I initially created Lockdown Sceptics – with the help of Ian Rons, co-founder of the Free Speech Union and computer whizz – in March of last year as an aide-mémoire for personal use. I was writing a lot about the new and still largely unknown virus and wanted to create a kind of online reference library, collating all the articles and papers and interviews about different aspects of the pandemic under separate headings. Then, when I’d created it, I decided to make it public in case anyone else would find it useful. I got into the habit of constantly updating it because so much new information about the virus was being published every day and, to do that, I found myself spending the best part of the the evening looking through news sites and blogs and medical journals. That, in turn, led to the daily update – I had gathered all this information, so why not publish it in one place? And so Lockdown Sceptics, as a daily news blog, was born.
Many readers have contacted me in the past 12 months to say that reading the blog has kept them sane because, until they discovered it, they thought they were the only ones who weren’t buying into the official narrative. Compiling it has also been therapeutic for me, although in a slightly different way, which I’ll try and explain.
First, the darkling plain.
For me, the most depressing thing about the past 12 months is that it’s destroyed my faith in so many of the people and institutions that I used to have some respect for – Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock, the Conservative Party, the judiciary, the police, the BBC, Sky News, the Civil Service, Imperial College, the Lancet, Nature, the Royal Society… the list goes on. I’ve always been alive to the risk that crowds are susceptible to collective hysteria and I’ve witnessed a few manias and moral panics first hand, but I hoped that Britain’s elites, particularly those who bear responsibility for steering the ship of state, would be immune to such madness. And it seemed they would be for a few weeks, which made their eventual surrender to a global psychosis that much harder to witness. To see them not only succumb to mass hysteria but consciously whip it up, using sophisticated psychological techniques, has been a shock. (I blame that, in part, for the British public’s willingness to surrender their liberty and hope they will recover their good sense once the propaganda ceases.) I won’t say this has been a deep shock because I’ve always been pretty cynical, but I used to have a sliver of confidence in Britain’s elites and I have struggled to hold on to that. It’s not an exaggeration to say my belief in Britain has been knocked for six.
But what has kept me from slipping into the slough of despond has been all the thoughtful, intelligent people who’ve contacted me, offering not only to help put out Lockdown Sceptics, but to contribute to it, too. They’ve come from all walks of life, different sides of the political spectrum and from a wide range of academic fields, all united in doubt about the wisdom of the Government’s approach to managing the pandemic. Some of them have been based overseas, but most have been my fellow countrymen and their presence and willingness to help has gone some way to restoring my faith in Britain. I often think, when reading a submission from a retired professor of economics or a lecturer in philosophy just starting out on her career, that here is the best of Britain – the heirs of Isaac Newton and David Hume and Rosalind Franklin. Like Orwell, writing in the Lion and the Unicorn during another crisis in our history when the people at the helm seemed to be steering us towards the rocks, I have persuaded myself that the problem isn’t with the country, just the people at the top. As he wrote: “A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.”
The wrong people have been in charge during this crisis in almost every sphere of public life. But there are good people out there – still – and not a few of them have been involved in this website – above and below the line. And the fact that Lockdown Sceptics has become such a thing – a kind of focal point for dissent from the official narrative, with an average of 1.25 million page views a month and – even more heartening – attacked and ridiculed almost daily by the lackeys of the Establishment is also a source of hope. And a tribute to the talent and energy of all those who’ve helped and contributed.
As a country, this has not been our finest hour. But I still believe in Britain – just.
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It seems to me that part of the problem is the use of the term “vaccine” at all, for such a product, compared with the conventional “sterilising vaccines”. As far as I know, the manufacturers never claimed that the C-19 one could prevent the infection of the recipient, only to mitigate the symptoms of any related infection.
It is possible that false information, or at least the absence of it, is a deliberate tactic of some promoters, to encourage it’s use.
Notwithstanding your note that “We didn’t know this, way back in December 2020 ” , the actual NHS leaflet promoting it’s use in March 2021, which came to me and others, said: “We do not yet know whether it will stop you from catching and passing on the virus.” Maybe they did know a lot more about it, and the whole thing was a marketing tool; not the ‘whole truth’.
Whether the accelerated evolution of unintended variations in related viruses is a mistake or not is a moot point. After all, it should be well understood that similar problems to do with excessive use of antibiotics tend to cause the development of bacteria that can survive the drug concerned.
Are they making the same old mistake, albeit re viruses rather than bacterial infections?
After all, it should be well understood that similar problems to do with excessive use of antibiotics tend to cause the development of bacteria that can survive the drug concerned.
Antibiotics are chemical substances which are toxic to cells (I’m allergic to mould which implies being allergic to penicillin. Which means that it kills enough useful cells of my body that I become sick because of it). They’re static, hence, cells can evolve to become immune against them. Vaccines are not antivrials. They’re supposed to stimulate the immune system of the body which then does the actual work of killing pathogens after an infection occurred. Viruses cannot evolve to become immune to that because the immune systems co-evolves to kill them nevertheless. These are two entirely different mechanisms.
There is a fair analogy to be made with antibiotics — the problem comes when the ‘thing that stops the organism thriving’ doesn’t reduce the population to zero, which then allows evolution to occur (in the presence of selective pressure).
There’s no analogy to be made with antibiotics. Vaccination doesn’t affect viruses directly at all and the immune system will ultimatively reduce the population to zero (to the degree that this is possible in a world where microorgansims and viruses are abundant).
The analogy in my comment above was an attempt to compare it with the traditional managerial, or medicinal approach to the use of other products that did create it’s own problems. I’ve been around long enough to notice that fashions come and go in the trade. E.g. some years ago, the dentist I used to use often prescribed 7 days worth of whatever, allegedly in a precautionary way. Not popular now, I think. One was sometimes advised to take the whole lot, and not stop half way through – but maybe not all did.
While humans do evolve their immune systems to counter the threat from pathogens, this takes place over long timescales and won’t help us in this case (eg, Europeans appear to have evolved a mechanism to partially protect against some hemorrhagic viruses — this presumably occurred due to selective pressures in Europe long ago).
Obviously we do enter a game of immune adaptation to viral evolution (I think this is what you mean), but this doesn’t mean that viruses can’t evolve to overcome an immune response created after an earlier infection — indeed, this viral evolution to overcome immunity is exactly what happens in many viruses. Fortunately, the immune response to infection is to generate antibodies and cellular immunity that recognise many of the proteins/regions in the pathogen, and as at least some of these won’t mutate rapidly (ie, the proteins become unviable after any mutation in the pathogen’s DNA/RNA) it is likely that the broad immunity will continue to offer protection.
While humans do evolve their immune systems to counter the threat from pathogens, this takes place over long timescales and won’t help us in this case
Thank you for proving that we all died of COVID after we were never born because our first ancestors already died out millions of years ago because they never developed an immune system capable of adapting to new pathogens. A small problem remains, though: Who are you and I why can we are argue about this? And doesn’t the fact that we both exist and can make us de facto indistinguishable from those other real humans who – unfortunately – never came to be?
I could equally well make the counter argument — how come there are such things as viruses in humans when humans have an immune system?
The reality is that organisms play a merry arms race, with pathogens evolving to overcome immunity, and our immune systems adapting to overcome resistant pathogen strains.
Because the immune system takes time to eliminate most pathogens of an active infection. Until this has happened, the alien organism (or virus) can replicate and possibly also infect other people (or animals). The immune system doesn’t protect us from getting sick, only from getting so sick that we die of it (for the case we’re discussing here).
The idea with the arms race is close to what I meant to describe, just with one important difference: A real arms race occurs because of directed activities of both parties. They’re intentionally competing with each other. That’s not the case for viral (or bacterial) mutation. Such mutations happen as undirected replication error during the reproductional process. Should such a mutation accidentally convey a reproductional advantage, eg, shorter replication cycle or stronger resistance against some negative environment factor (like already existing antibodies), the mutated speciment will be able to replicate more than the unmutated ones until its descendents (with this mutation) overwhelmingly outnumber the descendents of specimen without it.
Insisting on such details is not pettifogging: Sars-CoV2 has repeatedly been mispresented as dangerous, sort-of intelligent opponent actively seeking to overcome humans by clever mutations of itself.
‘… the manufacturers never claimed that the C-19 one could prevent the infection of the recipient, only to mitigate the symptoms of any related infection.’
Not even that.
Initially all they claimed from their so-called Human trial was reduction of symptomatic infections from 0.88% in the placebo group, to 0.04% in the active ingredient group – and in a fit, healthy cohort aged 18 to 55.
Smoke and mirrors.
This gave them their ‘95% effective’ deceit, implying it would reduce symptomatic infections by 95% in the population, whereas it meant reducing risk of infection in an individual by 95%. So 100 vaccinated people could still get it, not just 5 as implied.
But the absolute risk anyway was only 0.88% which means that natural immunity was 99.2% effective.
There never was nor has there been any falsifiable data with respect to reduced severity – just a lot of claims. In fact currently, observation from data shows an increase risk of symptomatic infection, severity and death among the vaccinated particularly triple or more dosed.
There’s no reason to assume that current COVID vaccines provide any benefits. Apart from that, that’s the misapplied Typhoid Mary story again: It’s possible that people are immune (or mostly immune) to what certain bacteria do what causes sickness, say, toxic execrations. Because of this, such bacteria can colonize their bodies and happily reproduce inside them. They’re cellular organisms capable of reproducing on their own. This is not true for viruses. These reproduce by hijacking the reproductive apparatus of cells of their host’s bodies. This causes these cells to cease functioning and ultimatively, leads to their premature death. Hence, viral reproduction necessarily causes damage to the host body aka sickness. And high viral load means very sick.
The impartial explanation of the Marek’s disease phenomenon is: Chicken in chicken mass productions facilities living in a density which wouldn’t ever occur in nature are exposed to extremely high loads of both pathogens and toxics. If they don’t get a certain cocktail of chemical substances which has been worked out by trial and error as early as possible, they usually die before they grew large enough to be sold. Those who die nevertheless end up as junk. Nobody’s regular doing post-mortems on them to determine the exact cause of death (that woule be ludicrous proposition).
Lastly, there is no such thing as vaccine-derived immunity vs natural immunity, just immunity caused by encountering a pathogen the immune system destroyed (or kept at bay) before the host body died. Crankden Bossche’s downfall is the fact that so-called natural immunity to flu (and colds) is leaky: Most people get mildy or moderately sick, infect a bunch of other people and then recover. If this would naturally lead to killer escape mutations our ancestors (or rather, all multi-cellular organisms) would have died out long before he ever got a chance to go onto this particular fear-mongering crusade.
Lastly, there is no such thing as vaccine-derived immunity vs natural immunity,
But isn’t the problem with the so-called ‘vaccines’ that they induce only a small and highly mutable part of the virus – the spike – in the body, which then develops immunity only against this spike … which then mutates in the wider environment (self selection via the stabbed) leaving the stabbed susceptible to the new virus, and actually more susceptible owing to immune imprinting?
Surely then, as far as the covid stabs are concerned, there’s a massive difference between natural and ‘vaccine’-induced immunity?
As I already wrote: There’s no reason to assume that present COVID vaccines have any beneficial effect (save the very benefical effect on the balance sheet of the companies which sell them). Everytime somebody collects another batch of statistics about that, the outcome is a different correlation.
Strictly speaking, assuming they had a benefical effect, immunity created by COVID vaccination would only be crossreactive wrt actual Sars-CoV2 viruses as the immune system was trained to fight something different but similar enough (that’s the claim). But that’s because the two biological agents involved here are different, not because one is artifical and the other natural (to which degree Sars-CoV2 viruses are natural is additionally unclear).
“However, the Covid vaccines aren’t sterilising: vaccinated people can still get infected and will have high viral loads when this occurs. We didn’t know this, way back in December 2020 when vaccination started.”
I think there’s evidence to suggest we DID know this. I don’t think the manufacturers ever claimed it. It was the politicians and “public health” people that pushed it.
Of course we knew. Just as we knew that some of that viral load might be unaffected by the imperfect immune response triggered by the ‘vaccine’ resulting in ‘break out’ variants.
Just as we also knew that immune systems prepped to recognise and respond to Viral Version A, when confronted by Viral Version B will ‘see’ enough similarity to A to believe it is A and produce an immune response which will not actually work on B. And so consumed with responding to what it thinks is A, it will not function to adapt to B.
This phenomenon is so well known it has a name, two in fact, either Antigenic Imprinting or Original Antigenic Sin. It can be caused by natural exposure, but this is not widespread throughout a population, but mass vaccination makes it widespread giving the new Variant a large supposedly immunised population in which to reproduce.
The irony being, it will be less successful in the unvaccinated whose immune system will not be distracted and will go to work on it.
Back in early 2021 the thoughts were that the vaccine simply didn’t work in some people — these then got ‘breakthrough infections’. The idea was that in those individuals where the vaccine worked, it offered sterilising immunity.
IMO this was always ‘unlikely’, but that’s what was being promoted by some.
If only Charles Darwin had written a book. Then he could have pointed out that if an organism acquires by genetic mutation a characteristic which makes it best adapted to its environment, it will be the most successful at reproduction.
Being RNA based, the virus is hopeless at getting exact copies of itself made – hopeless!
Each coronavirus creates about 100 000 copies in each cell it invades. It can invade millions of cells in just one host so overall throughout a populations it produces zillions and zillions of mutations, each one a test to see if it can get past the antigen imprinted immune system belonging to the idiot Jab-Junky.
Holy gosh, Batman, what are the odds that at least one of them will make it? Good indeed Robin, a fact we knew until we The Science™️ Pandemic struck, which is why mass vaccination programmes during the active phases of viral contagion were previously contraindicated. Bad idea. Expose millions to new variants with no protection.
‘… ex-academic and senior Government scientist.’
I laughed for two minutes when I read that.
Why?
Could be worse — I could work in military intelligence or be in charge of government efficiency.
For those that know about these things, can we assume that unvaccinated people, when they catch any Covid variant naturally, develop immunity from catching it a second time?
If that is the case then it makes a nonsense of universal vaccination. As many have said it should have been concentrated on those who are extremely vulnerable and let herd immunity develop in the rest.
It is doubtful that natural infection with Covid results in long term protection against infection.
But it should offer rather better protection than the vaccines.
It is doubtful that natural infection with Covid results in long term protection against infection.
But surely it does against serious and even significant disease?
Yes.
What do you base this claim upon?
As JohnK points out in the first post, the deliberate branding of the poisons as “vaccines,” which they clearly are not, has helped dupe millions across the world. Although describing the injections as prophylactics would have been equally disingenuous at least the general public would not have been conned into believing they were taking an injection that might provide some benefits. But then “have you had your Covid1984 prophylactic jabs?” would not have carried the same cache resulting in poor take up.
In other words the whole injection programme has been based on outrageous falsehoods from the off.
“Come and get your deathshot” has poor marketing appeal.
Or if they had described the injections as gene therapy. That is according to this Big Pharma executive.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/wHBKyHDHBHti/
So, one should never “vaccinate” huge swathes of humanity with none sterilising vaccines.
You don’t have viral escape, you have vaccine failure. We will never achieve a reasonable level of herd immunity, there are not enough unjabbed.
So a vast cohort of vaccinated humanity is now playing host to covid, giving it an undreamt of opportunity to carry on mutating.
I mean, who could ever have foreseen such a thing.
GCB has been saying this for over two and a half years – and I’ve no doubt many other immunologists/vaccinologists have thought the same.
GVB has been right so far, and if he is correct when he says that it is only a matter of time before this immune pressure gives forth a really deadly variant – but of more danger to the jabbed.
So, just carry on jabbing ad infinitum – what could go wrong.
What bigpharma and The RPTB have done and will continue to do is criminal.
If the ‘leaky vaccine’ targets very stable proteins in the pathogen (conserved regions in the pathogen’s DNA/RNA) then there’s also less chance of evolution working towards bad outcomes.
Fully understanding that is beyond my limited knowledge of virology I’m afraid but thanks for the information.
That said, we shouldn’t be relying upon a “less chance” situation if covid had been dealt with properly, ie as per the existing public health measures before Clown World took over.
Covid is entering its 4th year and there seems no sign of any proper herd immunity via unjabbed recovery from natural infection..
Let’s hope it continues to mutate into just an ordinary cold.
‘GCB’? Are you referring to Geert Vanden Bosche? If so, then yes that’s exactly what he has been saying, and quite rightly.
An insightful article. Forgive me if I’m off the mark but..
“Why [even in the 21st century] haven’t we created a cure for the common cold?” One of those pesky questions and phenomena that we’ve as laymen (and the real scientists) have queried and wrestled with for decades. “Ah, it’s actually quite simple dear boy – There’s so many but even a single strain mutates so quickly in circulation so before you’ve enough who become inoculated it’s adapted and evolved making ‘the solution’ imperfect.”
Is that essentially what they’ve been claiming with this sodding covid “vaccine”? “We’ve cured the common cold – roll up, roll up!?!”
So not only have we created “a vaccine” (that was marketed as a sterilisation in the absence of their publicly claiming otherwise – but as we now know.. was / is nothing of the sort, so fraudulent marketing if you ask me, but I digress) on a family of viruses that are the primary causes of colds, flus and now covid. But we’ve also created “a remedy” that has caused untold damage to the existing biosphere by creating this smorgasbord of disease even more prevalent than it already was in the wider world? (was this already due to existing “vaccines”? – digressing again but I’m suspicious of it all now). Not to mention potentially damaging those who took the advice in good faith a swathe of people’s immune systems (and lives) in this relentless pursuit to experiment and play god?
We may have made a catastrophic mistake! If only there were those who were warning of this type of arrogance and approach (inc predicting the actual reality of the world we now live & everything the author of this piece, Amanuensis lays out) long before this calamity really got going. Oh wait…
Waiting for the next shoe / claim to drop. “We’ve cured the common cold.”
The lack of any success in the development of a ‘common cold vaccine’ (including those that targeted coronaviruses) should have been a huge red flag. The use of ‘novel techniques’ wasn’t a sure fire way to overcome prior lack of success, and only introduced other risks.
Absolutely. For those who are interested, there is a lot of history about the work of the Common Cold Unit in Salisbury which is available online. ISTR it closed down around 1989. Some might already know that it was where the term “coronavirus” was invented, on account of the shape of it’s images under electron microscopy. Until that technology developed, no-one had ever seen a virus.
That’s interesting. I must admit that I have been veering towards the conclusion that viruses are simply a theoretical construct, and known by their perceived effects rather than anything else. I will look into the work you cite – thank you.
Certainly be interested in researching that, news to me. Thanks.
Precisely, you’ve laid out my ramblings far more succinctly. Thank you. What’s frustrating is the obfuscation and denial within the scientific community. Surely they knew the claims were bogus yet they said very little, or nothing – though I understand the insidious nature of censorship and the artificial environment it portrays.
One important thing to bear in mind is that for most people, “immunity” to covid isn’t that important because covid isn’t that dangerous. It’s in the same order of danger as flu, and appears to be more dangerous to people with already poor health. Bearing this in mind, the whole vaccination program is insane/evil delete as applicable.
There was a strong argument to be made in early 2021 to use the newly developed vaccines to protect the most very vulnerable. I’m not convinced that this would have worked, but the risk/reward suggested that it was an appropriate way forwards.
Well by “vaccination program” I meant mass vaccination without informed consent, coercion, mandates, bribery, downplaying the risks, the safety shortcuts. If you’re arguing that it could have been OFFERED to the “vulnerable” with a huge bunch of caveats and full disclosure of all the shortcuts, trial shortcomings, the fact that it wasn’t tested on the vulnerable, known adverse effects, a realistic picture of how dangerous covid wasn’t, and the fact that there were possible alternative treatments, well I would say an incredibly tentative maybe, but we’re in the realms of fantasy here. Informed consent wasn’t really possible because of the lies told about covid. Anyway, it rather looks like it’s killing the vulnerable.
Yep, agreed. And if the advanced of age cannot mount an immune response naturally, just by virtue of the fact of them being old and immunocompromised anyway, then why was it thought this novel jab would do any better? When did doctors throw all of their learning out of the window and believe that the immune system stopped and started with antibodies? Crazy. I still maintain, knowing what we know now, these jabs were never of any benefit to anyone, let alone the elderly. And if the jabs didn’t kill them the death protocols in hospitals/care homes did. Easier to hide unnatural deaths in the old folk and a safe place to start with your depopulation agenda. The cull just becomes more obvious as you jab down through the age groups and pregnant women.
I still maintain, knowing what we know now, these jabs were never of any benefit to anyone, let alone the elderly.
I agree, and it’s not often enough pointed out. No one should have been having this stuff.
knowing what we know now
I knew it by mid January 2021, at the latest.
“Protection” was a guise. TPTB probably figured it was a justified risk in the elderly because there’d be less life years lost if/when it all went tits up. And they’d get to hide behind the person’s comorbidities as a cause of death because nobody could possibly attribute an old person’s death to the jab. Not when the whole narrative depended on everybody taking the shots so as to protect grandma and the government cared so much about the public’s welfare that the elderly were prioritised when the weapons were first deployed.
Vaccine Schmaxine. It’s an infernal genetic jollop that doesn’t work but has brought untold misery to the human race.
I would much rather consult a Herbalist Shaman from Outer Mongolia or Darkest Peru or Stevenage than consult with the brightest medical spark who still speaks up and supports this utterly abomnable train wreck of a program.
💯💉☠⚰🪦
As the Covid “vaccines” only targeted the spike protein and not the nucleocapsid protein, and only addressed systemic immune response, there was never a chance that mucosal immunity would result, thus viral load in the upper respiratory tract was never going to be reduced.
Hence, the jabs were never likely to be sterilising, and evolution was always likely to occur.
And surely anyone in the field would have known that, right from the start? Anyone with a basic knowledge of the immune system?
I don’t have any medical background at all, but I pretty soon found out that the stabs did not produce mucosal immunity, and thus couldn’t prevent upper respiratory tract infection, and thus couldn’t prevent transmission …
Is there any excuse for the people who pushed the stabs as preventing transmission?
Several immunologists, virologists and other doctors with a modicum of interest in Covid and the mRNA transfection agents were saying this even before the jabbing programs commenced.
As you say, a basic knowledge of the immune system was all that was needed.
Unfortunately, across the board, all these voices were censored as we know.
I can see no excuses for doctors having no idea about this. Then again they were all “just following orders”.
Trouble is, I am pretty sure that many doctors really do not have any idea about this. Forgotten the day after they passed their immunology module at medical school.
I’m saying this from anecdotal evidence, not just making it up.
And of course it’s much easier just to follow orders than think for oneself, let alone stand out in a crowd against those orders.
The authorities DID know that the jabs weren’t sterilising when they started rolling them out.
When the jabs were first announced, I clearly remember Mike Graham on (what was then TalkRadio) say “so they won’t stop you getting Covid and they won’t prevent you from dying …. so not a lot of use then” and he laughed.
Subsequently, TalkRadio presenters (including Mike Graham) regularly promoted the jab programme and any comments like that disappeared, so they obviously got “a nudge” from OFCOM.
In every case, vaccine or no vaccine, it is the natural immune system that defeats a pathogen. A vaccine will give the natural immune system a ‘pre-view’ of a particular virus so that it is prepared for when the actual virus turns up. In addition, live virus vaccines, as opposed to dead virus vaccines, have been shown to ‘boost’ natural immunity so that it can defeat other pathogens and not just the one targeted by the vaccine. The big failure during this medical catastrophe was treating vaccines like a religion, in which, if a treatment is called a vaccine then it is asserted, it WILL cure you, and no discussion.