There follows a guest post by second year maths student and Lockdown Sceptics contributor Glen Bishop.
Having listened to an interview on talkRadio with Professor Jeremy Brown of the National Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which advises SAGE, I thought I would offer a critique of some of the points he made.
Firstly, Professor Brown stated: “If you were to release at this point in time, that is a mistake, and it would lead to a lot of death and illness.” This has not been the experience elsewhere and so as far as I am concerned is an unscientific claim. Florida released all restrictions in September and still has a significantly lower death toll than the UK. Texas released all restrictions over three weeks ago and cases have continued to fall sharply. In Mississippi, all restrictions were lifted four weeks ago. In the subsequent four weeks, the seven-day average case numbers have more than halved. This is despite these states being behind the UK on vaccines and the Kent variant making up a significant proportion of cases. If it has not happened elsewhere in the world, in places with lower population immunity from prior infection and worse vaccine progress, what makes Professor Brown so sure it will happen here?
What is happening in Europe now is not relevant to the UK as, judging from our death rate, we have built up more population immunity from prior infection than most of Europe and are miles ahead with inoculations.
Secondly, Professor Brown enlightened listeners with his thinking on the pandemic’s path, albeit conceding it is “a little simplistic”. He describes how the pandemic has hit in three waves, each causing 50,000 deaths and suggests another wave – a fourth wave – could lead to a similar death toll and scenes akin to the January wave. This is a poor representation of the epidemic to put it mildly, but I will run with this logic. Assume a fourth wave hits that, without vaccinations, would kill another 50,000 people. Around 95% of vulnerable people – the people who would be killed in Brown’s scenario – have actually had a vaccine, which trials show reduces deaths by 95%. That means a fourth wave would in theory claim, not 50,000, but 4,875 deaths. How do I get that figure? First, it would infect 5% of the vulnerable who haven’t been vaccinated and 5% of 50,000 is 2,500. Second, it would still kill 5% of the remaining 95% of the vulnerable population who would have died but have been vaccinated, since the vaccines only reduce death by 95% – so 0.05 x 0.95 x 50,000 = 2,375. 2,500 + 2,375 = 4,875.
So 2,375 will die in the fourth wave in spite of not being vaccinated – roughly 10% of the number of the 22,000 influenza deaths during the 2017 to 2018 winter. Certainly not a number worthy of any response beyond sensible advice. Anyone advocating anything other than sensible public health advice for this scale of viral death is just being hysterical and illogical. If they haven’t been advocating the same things for influenza every previous winter, what makes them do it now? Is it because they are caught up in the hysteria and groupthink gripping SAGE and the country? Why treat this differently just because the media enjoy talking about it?
Of the other group in this hypothetical scenario of Professor Brown’s – the 2,500 unvaccinated deaths – it is their choice not to take a vaccine and they should accept the consequences.
Professor Brown should feel free to lock himself away for the rest of time if he wants to make sure he isn’t putting the ‘vaccine hesitant’ community at risk, but he shouldn’t advocate forcing the rest of sane society to do so. What next? A ban on car travel because some people refuse to wear seat belts and it puts them at risk of dying? A ban on ‘do not resuscitate’ wishes from patients? Do SAGE want to ban sex outside of committed relationships because some people do not use condoms and could spread STDs? What about “a circuit breaker on sex” whilst we do mass testing for STDs and make everyone get a “coitus passport”, so the plebs can only fornicate if they have tested negative for chlamydia, herpes, and HIV? If Professor Brown insists on advocating one set of restrictions, it is illogical not to advocate the others.
If it is acceptable to restrict other people’s civil liberties because some people aren’t sensible with their own health, then I suppose Professor Brown will be getting to work advocating the banning of cigarettes, alcohol, chocolate, and junk food. Eradicating them from society may lead to a far greater increase in QALYs than eradicating Covid will, now that we have very effective vaccines. 78,000 die from smoking each year alone. Perhaps I ought not be giving Professor Brown these ideas. If you read this Professor, please don’t suggest them in your next JCVI meeting. You’ve done enough damage to civil liberties as it is.
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Well said, alas no mention of seasonality.
Will Jones is correct. The ‘dry tinder ‘ has either very sadly already passed away, or now has some level of immunity ( either from vaccination or natural protection from earlier infection). How the ‘learned ‘ professor can actually believe what he spouted on Talk Radio is beyond belief. If SAGE really do follow the data, then they must recognise that they have been and are now being massively over – cautious. Or maybe darker forces are at work here?
The precautionary principle is an ideal tool for academics (and inept EU bureaucrats). They live in a world immune from the pressures of taking risks to move forward. A comfortable sinecure leads to wooly thinking as being ‘better to be safe than sorry’ means never being proved wrong. Having no skin in the game allows them to keep playing Peter warning us of the wolf, even when the wolf is lying right in front of them; on its back, legs in the air – an ex wolf
I’m going with darker forces. There seems to be an element within government and its advisors who are deliberately keeping the scaremongering going against logic.
Maybe it’s to bring about the vaccine passports that the government ministers assured us they weren’t considering (a sure sign they were). If everyone goes back to normal, what incentive is there to have the vaccine if you’ve not already had it? Which makes it more difficult for various businesses to insist on it, and impossible for the government to introduce it.
If it’s held over everyone’s head that they cannot go back to their normal lives, going to the pub, concert, theatre, cinema, etc, without a jab and a certificate or passport to prove it, that’s the only way people will be forced to comply. And everyone must have a vaccine. Even if they don’t need or want one…
Great article Glen, thank you. You do wonder if the title ‘Professor’, as in Messrs Brown and Ferguson was a prize in a box of Frosties?
Unfortunately, the life sciences and medical side of academia don’t have a clue about the maths and modelling and trust those professors because they have the title.
The problem with the modelling community is that, this is their first proper opportunity to use their pandemic models, which for many amounts to decades of their lives work. Yet they don’t work and they can’t accept that. Completely human, none of us would want to admit our lives work was next to useless, but it is unfortunate for the rest of us who have to deal with the consequences of their refusal to admit when they are wrong.
Where are all the ‘experts’ discussing the effect of lockdowns, controls on international travel, on the immune system?
History indicates problems in store for countries with extended immigration controls:
‘Indigenous populations of the Americas experienced high mortality rates during the early contact period as a result of infectious diseases, many of which were introduced by Europeans. Most of the pathogenic agents that caused these outbreaks remain unknown. Through the introduction of a new metagenomic analysis tool called MALT, applied here to search for traces of ancient pathogen DNA, we were able to identify Salmonella enterica….’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0446-6
Thoroughly disreputable piece of garbage in garbage out modelling from Mystic Meg at UCL today I’m afraid. Claiming people who don’t take the gene therapy will cause more deaths including their own. So of course lockdowns will have to remain until the filthy plague spreaders are juiced. Report by Medscape who have also besmirched themselves in all this. Some encouraging pushback in their (clinician only) comments though.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/948331?src=WNL_ukmdpls_210331mscpedit_gen&uac=341672DN&impID=3281449&faf=1
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-43-vaccine-hesitancy/
“Report 43 – Quantifying the impact of vaccine hesitancy in prolonging the need for Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions to control the COVID-19 pandemic”
There is no need for NPIs – vaccines or not. NPIs don’t control the pandemic. This is just more Imperial bilge that assumes NPIs work in the way their model says they should
I really cannot believe the hubris displayed by these people. Thanks for the links. Truly GIGO in its most absolute form.
Imperial College is now so egregious in its pursuit of the pharmaceutical industry’s agenda – from whence so much funding comes – that it has totally blown any remaining credibility.
Their modelling has been so inaccurate that it’s only use seems to be as a guide to what is the most unlikely scenario.
I’m reassured by the fact that the modelled data comes from Imperial college.
Surely most sentient people will therefore dismiss it out of hand, unless they have the moral and ethical probity of a Michie.
As per my comment a few minutes ago:
“There seems to be an element within government and its advisors who are deliberately keeping the scaremongering going against logic.
Maybe it’s to bring about the vaccine passports that the government ministers assured us they weren’t considering (a sure sign they were). If everyone goes back to normal, what incentive is there to have the vaccine if you’ve not already had it? Which makes it more difficult for various businesses to insist on it, and impossible for the government to introduce it.
If it’s held over everyone’s head that they cannot go back to their normal lives, going to the pub, concert, theatre, cinema, etc, without a jab and a certificate or passport to prove it, that’s the only way people will be forced to comply. And everyone must have a vaccine. Even if they don’t need or want one…”
Corrupt fingers in corrupt pies.
And having watched UK Column and seen the adverse events data, I’m not having one of these unlicensed, insufficiently tested, high risk jabs.
Great article.
The article has some good points but I don’t like the implication that people who refuse or are hesitant to have the vaccine “aren’t sensible with their own health”, and are to be lumped in with smokers, junk food eaters, people who don’t wear seat belts, and those who practice unsafe sex. Many people who are understandably very wary of taking an experimental vaccine/ treatment, for which no one can give true informed consent because the necessary information isn’t available (and what is already known is largely being withheld or played down to us “plebs”), take our own heath pretty seriously and eat sensibly, exercise, keep our weight within normal BMI range, take vitamin supplements etc. For many people, they see the vaccine (if it can be called that) as a quick fix, so they don’t have to take personal responsibility for their health. I suspect there are going to be a whole bunch of people down the line regretting that they didn’t put more thought into embracing the jab.
I think a mass roll-out of a 6 month old vaccine for all age groups/health status would have been inconceivable before covid. People are hysterical
I don’t disagree entirely, the point is more from their point of view. I would take the vaccine, if I hadn’t already had Covid, but to take a vaccine for something you have already had is completely unscientific. That certainly would never have been considered before the Covid hysteria.
I certainly won’t take a vaccine until the government stops their attempts at coercion with vaccine passports etc.
I refuse the vaccine BECAUSE I take my health seriously. As a result my immune system works superbly and I don’t want anyone to bugger it up.
It was not always thus, before I changed my diet sixteen years ago I used to catch everything going. Yet curiously then I was eating the recommended diet and now I am not
I think the writer was playing devil’s advocate with regard to the vaccines. That’s his point, i.e. do it for one, logically do it for everything, but he’s not seriously suggesting that we should do that.
Disappointing that pieces on a sceptical web site push the notion that the experimental injections are a good thing. Perhaps, in twenty-odd years, we’ll be able to judge that they were, but, for now, they constitute a clear opportunity to exercise the precautionary principle.
Great item – well done.
I wish sceptics would scale down the triumphalism regarding the US ‘free’ states. It’s far too early to claim that the policy is a success. Things can change and, when they do, the effect can be pretty dramatic. See Poland and Czechia for example.
I’m still nervous about Sweden. While they’ve done ok, I was hoping they would be close to herd immunity by now. I’m also concerned about the rise in Swedish CU cases at a time when I was expecting seasonality to start kicking in.
it’s not easy to predict this virus.
Sweden has done amazingly. No lockdown, masks, mass testing or vaccines
They are done and dusted with their second season with all cause deaths barely above historic.
no excess mortality anywhere in europe
https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
Poland and Czechia aren’t on euromomo but I have no reason to believe they wouldn’t be similar to the rest of europe
I’d be surprised if Poland didn’t have an excess of deaths in recent weeks. Czechia appears to be over the worst but neither country had much of a Covid spike in Spring 2020
But the big question for me is ‘should we have locked down and should we be giving vaccines to children 6 months out of the lab’
There are no cherry-picked numbers anyone can give me or the results of any flaky models that will make me think yes. This is bigger than graphs. We know NPIs don’t do much for covid but they cause extraordinary death and suffering (10s of millions of kids developing countries nailed on).
There has been too much hysteria and not enough stoicism. Hysteria made them empty NHS into care homes – there’s half your deaths already. Then missed cancer and withdrawal of health services – another third.
This is all based on one massive lie – that the disease was so awful that we had to throw our pandemic plans away and embark on something never done before.
Freedom is not a policy.
‘What will be difficult for Governments will be to prove whether the extraordinary measures taken during the COVID-19 period have been an adequate and proportionate response to the situation. Putting whole cities under lockdown in the first months of the pandemic may have been justified in the view of the unknown characteristics of the new virus and the lack of adequate preparedness and response. However, with the passage of time, when more evidence was surfacing as to how the virus spread and which protection measures were most effective, severe restrictions may no longer have been strictly required by the exigencies of the situation. Certainly, freedom of expression is one of those human rights which will be difficult to limit, unless it is used to spread misinformation. The pandemic does not allow Council of Europe Member States to take a relaxed attitude and to assume that any kind of restrictions on human rights will automatically be justified without a constant evaluation both of the situation and of the measures necessary to prevent further spread of the disease.’
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12027-020-00630-w
Poland and Czechia, were inevitable as no immunity was built up in spring. All their first lockdown did was push the problem into winter when hospitals were already busy. Hence, the problem of Lockdowns. At best they can delay, but you won’t be able to keep them in place, strict enough and long enough to create a vaccine and then build up population immunity with a vaccine.
So all of their economic and social damage incurred from the first lockdown acheived nothing but a bigger problem in the winter months. I think Poland and Czechia add to the case, rather than detract as you imply.
Brilliant. Lets hope Brown and well Boris, Gove and King Matt are listening and act appropriately.
Lets hope the population are listening because it’s them that need to be unconvinced. Untill they are the country won’t ever be normal again.
The ruling claque have had numerous opportunities to declare victory over the Covid but have failed to do so.
The only solution that I see is for the present agreeable weather to go into a brilliant Easter during which the public will bring Lockdown crashing down by force of numbers followed by the middle classes demanding their rights of assembly and association with increasing vehemence.
Mr Jones loves the vaccines, yet no one needs the vaccine, not even the extreme frail-elderly and seriously ill, provided their vitD levels are right. No one need have died of covid19, and people have been allowed to die, denied the preventives and treatments that would have stopped and cured the disease, in criminal furtherance of the cvd vaccine scam, one of the great crimes of history.
We haven’t seen the beginnings of this scam yet, nor the beginnings of lockdowns. The real covid story – so far it’s been merely a U-certificate prequel – starts in the autumn, when a new rush comes of a virus that should be no more harmful than seasonal flu, and extreme immune reactions kick in for millions of people who have accepted the experimental gene therapy of the cvd jabs.
Why does a government advisory group need an advisory group??