The anniversary of the start of the pandemic has occasioned a rash of review pieces, replete with all the standard lockdowner myths that have become part of the Official Narrative in the past year. Not least of which is that lockdown came too late, as Boris has apparently now admitted according to Telegraph sources, which bodes ill for the future.
One of these review pieces, by Telegraph Associate Editor Gordon Rayner, takes a look back at the road to lockdown last March, and includes new insights from insiders, including several ministers.
It rehashes several myths, half-truths and clangers, which we will do our best to debunk.
By mid-March last year new Covid cases were running at an average of 271 per week, though the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) was estimating there were 5,000 to 10,000 cases nationally.
Questions over why Britain was not following other nations, such as Italy, into lockdown were rebuffed because government modelling suggested Mr Johnson’s “squash the sombrero” strategy of flattening the peak would prevent the NHS being overwhelmed.
Suddenly, on Friday, March 13th, everything changed. It was Gold Cup day at the now notorious 2020 Cheltenham Festival, which had been allowed to go ahead despite well-founded concerns that it would become a super-spreader event and SAGE realised it had underestimated the numbers.
Meeting in a conference room at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in Victoria Street, London, the scientists decided a 5-7-day lag in data provision meant the country was “further ahead on the epidemic curve” than they had thought, though SAGE did not at that stage recommend an immediate lockdown and warned that “measures seeking to completely suppress spread of COVID-19 will cause a second peak”.
Five hundred yards away in Downing St, Ben Warner, a young data specialist who had been No 10’s eyes and ears in SAGE meetings, conducted his own analysis of the numbers and concluded that the NHS would “fall over” in a matter of weeks because the virus was spreading exponentially.
Mr Warner took his findings to Mr Cummings, and at an emergency meeting in the Prime Minister’s Downing Street office the next morning, March 14th, Mr Cummings wrote Mr Warner’s projections on a whiteboard and said the course the Government was following would result in potentially tens of thousands of additional deaths.
“The PM was stunned,” said one source. “That was the key meeting in deciding we had to go into lockdown.”
“Our priority had always been to make sure the NHS could cope,” said another, “but the new analysis showed Covid wasn’t going to just pass that line on the graph, it was going to really smash through it.”
Reassuring to know the Government was being advised by a broad range of the best scientists in these crucial decisions, with Professor Cummings and Professor Warner drawing wobbly red lines on white boards…
Last June, Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson, who became known as “Professor Lockdown”, controversially told MPs that “had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final death toll by at least half”.
The accuracy of Prof Ferguson’s suggestion can never be proven, but one insider said: “We lacked the confidence in the public being prepared and able to react quickly, that’s why we waited days and weeks sometimes to implement things.
“There was a strange preference for giving people notice, which seemed bizarre. People were saying to us ‘if you’re going to do this, why not do it now?’
“It was a major misstep not to do lockdown a week earlier. There was a false hope that a few extra days would give us more time to prepare, when in fact it contributed to the whole year progressing as it did.”
Fears of rioting also troubled Downing Street. “There were conversations going on in Government about whether the summer could end up like August 2011 if we locked the country down,” said one minister.
SAGE had also warned the Prime Minister about the danger of “lockdown fatigue”, which has been blamed in the past for the decision not to lock down earlier.
In truth, Downing Street had plenty of evidence that the public was ready and willing to take the sort of tough measures that were being seen abroad.
“We had bags of data that said the public was hugely behind the idea of lockdown,” said one senior source. “We were never going to lose by going in hard. The more extreme the measures we took, the more the public were behind us.”
One source who worked with the Prime Minister said: “There are times when he listens to everyone around the Cabinet table and he will put his fist on the table and say ‘this is what we’re going to do’, like when the testing programme was going wrong. But he definitely dithered when it came to massive decisions that meant curtailing freedoms.”
“The accuracy of Prof Ferguson’s suggestion can never be proven” – this is one of the most persistent and pernicious lockdown myths. It’s as though Sweden doesn’t exist. We know Sweden didn’t lock down and fared better than the UK. And we know that places which didn’t lock down this winter often fared better than those that did. We also know that deaths in the UK peaked on April 8th, which, it was pointed out last April by leading Oxford epidemiologist Professor Carl Heneghan, meant that new daily infections had peaked around 23 days earlier on March 16th, eight days before the national lockdown was imposed. Thus contrary to pro-lockdown mythology there is ample evidence disproving Professor Ferguson’s claim that the UK death toll could have been halved by locking down a week earlier. Lockdown simply isn’t that effective and COVID-19 simply isn’t that deadly.
Then on March 23rd SAGE told Boris Johnson that the reproduction rate of the virus – the R number which would quickly become part of the national lexicon – had risen to between 2.6 and 2.8, meaning each infected person was passing it on to almost three others.
Advisers had been dismayed by pictures of crowded Tube trains in London and people ignoring social distancing advice by flocking to public spaces.
The death toll had leapt threefold to 335, with 6,650 cases. Mr Johnson decided he could delay no longer, and arranged a TV broadcast in which he told the nation: “From this evening, I must give the British people a very simple instruction – you must stay at home.”
Again, it has been known since mid-April 2020 that this estimate of R on March 23rd was way out. A straightforward analysis of the deaths data suggests R had fallen below 1 by around March 16th. Chris Whitty even admitted as much to MPs in July, when he said that R had gone “below one well before, or to some extent before, March 23rd”.
The deepest roots of the delay took hold long before Boris Johnson was Prime Minister. For years, all of the Government’s pandemic planning had been for an influenza outbreak, even though countries in the Far East had experienced the highly deadly Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) in the recent past.
David Cameron admitted in March 2021 that his own Government’s failure to plan for a respiratory illness pandemic was a mistake, though Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary in 2016, told the Telegraph: “I don’t feel personally to blame because as a Cabinet minister you take advice from your scientists and there was no advice to do otherwise.”
Exercise Cygnus, a nationwide planning exercise to simulate a flu pandemic in 2016, had given civil servants a false sense of security, as they believed they had rehearsed for what was now upon them, without fully understanding they had rehearsed for the wrong thing.
One Whitehall source said: “They had a plan for flu but they didn’t have a plan for this. Even though countries in the Far East had experienced Sars, we never prepared for that. That was the fundamental problem in the early days.”
Cygnus’s findings contained no mention of testing, for example, because flu is only spread by people who have symptoms, unlike coronavirus, which can be spread asymptomatically.
The same source said: “Dominic Cummings was asking questions of [Cabinet Secretary Sir Mark, now Lord] Sedwill around 4-6 weeks in, they were being waved off because people were saying ‘we’ve got a plan for this, don’t worry’.
“The question for the future is whether those lost weeks were fundamentally critical and would we not now be talking about 125,000 deaths. What did those weeks cost us? It’s important to know because it could happen again.”
The claim that the UK’s Pandemic Preparedness Strategy did not envisage a coronavirus outbreak that could kill upwards of 125,000 people is yet another clanger. In fact, the document prepared in 2011 explicitly envisages the possibility of a SARS-like pandemic and up to 315,000 additional deaths. The COVID-19 pandemic has been well within these anticipated bounds – no country has yet experienced an equivalent death toll of 315,000, and the UK (as one of the worse hit countries in the world) is nowhere near it. Nonetheless, the strategy did not recommend lockdowns in any circumstances, questioning whether they were effective or ethical.
However, here is what lockdowners claim made the real difference with COVID-19: asymptomatic transmission.
The issue of asymptomatic transmission – and ministers’ lack of knowledge of it – has been cited by Mr Johnson almost every time he is asked about why Covid was able to spread in the UK.
It is a narrative that has gone largely unchallenged, yet some scientists on SAGE did try to raise the alarm.
On Jan 28th SAGE noted that “there is limited evidence of asymptomatic transmission, but early indications imply some is occurring”.
Then on Feb 21st last year the Italian village of Vo’Euganeo near Venice went into quarantine after the country’s first recorded death from Covid, and almost all of its residents were tested for the virus.
Around 40% of those who tested positive were asymptomatic, strongly suggesting asymptomatic transmission was occurring.
Members of Sage were so struck by the findings that they raised them with the Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and with Prof Ferguson, only for their concerns to be dismissed.
One scientific adviser said: “Neil Ferguson’s response was that it doesn’t really make that much difference to the models, which seemed a bit strange, because it certainly made a bloody big difference.”
Tests on passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan, where hundreds of people became infected and were quarantined, including Britons… also raised questions in February about whether the virus was being transmitted asymptomatically.
Nice to see a rare criticism of Ferguson’s modelling, if for the wrong reasons. In fact, asymptomatic transmission is another big fat lockdowner myth. The presence of a high proportion of asymptomatic PCR-positive individuals, as in Vo, is just a reflection of how sensitive the PCR test is in picking up viral material long after a person is infectious. As with other viruses, asymptomatic carriers of SAR-CoV-2 are barely infectious, with one recent study finding they account for just 0.7% of transmission. The fact that 40% of those who tested positive in Vo doesn’t “strongly suggest” asymptomatic transmission was occurring. All it shows is that almost half of those infected are asymptomatic. It tells you nothing about how they caught it.
In mid-March, Sir Patrick spoke of the need “to build up some degree of herd immunity” which would mean that “probably 60%” of the population would have to get the virus.
One health source said: “He was talking about herd immunity because that’s what you do with flu. What’s been forgotten in all of this is that herd immunity was what SAGE wanted at the beginning.”
One senior MP said: “They definitely had a view early on that allowing it to spread to build up immunity was necessary. They were saying privately ‘this is going to be like chickenpox, we are probably all going to have to get this’.”
Sir Patrick later denied herd immunity had ever been the preferred policy of SAGE, and it was never taken up by the Government.
It is nonsense to suggest that herd immunity is possible with flu but not with COVID-19, which is why there are so few reports of people being reinfected, even with all the new variants that are getting so much press coverage.
Should have stuck with the original plan, Boris.
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So who is Ben Warner? What is his actual position and who employs him? What qualifications and experience does he have in data analysis? When is he going to be held to account? How about it, Will and Toby?
A good read, thank you, Will. Keep on pointing out the lies and misrepresentation! As I’ve said before, all the scientific advisors are going to be thrown under the bus by Johnson as he attempts to escape the blame for the death and misery his decisions caused. But he is to blame and should never be allowed to escape facing the consequences of his actions.
As you say – a good reminder of the trail of debris of the falsehoods behind the scamdemic.
As to ‘Ben Warner’ and the question “What qualifications and experience does he have in data analysis?” – a precondition of official involvement in analysis of data about SARS-CoV-2 seems to be fundamental data illiteracy.
Otherwise, why would a moderate viral outbreak ever have been cast as ‘unprecedented’ when at least seven other years in the past quarter century had been worse in terms of mortality. A pretty basic fact.
They come for the comments without warning in the early hours of the morning
Where they are taken nobody knows, never to be seen again they are the disappeared
“There were conversations going on in Government about whether the summer could end up like August 2011 if we locked the country down”
If only!
Another great article from Will, although I’d like to make a point.
Reassuring to know the Government was being advised by a broad range of the best scientists in these crucial decisions, with Professor Cummings and Professor Warner drawing wobbly red lines on white boards…
I do like Will’s dark sense of humour, but I think we must try to be fair to the main players at this point. During those heady days of mid-March, like many other people, I too was watching the infection and death figures growing apparently exponentially, and thinking where is this going? We were talking about hospitalisations and deaths increasing say 100- to 140-fold each month. Not good.
At the time I was telling people that if I was PM I would want the scientists to explain to me where and when this trend was likely to stop. And if they couldn’t say where it was going to stop then something would have to be done, if only to gain a breathing space where we could take stock, get more information about the disease, and get a plan together.
Hence I reluctantly went along with the measures announced up to Friday 20 March, when pubs and other indoor venues were closed. But the following Monday, 23 March, when Johnson announced we mustn’t leave the house, I realised it was bullshit. Respiratory viruses do not spread outside in the fresh air; indeed fresh air is a massive antidote against such illnesses – as my grandmother and all her grandmothers before her knew well. From that point, and as I learnt more about respiratory viruses, and as more data on the disease emerged, I was a full on sceptic.
I think it’s important that we don’t rewrite our own histories of the pandemic, and we judge the main players on the knowledge they had at the time. And subsequently there’s plenty to hang Johnson, Whitty, Vallance, et al. many times over.
But if I’m honest, for me, I could have been Ben Warner back in mid-March 2020.
I wasn’t crunching the Exponential numbers but was was out and about as a key worker observing what was going on in reality.
After three weeks or so it was clear that we were not being told the truth unless London itself was a cauldron from hell.
I gave bozo my trust for 3-4 weeks this time last year but since then he has been abusing that trust.
Yes, I gave Johnson my trust, with increasing reluctance and disquiet, up until 23 March, when he completely forfeited it.
“up until 23 March” – i.e very early in the whole shit-show.
I can’t remember the precise date, but I shifted from a ‘don’t know – let’s be careful’ position after suspicions arose from listening to the clearly propagandised BBC output … which led to an analysis of source mortality data to provide the blatantly missing context … and showed a lie in the making.
I recall a definite moment – a Sunday lunchtime listening to the R4 One o’clock news, early to mid March – when the conscious thought hit me that I was being emotionally manipulated. And I immediately then realised that I had been unconsciously aware of this for sometime before that.
That’s a separate issue to the seriousness of the disease of course, but by the end of March I was confident it was analogous to a bad flu, at least for healthy people under about 70.
At the time I was prepared to accept that the government had simply made a terrible mistake. That perception changed later of course.
Sitting in Bangkok amongst thousands of Chinese, many from Wuhan, during Chinese New Year, I spelled a rat in January 2020. Then enjoyed complete normality in Thailand until the ‘start gun’ of panic was fired in the US and everyone panicked.
It wasn’t just Heneghan who very early on said there is no evidence to support lockdowns etc, it was most older experienced epidemiologists and virologists. Ferguson admitted ‘we didn’t think we could get away with it’. ‘Get away with it’ is what they have done and continue to do.
Manipulate stats, invent ‘cases’, invent death certification, produce GIGO models, use PCR in a way its inventor said it should never be used, force inject genetherapies in the name of ‘vaccines’ not authorised for use, ridicule cheap generic drugs that can reduce most symptoms, kill more people than this virus ever will by stopping normal medical services, crater economies, ruin lives, create a mental illness avalanche.
And in doing all this create a fertile environment for a biosecurity fascist totalitarian regime across the anglosphere and most of europe.
I am pleased to say I could never, ever be Ben Warner, not then, not now.
Yes, you make very fair points. Anyone properly briefed on this back in mid March 2020, and anyone with the benefit of hindsight now, would have seen this.
I’m just trying to be honest with where I was back in mid-March (not at the end, by when my views had changed).
And if I was at that point back then, then I can hardly upbraid others for it now.
Against that is the argument that the likes of the actual Ben Warner should have been far better briefed by mid-March – and I wonder why, apparently, they were not.
I now understand, as we all do on here, why lockdowns don’t work for a respiratory virus such as covid – and how the theory and latterly the empirical evidence says they can’t work.
“Stay Inside” was the first version of their propaganda campaign when lockdowns began. Like yourself, it was obvious to me at that point they had no idea what they were going.
By that point it was obvious to me that they were lying!
But they had already signed up contracts worth over £120 million in early March for their extensive propaganda advertising campaign. Yes, I think they knew exactly where they were going.
Boris has to play along with the “lockdown too late” narrative. He will never admit that they overreacted, panicked, destroyed small businesses, charged care homes full of sick people, left millions on the breadline and caused untold damages to the countries health and prospects.
Yes. The basic psychology of the psychopathic narcissist. Self before others.
Blame where blame is due – and it falls on him. It would have been possible to have changed tack, but instead, this psycho/sociopath chose to keep gigging, and bury the country.
I was thinking of a captured Hitler in Spandau complaining about everyone else screwing up his war.
‘You made me delay attacking France, if we had gone in ‘sooner, harder and longer’ it would have been game over in the west instead of which you bastards held back and allowed Englands army to escape !
Same goes for Russia, I should have gone in sooner but that wanker Mussolini distracted me over the bloody Balkans.
‘Don’t get me started on the Final Solution’.
There’s enough material there for a book but it isn’t funny.
Regarding ‘herd immunity’: let’s not forget the full-on outcry in the MSM that even talking about ‘herd immunity’ was insulting and offensive because ‘we are not sheep’, we’re people’.
Even then I was shocked by the abysmal ignorance displayed by the MSM authors and editors, never mind that nothing much was known about the virus as such. I wondered then and still wonder if the ‘route to lockdown’ was already planned, if they were already ‘framing the narrative’ for that desired outcome.
The PM, ministers and Cons. MP’s are in a trap. With 120k deaths it looks on the surface that Prof. F. must be right. So the only defence is that SAGE gave the wrong advice at the start and Prof. F. came along and provided the right science. This can only strengthen Prof. and the modellers. It is why anyone with any modelling experience (plus anyone who can read a graph) needs to pile in on Imperial & the other modellers. Unless they are discredited, their narrative will be the accepted one in govt. and generally. Then the automatic response to a rumour of a new virus will be lockdown.
There should be enough data now to examine how travel from China in 4Q2019 correlates to infection rates in various countries.
I have always been surprised that the “too late Lockdown” (23rd March 2020) argument has never been aggressively challenged by the fact that Lockdown One was instituted just as the finest spring weather in living memory began. That meant that those who live in poor cramped accommodation with no outside living space were unable to enjoy the material benefits, both to physical and mental health, of extended exposure to the fine weather until the Lockdown was eased on the 10th May. During the 49 days of that first part of the lockdown in London there were 27 days when sunshine hours were in double figures, equal to plus 70% clear skies on each of those 27 days. I believe that by locking down so tightly in late March the authorities made the infection, hospitalisation and death numbers far worse than they would have been if they had instead encouraged people to enjoy the fine spring weather.
The more of this sh1t I see coming from HMG the more I’m inclined to think that they are creating their smokescreen early on. The inevitable inquiry into the whole debacle will be a whitewash.