Boris Says Schools to Be Shut Till At Least March 8th
The Prime Minister confirmed yesterday that the lockdown will continue until March at the earliest, dashing hopes of an earlier reopening. Katy Balls in the Spectator has the details.
England’s national lockdown is set to run on until at least March. Speaking in the Commons chamber this afternoon, Boris Johnson confirmed that the return of pupils to the classroom would be the first thing to be eased – and this would not happen in February as he had previously hoped. Addressing the House, Johnson said “it will not be possible” to reopen schools in England after the half-term break next month. However, he remained hopeful that so long as the UK’s vaccination programme remained on track, the return of pupils to the classroom would be able to begin from Monday March 8th.
Given that No. 10 have no plans to relax any restrictions prior to schools reopening, this means the lockdown is here for the foreseeable. However, Johnson attempted to give both his MPs and the public some hope by saying that work on a roadmap out of lockdown was now underway. He said his government would reveal its “phased” route out of lockdown in the week beginning February 22nd. Guiding this work will be the research underway in government on whether vaccines block transmission of the virus.
In fact, Boris was only prepared to say that March 8th “could see the start of a phased return of pupils to the classroom”.
The Government has made this decision despite its own health advisory body, Public Health England, saying primary schools were safe to open after half term, as the Times reported on Tuesday.
Public Health England (PHE) said that there was now a “strong case” for the return to class, adding more pressure on Boris Johnson to set out a timetable for primary schools to reopen.
Pupils in that age group are “resistant” to wider coronavirus trends and play a small role in spreading infection, a series of comprehensive studies has concluded.
Outbreaks were recorded in 3% of primary schools during the autumn term, with most cases among teachers rather than pupils, PHE found. “Everything we have learnt from the summer half-term and the recent autumn term indicates that they are safe to remain open,” Shamez Ladhani, its chief schools investigator, said. Secondary schools were five times as likely to record outbreaks and much more closely reflect wider infection patterns, suggesting that a later, more phased opening might be necessary.
The harms to children from these lengthy school closures are incalculable and often irreversible.
Deborah Cohen presented a carefully balanced report for BBC Newsnight about the risks and benefits of reopening schools on Tuesday evening that is worth a watch.
Stop Press: Portugal has banned private schools from using online tuition during a two-week closure to prevent state schools falling behind. Talk about levelling down. No surprise to learn the PM is a socialist. The Mail has more.
Portugal’s socialist Prime Minister has banned private schools from teaching pupils remotely during a two-week classroom closure. The minority Socialist-led government of Antonio Costa said that allowing private institutions to teach remotely would put state school pupils at a disadvantage. The Portuguese government ordered all schools closed for two weeks last Thursday to slow contagion rates as hospitals faced record numbers of COVID-19 patients.
The performance of state schools was patchy during Portugal’s first lockdown, with many schools coming under fire for poor provision of online schooling.
Portugal’s ban on private schools teaching remotely also includes international schools, meaning British children living in the country doing GCSEs, A Levels or the International Baccalaureate cannot by law be taught for the next two weeks. Learning time lost during the imposed holiday, and any additional time lost from the school closure, would be compensated at a later data in the school year, the Government said.
“Banning digital classes in private education is a totalitarian and Marxist-style measure,” Rui Rio, the leader of the centre-right opposition party said. “[The measure] has nothing to do with the public interest or with the defence of public health. It is the left at its worst.”
Stop Press 2: The Mail reports that teaching unions are calling for even longer closures. The paper has also run a piece with comments from exasperated parents.
Borders Closing Ever Tighter With Arrival of Forced Quarantine
Home Secretary Priti Patel set out the details of the Government’s new forced quarantine policy for arrivals into the UK yesterday. Kate Andrews in the Spectator has the details.
Arrivals from 22 “high-risk” areas will soon be forced to quarantine in a hotel when they arrive in Britain. There will be no exceptions to the rule, and travellers must stay put for 10 days, even if they test negative for COVID-19. The “red list” of countries include Portugal, South Africa, Brazil and Cape Verde.
This crackdown was a long time coming. When Denmark found a mutant strain of Covid last autumn amongst its mink farms, the UK became the only country in the world to close its borders to anyone from there. Did the fast response acknowledge regret among ministers about not being stricter on the border last spring? Quite possibly. This time, the Government has been much clearer about the reasoning behind this decision. Priti Patel told the Commons:
“The Government’s focus is on protecting the UK’s world-leading vaccination programme – a programme that we should be proud of. And reducing the risk of a new strain of the virus being transmitted from someone coming into the UK.“
The details of this quarantine scheme are still up in the air and it is not yet clear when it will come into effect. But despite these tougher measures, it seems that some in the Cabinet wanted the Government to go further. Had Patel had it her way, the measures would have extended to everyone arriving in Britain. Boris Johnson stopped short of this for now. But once the infrastructure is in place, it is easy to see how arrivals from any country, with no advanced warning, could be affected.
Is this an attempt to emulate Australia and New Zealand? Except their strategy was to wait in splendid isolation for a vaccine. But we’re closing borders after the vaccine has arrived because we’re worried about new vaccine-resistant variants. The problem with this is that the logic seems permanent – after all, there will always be a risk of some new mutant variant emerging. As Kate says: “Britain will be one of the first countries to close its borders to countries based on a hypothetical scenario – the possibility of a mutant Covid strain that can evade vaccines – rather than an immediate threat.” Such excessive caution bodes ill for the future and a return to normal.
Worth reading Kate’s piece in full.
Stop Press: Professor Devi Sridhar, the Scottish Government Covid adviser, has said the quarantine plans will be ineffective and need to go further because they don’t apply to all countries. Won’t be long…
Flying is Only For The Rich in Covid World
A Lockdown Sceptics reader has written to tell us about the extraordinary cost and inconvenience his partner had to go to just to fly to Prague to visit her frail mother.
My partner is from Prague and needed to travel home last week in time to see her mother who is very frail, has had multiple strokes and is now going for quite a complex operation. She wanted to make sure she saw her before the potential issue got out of hand (or there were complications in the hospital). So last Monday I managed to book a flight to Prague.
It transpires there are no direct flights although at short notice I managed to book something with KLM via Amsterdam. Having taken my payment, an hour later they sent a message saying that they required not only a PCR test within 72 hours of flight, but also a rapid test at the airport within three hours of flight or so.
Having investigated, it looked like Boots was the best place to get a PCR test, although you have to use two separate portals to book one. It cost £120 and the test results only turned up by email about 12 hours before my partner was due to take off. It was an email showing a “certificate” which could be printed off.
To get the rapid test, we had to use a company called Collinson at City airport, where she was flying from. It seemed to have only been recently set up and may be part of another group involved in test and trace but I cannot be sure. This test cost £80.
Passengers were not allowed to enter the airport (even though it was completely empty) unless they could prove that they already had a test booked with Collinson. Chairs were all removed meaning everybody had to stand outside until they were called for their test. Once the test has been completed, they email you the results but they refuse to print anything off, meaning in some cases this can cause a problem with some airlines if you are unable to show something “physical” at the gate. And to come back into the UK she has to do it all again at similar cost.
Overall this makes a flight that would normally cost £150 approximately £600 just for a quick jump to a European city. This may change, but I don’t think the idea that they want rapid tests at the airport is going to go away anytime soon, making it completely price prohibitive for anybody on a normal wage to travel, especially with children over 12 who are required to have a test as well.
On top of it all, even though everybody on the same flight must have been negative for COVID-19, they all still had to wear a mask. What sort of lunacy is that? Either they are safe to fly since they had the two tests or they are not.
As a side note, since it was a nice day I decided to take a drive along the river from City airport and randomly arrived (I promise) at the Excel Centre being used as a Nightingale Hospital. It looked completely deserted so I decided to drive around the perimeter.
Apart from one security guard who told me that it was “very quiet today” I saw nobody else. I’m not sure if it is officially “in use” currently, but apart from a few signs directing people to “have your vaccination here” I didn’t see anything and it looked completely dead.
Lastly, having just written this it transpires that KLM have cancelled all their flights from Amsterdam to London so I had to scramble to get my partner on a flight with Air France via Paris. Once again there seems no logic to it at all.
Preliminary Materials For a Theory of Devi Sridhar
We’re publishing a new essay today by regular contributor Sinéad Murphy, a Philosophy Lecturer at Newcastle University. She takes Scottish Government adviser Professor Devi Sridhar to task for her “Young-Girlism”. I’ll let her explain.
Following her appearance on Newsnight on Friday January 22nd, Devi Sridhar, Professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, tweeted this:
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 capture the defining characteristics that make the populations of twenty-first century democracies so ripe for control.
These characteristics are: infantilisation, emotionalisation, and relativisation. The Young-Girl, as model citizen of modern democracies, is childlike, sentimental, and eminently prepared to relinquish heretofore absolute values.
Devi Sridhar’s tweet is a perfect example of Young-Girlism. It is worth taking the time to pick it over.
Worth reading in full.
Times Front Page Misrepresents Covid Victim Age Distribution
To mark the unhappy milestone of 100,000 Covid deaths yesterday (which are “with” not necessarily “of” Covid, of course), the Times displayed the names and faces of 20 people who died with Covid on its front page. They’re striking because many of them are relatively young. A Lockdown Sceptics reader has written in to point out that they are in no way representative of the typical age of people who die with Covid, making the image highly misleading.
Whilst recognising that the 20 victims represent personal tragedies, it is also important to note that their selection conveys a very false sense of the age distribution of Covid deaths.
I’ve plotted below the age distribution of all UK Covid deaths (taken from the same edition of the Times) and also the age distribution of the victims in the Times photos. The 45-64 age bracket is nearly nine times over-represented. The 15-44 bracket is five times over-represented.
Right at the end, the article does say: “The vast majority of victims have been older people, with 90% of those who died aged 65 or more and 75% aged at least 75.” Many readers won’t get this far and if they do they will tend to remember the much more salient pictures rather than the stats.
I think this sort of thing matters because it fuels the well documented public risk-blindness when it comes to Covid. And this is going to hinder a rapid escape from the lockdown.
Locked Down in Mexico
Jo Nash has written a fascinating account on Left Lockdown Sceptics about her experience getting stuck in Mexico last spring, and her journey during the restrictions from lockdowner to sceptic.
As lockdown started to bite after a few weeks, my local taxi driver friend who regularly helped me with my shopping told me how the people in the small town where I was living were suffering. The vast majority of Mexicans work in the informal economy on a day to day basis. After a week of no income many were unable to pay bills and buy food. Alcohol abuse was rising alongside violence in the home. Children witnessing these growing tensions had nowhere to go, and often got caught up in family violence. Children in more stable situations were expressing hopelessness and lethargy as their education had been abandoned and they could no longer play outside with their friends.
Then, the organised gang raids started. The Walmart where I shopped once a week was raided by a motorbike gang of 30, all wearing black, all masked and armed, who walked into the store and took as many electrical items as possible – smashing up glass display units with hammers and grabbing their swag in a precise military style operation. Later these items were sold on the black market and it was rumoured the money was used to buy food for the poor which was distributed free by gang members. These were happening country wide and a media blackout ensued to prevent copycat raids.
The left-wing President Amlo appealed for calm as a return to pre-Amlo anarchy was looming on the horizon due to the harms of lockdown. These experiences, and my increasingly obsessive probing of the background to C-19, shifted me from pro- to anti-lockdown as the consequences of the restrictions for the poor became clear. I signed the Great Barrington Declaration within hours of its publication in support of focused protection rather than lockdown and began to follow the scientific and political developments closely.
During this time I worked online editing research, but the isolation began affecting my concentration, morale, and energy levels. I had been hanging on to see when lockdown would lift so I could see my Mexican friends again, and we could resume with our previous plans, but it didn’t end. So, in the middle of May as my visa was about to expire, despite the ‘shelter in place’ order, I booked a flight to Scotland to stay with old friends where lockdown appeared to be lifting and then go on to India from there after summer. I booked a flight to Edinburgh with Tui and two days later the new UK quarantine order was imposed, so it was cancelled. With the refund I booked another flight, with Turkish airlines via Istanbul for June. This was cancelled for the same reason, rebooked, and cancelled again with no refund “until flights returned to normal” the airline said. Other airlines that were still flying were cashing in by charging 300% of normal flight prices.
Not only was I now in the country illegally as my visa had expired but I was five hundred pounds out of pocket and faced paying another £1,500 to get to Edinburgh.
Worth reading in full.
Share Your Story With Julia
Julia Hartley-Brewer is appealing for more “Lockdown Stories” from people willing to share their experiences of lockdown on her talkRADIO breakfast show.
Please email [email protected] if you are willing to speak on the radio about how lockdown has affected you or your family – whether it’s your physical or mental health, missed NHS treatments, losing your job or fighting to keep your business afloat, financial worries, unable to see family members in care homes, children missing vital schooling or university or any other experiences you want to share. Please include your phone number.
Sceptics Under Fire
George Monbiot in the Guardian has proposed a Ministry of Truth to deal with sceptic troublemakers.
I would like to see an expert committee, similar to the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), identifying claims that present a genuine danger to life and proposing their temporary prohibition to parliament.
While this measure would apply only to the most extreme cases, we should be far more alert to the dangers of misinformation in general. Even though it states that the pundits it names are not deliberately spreading false information, the new Anti-Virus site www.covidfaq.co might help to tip the balance against people such as Allison Pearson, Peter Hitchens and Sunetra Gupta, who have made such public headway with their misleading claims about the pandemic.
But how did these claims become so prominent? They achieved traction only because they were given a massive platform in the media, particularly in the Telegraph, the Mail and – above all – the house journal of unscientific gibberish, the Spectator. Their most influential outlet is the BBC [Eh?]. The BBC has an unerring instinct for misjudging where debate about a matter of science lies. It thrills to the sound of noisy, ill-informed contrarians.
Self-professed “lockdown hardliner” Peter Franklin in UnHerd is alarmed by Monbiot’s proposal.
I… thought that the claim that the ‘lockdown mentality’ was a permanent threat to our way of life was wildly overblown. But suddenly I’m not so sure. The fact is that some of my fellow hardliners are going off the deep end.
This morning The Guardian published a column by George Monbiot, which calls for Government restrictions on free speech:
“We have a right to speak freely. We also have a right to life. When malicious disinformation – claims that are known to be both false and dangerous – can spread without restraint, these two values collide head-on. One of them must give way…”
The one he want [sic] us to give way on is free speech: “When governments fail to ban outright lies that endanger people’s lives, I believe they make the wrong choice.”
What does he mean by “outright lies”? The examples given include “vaccines are used to inject us with microchips” and other conspiracy theories. But why suppress obvious nonsense that isn’t going to inform government policy? Monbiot’s answer is that ordinary people might believe it and refuse to get vaccinated – thereby putting themselves and others at risk.
On this basis, he proposes a time-limited ban on the most blatantly false claims – “running for perhaps six months”. But why stop there? Why not set up a Ministry of Truth to provide an ongoing means of suppressing dangerous information? If lives are at stake, then isn’t that all that matters?
Worth reading in full.
Tim Worstall in CapX isn’t too impressed either. He suggests George will need to censor himself given his own inglorious history of “dangerous falsehoods”.
Stop Press: Sky News have done a hit job on sceptic Sir Desmond Swayne MP for urging Save Our Rights UK, whom Sky label “anti-vaxxers”, to “persist” with their anti-lockdown campaign.
Swayne’s interview was from November and many of his comments, such as those about ICU occupancy being normal for the time of year, relate to the situation then rather than the unusually busy period in January.
Angela Rayner, deputy Labour leader, has written to Conservative Party chairwoman Amanda Milling calling on the party to take action.
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) seems to be playing a big role in this smear campaign. Which is surely a case of mission creep, as being sceptical about lockdowns can hardly be described as “hate”.
Sir Desmond posted on Twitter yesterday: “Sky is wrong. Aside from my question to the PM this afternoon, an examination of my blogs will reveal that I am a most enthusiastic vaccinator.”
Stop Press 2: In response to Toby’s Twitter thread we published yesterday, Sam Bowman corrected himself and apologised for the mistake. Rather oddly, he then blocked Toby, meaning he won’t be able to see any of his tweets again. Sam will have to rely on others in future to correct his mistakes.
Round-up
- “Will the Truth on COVID Restrictions Really Prevail?” – Great piece from Scott Atlas in Real Clear Politics on how lockdowners are blaming sceptics for the failure of their policies
- “Don’t you dare call us ‘Covid deniers’” – Brendan O’Neill in spiked continues his valiant defence of lockdown scepticism
- “How dare they accuse AstraZeneca of deliberately dishonouring the EU” – Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph explains the ins and outs of the EU vaccine debacle
- “Don’t kill Granny, just terrify or ignore her” – Nicola Lund in Conservative Woman on the shocking treatment of the elderly during restrictions that are supposed to be about protecting them
- “Negligence and complacency behind the NHS crisis” – Ann Bradshaw in Conservative Woman argues “the current state of the overwhelmed, under-bedded and understaffed NHS, which is also contributing to the spread of Covid and leading to interminable lockdowns of the UK population, is in reality the price of negligence of those in charge of the NHS”
- “50% of Delhi population has Covid antibodies: What the latest sero survey shows” – Report in the Hindustan Times on immunity levels in India. See also this comment in The Print by Sanjiv Agarwal
- “Police fine two men after finding 20 people at baby shower in east London” – Report in the Telegraph of a police raid on a baby shower. More evidence of covert non-compliance. But how many would tell a pollster they support the lockdown?
- “German paper doubles down on Oxford vaccine claims” – The Spectator reports on rumours that the European Medicines Agency may be about to reject the Oxford vaccine because of its low efficacy in over 65s
- “Another ‘Disease X’ could be around the corner, expert suggests” – Report from ITV News in which Professor Mark Woolhouse claims: “We were all prepared to meet the pandemic flu, and we got something else.” Except the UK’s pandemic plan explicitly allowed that the pandemic could be a virus like SARS and that it could kill up to 315,000 people
- “Moscow mayor lifts ban on nightclubs and drops curfew for bars amid falling coronavirus cases across Russia” – Normality returning in Russia, reports RT
- “Shoddy Covid ‘Science’ on asymptomatic spread” – Watch US biologist Bret Weinstein ask why the same three questionable papers always seem to appear when a researcher needs to justify claims of asymptomatic transmission
- “Faced with the woke onslaught, the Left needs to wake up to the importance of free speech” – Calvin Robinson in the Telegraph highlights Helen Pluckrose’s new project Counterweight, “a sort of Citizens’ Advice Bureau for woke issues” that intends to “provide you with practical information and expert guidance to resist the imposition of the ideology that calls itself ‘Critical Social Justice’ on your day-to-day life”
- “Man arrested for offering free soup (the Common Unity Soup Initiative) in a park during lockdown” – Watch a man being arrested on Tuesday for persisting in providing soup to people in his local park. How dare he?
- “John Kerry reveals Biden’s devotion to radical ‘Great Reset’ movement” – The Hill reports that Joe Biden’s new special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry told a WEF panel discussion in November that, under Biden, the Great Reset “will happen. And I think it will happen with greater speed and with greater intensity than a lot of people might imagine. In effect, the citizens of the United States have just done a Great Reset. We’ve done a Great Reset. And it was a record level of voting”
- “Controlling borders is a critical step in the fight against Covid” – Dr Mark Toshner continues the Speccie‘s recent run of pro-lockdown pieces with another liberty-destroying misapplication of the precautionary principle: “If we don’t act now, and assume the worst about these new variants, it might be too late to act”
- “Pioneering antibody treatment for Covid that is being trialled on NHS is found to ‘prevent 100% of symptomatic infections and cut asymptomatic infections in half’” – Daily Mail report on REGEN-COV, the cocktail drug called a “cure” by Donald Trump when he was given it during his coronavirus battle last year
- Jonathan Engler has a Twitter thread contrasting the high excess mortality in 15-64 year-olds in England in 2020 with the lack of excess mortality in the same age group in Sweden and asks if this is a tell-tale signal of deaths caused by lockdown
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Three today: “6ft Further” by Media Bear, “What’s Another Year?” by Johnny Logan and “Break The Rules” by Status Quo.
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’re hearing from Roger Tarrant, who was cancelled by the Federation of Small Businesses late last year for questioning the ideology of BLM. He wrote about what happened to him in the Critic.
I was cancelled as the Federation of Small Businesses’s South West National Councillor towards the end of 2020. My crime was “wrong speak” on the region’s internal WhatsApp group. Or as the Chair, Mike Cherry, and the Board put it, for “conduct likely to bring the FSB into disrepute”.
What was my crime? In response to the Black Lives Matter protests happening in England in June, I sent a message to an internal WhatsApp group pointing out that only 163 people had died in police custody in the UK in the last 10 years and that 140 were white, 10 black and 13 other ethnicities. I also made the point that disadvantaged white boys in England were less likely to go into further education than disadvantaged black boys.
“Does only BLM or should all lives matter?” I asked. “Are only white people racist? Sorry to burst the moral outrage bubble, but FSB should be careful how it handles its response.”
Immediately, the Exeter Area Lead in Devon, a white middle-aged man, accused me of being a racist. He asked me in the group: “was I saying that… all that stuff about BLM deaths due to coronavirus was probably all made up and there is nothing wrong with a bit of slavery?” It was hard to make head or tail of his accusation – BLM deaths? – but I had obviously said nothing of the kind. He then immediately left the WhatsApp group and made a formal complaint to the Regional Chair and Board. I assumed it would be dismissed, but within days there followed a letter from the director attached to the region asking me to resign. I declined.
Worth reading in full.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
We’ve created a one-stop shop down here for people who want to obtain a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card – because wearing a mask causes them “severe distress”, for instance. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and the Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. And 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.
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 and Prof Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson’s Spectator article about the Danish mask study 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 Toby’s 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. 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
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the past 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. Doing these daily updates is hard work (although we have help from lots of people, mainly in the form of readers sending us stories and links). If you feel like donating, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links we should include in future updates, email us here. (Don’t assume we’ll pick them up in the comments.)
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
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The despot would have replaced him.
Incidentally, a Uni-educated, ‘professional’ woman I know said to me recently (without a trace of irony), “I wonder where he found the money”. – FFS!!!!!!
We are doomed!
This is the ONS data since 1838 of deaths as a proportion of the population. I’ve presented it as a chart since my birth.
It’s funny, I’ve seen photographic evidence of my grandmothers holding me & bouncing me on their knee when I was a baby. They did this despite a death rate of 1,948/100,000 in 1960 (I was born at the end of 1959).
I remember shaking the hand of ex Prime Minister Harold Wilson on my graduation day in 1981. He shook the hand of a 1,000 people or more that day despite being pretty frail, in 1981 1,666/100,000 people died, what a brave man Harold was!
As the year 2000 arrived I saw thousands of people hugging & kissing total strangers, 2000 was a year when 1,266 people/100,000 died.
In 2008 I happily shook hands with people, attended big sporting events and visited China in the face of a death rate of 1,092/100,000.
In 2020 I stayed at home, didn’t shake hands with anyone, didn’t hug anyone, was made to feel guilty for meeting friends in the street. 2020 was a year when 1043/100,000 died. The safest year of all those mentioned above.
The PURGES are continuing today in true AUTHORITARIAN fashion!!
The media witchhunt of Sir Desmond is in full swing!!……
I emailed Desmond Swayne applauding him and telling him to keep up the good work..
………..I suggest anybody who values free speech and opinion does likewise!!!!
I emailed him yesterday.
Send it via the conservative central office as well.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/lYHAlVDwaIg6/ – Dave Cullen and Fiona Marie Flanaghan discussing how we got here and where this is going [nowhere good]
Might not be news to people here, but there are some interesting historical mortality data for England and Wales in this article:
Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Manufacturing the Crisis
Regarding travel – according to the DT, Gove states that business people will need a powerful reason to travel, and will be decided on a case by case basis. Plod will be deployed from the streets to the airport – so some thick, hi-viz numpty will decide which business contract is worthy of my attendance. Will we need to visit plod central office now to explain our travel intentions. What happened to us leaving the EU and forging our place internationally- looking at DM comments, we appear to be reverting to some backward, insular island begrudging anyone a life that doesn’t involve a dark room, Netflix and takeaways – sorry, just the media and public joy at banning UAE flights and Gove, last straw.
Absent a substantial international popular rebellion, wherever anyone is living now is where they will live for the rest of their lives.
As a former regular traveller I am acutely aware that this was a luxury, and not a right. Nevertheless I worked my arse off for years to be able to afford it, and always travelled in the spirit of exploration and learning, not indulgence. The handful of friendships I made along this path are the only ones I now have left.
Gove can also FOAD.
I have soft copy documentation of this nightmare extending to over 5,000 Microsoft Word pages to this point. Backed up to an external hard drive.
This will be rendered null and void by an EMP attack. Hard copies are therefore the only guarantor that what we have argued will be recorded in history.
Very true. There is now active 1984-style eradication of the record. Not many people will have noticed but there was something very odd about Obama’s two term presidency: none of the major publishing houses produced a serious biography of Obama during those two terms. There was one heavyweight but v anodyne biography produced right at the end of the second term,
One odd thing about Obama’s history is the silence that is his academic career. He was a lecturer and senior lecturer for twelve years without publishing any papers. He was the president, and yet not one single former student of his came up with even one set of lecture notes. As an academic, it is though he never existed.
He seemed to arrive from nowhere.
Despite all human endeavour & “progress” in modern technology the most effective method of keeping records is still carving it in stone LOL.
Anyone here familiar with this internet innovation company?
Dfinity is introducing a new standard, which it calls the internet computer protocol (ICP). These new rules let developers move software around the internet as well as data. All software needs computers to run on, but with ICP the computers could be anywhere. Instead of running on a dedicated server in Google Cloud, for example, the software would have no fixed physical address, moving between servers owned by independent data centers around the world. “Conceptually, it’s kind of running everywhere,” says Dfinity engineering manager Stanley Jones.
Here’s another one, SAFE.
Other projects tell a similar story. The SAFE Network, a peer-to-peer alternative to the internet in which data is shared across all the hard drives of participating computers rather than in central data centers, has been a work in progress for 15 years. An open-source community of developers have built a handful of apps for the network, including a Twitter clone called Patter and a music-player app called Jams. “My sole goal is to take data away from the corporations and put it back with the people,” says founder David Irvine. But he admits that the SAFE Network itself is still nowhere near public release.
Sounds similar to how Torrent sites have been working for years.
Like the Pirate Bay. But we want impregnable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdKEbnS1eBE
Percy Mayfield, People get ready …
DT (paywall, etc): https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/28/first-real-world-data-vaccination-effectiveness-shows-really/
First real-world data on vaccination effectiveness shows ‘really promising’ results
There you have it, folks.
Hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of pounds to the big pharma boys, and it could save up to 4,000 lives.
Prof Hardon means wrecking the economy and destroying countless livelihoods with lockdown might have bought enough time for these phoney vaccines to postpone the death of up to 4,000 desperately ill elderly people who haven’t properly seen their relatives for almost a year.
Although, on the other hand, maybe 4000 desperately ill and very elderly people will die from the effectiveness of the vaccine (very challenging, as admitted by the manufacturers), and a load of healthy people will end up suffering various inflammatory diseases eg Bell’s Palsy. Hey-ho…none of this matters to the callous amoral MSM.
“It does look like our first dose strategy is proving to be a good one”
Yes, absolutely no doubt about this. Especially considering that the second dose is being administered on a completely different schedule than the manufacturer’s recommendation, thereby nullifying the already woefully inadequate clinical trials upon whose findings the MHRA granted emergency usage authorisation for these unlicensed products.
Which vaccine is he talking about? Does he even remember? Does he care?
Fuck’s sake; there’s another one!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55850352
Covid-19: Novavax vaccine shows 89% efficacy in UK trials
They are getting better, soon the jabs will be almost as good as our own natural immunity! What’s that at right now? Being pessimistic, 97% effective of stopping you of dying from covids?
Better if you aren’t fat, old and nearly dead from other stuff.
Modern science is truly astonishing. Soon they will be able to claim that covid vaccines are better than our own natural immune system.
Crazy.
What a world we live in.
At least with my own immunity I know there won’t be any side effects. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
“The Novavax jab is the first to show it is effective against the new variant of the virus”
That statement is immediately suspicious, knowing the implications for proper sampling.
Horse apples. That’s what poor kids used to play street hockey.
Only 89.3% effective? I was hoping for 89.4% myself. Disappointing.
Gotta love the pharmaceutical naming conventions. I can imagine their marketing teams agonising for days on end before they came up with this gem. Chuck in an ‘x’ and it always sounds more authoritative.
“Cuntvax” would be my personal choice. But that’s just me.
In the model fearing world we live in today that 0.1% at scale amounts to billions of extra lives saved over millenia. Not a figure to be scoffed at.
Which is why I expressed my disappointment at the performance of Novavax.
Also, it reminds me of bullshit washing powder adverts from the late 80s/early 90s. “Customers were 95.6% more satisfied with the performance of Daz over other products“. A well known marketing trick/con. Reductio ad absurdum.
At Bojo’s latest presser Patrick Vallance said of the UK’s coronavirus cases, “We still are in a position with very high numbers.”
He said the Office for National Statistics data shows there are one million people with the infection in this country.
That really bothers me. The chart below shows the latest ‘cases’ data.
First the numbers start plummeting on the day the Lockdown started. That’s highly improbable. There should have been some continuation in the rise, or a levelling, then a steady drop; certainly not what actually happened.
This sudden drop even goes against what he says should happen.
They are not testing fewer people each day; in fact, testing’s going up and up.
I can only assume the order has gone out (on Lockdown day) to drop the CT cycle rate of the PCR tests. I can’t think of any other explanation for this drop.
What a bunch of manipulative sods. This is done for one reason – to frighten people into accepting the vaccine.
Dear Pat,
F off.
The Globalists are the epitome of artificial intelligence. Not human. Boring.
Recent discoveries:
Interestingly talk about all of the above have been censored by the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
So when will people be able to sue them for removing information that could have led to lives being saved?
Not might work, does work.
“Immunity is a thing.”
I have been accused of being a Neanderthal by many for suggesting this.
Sure, there have been some bloody awful diseases that used to exact a terrible toll which we have more or less eradicated with medical improvements.
But SARS-CoV-2 is not, has never been and never will be in the same league as the aforementioned.
Ive heard two reasons for the low no of cases in New Zealand.
1) They don’t do PCR tests outside hospital.
2) They limit the PCR tests in hospital to 30x.
Anyone know or have references to verify either?
If we did the same, we’d be world beating as well!!
The most likely reason is that they don’t actually have many cases. It’s possible for them because they’re in the middle of nowhere and they started from a low base of infection.
No country with a high prevalance of the virus can do what NZ did without first getting to the same point they started at. Once you factor in all the variables it’s easy to see that you’re looking at completely different problems.
Yes. It’s a very different country from most in Europe.
And don’t forget the penalties of all this. A member of my family (mid-70s) has a close friendship with someone in New Zealand. They had been spending 4 months together here and 4 months together in NZ each year – reckoning that the costs were well worth it at their age as long as they could afford it- an admirable, late life-enhancing ‘f.it’ attitude in my view.
Now they haven’t seen each other for a year.
Yes – they might be fortunate to be able to do this; it might be unusual, but it’s just one example of many that are less so
,
It will be 100000 soon!!!!
oops, did I say I was crap at maths?
2nd time this week, mate. 😉
There’s a vacancy at Imperial College if you need it.
LOL!
Where is the UK version of VAERS? All I can find is the window for reporting an AE. I would live to know where we’re at.
.
Athens:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1354788316365938691
10’s of thousands of masked zombies stagger down the road?
And fall into a ditch.
Better than tens of thousands of zombies hiding in their homes!
yes…..
I don’t know what PCR is supposed to tell us exactly, but the proportion of positive PCRs in the UK was 5.50& as of January 21st and had been smoothly uinterruptedly and continually rising since August.
This tells us that none of the measures have the slightest effect.
All the ups and downs in numbers of ‘cases’ are therefore artefacts of test numbers.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-positive-rate-bar?tab=chart&stackMode=absolute&time=2020-06-03..2021-01-21&country=~GBR®ion=World
Of course but what do cases make?
Prizes!
Carbon neutral in 9 years. The planet will be saved!
They will not neutralise any of my fucking carbon without a fight to the death. Nor yours, or anyone else’s on here.
I just brewed another batch of ale, stout, it’s truly incredible how much Co2 is produced….amazing, it would fill…errrr quite a big thing. Probably.
Anybody got a graph?
Greta wants to flatten your curve, big time. A serial climate criminal, and you are still enjoying alcohol. Unacceptable in the New Puritan Order.
I think what I am after, to be clear:
Is some kind of graphical representation of how much Co2 you get plotted against something or another that shows how much booze you get.
I think this would be quite an eye opener.
Enjoy your produce, then worry about these minor particulars afterwards.
I willingly subcontract my supply of alcohol to a fabulous local brewery whose exemplary products and services need to be supported. I bet they are carbon neutral as well.
I am aware you a chap who likes to keep on top of his hydration curve, I can strongly recommend brewing your own. It’s like looking after a baby for about 5 days, it chuckles and gurgles happily away. Its a bit of a plava getting it in the bottles but then after two weeks.
Boom Shiva!
Shall we say.
😉
Several mates have been imploring me to go down the home brew route for years. Trouble is, every time I have tasted their beer it has been absolutely disgusting. Vinegar that would ruin chips. I need more convincing. Until such time that it is my only option I will defer to those with the knowledge, skills and infrastructure to satisfy my demands.
The potential forthcoming social collapse will undoubtedly bring this question into sharp and urgent focus.
I lived in a predominantly Portuguese neighborhood in the 1970s in Montreal. My landlord lived downstairs and made his own wine and people down the street did as well.There were empty crates of grapes out on garbage pickup day and stains up and down the sidewalks. One day as I walked through a pathway beside my building I heard a rooster crow. Good times.
Electric vehicles are boring and much less Green than most people believe that they are. Watch Vernon Coleman’s BitChute take on Electric Vehicles. Busted!
Electric vehicles have appalling human and environmental impacts in their manufacture, usage and disposal. Very similar to masks. Both are fundamental pillars of subjugation and control. No wonder XR et al are so thoroughly stimulated by these impositions on the plebeians.
Also you will own nothing and you will be happy
In order for happiness to occur one of two situations must obtain:
Either 1) We will be dead, and they will be happy; or 2) We will own them (in every sense), and be very happy indeed.
They’ll never get my ukulele!
DavidC
Grrrrr!
Anyone got the current all cause deaths total for UK (not England & Wales) for 2020, with source?
Just trying to do some calcs and it’s a pain to use the constituent numbers. Hoping someone’s done it somewhere already.
Sorry but just thought I’d take this opportunity to echo what UK Column news says about the ONS. I know they only give figures for England and Wales but they are highly accurate and have enabled me to see my way through the bullshit whilst trying to run a business.
I guess this is just a thank you to their unpoliticised accuracy.
They have been a pillar of reputable data in the unholy morass.
I guess they’d better watch out.
Of course – the ‘Covid’ death numbers are nonsense – but they’re only reporting what they get from the NHS and the 28-day PCR nonsense.
Fair enough – not going to disagree with you on that.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/totaldeathsin2019and2020sofarintheuk
https://www.statista.com/statistics/281488/number-of-deaths-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/
Thanks, but first one only covers 2019 (and E&W part way through 2020), and second one only goes to 2018. So still looking….
If you use England and Wales data, you’ll find that you have captured the indicative basic pattern for the UK as a whole.
Official full figures 2020 due out any day. I extrapolate after week 46 which gives 600k. Even adding 10% means annual deaths only just on high side – NOT catastrophic.
Best I can do. Off here a few days ago.
Great stuff, thanks!
Well done Toby, Graham Brady and Richar Tice.
https://mobile.twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1354906617809170432
Should be the headline for this website tomorrow. Finally a proper adult debate after 10 f**king months. All the bbc, etc., had to do was hold a similar event/s instead of treating the whole population like a bunch of woke retards.
THURSDAYS 7PM , LETS REPLACE “THE CLAP “ “WITH THE HORN” 5 MINS OF YOUR CARS BUGLE CALL !!!! WE HAVE TO START SOMEWHERE !!!
It would only work if mainstream told people what was going on. Not much likelihood of that happening.
How about a mass blowing of raspberries?
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/surgeon-warns-fda-pfizer-immunological-danger-covid-vaccines-convalescent-asymptomatic-carriers/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=9a687b92-5f4c-4559-91e9-8afbfabbfd7a
In a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Pfizer and the press, Dr. Hooman Noorchashm warns of an “almost certain immunological prognosication that if viral antigens are present in the tissues of subjects who undergo vaccination, the antigen specific immune response triggered by the vaccine will target those tissues and cause tissue inflammation and damage.”
Dr. Noorchashm’s prognostications of harm in elderly individuals with cardiovascular disease coincides with the numerous reports of unexplained cardiovascular deaths following COVID-19 vaccination in Norway, Germany, the UK, Gibraltar and the U.S.,” said Lyn Redwood, RN, MSN, director and president emerita of Children’s Health Defense.
Redwood noted that J. Patrick Whelan, M.D., Ph.D., sent similar concerns to the FDA on Dec. 8, 2020.
Whelan raised even more worrisome questions, Redwood said, in that he cited research showing that in addition to the heart, ACE-2 receptors are also present in microvasculature of the brain, liver and kidney.
“Ignoring these valid and scientifically supported warnings from leading immunologists may result in hundreds of millions of people suffering potentially deadly injuries or permanent damage following vaccination,” Redwood said. “It will also further erode the dwindling confidence that our country has in our federal regulatory agencies to protect the health of all Americans.”
Well if genuine comments on DM articles are the bellwether, looks like Prince NutNuts and Pharma Hancock are in for a shock – come March ‘the peoples ain’t taking this crap no more’.
Well done for having the balls to look at the MSM.
Keep us informed.
Thanks for taking one for the team, Andrea! I just can’t bear to look anymore.
I would to point out some valuable articles which I think are worth sharing:
Yet Another Study Shows—Yet Again—That Lockdowns Don’t Work by Ryan McMaken “We find no clear, significant beneficial effect of [lockdowns] on case growth in any country….In none of the 8 countries and in none out of the 16 comparisons [examined] were the effects of [lockdowns] significantly beneficial.”
Medical Errors and the Cult of Expertise in the Age of Covid by Ryan McMaken Many healthcare professionals have happily embraced the same attitude as cops: “We’re experts, don’t you dare question us.” But the 100,000 yearly medical-error deaths suggest this expertise ought to be questioned more often.
Hoppe on the Lockdowns! – a fantastic interview with Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe (translated from German) Thomas Jacob: Professor Hoppe, you are known as a critic of the state and of political centralization. Doesn’t the coronavirus prove that central states and central government regulations are necessary?
Hans-Hermann Hoppe: On the contrary […] if the course of current events has demonstrated anything, it is not how necessary or efficient central authorities and decisions are, but conversely how critically important decentralized decisions and decision-makers are.
Covid-19 and the Socialist Calculation Problem by Patrick Barron Just… Read more »
Does anyone have the lowdown on the newest vaccine being touted by the media?
It has a fancy name beginning with ‘V’ and I won’t be taking it.
It doesn’t kill you.
Yeah, hilarious, guys. Anyone who understands the press release? Is this another experimental tech vaccine?
It’s made from unicorn wee wee?
What press release?
Received this morning.
I was asking about the Novavax one.
My word, I had not even heard of this one. Need to up my research game.
In time there will need to be a roulette wheel installed in all vaccination centres to determine which manufacturer’s produce is injected into the people.
Love all those fancy names.
The Technocrats think that they are creating a perfect society for all of us. Ha! Ha! Ha!
It is the placebo.
If you use the governments 100,000 deaths number, and the IFR of Ioniadis of 0.26%, 45,000,000 have had covid roughly?
I think the ifr for this country is likely to be rather higher than the global number, because we have an older pop.
Yeah 62k deaths and IFR .35% seems reasonable.
How many of those are really Covid deaths?
3
Good point, but Prof. Ioannidis IFR takes the official death figures at face value as far as I know.
Yes, he does; I agree. But his overall IFR possibly has greater weighting from data originating in countries that don’t label so many deaths as Covid.
What are the maths? I’d make it ~38,461,538 have had it, ~38,361,538 recovered… but it’s been a long time since I’ve done maths ha.
Do Lockdowns Work? The Literature – InProportion2 (talkigy.com)
Nicely collected evidence
Do you think the tech corporations will not be censoring all those people who claim lockdowns are effective on the ground that they are spreading dangerous misinformation?
Protests in Greece
Oh boy what a shot on Twitter: “Mainstream media, what is happening in Athens (Greece)? https://t.co/fv0zvP5M6N” / Twitter
A summer of protest increasing in severity is guaranteed unless the lockdown mafia turn face on something big, PCR, misattribution, corruption. I don’t know, there are many. However, people won’t be taken for fools in 2021
Not entirely sure that the protest is anything to do with C19. Lots of comments suggest it’s for something else – especially as they’re all wearing masks
Students and teachers oppose education reforms that include plans to set up a state security division at university campuses.
Students, teachers defy weeklong ban on protests | News | ekathimerini.com
All this protest must have been expected. It would have been ‘factored in’, surely? So – if ‘they’ are ready for it, what action will ‘they’ take?
It may be used as cover to liquidate the, “problem elements,” in society.
Wall street greed may come to our rescue. How? Well the reddit warriors seem to have inflicted billions of damage already – and I am guessing there is a lot more of the same coming.
The lockdowns are a controlled demolition of our economies to implement their new economy- however if hedge funds/wall street is imploding it is impossible to carry out controlled demolitions.
Also the reddit small investors can show how targeted action by little guys can cause major problems for the elites.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/wallstreetbets-proves-system-rigged
I wish I could get my head around what they’ve done – it’s all a bit beyond me
Little guy beating big bad guy can only be a good thing though. Go the underdog!
They (the retail investors) have targeted shares of a company which they know is shorted by hedge funds. They drive up the price and this leads to margin calls on the short sellers. If you are short selling you post collateral to cover your increasingly costly position as the price of the shares go up.
So a hedge fund has to show it has the funds to hold their position. Citadel had to bailout their own hedge fund, and they also own a retail exchange which they then ceased the shares trading on.
Shows how the big players have it rigged.
The sight of hedge funds crying about their losses and getting angry with retail investors is just beautiful. The rigged system is fully exposed.
They hedged their bets and lost. Boohoo. Unfortunately they took us down with them.
Hedge funds can destroy sound businesses so surely good news
As well as buying and selling shares you can place a bet on whether a share price goes up or down. A bunch of rich guys decided to bet that GameStop shares would go down. If enough if them place this sort of bet the price does indeed go down, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
But the users of GameStop and their mates heard about this and decided to buy GameStop shares and so many did this it tipped the price in the other direction. So the hedge funds, having bet the price would go down, lost a bunch of money.
An example of how the crowd can beat the elite who think they know a lot but who are few in number.
Thanks – I kinda get it
I’m buying GME tomorrow just as a fuck you to the hedge funds don’t even care if i lose it.
My fear is that GameStop is just an op they will use to lock retail traders out of everything other than buy and hold for 30 years minimum.
With hindsight this appalling government mandated disaster could have been nipped in the bud if all food-chain workers had refused to go to work, plus all utilities’ employees. Should the bastards ever try such a stunt again, we need to convince those workers to stay off.
Didn’t even need that. Just that corrupt bastard Rishi to have refused to turn on the magic money tap.
At the beginning of this (i was opposed to all gov measures,) but I did think come July 2020, Tory support would revolt & we’d get back to normal and scotland & wales would be brought into line by turning off the money tap.
I dunno WTF happened.