Children in the UK could start getting the Covid vaccine from August, much earlier than expected. Ministers are awaiting safety data on a child vaccine study being run by Oxford Uni before making their final decisions.
Is the reason some EU countries are experiencing a rise in Covid infections, but not the UK, because regional epidemics follow the same pattern as seasonal flu epidemics, with some aggressive and others mild?
Back in January, when the lockdown was being put in place in Britain, I wrote a piece for this website trying to imagine future trajectories. I started with the assumption that, since COVID-19 is a respiratory virus, it would probably behave in the same seasonal manner as other respiratory viruses. Most notably, the flu. I called this “the flu hypothesis”. Using this simple reasoning I then went and examined what different types of flu seasons looked like and used these to then discuss what government responses might be in the event of each. Broadly speaking, I found two types of flu season. One I referred to as “gradual”; the other I referred to as “aggressive”. In the case of an aggressive flu season, cases tended to accelerate rapidly toward the end of December into January. These would then peak in mid-January and after that cases would burn out. In the case of a gradual flu season, cases would not accelerate quickly at all. They would creep up in early winter, rise a little in January and then either settle back down or continue to climb right through March-April. Simply looking at previous flu seasons, I gave an estimated probability of an aggressive season of around 25-33% and an estimated probability of a gradual season of around 66-75%. By the end ...
With mass testing of schoolchildren happening and those testing positive and their contacts required to self-isolate, it is not surprising that more than 200,000 children were at home isolating at the end of last week.
I have written a short reflection on the year gone by and why the grotesque mismanagement of the crisis by our elites has shaken my faith in Britain, but not quite destroyed it.
Research indicates the Common Cold suppresses COVID-19 infection. In a guest post, Guy de la Bédoyère points out that lockdowns may have stopped us getting the very thing that would have protected us against coronavirus.
According to a new report by the Royal Academy, the UK faces a decade of misery thanks to... well, the RA says "the pandemic" but it's the lockdowns, obvs. Damage caused by the "pandemic" much less in Sweden and Florida.
We're publishing an original piece today by Dr James Moreton Wakeley, a former Parliamentary researcher, about the Government's shameful use of sophisticated psychological techniques to terrify the British public.
The number of excess deaths in England and Wales has fallen below zero for the first time in six months, according to ONS data. 11,000 people died in Week 10, which is 4.4% below the five-year average (511 deaths fewer).
by Dr. James Moreton Wakeley Fear is our most powerful emotion. It triggers our deepest animal instincts and makes us act in irrational ways. We find ourselves fighting, fleeing, or hiding. We look only to our own safety, forget how to think, and become heedless of anything or anyone else. Fear is the ultimate master of the mind. Employing it as a form of influence, however softly, however subliminally, can profoundly change behaviour and cause lasting mental trauma. Enemies do it in times of war to undermine their foe’s morale and will to resist. It is the tactic used by totalitarian regimes throughout history to compel obedience. And it is the tactic that the British government, for the past year, has consciously employed to turn us into the compliant subjects of lockdown. Using such behavioural science to ‘nudge’ us into acting in certain ways is not new. As conceived by the Cameron government, harnessing ‘nudge theory’ to encourage people ‘to make better choices for themselves’ without resorting to the compulsion of law is not necessarily malign. Yet the ways in which behavioural science has been employed over the course of the past year demonstrates the deep truth of the old aphorism that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) is ...
