Month: January 2021

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes a brilliant response to @cjsnowdon's @quillette article, readers' comments about @NeilDotOBrien's new website and a psychologist's explanation of "Stockholm Syndrome".

by Angus McIntosh Economist Milton Friedman: "Nothing so permanent as a temporary government programme." Let us take a moment to look beyond the current turmoil of the pandemic and the ensuing policy chaos and to consider its possible legacy. At this point we are struggling to cope with the tide of misery which Covid and the lockdowns have created. But eventually, through a combination of spring weather, natural immunity and the vaccine, the virus will subside to the point where we could start to live with it as a normal part of the disease landscape. It may then take a decade or more to recover from its terrible toll of death, depression and poverty and this is tragedy enough. But potentially even more damaging for our long-term future are the lasting shifts in attitudes which the virus may leave behind. These will be many and complex, but there are three which are particularly likely: Permanently lowered public tolerance for life’s normal risks and challenges.Increased popular willingness to sacrifice freedoms in pursuit of safety.Greater tendency for authorities of all kinds to exploit the above. The first two of these malign legacies represent acceleration of existing trends, rather than completely new phenomena. But the third is undergoing more of a revolution. Anyone who doubts that we have taught certain policymakers an unexpected ...

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes a round-up of all the medical evidence that ivermectin is effective, an original piece by a senior scientist on the QALY imbroglio and more good news about Sweden.

by Dr. David Cook In 2017 the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) rejected the drug nivolumab for use in the NHS to treat patients with advanced head and neck cancers. The reason given was that, despite the drug showing positive benefits, it was judged to be too expensive based on the cost per ‘quality adjusted life year’ (QALY). For patients with this disease (and clinicians treating them) this was a hugely disappointing decision and although subsequently nivolumab has been approved for use, at the point of this judgement it must have felt to these patients that their lives were somehow being deemed to be less valuable than those of other patients. Let’s wind forward to today and Lord Sumption discussing the impact of lockdown on society and apparently suggesting something similar, namely, that some lives are less valuable than others. But in both of these cases is this what was actually meant? Are we really assigning a value to a life? Are we really judging that some lives are more valuable than others and so more worthy of saving? To answer these questions, let’s focus on QALYs because these seem to be highly culpable in the crime of ‘life valuation’. Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) are not used to assess the quality of a life and they ...

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes news of a legal victory against lockdown restrictions in Germany, a debunking of the latest pro-masking study and a new video by Remy about pro-lockdown hypocrisy.

Asuncion, Paraguay Paraguay is not a well-known country. Frankly, this is justified: it has nothing much to offer tourists that can’t also be found in one or both of its giant neighbours, Argentina and Brazil. Nevertheless, the Paraguayan people are polite and kind, the food is excellent, the climate is warm (of which more later), and right now it is a far pleasanter place to be than Britain. That latter statement is a fairly recent state of affairs. In March, Paraguay won some rare international praise for locking down hard as soon as it had registered its first two cases of COVID-19. This lockdown began to be loosened in May in the almost complete absence of both cases and deaths up until then, and was not reimposed when numbers did begin to pick up in July; although there was some typical fiddling around with local restrictions, curfews and other ineffective nonsense. As it stands according to the data, Paraguay has plateaued at about 15 deaths ‘with’ Covid per day since August (in a country of 7.3 million people). No classical epidemic curve, just a delayed rise to what may well be the endemic state. I have not come up with a fully plausible explanation for this pattern, but I am reminded of the observation that more equatorial countries tend not ...

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes proof by David Patton that Lockdown 2 didn't work, a BBC survey readers can fill in and an original piece on why the demonisation of lockdown sceptics is a moral panic.

by Nigel Alphonso On January 16th, an article appeared in the online magazine Quillette by Christopher Snowdon from the IEA, a right of centre think tank. The article purported to demolish the claims of a particular variant of ‘lockdown sceptics’ and as a result has garnered widespread praise including from Toby Young who tweeted that it was a thoughtful piece which sceptics needed to address. I respectfully disagree. The article was disingenuous – not in respect of what it said but in respect of its omissions and its failure to frame the argument within a judicious lockdown/anti-lockdown framework. This is not intended as an attack on Mr Snowdon per se but the criticism I make touches on the wider failure of the libertarian, left of centre and conservative movements to counter the lockdown arguments and the failure of the lockdown sceptics' movement to achieve any penetration with the wider public. This essay is not primarily about the merits of lockdown or the technicalities of the data but about the intellectual honesty of some of the main protagonists on both sides of the argument. First to the article itself entitled “Rise of the Coronavirus Cranks.” Mr Snowdon is at liberty to write whichever article he chooses. However, his article might more appropriately have been entitled “My problem with Ivor Cummins and ...

Governments should never be in thrall to scientists by Sean Walsh The philosopher of science (and incorrigible mischief maker) Paul Feyerabend once wrote this: Unanimity of opinion may be fitting for a church, for the frightened or greedy victims of some (ancient, or modern) myth, or for the weak and willing followers of some tyrant. Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge. And a method that encourages variety is also the only method that is comparable with a humanitarian outlook.Against Method Feyerabend claims in that book that the separation of science and state is at least as important as that of Church and state. The problem with SAGE, he’d argue, is not that it is composed of rubbish scientists (although he’d certainly have thought that), but that it exists at all. When you throw epidemiologists, computer modellers, behavioural ‘nudge’ scientists, immunologists, sociologists and (for all I know) tarot card readers into a Government briefing room and instruct them to find a consensus then you are making the mistake of believing that ‘consensus’ is the friend of knowledge, when in fact it is usually an enemy. Those who would advocate the inclusion of, for example, Sunetra Gupta onto this group miss this point: her best work will be done outside the Lockdown Establishment. Were Professor Gupta to be invited to ...

Today’s update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes WHO's revised guidance on PCR tests (vindication for sceptics!), an essay by a philosophy lecturer on why she's given up on Covid-compliant universities and 10 problems with the Google-funded mask study.