Politicians, journalists and academics are wrong to blame the public for the failure of lockdowns since “the population [has never] sacrificed so much to comply with public health mandates”, say two of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). Writing in the Telegraph, Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya – professors of medicine at Harvard and Stanford respectively – say that lockdown proponents need to acknowledge that eschewing focused protection and quarantining entire populations indiscriminately has led to the “biggest public health fiasco in history”.
A year ago, there was no evidence that lockdowns would protect older high-risk people from Covid. Now there is evidence. They did not.
With so many Covid deaths, it is obvious that lockdown strategies failed to protect the old. Holding the naïve belief that shutting down society would protect everyone, governments and scientists rejected basic focused protection measures for the elderly. While anyone can get infected, there is more than a thousand-fold difference in the risk of death between the old and the young. The failure to exploit this fact about the virus led to the biggest public health fiasco in history.
Lockdowns have, nevertheless, generated enormous collateral damage across all ages. Depriving children of in-person teaching has hurt not only their education but also their physical and mental health. Other public health consequences include missed cancer screenings and treatments and worse cardiovascular disease outcomes. Much of this damage will unfold over time and is something we must live with – and die with – for many years to come.
The blame game for this fiasco is now in full swing. Some scientists, politicians, and journalists are complaining that people did not comply with the rules sufficiently. But blaming the public is disingenuous. Never in human history has the population sacrificed so much to comply with public health mandates.
The professors are very critical of lockdown zealots like Neil O’Brien MP who have attempted to slur respected scientists – such as Oxford professor Sunetra Gupta (the third author of the GBD) – for not toeing the line on lockdown. This, they say, has stifled the public debate on the most effective way to deal with Covid.
A few academics have jumped on the bandwagon. Dr Depti Gurdasani at Queen Mary University, for example, accused Dr Gupta of pseudoscience, suggesting that she should be deplatformed and Oxford University should act against her. Unfortunately, such behaviour intimidates other academics into silence, undermining scientific debate.
Last spring, the pandemic was waning due to a combination of immunity and seasonality, and many lockdowners claimed that lockdowns had succeeded. Still, it was obvious to any competent infectious disease epidemiologist that it would be back, and in June, Dr Gupta said she expected a resurgence of Covid in the winter months. This didn’t prevent journalists and politicians from falsely claiming that she thought the pandemic was all over.
The fact is that with a lower herd immunity threshold in the summer than in the winter, immunity can drive a pandemic on its way out during the spring but then resurge next autumn, and that is what happened. A year into the pandemic, one would think that politicians and journalists writing about Covid would have bothered to acquire some basic knowledge of infectious disease epidemiology.
Their article is very much worth reading in full.
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In 2006, after watching that tiresome piece of specious piffle, “An Inconvenient Truth” by the conman Al Gore, I wondered about that graph which showed a clear connection between atmospheric CO² concentration and global average surface temperatures.
He claimed that the former caused the latter.
I asked my peers, “How do we know it isn’t the other way around?”
Stunned silence.
A bit like when I asked my geography teacher if we knew when TheHoleInTheOzoneLayer™ first appeared. Actually, I think he laughed at me, and most of the class followed suit.
Awkward questions, eh.
Sorry about the superscript 2. My phone doesn’t do subscript
I was working for HSBC at the time in a distant place, far from UK – back around 2005. Guess what, all the staff in our unit were made to watch the Al Gore film by the powers that be at Head Office. No wonder so many believe all the global warming garbage when they have this enforced on them by the bosses.
The CEO of the last company I worked for, Marsh McLennan, berated us via internal company emails and everyone else via primetime US television about the “importance of getting vaccinated”.
C*nt.
I work in the same place and I got the same email. I’d placed him in the ‘New York lefty’ box prior to Covid so I wasn’t surprised.
Spent a chunk of last year worrying about a vaccine mandate being implemented, but thankfully it wasn’t and presumably the moment has passed now.
UK leadership are a bit more circumspect than head office in US, although equally woke. Thankfully the leader of my division is a bit of a lockdown sceptic (not vaccine sceptic though).
I’d have told him to mind his own business.
The system is just too complicated and impossible replicate for us to be able to understand it. Too many variables.
So I don’t think the climate fanatics know that CO2 causes temperature rises.
But I also think their critics don’t know for sure that it’s temperature that causes CO2 rise.
It could be both – they reinforce each other. It could be neither – a completely different set of factors. It could be both or either in theory but in practice other bigger factors prevail.
Who knows.
All I want is for self appointed guardians of our society to stop telling us all how to live our lives on the pretence that they know things that they really don’t know. They are playing with people’s lives on the basis of mere speculation.
Exactly. They can stick their “models” where the sun don’t shine.
This is not “new”. Been known and written about for many years by real Geologists and some Climate Scientists, and even some amateurs have known. And there is much “science” to back up the idea. Maybe the real shock is that these so-called “climate scientists” are new to these facts and are willing to go against their peers or something.
Why are you showing in your top photo cooling towers which release *steam* not Carbon DiOxide from those cooling towers? Why perpetuate the misinformation?
It’s true, so many people I know still think it’s smoke. LOL. I mean, the clue’s in the name – – – COOLING tower!
Explaining how power stations work doesn’t seem to help them.
Too much concentration and focus needed by their porn and Netflix-addled brains.
The only way to save us from climate change is to mandate CO2 limits for everyone.
The only way to save us from Covid is to mandate vaccines for everyone.
Those with the power to mandate connect with those who implement or reinforce the mandate, and a slice of the resulting massive profits get fed back to the mandators. A nice little scheme for the in-crowd.
Good post Mr Morrison. Please don’t forget Professor Pascal Richet, who last year wrote about co2 lagging temperature over the last four glaciations in a supposedly reputable journal Copernicus. His peer approved story was pulled.
https://www.history-of-geo-and-space-sciences.net/2021-05-26_hgss-2021-1_latest-version-of-the-manuscript.pdf
cart before the horse!
Thank you Chris. I have watched some of William Happer’s presentations and they are compelling. If I may correct you he does not merely “suggest” that the absorption by CO2 is near saturation. He and his team have calculated the effect of a doubling of CO2 and demonstrated it in graphically form as minimal.
This has been known for years.
The problem is that facts always lose in the face of ideology, such are the times we live
in…
Why can’t we post images any more?