required reading by anyone on the fence about taking the vaccine. For me it just confirmed why I won’t take it, ever.
https://off-guardian.org/2021/01/03/what-vaccine-trials/
Messenger RNA vaccines are extremely problematic, you would have to be absolutely desperate to try them.
This is great stuff. I won’t be sharing it with any collaborators, because they will be unable to understand it. If they could, it might just save their lives. Oh well.
I, too, will be selective with whom I share it! Unfortunately my idiotic parents are eager to get the vaccine. My dad is a retired GP and believes everything the “public health experts” say and has always been like this. My mom goes along with what he says, but since she’s actually very healthy and had a mom who just died at almost 101, I may try to get through to her. I think many of my friends believe I’m a bit of a crackpot, so unless they ask I won’t be offering. I can really only force my nearest and dearest to hear me out, so beyond my husband and kids I have very little influence.
Just watched the interview with Wolfgang Wodarg by Nick Hudson at PANDATA linked by BeBopRockSteady, well worth a look. As time goes on, the shadows cast by these psychopaths – there really is no other word – get bigger but the light which creates the shadow, which they cannot control, reveals with increasing clarity who they are and what they are doing. If we hold our nerve and keep faith with reason and truth, the line will eventually break; if only because the people driving this crime against humanity are quite literally and very seriously deranged.
I’m just making a half time cup of tea, a very informative watch. Interesting to hear of his work with Paul Flynn on the Council of Europe report. Good intro from Nick too:
He is that man and the people doing this do not have full control of the consequences.
Spotted him through corona.film early on, thank God, helped to make some sense of the Insanity.
I followed a link here to a YT video by Prof Dolores Cahill (?). V. Powerful info on on how the mRNA Covid vaccine can create havoc in your immune system if you later get exposed to another coronavirus.
Can anyone out the link up here? It’s so important!
I think this might be why the government has delayed the second shots of Pfizer vaccine because they know if they don’t delay till spring a lot of elderly and frail people are going to die as a consequence of having the vaccine.
I can’t find it on YouTube.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/afekJTzyDWY5/
The idea that this is a tactical delay to militate against unconcealable widespread vaccine damage is an interesting one. They are in serious trouble if this is in fact what is happening, because the efficacy of the vaccine is shot to pieces as a result of not being administered as the manufacturer recommends.
I watched this earlier but was only half listening. Need to listen again as it rather worried me.
I think it’s extremely concerning. But of course none of this will feature in our MSM.
Thanks – yes I misrembered it as You Tube. I would really urge everyone one to watch this. All science!
Need to tread very carefully on this one though as Professor Cahill has a certain track record. I’d prefer something from her peers before I trust it – it’s a little too anti-vax.
That said, I’d already decided personally not the take the Pfizer vaccine but wait for the AZ one. Partially because of slight worry over long term effects of a novel new mRNA vaccine but also because I’m ex-AZ and have a completely illogical trust in them 🙂 But as todays report shows about why the sceptic view is struggling, we work on emotion.
And it’s cheaper which appeals to my Yorkshire roots.
Yes, my Spidey-senses are apt to tingle whenever I hear Dolores. The first time I saw her was fairly early on in the ‘crisis’: her demeanour and liking for making absolute black-and-white assertions doesn’t quite fit with her apparent credentials.
Has everybody seen this?
Recognise loads of the names and not surprised that many have worked for pharma. Is it a particular team?
It’s our illustrious SAGE! An odious, corrupt coven if ever I saw one.
2020 was analysis.
2021 is action,
I liked this Tweet that just appeared on my thread:
https://twitter.com/taniatheherblst/status/1345804694908788737
Tania The Herbalist
@taniatheherblst
I lost many friends and a few family to covid this year. Of course none of them actually died… or even had it. But they revealed themselves to be cowards who would quickly sell out my freedoms for their own fear. And that, I cannot abide. Sucks to be them.
Brilliant, this is such a great inversion of the emotive language so often employed by the MSM and the zealots. I think I will re-use this widely.
My dear neighbour’s courage has recently failed her, a shock since she was so stalwart but I don’t blame her at all, the onslaught has been constant.
I was having a look at the spectator COVID data hub and got to thinking about the hospital admissions of COVID. The graphs show there are around the same amount of people in hospitals now with a COVID positive test as there were in April. But in April for a while anyway there were do not admit orders in place for known ill and elderly at home and in care homes. We know a lot of people died at their home and care home and were not admitted to hospital.
Anyone who needs hospital is now being admitted and from care homes too, also everyone in hospital is tested weekly and as we know around a third or so are picking up their infections in hospital. Hospitals are also trying to offer full services so they will be fuller. I have doctor and nurse friends currently working who say their north west hospitals feel busy in a normal January way, though in November they did cut back on elective surgery as they were full on ICU. London hospitals seem to be feeling it currently but Mike Yeadon has tweeted that oxygen demands are normal.
And, perhaps like most… Read more »
Excellent post. Personally I’ve been wondering about the reasoning for mandatory masking. We are told that it stops people spreading virally loaded droplets. I think back to the spring when I was out shopping virtually every day in local small supermarkets. I’d don’t recall ever once hearing anyone cough or sneeze with or without a mask. I can’t seem how droplets would be an issue!
People who were coughing and sneezing were clearly staying at home! Ah well, then we should be seeing huge rates of infection within the home – only problem is we don’t. I think I saw a figure of 17% for transmission within the home. Incredibly low when you think how people will be getting into bed together, hugging each other and sharing so many touched surfaces.
My view has always been it’s through aerosol and contaminated surfaces that transmission is mostly taking place and that it is indoor spaces, most obviously supermarkets where most transmission occurs.
If it is supermarkets, then logically supermarket workers must be the most at risk group.
Karl Denniger at the Market Ticker has amassed a large body of evidence that aerosol transmission is a secondary vector and it is primarily a contact transferred infection.
It is spread by the same mechanism as Norovirus or Polio, oro-foecal contamination.
https://market-ticker.org/cgi-ticker/akcs-www?post=239747&page=1
Supermarket workers would clearly be one of the most resistant population groups in the country. They would have been exposed to numerous coronaviruses and also to undertake the quite physically demanding work, they are probably in the top 30% of the population as regards fitness.
The oro-faecal route of transmission is a better candidate than droplets I would think but again, why then is intra-household transmission so low?
I would say that people are washing their hands more and not shaking hands when they greet each other. It is my belief that these two factors are easily the most important.
WRT intra-household transmission, I also see two factors here; first, if no-one brings it into the home, no-one gets it, but if someone brings it in, then the general cleanliness within most households keeps transmission to a minimum.
There is an element of people taking more trouble over hygiene than they would in normal times. Even the hand-wringers and bed-wetters are helping by sanitising everything. Although I never bother, most supermarket trolley-handles are slimy when I touch them, so it will have some effect; as long as they are the ones damaging their skin and health through overexposure to sanitisers, then I see no downside there.
British society is brewing the mother of all reckonings with its continued and relentless favouritism towards preserving the old over the future of the young. If the schools are made to close again for months on end, perhaps til Easter if not for longer, we will have had two consecutive school years ripped away from British children, we will have had two consecutive years of Mickey Mouse grades being awarded for GCSE and A-level based on ‘teacher predicted grades’. There is no salvaging the precedent that this will set for current schoolchildren and subsequent school years, as the very notion of meritocracy, of working hard for your grades, of bonding with your classmates and teachers in the process of education will be thrown out the window. What is to stop kids who don’t like school work to simply play truant for months with no repercussions during ‘online learning’? Who will stop them from cheating or just copying and pasting answers from Google or Wikipedia?
In Britain we already had a workforce that has increasingly fallen behind the standards of competitor countries, we have university graduates who barely know the basics of spelling and grammar and can’t calculate 9 x 8… Read more »
You are so right. Also good for me. 67 with an above average IQ keen to work.
The other problem is that a degree in Social Anthropology makes you 2IC OF Scotland.
And she appears to be one of the cabal running the Scottish government……
Except that the policies are not favouring the elderly at all, they are killing them. As for the young, well it seems to me that only brain dead slaves are going to be required for future purposes, so what better way to prepare them for a lifetime of total, abject servitude?
Yes, the folly is that the population has been conditioned to prick its ears up and jump at any negative trends in the covid statistics, whereas the media and authorities have never, ever reported on any of the other major causes of death in this country with this kind of relentless barrage of daily updates (heart attacks, strokes, dementia, road traffic accidents, suicides etc. etc.); we’re in a hole of hysteria that we cannot rescue ourselves from, and the media’s default mode is to go to a (understandably) stressed and fatigued doctor wanting to mouth off about more lockdowns in order to reduce their workload, rather than some other kind of expert or researcher who isn’t on the frontline but because of it can give a more balanced and objective view.
The reality of the situation is whatever the MSM says it is, and this is where we have failed most spectacularly as a people. The enforced isolation has surely played a big part in this. Very few people are out and about to anything like the extent they previously would have been, and so the plethora of lies have little or no resistance.
The separation of people from all their support networks left them wide open to the Government propaganda beamed nighty into their homes.This has caused brainwashing on a national scale added to social media which enforces groupthink.
I’m lucky that in all my circle of work colleagues and friends we are all sceptics but my wife is being driven mad by the stupidity and hypocrisy of her friends,my daughters the same.
Which gives us another key reason why lockdown is being used. This level of propaganda can only be effective as long as people are isolated. It is essential to ensure the success of the mass psychological transformation ritual we are all being subjected to.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I suspected the PCR cycle count had been increased. This is only a suspicion, but have just found this tweet (NOT from one of our allies btw, not a sceptic):
https://twitter.com/fascinatorfun/status/1345866721861767168
Sadly sheeple just don’t get it. No idea what a Ct is let alone what it means. Emperor’s New Clothes.
It’s not for their benefit I’m posting here 😉
Apologies. I realise that. Sadly I’m beginning to accept we can’t win this battle with facts.
It’s definitely grim, but not for the reason he thinks of course. This is going to be a tough year.
The huge 27/28 jump is definitely dodgy. I thought it might be some Post-Xmas blip.
We must never lose sight that these are not ‘cases’. They are positive tests. Chalk and Cheese.
And deeply flawed tests too. “Asymptomatic cases” are bullshit.
If we ever accept that despite feeling perfectly healthy we can be ‘tested’ and found to have some dreadful infectious disease we are indeed lost.
I don’t believe in mass testing, in fact that jump is just further proof of its unreliability.
This is the Big Lie. If 50000 a day worked, why not 80000 a day? Why not 1000000?
Movie The Prestige. Every Magic Trick has three parts. We. Have yet to see The Prestige.
https://twitter.com/ChGefaell/status/1345838869355384832
Very short presentation of death excess Spain. Always interesting as often a bit before UK. The second seasonal wave just shows a slight national increase compared to April. Madrid,the epicentre of April outbreak shows hardly any excess mortality in autumn wave.Herdimmunity locally. The “cases” are not included here would just show an enormous more “cases” in the autumn compared to the April peak. Useless indicator.
Interesting week ahead in the US:
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/trump-rages-when-doubt-call-it-covid-pressure-clean-death-toll-mounts
161 admissions and you get $77,000.
In the UK I wonder what incentives the testing companies get to churn out a certain number of positives? A Fear Quota if you will
Am I alone? Is the proliferation to of Soma like ‘The Cabin’ and ‘The Only Way is Essex’ part of the Great Reset? This is the Great Leader from every TV screen by any other name.
Here is a link to a German study / collation of data adding weight to the evidence that the masking of kids is just pure child abuse.
The University of Witten / Herdecke study had input from hundreds of German doctors and over 20,000 other people in Germany.
See for yourself. No surprises here. Common sense.
https://2020news.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Corona_children_studies_Co-Ki_First_results_of_a_G.pdf
I really do hate people who want kids masked. They are unemphatic, void of compassion, and very, very, self absorbed.
Thanks for the link have posted it directly on FB to all the parents abusing their children, I think there’s a few more friends I’ve lost.
They weren’t friends to begin with
Its child abuse. The brain needs oxygen. Young children with their developing brains will be harmed greatly by this obscene practice, and those pushing these policies know it too. Macrons France now makes all children from the age of six wear masks all day. There’s no other way to describe these people other than psychopaths..
PandaCast | A Conversation with Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg
https://pandata.org/wolfgang-wodarg/
Link doesn’t work, SSL error.
Works for me (Firefox), may have been a temporary problem. Try a different browser perhaps?
Works here, great interview, many thanks.
Thanks BTW, have spent this evening watching Reiner F speaking with FranceSoir, the Catherine Austin Fitts interview again which is excellent and this will be up next. Looking forward to it.
ITN News just now. Apparently a Mother and Grandmother ‘got the virus’ from the 12 year old son. Grandmother died. Sad. What is the evidence it came from the son? This is the ramping up of Project Fear because the old threads are wearing thin. Also reference to the ‘more virulent strain’. Utter bullshit. Apparently it’s about ‘70% more infectious’. Ferguson crap.
It is completely and utterly impossible to isolate where someone caught a virus – or who from, other that a sexually transmitted one.
Is it worth complaining to ITN. To get the standard reply.
Was downgraded to 56% last week and then 48% two days ago! But, wait, we have the super-transmissible South African strain coming onto the scene. It’s all tosh.
Or will the sCaRy Nigerian contender get in first?
The one that empties your bank account too but you don’t spot anything fishy?
Don’t forget the super strain from Cape Cod.. I had it last week.. fishy breath, and felt battered afterwards..
Typical MSM hysterical drivel, even Nervtag reports admit no evidence of more virulence.
How cruel to blame a grandson for the death of his grandmother. The story sounds like nonsense, she could have caught covid anywhere.
I am afraid that grandmothers sometimes die, not a good reason to lock them all up for their own good is it? I know of at least one 80 Yr old who would like to spend the last years of his life living and making choices about the risks wants to take with his life.
The boy needs to be locked up. Presumably he didn’t follow the correct procedures to perfection.
We must have zero tolerance until every living person on this earth is made to feel guilty for somebody else’s death.
A student union busybody is bleating excitedly on social media about our uni’s mass testing centre and that they’re pleased to see so many students taking part. Accompanied by a mask selfie outside. FFS.
I remember when masks were first mandated a young family taking a selfie outside a butchers with masks on.
Enthusiastically cooperating with their own enslavement. If they survive the vaccine unscathed, all of their students will live a completely miserable existence their entire adult lives, and will die well before the current average life expectancy.
BAAAAAAA *sheep noises*
Almost all lockdown sceptics think Covid-19 is a real illness (like flu), deadly to some.
Almost no lockdown zealots acknowledge the suffering lockdowns cause, and the damage to society. The decision to shut down society, is as big as the decision to start a war with a major power, but they talk about it as if they are insisting everyone wears a seat belt or a crash helmet.
Zealots are not making an argument that weighs the suffering of covid and the suffering of lockdowns, claiming in balance we should lockdown. They say lockdowns are the only safe option.
Which is why anyone who supports this is my deadly enemy.
I will say however that upon more detailed questioning the majority of collaborators I engage with are perfectly aware of the damage that is being done, but are just way too scared to speak out about it. The zealots are a small but extremely influential minority.
Yes they are. But quite easy to grind down. On Twitter anyway.
I suspect they are even weaker in person. I hope you have ruined the rest of this week for your current target.
Hopefully he’s back at work tomorrow, on earlies, and will lie awake all night, worrying if he got it wrong or not…
Those I engage with don’t care. They see safety from Covid as overriding any other possible harm.
Economic and financial illiteracy are as much to blame for lockdown zealotry as scientific and statistical illiteracy, in my opinion. I think most people have not the slightest idea what money is or where it comes from, or how our public institutions (including the sainted NHS) are funded.
Or where food, and power, and clean water come from.
Had that chat on Twitter today as well, lol.
It’s funny you should mention food, power and water as I was thinking these well off wfh types who want more sever lockdowns do they think for a minute of all the workers keeping electricity and gas and water coming into their homes, do they think of the people picking, packing, growing, distributing food? No I don’t think they do. Perhaps if these things did stop in a cold January and there were no strawberries to buy in the shops they would soon wake up. Perhaps the cosy wfh types would like to do these essential jobs for the rest of the winter and let those currently doing them shelter at home. Makes my blood boil!!!!
You are SO right and this is a fundamental failing of education systems everywhere.
It’s amazing. Breathtaking in fact.
This is a key point. It became apparent, very early on, that most people have almost no grasp whatsoever of basic economics, or of statistics; this has really hindered sceptics in putting forward arguments.
I can’t tell you the number of times I have shared statistical information, related to the economy, or to population and health, and it just gains no traction at all, because so many people lack the basic skills required to read the information properly.
I sometimes wonder whether this is the case with our government leaders – that they actually can’t understand the concept of relative risk, or, if they do, that they always take a ‘glass half empty’ precautionary approach with any statistics that are remotely negative. So whilst the lockdowns are not the result of ‘incompetence’ as such – ie, just getting it all muddled and wrong – they are the result of a sort of twisted competence based on psychotic levels of risk avoidance.
You can imagine Vallance and Whitty constructing their charts, secure in the knowledge that if they present information “in a particular way”, the chances of the politicians actually cottoning-on to the potential ranges and anomalies in the data are close to zero.
They must laugh their heads off at Johnson and Hancock…
I think that the average attention span has reduced significantly over the past decade or two.
If something doesn’t have an instant payoff, not many with invest the time to really understand it.
Agree. Nor do they appreciate the knock on effects of businesses closing, particularly pubs and restaurants. A restaurant may survive in the end but smaller producers and suppliers may not.
Blame the dumbing down of the masses and our woeful education system, the general intelligence of your average Brit is staggeringly low, you see it daily, workers in shops/bars who can’t even count change without the use of a till, got a 1st class honours degree from Uni though! Economics/Financials/Statistics pfffft…forget it. Too fucking dumb to even contemplate.
No, the day this changes is when the massive state teat runs dry of it’s magic milk. Only then will we see the fuckers screaming for change and civil unrest.
Needs to happen soon, very soon.
At the end of the financial year, I suspect. This is why they’re rushing with the vaccine and making vague coercive threats.
Yes I am sure that illiteracy and ignorance is one cause.
The psychology of lockdown zealotry would also be worth exploring. There was an interesting piece on yesterday’s update discussing why the decision makers are pro-lockdown.
I think other causes may include the inability to deal with death, perception of risk, and ‘group-think’. It really bothers me.
Most people I know seem to be covidians, with only a few exceptions.
I’ve got one wriggling like an eel on a griddle right now on Twitter. He’s just been bleating about a shortage of lorry drivers if we don’t lock down! You know, like it’s really impossible to train any more up if this was even remotely true…
All desperate stuff.
Lorry drivers? It is pretty easy to ‘socially distance’ in that profession!
When the lockdown zealots lose thre jobs or their pension fund is raided or they lose the house tey own, then maybe just then they may say no more lockdown. I’m afraid those braindead fuckwit zealots will never see the light unless they are queuing at a food bank.
So long as they see it.
👍✅
March 2020: You are a seemingly healthy 30-year-old. Your scheduled cancer screening was cancelled. Actually you have a pre-cancerous condition which would be easily treatable if diagnosed promptly.
May: you are in pain, but don’t seek help because you have to protect the NHS.
June: in greater pain, you are granted an online consultation. Doctor recommends paracetamol.
July: in great pain, you dare to attend A&E. You get a referral.
August: you are diagnosed with advanced cancer.
September: you are scheduled for an emergency operatiin.
October, November, December: your operation is cancelled because the bed might be needed for a Covvie patient.
January 2021: your condition is found to be inoperable.
February: you die in agony, praising the NHS with your last breath, happy in the knowkedge that your death might have prolonged the life of a 90-year-old zombie with multiple co-morbidities. As you expire, an untrained operative sticks a swab up your nose.
And you go down as another victim of the Rona.
Dear Annie
The script editor for Casualty was pleased to recieve your story idea, but regrets that he cannot use it as it requires far too much suspension of disbelief by our viewers.
Yours etc
BBC
Dammit, foiled again.
This would fit in very well with the observation that we’ve failed to convince people because we’ve been too factual whereas people are working on the moral and emotional levels.
OMG I may have to steal that
That’s ASDA off my list. Nauseating advert involving masks and social distancing. Oh and ‘plant based meals’. Please don’t tell me this is the new normal!
Wow, they are even pushing the vegan GMO diet as well as all the other crap. We are under attack from every conceivable angle.
Yeah.. they’re not hiding it now. Agenda 2030 on vegan steroids..
The end of agriculture is one of the key goals, necessary in order to achieve the depopulation of all rural areas. All food will be lab grown GMO vegan shite.
It’s all fucking nuts though. How can they expect us to go for health fascism, owning nothing, no meat whatsoever, no middle class, no wealth aspirations, unnafordable travel, unaffordable vehicles.
The great reset is absolutely nuts and doomed to fail. You cant take what were free people and try engineer some sort of North Korea into them. These people are so rich they’re completely detached from reality.
On the current trajectory we are headed for North Korean conditions by the end of this year. We all keep saying that when this or that happens people will wake up en masse to having been duped, but I’m afraid the brainwashing is too deep.
Yes, people forget that in places like North Korea and other marxist/soviet states there wasn’t really a functioning democracy beforehand. Places like Germany which had functioning democracies but which then fell to fascism and then communism, had been softened up by years of war and depression beforehand. We’ve had neither so I’m not quite sure how they expect to get the Great Reset in place – possibly a war with China?
Trouble is, if you want a war with China (for example), the last thing you want to do is trash your economy beforehand.
Or people. Soylent green is people!
It’s veganuary!
https://www.bitchute.com/video/afekJTzyDWY5/
Professor Dolores Cahill: Why People Will Start Dying A Few Months After The First mRNA Vaccination
That’s pretty scary. I had a gut instinct that I didn’t want the Pfizer vaccine…