There follows a guest post by Lockdown Sceptics regular and second-year maths student Glen Bishop.
I thought I would just write with a few points from the Imperial College paper for SAGE released today that might be useful. I haven’t been through the Warwick or LSHTM ones yet, but I am sure they are similar. It is the same bad modelling with dodgy and out-of-date assumptions.
They are using the same vaccine efficacy assumptions they used in their paper released on February 22nd for the original lockdown release plan. They were out of date and underestimates then and haven’t been updated. AstraZeneca efficacy against severe disease (and therefore death) is assumed to be 80% in the model. The EAVE study in Scotland put it at 94% and the latest AstraZeneca study in the U.S. put it at 100%. The difference on projections is obviously massive. Even if the real figure is only 90% and all vulnerable groups have had the vaccine, then projections will be over-predicting deaths in the vaccinated population two-fold and if it’s 95% then they will be over-predicting deaths four-fold. The difference between 80%, 90% and 95% seems small, but the implications for end results are enormous and this is just one of a dozen assumptions, with uncertainties that compound together to make the projections absolutely useless.
Even with their dodgy modelling and assumptions, the Imperial team predicts a worst-case scenario of 40,000 deaths between June 2021 and June 2022 with a central estimate of 15,700 deaths. Winter flu season in 2017-18 had 22,000 flu deaths, so this is well within normal tolerance for death from respiratory disease which everybody accepts with zero interventions except voluntary vaccination. Also, worth noting that a significant number of those Covid deaths would be people who chose not to have a vaccine.
More alarming is this part in their summary: “Whilst the impact of Test Trace Isolate (TTI), mask wearing, hand hygiene, and Covid security on R is difficult to quantify, it will be vital to emphasise the importance of normalising and ensuring adherence to all measures even after ‘full lifting’ is achieved.” In other words, they have no idea if masks, TTI and the Orwellian-named “COVID security” (which I assume is social distancing and all the niggly little rules that busybody managerial types love) actually have any effect, but they are going to insist they become part of everyday life anyway.
The models assume – and the Imperial group advocates – that masks, TTI and “COVID security” remain indefinitely after June. They mention no end date. They seem to want to make this a new normal that lasts forever. This is typical out-of-touch, irrational and neurotic behaviour from SAGE. As we know, if everything returns to real normal, SAGE members lose their celebrity status as advisers and all that comes with it. An advisor will always advise that you need more advice and keeping masks, TTI and “Covid security” allow them to do just that.
Boris and the ‘Conservatives’ are going to have to cut SAGE off at some point or they might as well go back to their country homes and hand SAGE the keys to No. 10.
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Translation:
“This will never end.”
Well, that is the short version, for those in a hurry.
To whoever spoke the title quote of this article
“Do you speak like that at home?”.
Too much ‘I believe in vaccines’ religious stuff vitiates this article. I can see no convincing vaccine effect in the data – unless they are responsible for the higher than expected peak in the new year mortality spike.
We can get back to living with or without leaky vaccines and the dodgy data (absolute risk reduction?).
Glen Bishop seems to have more faith in the snake-oil than SAGE or the government!
Once again anything out of Imperial, is ideally printed on soft paper and used in any toilet equipped bathroom.
“To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas.” – Dr George Brock Chisholm [WHO 1948-1953]
An apt quote for Britain as it accelerates headlong toward technofascizt governance with heightened digio-bio-security, AI managed social credit scores and an uptick in draconian storm-tropper policing measures all imposed to combat the ‘threat’ of a non-deadly flu virus.
GAVIs link to Imperial College is well documented, and guess what?
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored Imperial College to the tune of $185 million till the end of 2018, the second largest sponsor to the Wellcome Trust, the research charity which began funding Imperial College prior to Ferguson’s FMD débâcle and which, by the end of 2018, had already provided Imperial with over $400 million in funding.
For the bigger picture detail read the link below:
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/who-controls-british-government-response-covid19-part-one
Lies, damned lies… and statistics indeed!
Read the Great Awakening, look uo wwg1wga. Aearth shattering thing is about to happen. lets hope Boris pays for his lies and deceit. Get on telegram and get Whiplash347 channel. Its up to you if you want to believe!
I think you overestimate these scientists. Double blind trial data I’ve seen shows a pretty good effect from the vaccines compared to the control groups and if there were a conspiracy to fiddle that data then it would have to be a massive one, they aren’t intelligent enough for that. Vaccines are comparatively easy to make.
Hence, I advocate elderly or vulnerable people who are at serious risk and haven’t already had covid take it. I won’t be taking the vaccine myself though because I have already had covid so taking a vaccine for it would be nonsensical, especially now with vaccine passports coming down the line. I’m not being coerced.
The real snake-oil I see is the modelling and all the authoritarian interventions.
I have absolutely no problem with people wearing masks, avoiding their fellow human beings and subjecting themselves to repeated pointless testing for ever if they wish to do so. Just don’t impose your cranky beliefs that it makes any difference on the rest of us.
It’s a cult Matt, so one has to be very careful about how you approach waking Covidian believers up!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGRY4EZIkWw
SAY NO TO EXPERIMENTAL GENE THERAPIES
SAY NO TO DRACONIAN AI TRACK/TRACE VACCINE PASSPORTS
Yes it’s like veganism.I don’t care if people want to be vegan. I care A LOT when they want to inflict it on me, and everyone else.
Hear hear.
Do you think SAGE has a model for predicting the chances of one of their models being right one day? I mean statistically it must be possible, like winning the lottery or being struck by lightening. Although I think we’re more likely in unicorns and pots of gold at the end of the rainbow territory.
I’m afraid that the probabilities are far too small – well beyond the reach of the random. The correlation between the terms ‘SAGE’ and ‘Utter Bollocks’ is around 0.95, I reckon.
When will Boris and co remember ‘I was only following odders’ didn’t work at Nuremberg . So ‘we were following the science’ is’ent going to work with Covid!
But he doesn’t even have this excuse. His utterances ‘follow the science’ like a certifiable idiot’s follow reality.
We are in the territory of the Flat Earthers and Witchcraft.
hahaha “An advisor will always advise that you need more advice”. Brilliantly said
Seriously…. I watched mr Bojo on TV yesterday and the guy is a nut. He mumbles and stutters like someone who is making this up as he goes along. How on earth did this guy get to be PM… he is not right… I am telling you man.
He is not in charge; his strings are being pulled by Bill Gates and Tony Blair.
Sorry mate I voted for him together with lots of other people who were hoodwinked (that’s how) regretting it deeply now.
Don’t feel so bad about who it was you voted for between the British political clusterfuck. The same result would have happened regardless of whether the party badge was blue, red, yellow, green, etc. The problem is that voting for one of the Westminster parties validates their corrupt system. If you don’t have a choice of a good independent candidate, spoil your paper.
Once and for all, we need real genuine change in British politics. We need to get to a position where those currently in power will face justice for what they have done, but this can’t be achieved while their system is still strong.
Less Labour MPs, less Tory MPs, less Libs, etc, means more focus on individual constituencies and a higher concentration on representation. Your elected MP would be answerable to you only and not the party whip – as it should be!
A weaker Westminster bubble would open up the ability to bring criminal prosecutions to those who have conspired against us for over a year now.
Time to nationalise the assets of Imperial College, dismiss all the staff without any compensation, seize the pensions funds, turn its premises into car parks (or electric vehicle charging points) and use the proceeds to compensate those most impacted by the State’s actions over the last year.
Privatisation into the London Campus of the private University of Buckingham would be more useful.
Universities are private institutions.
The nature of ownership is irrelevant – last time I heard Big Pharma was all privately owned!
All other Universities are beholden to the state through the fees structure.
How can nobody in government be questioning the constant doom mongering? The fact that Sage models are never right. They must know about HART. They must know about Sweden, American states that have opened up etc. They must know there’s no evidence for masks yet they want to subject us to this hideous existence knowing there is no justification for it. It is beyond obscene.
Yes seek advice from world renowned scientists, many in this country, many across the world. Drs John Ioannidis, Scott Atlas, Jay Battacharya, Carl, Heneghan, Sunetra Gupta, Martin Kuldorff, Peter McCullough, Clare Craig, Tess Laurie, Pan Data, Pierre Kory and so many many others.
An excellent article in Conservative Woman talks about why we need a ‘Covid Nuremberg Trial’. Bring it on.
For the last 30 years or so, under the auspices of the UN and IPCC, the ‘warmists’ have been producing incomprehensible climate models. Over that time every single model has produced forecasts that have been completely wrong when measured against outturn. With the exception of one ( the Moscow one) they have been wildly wrong and all in the same direction, completely over-forecasting increased temperatures.
Has this stopped the exercise, has it stopped the clamour for restrictions on lifestyles to counter climate change? Not one iota. Because the models are there to give the media something to base endless lies upon, to support a belief system, to ‘prove’ that ‘the science’ says this is what we should do.
Exactly the same with these Imperial and other models. They are not designed to reflect reality, they are designed to give support to the aims of their political customers.
Johnson’s government aren’t taking their advice, they are commissioning such stuff as part of their ongoing move to totalitarianism using every pyschological trick in the book.
Nicely put. Our only hope is that many free thinkers continue to link the fraud about climate change and Covid with the bigger, horrifying picture of global resource managemnt and technocractic rule.
Glen Bishop has done extremely well; he has shown up the laziness of national journalists, and I hope he continues in citizen journalism life long. If he is not prevented by the future state
On refuseniks – he is forgetting that many if not most of those refusing the jabs have already had Covid and have immunity which will last for years. That will account for most of the relatively low uptake amongst NHS staff. They have read the peer reviewed studies showing immunity, and concluded that there is no benefit to them or patients in taking jabs whose effects remain unknown. The more robust of the public have done the same. They are not, as he seems to assume, taking a deliberate risk with their lives.
“Glen Bishop has done extremely well”
He as in some areas – but is woefully uninformed about ‘vaccines’.
A different take on vaccination (beyond the immediate) that is worth reading :
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/are-vaccines-paving-the-way-for-the-next-pandemic/
I’d go further than that, much like antibiotics result in “super bugs”, what’s to say increased vaccinations won’t eventually create a “super virus” ?
And at the other end of the continuum of belief/understanding is the concept of the myth of contagion!
They don’t actually need to create a super virus, they just need to knock down your immune system until anything can infect you
These modelling figures make no sense (quelle surprise, eh?). Let’s see the number of deaths we might expect if we make the following (somewhat crazy) assumptions:
Now, Prof Iaonnidis estimates a UK IFR of between 0.3-0.4% so taking the upper bound here, and working from the published 2020 covid death stats for England and Wales and the 2019 population data we can work out an IFR for the various age ranges – assuming a uniform infection rate. My estimates are in the table.
Now, using these estimates we can figure out what would happen if absolutely everyone got infected with this virus in July – including those who’ve already had it. We find that about 14,600 would be expected to die in the under 60’s and, with the vaccine, around 22,300 people over 60 would be expected to die. A grand total of just under 37,000 deaths.
That’s the maximum possible number of deaths if we accept the assumptions.
Is it possible there’s something wrong with the models? Surely not!!!!
“a 90% effective vaccine”
Please don’t swallow these meaningless figures. These ‘vaccines’ are leaky prophylactics – not treatments that have been shown to enhance immunity and inhibit transmission. The last absolute risk reduction figure that I saw was around 1%. Which is why you don’t see that essential figure quoted too often.
Invermectin seems a far safer method of achieving the same results without the doubts about the experimental concoctions.
I do wonder why the prime minister will not ask for advice from world renowned scientists. I am afraid the sage group do not fall under this category. Surely he know this.
In Old Testament times if a prophecy failed to materialise the prophet was put to death. These predictions are no more than Nostradamus with fast computers.
Can I recommend the following blog-piece, cited in today’s Round-Up? :
We need a ass twitter pile-on on.
If anyone has a twitter account, please tweet Keir Starmer & the labour party.
Tell them that ‘you were an ex-labour voter, but you are so disgusted by the idea of a ‘domestic covid certification’, and that you will be willing to give Labour your vote if they explicitly vote against (not just abstain) these passports. Keir – this is a sure fire open goal, take it!’
If we get enough people to tweet this, hopefully it will nudge Starmer to publicly and actively oppose it
“An advisor will always advise that you need more advice and keeping masks, TTI and “Covid security” allow them to do just that.”
This is the whole thing in a nutshell. As Warren Buffett once said, “Never ask your barber if you need a haircut”.
Johnson is their useful idiot, the global cabal must have watching him for years. Even more useful than the one before, Blair
Difference is Blair is not an idiot, he know full well what he was doing
The important similarity is not ‘idiocy’, but a shared psychopathy.
Excellent piece again Glen. I hope you find time to continue using your Maths – and more importantly basic intellectual – skills to keep providing these critiques. And you have SAGE down to a ‘T’. Why would this bunch of sociopaths want the one event that has given them a huge sense of personal worth, fame and authority, to ever end?!
I agree the forecasting is incredibly poor.
The government were so frightened by the huge numbers that it led directly to the decision – never admitted – to empty the hospitals of elderly instigating the raging epdemic we saw in care homes.
Instead of “saving lives” these forecasts have been responsible for the early demise of 10s of thousands of care home residents.
Hmm, I suspect that you have that upside down: the government WANTED the huge numbers – and hence the modellers arranged for the numbers required!
Hmm squared. In days they went from talking about a well prepared, thought through plan for pandemic response to adopting the playbook of the CCP. My conspiracy theory is bigger than yours!
Seriously, I think imperial college & Neil Fergoson are simply incompetent but when Robert Peston, Laura Keunnsberg, Beth Rigby et al got hold of it and started waving their shrouds at the bewildered Boris in those daily press conferences. Boris just lost his nerve and went invertebrate – everything done since is a doubling down to avoid having to admit he got it wrong.
How tragic was that, to remove thousands of very ill people from hospital to care homes where even doctors refused to visit. Unbelievable in a so called civilised country
Watched an interesting film last night called Little Pink House, about Pfizer and how they squash anyone in their way
Who are Sage, there are a lot of them, many call themselves ‘scientists’ without emphasising the ‘behavioural’ scientist bit
SAGE isn’t comprised mainly of behavioural scientists.
The SAGE members have consistently and seriously overestimated the figures for infections and deaths, thereby “guiding” the Government to these hugely expensive and massively restrictive measures but with complete impunity for their errors. In the early days when it was a ‘novel’ coronavirus there was little option but to model possible scenarios, albeit they seem to take an extraordinarily bleak view from the very beginning – very much a “worst case” that, even then, seemed to discount entirely the possibility that many people may have any pre-existing immunity or resistance.
Perhaps they might take better care now, move away from “modelling” using flawed assumptions and incorporate into their thinking some of the massive volumes of firm evidence now available that runs counter to their views if they stood to suffer some personal consequences of their Project Fear, such as a loss of a proportion of personal income related to the extent of their exaggerations? Something like a ‘reverse bonus’ to reflect the fact their errors have such a massive effect on the the nation in so many ways and so they should share in the pain directly.
This will not stop until a member of SAGE, hopefully Ferguson, gets his just desserts
I think SAGE already have the keys to No. 10.