Boris told the country yesterday that, despite the vaccines, there is going be “another wave of Covid” at some point this year. Speaking at a Downing Street press briefing, he said:
As we look at what is happening in other countries with cases now at record numbers around the world, we cannot delude ourselves that Covid has gone away. I see nothing in the data now that makes me think we are going to have to deviate in any way from the roadmap, cautious but irreversible, that we have set out. But the majority of scientific opinion in this country is still firmly of the view that there will be another wave of Covid at some stage this year and so we must – as far as possible – learn to live with this disease, as we live with other diseases.
The warning came as he announced a task force to find new ways of treating COVID-19 before winter, with the aim of developing a tablet that can be taken at home to provide crucial early treatment. He said:
This means for example that if you test positive for the virus that there might be a tablet you could take at home to stop the virus in its tracks and significantly reduce the chance of infection turning into more serious disease.
The task force is welcome, of course, but the question is why is it only just being set up, when we first knew of this virus in January of 2020? Why wasn’t finding effective treatments a priority from the start? Why did none of the journalists at the press conference ask this question? Treatment should always be the first solution reached for when faced with a disease, as unlike lockdowns and vaccines they provide a way of making sick people better.
While the idea of learning to live with the disease, including through the use of treatments, should be reassuring, what the politicians mean by the phrase in the past year has typically turned out to be quite different to what most of us mean by it. We mean getting back to normal. They mean setting up a new “normal” of vaccine coercion, biometric ID passes, permanent screening programmes, face masks, closed borders, and restrictions on social contact and basic freedoms that loosen and tighten depending on the questionable results of mass testing. No thanks.
So why now? Is the Government only turning to treatments at this point because its fears are growing about variants that can escape the vaccines (for which there is some evidence)? Is this a further sign that the Government and its scientists are losing confidence in the vaccines?
In fact, as Professor Philip Thomas argues, there is unlikely to be a “third wave” now that we have the vaccines to top up our acquired and pre-existing immunity (and I doubt there would be a “third wave” without the vaccines). The remarkably low Covid hospitalisation rate for people who’ve been vaccinated that was reported yesterday adds to that hope. However, there is always going to be a winter flu season, and Covid and its potentially immunity-stretching variants are always going to be around. Who knows what the future will bring? Certainly not SAGE and its discredited modelling teams, whose alarmist predictions have consistently fallen flat. (Even in winter they predicted a much bigger surge and failed to anticipate that it would peak before lockdown.)
The question that has never been answered in this crisis is how safe do we need to be from Covid before we can go back to normal? Actually, it was answered once. In the Government’s original Pandemic Preparedness Strategy we know that a death toll of up to 315,000 within a few months from a pandemic virus was envisaged as being acceptable – still far more than we have seen with the (PCR-inflated) Covid death toll of the past year. That scale of mortality was not deemed to warrant any of the unprecedented measures we have experienced since March 2020 (which in any case were, correctly, judged not to be effective).
But since that sensible, science-based plan was ditched, the key question of when we can return to normal – the old normal, not the new normal – has never been answered. Is it because to do so would mean the politicians and scientists would have to grow a spine and endorse an acceptable level of risk and bring the emergency – and their status in it – to an end?
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Lockdown is primarily an assault on the mind, hence the bombardment of absurdities and goalpost-shifting.
“Assault on the mind”.
Yes, even I felt a bit anxious going in a supermarket today without wearing a “lanyard” for the first time in a while today. What chance have children got in coping with the horrors of the last 15 months? Stories like this bring it home, and I’m so grateful to the places and people who have been able to give them some sort of normality in these dark times.
Well done for ditching the lanyard! How was it?
You have to remember that 5 year olds have spent the last quarter of their lives locked up in their homes. It’s mostly all they know.
Not to mention their mask-wearing parents. Disgraceful.
A whole cohort of babies born over the last 15 months have not seen normal faces. Not been smiled at by other adults.
Like the mad woman I am, I always seek out small kids and babies in the supermarket entirely in order to smile at them.
Not mad. Just human. Mind you my husband had a slightly different experience in Aldi the other day. He caught the eye of a little boy in a trolley, so he smiled and said “hello”. The little boy retorted in the gruffest, deepest voice, ” SHUT UP!” My husband actually thought it was funny, he was so outspoken, but realised it was probably a protective thing, not being used to seeing unmasked faces!
I have put this up before so forgive me for repeating myself, but this was such a defining moment. A while ago when I was outside a supermarket with all the face naps, a young dad walked past pushing a stroller, fully masked up and totally engrossed on his phone. His baby was sitting up and looking around. He saw me maskless and gave me a huge smile. I smiled and winked back and he really chuckled. It was a lovely moment but so sad too, as dad was totally oblivious, as too it seemed, all the other faceless ones with kids.
It’s a damned disgrace! All for nothing!
Where does the Cambridge couple stand on this atrocity? I thought mental health was their great cause.
Only when it makes for a good photo op.
Less than nothing.
I remember being scared and nervous when I went to school for the first time.
I don’t remember being referred to a psychologist. My mother knew that new experiences were unnerving for children, and that I’d get over it. It took me a day. It took my sister a week when her turn came.
I’m so glad we were children at a time when childhood existed.
Ditto going to secondary school and starting new jobs.
9 schools/7 jobs myself.
It’s no longer seen as normal to be a bit scared, stressed, upset it all needs to be packaged up, labelled at treated like an illness. Probably more money in that for someone.
I was a timid child, I was put on a bus at 11 and sent to a huge (2000 pupil) secondary school 20 miles away, I was the only child from my primary school to go there, it was terrifying. I survived and started to gain confidence i even made friends, before being moved again less than a year later. Many kids today have it too easy, so they don’t have the mental tools to deal with adversity.
That doesn’t of course mean that any of this fear propaganda has been needed or is in anyway right.
“Many kids today have it too easy”
Please don’t do the whinging old fart routine.
We were never put through what this young generation are suffering, and my constant sadness is that children’s lives are generally now much more limited and controlled than mine was, when, from the age of about eight, I was able to disappear across the landscape with mates for a whole day without anybody having a melt-down. Many children now are never allowed to breath without adult intervention. Schooling has deteriorated to a surfeit of routine Gradgrindery, plagued by constant ‘monitoring’.
That’s not ‘having it too easy’!!
What are you going to do about it then RickH?
What I can – without deluding myself. Starting with what I’ve already noted – just treating my grandchildren, family and friends normally – i.e. ignoring sociopathic distancing.
You seemed to have had a bad day yesterday?
No – no more than every day is a bad day in this shit-show.
Oh OK. People are coping in their own way, I just think that people may need a lift sometimes, something positive and empowering to focus on.
But as I say, each to their own way.
Good point , well made. I think many millennial parents (including my own children) have been co-opted into the safety cult…. I was not aware enough of the creeping elfinsafety culture when I was a young parent, so have inadvertently contributed over the years.
Yes, Barbara. Undoubtedly there are certain real dangers that we didn’t have – traffic being the most obvious. But the precautionary principle now rules lives, rather than being a sensible part of assessing danger.
… and that has definite consequences. Look at all the advertisments for antiseptics etc.; then look at the consequences in terms of immune deficiency and allergies.
Mmmm … somebody seems to think continual child abuse and antipathy to kids is ‘having it easy’
Interesting.
So, add ‘Systematic Child Abuse’ to the list of crimes already committed by the International Police State.
That charge sheet is growing mighty long.
Children get their behavioural clues from their parents and other adults in their families. So the mental health problems being experienced are a direct reflection of the hysteria generated by these adults, in response to the incessant, ‘we’re all doomed’ Government propaganda. Another charge to be laid against the commie bitch Michie and her team of psychopaths
So are we meant to think of the Government Behavioural Insights Team as a good thing or a bad thing? Have they done what was requested?
We can only pray that these children are sufficiently resilient to get over this without it blighting the rest of their lives.
One of the intentions behind all this Totalitarianism was to deliberately cripple our children. This report will be music to the ears of the globalists.
A generation of fearful, compliant youngsters will make for a perfect slave class.
Evil beyond comprehension.
Instigated by compliant adults
We live outside a secondary school and I was watching their behaviour closely as they congregated waiting to be let in through the gate this morning. 98% appeared happy and normal. Joking. Playing. No masks. No social distancing. Two unhappy kids were standing alone wearing masks and extremely agitated, pacing about with backs to the others. Very self conscious. Not part of any group. It struck me again that masks are extremely divisive. At least the kids are rejecting them. Confirms how most humans like to be part of a majority / don’t want to be the odd one out. Maybe the kids can help get us out of this mess.
I’m hopeful that children have the capacity to recover – but there are so many ignorant parents who are pushing their kids into trauma because they themselves are mentally disabled by fear. Hypochondriac teachers are another problem.
I will never forget – fortunately very early on in the scam – when we first persuaded a ‘fuck stupid rules’ visit from our grandchildren. At first meeting they flinched because of all the sociopathic nonsense that surrounded them. But they did shuck it off very quickly, and we were back to normal hugs etc.
But imagine if that nonsense had been continually reinforced for 15 months by a neurotic parent.
I suspect that a neurotic parent would just find something else to be neurotic about to upset their children.
Well I’ve refused testing for my kids (one of only two sets of parents in the year can you believe it) and also stated a mask exemption for my oldest so that she has the flexibility to not wear one, or wear one if she wants to fit it. Thankfully her class ditched the masks anyway and outright laugh at the more neurotic teachers, of whom there are quite a few. On vaccinating children, a relative who was a doctor and remains in close touch with someone in very high level A&E management in the NHS has told me that there is no case for kids to be vaccinated.
What I can’t understand is the teaching unions’ obsession with it all, is it really as simple as a self-interested attempt to stop coming to work?
Anybody with half a brain and an intact set of morals can work out that children shouldn’t be ‘vaccinated’ against SARS-COV-2.
“…is it really as simple as a self-interested attempt to stop coming to work?”
No – I don’t think it’s that. There is something very weird about the leadership of the teaching unions at present – and they are not representing the views of all teachers.
I have discussed this with another of the old fart generation who also worked in education at different levels and – admittedly many moons ago – was actively involved in union work.
We share the same perspective at being disgusted at current attitudes within the leadership – both of the union and of school leadership in general (noting also the exceptions).
But, of course, this is happening within an overall framework of manufactured mythology and lies – a far cry from the diversity of another time.
And I don’t suppose Hancock, Give, or Johnson have lost any sleep over this. They give humanity a bad name.
This video is worth watching. Bill Whittle talks about fear and how we deal with it, in the context of why older people are generally less fearful of CV19 despite being more susceptible.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DO5rBNB_vx8
“Coerced Cowardice.”
Published on Jun 21, 2021
The less likely you are to die of COVID-19, the more likely you are to be afraid of it. In this episode of the Firewall, Bill Whittle explains the source of this historically-bizarre fear ratio. “