We’re publishing a new essay by Guy de la Bédoyère about the excessive cautiousness that is preventing the Government from being more bold. Guy traces it to the cautiousness of the modellers and points out how odd that attitude is to the adventurousness of pioneering scientists like Edward Jenner and Marie Curie. Here’s an extract:
Regardless of your views about vaccines, it is a fact that Edward Jenner took the reckless step of infecting his gardener’s eight-year-old son first with cowpox and then with smallpox. As we all know, the experiment was a success. By today’s standards of gibbering caution, it was the most outrageous example of recklessness imaginable. Yet how else was he ever going to find out if it worked? If that happened today, Jenner would probably never have dared try his theory out and if he had he’d have been struck off and imprisoned. I have no doubt that had a predictive modeller been on hand, busy calculating the risk, there wouldn’t have been a virus in hell’s chance of him being allowed to go ahead.
On December 23rd 1750 Benjamin Franklin electrocuted himself when he tried to kill a turkey with electricity, believing the meat would be more tender. He survived, chastened by the experience. In 1839-43, James Clark Ross took two sailing ships, the Erebus and Terror, on an epic voyage of exploration and scientific experiment around Antarctica. Today he wouldn’t have been allowed out of port.
There are so many other examples from those days of early science it would be impossible to list them. But the underlying approach reaches right into more recent times. We have aviation because people were prepared to throw themselves into the air with bizarre pieces of winged equipment or brave their way across the Atlantic in a Vickers Vimy from Newfoundland to Ireland, as Alcock and Brown did in 1919. Imagine the risk assessment if anyone had bothered to think of writing one at the time, and the same applies to Marie Curie’s work on radiation.
Worth reading in full.
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The human race won’t be wiped out by an asteroid or a virus, it will die of boredom because of risk assessments and the precautionary principle.
The ‘god’ of ‘the precautionary principle’ makes sure these past exploits will never be repeated. I doubt if the human race would ever have emerged from caves if the current attitude to risk had then be used.
Marie Curie died of anemia contracted from her long-term exposure to radiation. Sometimes caution is best.
She was 66 when she died, above the average life expectency for the time.
However if you’re cautious and never do anything then you’re still dead in the end anyway.
The difference is that you’ve never amounted to much or achieved anything.
Sweden was cautious – they stuck to the agreed WHO pandemic plan. Most other countries were reckless, but pretended it was caution.
You could argue that politicians have been cautious, or thought they were being cautious. But the modellers? I beg to differ. They have been bold as brass in predicting doom and doubling down on their predictions long after it was obvious they were nonsense. And bold as brass in wanting to prolong the emergency. You don’t need to be a “conspiracy theorist” to see that honest motivation to do good among the politicians, “public health experts” and others is thin on the ground.
I’m afraid I regard this as a load of utter nonsense. The present satiation where the “vaccine” manufacturers are allowed to foist untried therapies on an unsuspecting and largely brainwashed public is surely what Jenner did, but on a near global scale with attendant massive risk. By contrast the aviation industry has become steadily safer by adhering to sensible and practical protocols of testing, developed over many years, before aircraft are certified. The only times it has come unstuck have been where those protocols have been subverted for commercial gain (or national influence). To cite three specific examples – DH Comet rushed to beat the B707 but in so doing overlooked significant design failings and also lacked the knowledge of metal fatigue to ensure safety but was put in service for British prestige. DC-10 rushed and corners cut in design and certification to compete with Lockheed Tristar. B737MAX. Basically the last 50 years of how to do things right thrown in the bucket by manufacturer and regulator simply for commercial gain. This in spite of warnings which were ignored allowing an improperly designed aircraft (certified new technology against old out of date standards) to go through an inadequate and inappropriate test programme leading to disaster – sound familiar at all?
I think this article also misses the point that we are not talking about flying across the Atlantic or going to the arctic or going to the moon. We are talking about walking out your fucking front door down to the shops!! Paralysis by analysis is what we have. But this has all been artificially induced by the fat pig dictator and sage to keep people frightened so they stop thinking for themselves and just follow the rules. Brainwashed individuals walk around in masks and have an experimental mrna jab into their arms. We the true LS step back and can see what is going on, but its a lonely place.
This isn’t primarily about ‘caution’.
It’s about power.
Spot on. Caution has been used as an excuse (falsely as employing obviously damaging untried interventions on a massive scale is actually the opposite of caution).
Ah yes, Jenner. Born 1749, died 1823, if memory serves. A few minutes consideration of the history of science, and it becomes clear that whatever Jenner was putting into peoples bodies in the late 1700s was more likely to spread TB, syphilis, and a host of other diseases, including smallpox itself. The cowpox story seems bonkers, it’s a different disease, I’ve never found any convincing information on how it was supposed to work. Goodness only knows how many people died of sepsis as a consequence of “vaccination” in the 1700s and 1800s. Jenner’s son died young, early 20s I think, of TB. At that time they knew little, if anything, about disease vectors and antisepsis. Hell, it took until the late 19th century before routine antisepsis was used in hospitals, when the cause of puerperal fever was recognised (doctors going from mortuary to maternity ward without washing hands or changing their gore-soaked coats – Semmelweis 1860 wrote a paper). The only possible consequence of vaccination at that time, with no real understanding of bacteria, viruses, interspecies transfer of viruses, no knowledge of antisepsis etc etc, would have been to spread disease far and wide.
Jenner observed that milkmaids, who were in close contact with cows on a daily basis, never caught smallpox. Cowpox can produce an immune response to smallpox because the 2 viruses are very similar. Jenner’s work provides good evidence to support the claims of people like Gupta that a significant percentage of the population was immune to Covid in early 2020 because of previous exposure to other coronaviruses (e.g. common cold), despite the claims of the doom ladden modellers that there was no pre-existing immunity.
I also wonder if the milkmaid was more flush with vitamin D from bare arms out in daylight and unlimited supplies of fresh milk, compared to others who were either poor and starving or rich and totally covered when outdoors so as not to get a tan.
Yes.. and another theory re Smallpox from a Dr Charles Campbell was that it came from bedbugs. Still today we don’t understand ‘viruses’.
It is a strange manner of caution that is accompanied by an even greater recklessness. This is a caution that trades a negligible risk for an unknown risk by coercing a healthy population to undergo an experimental injection.
Or are we talking about a caution in ensuring that an agenda is followed and/or that one’s position is protected?
Indeed, previous pandemic guidelines were ditched and highly damaging lockdowns were recklessly waved through on flimsy evidence. As with climate change, the “caution” is always applied to the perceived problem, and not to the proposed solution. It’s a rhetorical device, rather than genuine caution which would pay equal attention to risks in the problem and the solution.
I grew up with a sense that some of the most profound scientific discoveries were happy accidents or the result of risky leftfield thinking, sometimes drug induced inspiration even. In freer times, students and practioners were able to experiment more and make these serendipitous discoveries. Catastrophes may of course have also been under-reported.
In recent years we have become familiarized with the top-down practice of consensus science, sold as steady, cautious, thorough. It now seems like a big con because to step outside that straight-jacket risks bringing the cancel culture swiftly to your job resume. As politically correct ethics and inclusivity modules are stuffed into every subject, creativity has been further stifled, replaced with fear of non-conformity.
Our dear leaders now reveal that they want micro-control of every area of our lives and they have done a wonderful job of setting us up to deliver just that. Somehow modelling snuck through in key institutions, up towards govt and is now de rigueur. I know we were given clues in Swine Flu and Foot & Mouth, but aren’t there lots of scientists left wondering how the heck that happened? How did modelling win? Or are they all doing it to a lesser extent? Interesting how G8z started in computing (software), moved through big pharma (vaccines), more recently buying great swathes of farmland (presumably for building artificial meat factories on?) and now on to climate control via cloud seeding.
Science isn’t even pretending to be the servant any more; it’s happy as the master and it seems to have all the money. Science is whatever they say it is.
The implication is that caution is delaying the ending of the lockdown which is probably true and that caution is misplaced. That 2nd though depends on what SAGE are being cautious about. Lockdown when it was first introduced had a major flaw (two major flaws if you include it didn’t actually work), that being there was no reasonable way to escape it. There were no vaccines, lock society down and when lockdown ends the virus gets them later. Neil Fergussons famous model was clear on that. We then got a number of miraculous vaccines and if we vaccinate enough people lockdown can end without people getting covid on release. The vaccines are wonderful all the published reports show this. Though how when cases were falling prior to the program starting the experts can be sure that the results are the effect of the vaccine and not just natural seasonal collapse I’m unsure. Still they may well be correct. What if they are not though. Lockdown is released and cases rise. Lockdown and the vaccine have cost billions, the majority of the people still believe the policy was correct. If cases rise steeply the it will be clear the Governments policy was pointless. Wait a month or so though and summer will be here, no steep rise in cases regardless of the vaccines effectiveness and the Government claims a success. If they go up again in autumn so what we have already been warned about the varients that are likely to spring up. So delay is undoubtly a useful policy for those who introduced lockdown.
No, sorry, please don’t fall into the trap of thinking that lockdowns etc. are the default, cautious approach to easily-spread, respiratory virus pandemics. They are not. We had a plan for such a pandemic, which broadly followed WHO guidelines and was orthodoxy until the CCP went crazy in Wuhan. Lockdowns, border closures, mass testing, mass emergency vaccination, masks, school closures etc etc were all specifically recommended against by the WHO as being damaging and with no evidence they would do any good.
The Swedes took the cautious approach – most other countries followed the CCP in never-before tried measures. Furthermore, as the year went on and evidence mounted that all of these measures were doing more harm than good, governments doubled down on their initial position rather than revising it in light of the evidence for what was a novel virus – this is the opposite of science and the opposite of caution.
All of this a matter of public record.
The UK government has never been asked to justify why it threw our expensively-produced pandemic plan out of the window.
SAGE know all of this very very well. They are not stupid. It’s a power grab. The PM is either stupid, cowardly or wicked, or some combination of all three.
The precautionary principle is an infection from the EU that has taken root in the British bureaucratic class. Whatever you do don’t get blamed for anything – even if that means nothing ever happens,
We have to purge that infection if we’re ever to get Britain fighting fit again.
It is way past time that those who call for caution pay the cost of it – rather than socialising it onto the rest of us.
Big difference between electrocuting yourself or taking off in a flying machine and sticking a needle in someone else (a child…. btw didn’t that child become brain damaged following injection….can’t remember). One could argue about the cautionary principle applying to lockdowns and to vaccines, either way…. A neat way of causing confusion!
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.winfried-stoecker.de/blog/luebeck-impfung-gegen-corona-zusammenfassung&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwiE57CEyfXvAhUv_rsIHWxQCMoQFjAEegQICBAB&usg=AOvVaw1Fnp8UNJXvdT0dBkTKSIji
The modern day Jenner, successful medical industry entrpreneur Prof. Winfried Stoecker, who developed a much better vaccine and/by injecting himself and who wants to give it away for free, is currently being prosecuted on behalf of Big Pharma and Lockdown and gene therapy politicians, aided and abetted by the Lockdown and gene therapy advocating media.
“On December 23rd 1750 Benjamin Franklin electrocuted himself when he tried to kill a turkey with electricity, believing the meat would be more tender. He survived, chastened by the experience. “
If you electrocute yourself , you die .
Yep, I came to the comments section to make exactly that point.
Still, since I’ve spotted a pattern of Mr Bédoyère writing, here, to misdirect us, his failure to consult a dictionary is a minor concern.
This is exactly what has happened with anthropogenic climate change, everything is based on mathematical models of what is a chaotic system.
If the models, when applied to known good data from the past cannot “predict” what actually happened then the models are clearly wrong; however, the innate arrogance of the modellers, such as Neil Ferguson, does not allow this, despite the fact he has had no training in biology or physiology.
I like Guy’s articles. I like this one too – but I think he’s a tad too dismissive of models.
I’m a theoretical physicist and everything I do, all the explanation and research, is based on models.
When we encapsulate a set of natural laws with mathematical expressions we are constructing a model – a mathematical model – that, we hope, provides a decent representation of reality.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to represent reality with a model. The issue isn’t with modelling – it’s with any failure to check whether the models do indeed provide anything like a reasonable representation of reality.
So we might take Maxwell’s equations which can be written as a set of coupled partial differential equations which, along with the Lorentz force law, are supposed to provide a representation of electromagnetic phenomena. They’re not complete, as we now know, because Maxwell developed his laws in a pre-quantum era. They are pretty damned good though.
How do we know this? We know this because the models (Maxwell’s laws) have been extensively tested. We take the laws and work out what would happen if we do X and maybe a little bit of Y – and then we see if the predictions of the model are actually borne out by experiment.
There’s still a good deal of research trying to figure out consequences of Maxwell’s laws – those pesky little mobile phones being very good examples of how much recent development of antennae design there has been.
That’s all fine and dandy when we’re trying to figure out the laws of nature – they’re pretty simple, relatively speaking, even though their mathematical representation looks terrifying to those who don’t speak maths. Everything becomes decidedly less fine and dandy when we try to model complex societal processes. Modelling nature is one thing; modelling complex societies is a whole different ball game. Even modelling more complex natural processes, such as the weather, is fraught with difficulty.
With societal models we don’t even know the “laws” driving things – or if, indeed, there are any such laws. With covid19, and other respiratory infections, we don’t really even have an iron-clad understanding of how transmission occurs or what the important factors are. Are they transmitted by droplets or aerosols, or both? How many viral particles are necessary, on average, to cause an infection? How long do these aerosols hang around in both indoor and outdoor settings? If I’m in the same shop as an infected person what’s the chance I become infected? Can they be spread, at all, by an asymptomatic person?
And so on, and so on. You get the general idea. Every single one of these things has to be built into the modelling, either explicitly or implicitly. Then there’s the technical difficulty of constructing a model. If you’re going to develop a stochastic model then do you assume a Markov process, for example?
At almost every stage of constructing a complex model, assumptions are built in. They may be good assumptions and turn out to be correct, but here’s the kicker; they need to be tested against reality. Anything less than this is not “science”. The whole scientific edifice relies on this. Crudely stated: if your idea doesn’t match reality chuck out your idea.
Now, the more complex a model is, the more difficult this process of checking is. Sure you might be able to make a reasonably accurate prediction – but this still does not mean your model is “correct”. Not by a long shot. There are many examples, even with much simpler natural laws and systems, where theories have correctly predicted some results, but ultimately fail further testing.
Based on my professional experience I wouldn’t be at all surprised if several fundamentally different models of covid19 spread were able to give a reasonably accurate reproduction of the data when the “right” parameters were put in. Or rather, when a set of parameters is found that is able to match the observed data. Which one of those models, if any, would be close to a description of reality, of what’s really happening?
Now none of what I’m saying here says that models are useless. They are not. There are many examples of such mathematical and complex models being successfully used in science and engineering. No, what I’m saying is that these models should be used with some degree of caution and only after extensive testing.
The problem isn’t with the modelling of covid19, it’s that we’ve largely forgotten to do the “science” bit – and actually test the damned things properly.
All mathematical formulae are effectively models of reality, from Newton’s laws of motion through to the general theory of relativity. It is not the models themselves that are the issue, after all it was Newton’s laws of motion and not Einstein that got man to the moon and Perseverance to Mars. It was a mistake in the “model” that made Mariner 2 miss by millions of miles (mixing imperial and SI units). OK a miss by an unmanned probe is an expensive, embarrassing mistake but not catastrophic. However, the untested models for disease can be catastrophic and potentially fatal. If the model cannot produce the observed outcome from past data then it must be wrong and hence must be changed.
Totally agree, “models” are equations that reflect reality, and at least in physics allow prediction of what will happen to parameter y if you tweak parameter x. I don’t think this is always a case in human sciences, there is often a tendency to use curve fits and call it a model. For any model related to human performance, behaviour, or disease resistance, how do you model inherent variations, or the effects of nutrition, living conditions, sleep cycles, physical fitness etc. Doing any sort of controlled experiment on humans is a nightmare, short of caging them for 5 years and controlling all aspects of their daily existence, diet and sleep. A more interesting approach is to figure out why some people are more robust and resistant to disease. What happens to your immune response if you are deficient in some chemical pathways mediating the immune response? In an engineering sense, if you do not maintain the body with the correct inputs, how can you expect it to perform as per design? If you cannot mount an effective immune response to a real disease, how can your body be expected to do so for an artificial trigger?