Day: 26 February 2021

by Guy de la Bédoyère Those of us contribute to and read Lockdown Sceptics have had the opportunity to consider a wide range of views. There’s been a healthy debate. I’ve tried to steer something of a middle course in an effort to find common ground that might help us get out of this mess. I’ll lay my cards on the table. I am going to be vaccinated as soon as I can. That is my choice, and I am glad that it is my choice. I accept for example that in order to protect other people I needed to learn to drive and to have a driving licence to prove it. Similarly, I accept the normal passport as a means of proving who I am and protecting me and everyone else from maniacs and others not entitled to come to this country. I also accept that there are consequences of making choices. If I choose not to have a driving licence, then I would have to accept I cannot drive on a public road. And I doubt if anyone would want me to. If I chose freely not to have a passport then I would not be allowed to travel. So, I have no problem with the notion of vaccine choice as another facet of choice with consequences. I grew ...

I have a research background in the social sciences and dozens of peer-reviewed publications to my name. There’s a lot that sets off my crap detector in Ferguson’s comments – mostly to do with overestimating the validity of his own data, and using this to in effect depoliticise political questions and naturalise a kind of technocratic despotism under the guise of neutral science. I don’t think this is a deliberate conspiracy; I think it’s a predictable result of a particular way of seeing. The political assumption is that ‘we’ as a society make decisions for the whole society (i.e., society is not an aggregate of individuals), that within this range of decisions, anything goes (the only criteria are quantitative), and that the decisions should be made based on expert data. These are highly contentious beliefs: they are not apolitical or scientific. I believe lockdowns are always wrong because people are autonomous beings with a need for freedom, and acts such as threatening violence if a person leaves their home are abusive regardless of circumstances (I don’t believe there is any significant moral difference between a Government, a terrorist group, or an individual abuser making such threats, and I don’t believe the ends justify the means). But I could also cite dozens of political theories which oppose the general model that the Government should ...

Emboldened by your recent contributor's account of his upcoming trip to Miami to attend a job interview (and I wish him the best of luck), I would like to share how I and one companion were recently obliged to travel from the UK to the Alps. The envy of frustrated skiers across the nation, I'm sure – but I hope this inspires some others who may be underemployed to think outside the box when looking for work. So many essential workers put their lives on the line to keep the lights on for the rest of us that it occurred to me that I should show similar courage and do my part. With no real work at home, I decided that I was willing to step out into the virus-ravaged wastelands and risk it all. As we know, international travel is perhaps the most dangerous act of any, and so that would be how I tested my mettle.  Ideas such as ‘chalet inspector’ or ‘independent fondue taster’ seem unnecessary these days; I'm sure people can manage to taste their own fondues during a pandemic. What, though, is the field that absolutely requires travelling in person? Transport, of course – whether that's driving a coach, flying a plane or moving a lorry full of goods. Readers will remember the chaos suffered ...

by Sinéad Murphy Over a week ago, the journalist Owen Jones posted a video on his YouTube channel. Its title: “The Deniers.” I have not been a reader of Jones’s writings nor a viewer of his videos, but I have been aware of his relatively high profile as an opinion columnist and an interviewer. Nothing could have prepared me for his performance in “The Deniers”. Jones’s demeanour in this video is that of a bad-tempered child who, from the safety of his mother’s skirts, entertains himself by taunting his chosen targets – he pulls faces, he calls names, and he mocks the objects of his petulance with hand gestures and sarcasm of the most puerile variety. Jones’s victims are professional people – just like him. Among them: Professor Karol Sikora, former Chief of the Cancer Programme of the World Health Organisation; Professor Sunetra Gupta, Chair of Theoretical Epidemiology at University of Oxford; Professor Carl Heneghan, Director of University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and Editor-in-Chief of the British Medical Journal’s Evidence-Based Medicine provision; and Dr Michael Yeadon, former Head of Allergy and Respiratory Research at Pfizer Global. These are the people – the ‘Deniers’ – at whom Jones makes his faces and levels his taunts. More than once, he uses his hands to place notional quotation marks around Karol ...

Today’s update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. We hear that US states which locked down had MORE Covid deaths (see graph), Toby tells us about his talkRADIO debate with Christopher Snowdon, and the latest vaccine news.