Month: February 2021

By Ben Hawkins Imagine you are walking across a bridge over a rail line. Suddenly you hear screams coming from under the bridge. You look down and see that four people are tied to the tracks. What’s worse, you look up and see what looks like a runaway train carriage hurtling towards them. The carriage doesn’t look that big – if you could push a large object over the bridge in front of the carriage, you figure that it would be enough to stop the carriage and save the four people tied to the line. Looking around for such an object, you see an incredibly fat man stood at the edge of the bridge. He looks big enough to stop the carriage. Do you push him, knowing that falling from such a height and being hit by the carriage will almost certainly kill him? Do you sacrifice one life, to save four others? This is an example of a trolley problem, a hypothetical scenario designed by ethicists to examine how we should behave in different situations. The above example is tricky, because whilst we would usually agree that four lives are more important than one life, the positive act of killing someone goes against many of our moral intuitions. Most people, when asked what they would do in this scenario, ...

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes an analysis of why ICU numbers aren't falling by a senior doctor, a comparison of those US states that locked down and those that didn't and a Postcard From Rwanda.

I write this at the beginning of the third week of Rwanda’s second lockdown, some eight months after the first ended. The lockdown only encompasses the capital, Kigali, as the epicentre of the rise in cases, and domestic and international tourism is still open for those wishing to see the rest of this beautiful country. We have to get police permission to leave the house even for food shopping, masks have been mandatory outdoors – and in cars – since the WHO changed their advice, and outdoor exercise is only allowed between 5am and 9am; even then we are only supposed to stay in our Umudugu, a small village within a village (ours is tiny). The biggest cheerleaders for this latest lockdown were, predictably, the privileged expat community, those least likely to be severely affected by the closure of the Rwanda’s economic centre. Rich (especially so in a context where the average salary for Rwandans is around $50 per month), mainly European and North American people have been a constant source of panic, hysteria and judgement since the very first case of COVID-19 arrived in Rwanda in early March 2020. This is expressed in the groupthink posts on Expats in Rwanda Facebook group. In their comfortable compounds, with their gardens, their nannies, and ‘house boys’ and their home deliveries of ...

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes a Postcard From Capetown, news of a free-to-attend sceptics' symposium in New Zealand and the estimated economic cost of school closures (£350 billion).

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes details of an embarrassing Facebook censorship climbdown, a rebuttal of Christ Snowdon's critique of Dr Mike Yeadon and a summary of Prof John Ioannidis's latest paper.

by Nicholas Lewis Christopher Snowdon on Channel 4 News Christopher Snowdon makes some reasonable points in his January 16th article in Quillette “Rise of the Coronavirus Cranks”. However, he conflates cranks and rational sceptics, resulting in much of his critique being wide of the mark or plain wrong, and rational sceptics being unfairly tarred with the same brush as cranks. A response to Snowdon’s general argument has since been published elsewhere. However, it does not challenge the key quantitative criticism that Snowdon makes. Snowdon asserts that claims by Mike Yeadon are “demonstrably nonsensical”. Specifically, he attacks Yeadon’s claim in an article in Lockdown Sceptics in mid-September 2020, that the vast majority of Covid cases identified by Pillar 2 (testing in the community, England) since May 2020 had been false positives. Snowdon accepts the mathematics but challenges Yeadon’s assumptions regarding the true positive rate and the PCR test false positive rate, of 0.1% (the rate found by the Office of National Statistics) and 0.8% (the low end of a 0.8-4.0% false positive rate range stated in a report by Government scientists). Snowdon wrote that Yeadon “did not draw the obvious conclusion that if the false positive rate of the PCR test was 0.8 percent, the ONS should find positives at least 0.8 percent of the time”. Snowdon may think that is ...