Day: 18 February 2021

by Derek Winton Historians are sure to pore over this ‘unprecedented’ period for centuries to come. It is my belief that in the fullness of time, they will come to regard our response to the Sars-CoV-2 virus as monumental folly. In particular they will be bewildered by the role of deeply flawed computer modelling in triggering a chain of events that fundamentally, and perhaps catastrophically, damaged western society. I should outline my own credentials on this subject: I have an MA in Philosophy and Mathematics and a MSc in Computational Intelligence. I have been developing software professionally for more than 10 years and also have experience working with the code produced by academic institutions. In this particular instance I am a contributor to the official online software repository for the Imperial Model. I have submitted hundreds of lines of comments that explain the functioning of the model and these comments were accepted by the Imperial team. Background To put the role of the Imperial Model in the proper context, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the situation as it stood in February 2020. There had been rumours for a few months of a new virus in China. Footage of Chinese citizens being forcibly dragged from their homes by Government agents in hazmat suits and locked in hermetically sealed vans. Tales of ...

by Dr Mark Shaw I wouldn't say I was anti-vax in stance but I do think that vaccination should be carried out only where absolutely clinically necessary. All forms of medication involve some risk – no matter how small. The decision to medicate our immune systems should be one that is taken with the utmost care and diligence. The extraordinary pressure to be vaccinated has come from, among other reasons, a desire to exit lockdown speedily. The two issues (lockdown and vaccination) have become inextricably and painfully linked by the abandonment of the following principles that should form the backbone of healthcare: First do no harmDon't panicProperly evaluate riskEnsure action is founded on solid evidence based medicineDo not over-exaggerate or over-promise So the problem with the Government's strategy is that it is rolling out a vaccination programme in a blanket approach that does not allow the public to make a properly informed decision based on evaluating their own relative risk of suffering from the effects of catching Covid. A clinician should only advise a patient to undergo treatment when they have been informed of all the pros and cons – so that the clinician has the patient's informed consent. Informed consent (in this case of the public) can only have been obtained when the relative risks have been presented in ...

A man owned a chicken farm. One day he became concerned that it hadn’t rained for a while and that his crops, which he used to feed his chickens, might fail resulting in lots of chickens dying. So, the man went to the nearby temple to consult the Sage. After performing a complex ritual, the Sage had the answer: “You must sacrifice one of your chickens every week or it will never rain.” The man was upset – he liked his chickens and was always reluctant to kill them. But the Sage was wise and the ritual complex, so he obeyed the command and that evening he killed a chicken. The next day it rained. We may well laugh at the man’s stupidity. How could he believe that sacrificing a chicken will have any relationship to the weather? But how do we prove that it doesn’t? Clearly, the first time the man sacrificed a chicken it rained the next day, but this isn’t really evidence of cause and effect. So, rather than just this one case, what if we observed the man for a whole year? If we did this, we’d note that he sacrifices a chicken every week on a Tuesday night and that it rains in the subsequent week 10 times. From these observations we might conclude that ...

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes Will Jones on the insanity of asking parents to become overnight lateral flow testers, news of a hotel quarantine legal challenge and a tribute to the Lamb & Flag.

by Dr James Moreton Wakeley Lockdown should end now. Its failure and cruelty as a policy is self-evident. The first lockdown was decreed amidst the panic and uncertainty of media hyperbole that drove the Government to ignore established guidance on pandemic management and to follow the instinctively totalitarian example of China. Continuing justifications have been found in the apocalyptic and opaque modelling of SAGE. Yet this name has proved to be as ironic as it is Orwellian. Almost a year on, SAGE has been shown to be wrong time and time again and strong empirical evidence now exists showing that lockdowns are not critical to combatting Covid. Cases were already falling before all three UK lockdowns were announced. Lockdown-averse Sweden has recorded excess deaths no greater than the EU average. The worst death rates in the USA are found in the states that have locked down the most rigorously, whilst those states that remained free have not fared dramatically worse than the average. Perhaps more importantly, the costs of lockdown are unnervingly apparent. The UK is now more indebted than ever before in its history. Children’s mental health is precipitously deteriorating whilst their education continues to atrophy. Last year, a Bristol University study suggested that the medical and societal impact of lockdown will kill five times more people in the ...