- “Pfizer asks U.K. regulator to approve Covid vaccine for use in 12 to 15 year-olds” – Pfizer has formally asked the U.K. regulator to authorise its jab for children over 12, the Telegraph reports
- “Were fears of a third wave overblown?” – Writing in the Spectator, Ross Clark puzzles over the unduly pessimistic assumptions that continue to be used in the models submitted to the SAGE committee
- “Deaths in Britain 7.3% below five-year average as Covid fatalities continue to fall” – The latest ONS figures indicate that there were 766 fewer deaths in the week ending April 30th than would be expected for this time of year, according to the Telegraph
- “At long, long last, the Government is putting children first” – Molly Kingsley celebrates the end of masks in classrooms in a piece for the Telegraph. “The battle is far from won,” she writes, but the “decision should give parents some hope that going forward better, braver and bolder decisions might be made”
- “Three borders, seven documents and an expiring Covid test: my 14-hour dash across Europe to get wed” – The Telegraph‘s Annabel Fenwick Elliott describes her drive across Europe to meet up with her German fiancé
- “What About Weddings?” – An open letter calling on the Prime Minister to remove the restrictions on weddings after June 21st
- “‘Expand green list or cost UK £19bn’: MPs call for more countries to be added to register of ‘safe’ travel destinations to boost economy” – A cross party group of MPs are predicting that revenues from international tourism will plummet to just £1.1 billion this summer against £20.2 billion pre-pandemic for June, July and August unless the ‘green list’ is expanded, the Daily Mail reports
- “It’s time to reopen transatlantic travel” – The Daily Mail says a coalition of airlines, including Delta, Virgin, British Airways and Jet Blue are lobbying Joe Biden and Boris Johnson to establish a travel corridor
- “#BeKind and #StaySafe, or else!” – “The application of behavioural science is getting so concerning that even I have a problem with it,” writes Patrick Fagan, formerly the Lead Psychologist at Cambridge Analytica
- “What if it all happens again?” – In the Conservative Woman, David Seedhouse describes the COVID-24 scenario which the Deliberative Practice community is debating next week and explains how readers can take part
- “The unleashing of Johnson’s inner tyrant” – During the flu epidemics of 1957 and 1968 “there was a concerted effort by both government and the media to avoid spreading panic and fear”. Jeff Williams explains the dramatic change between then and now in the Conservative Woman
- “Wales and a very convenient pandemic” – “Something strange and secretive is happening in the heart of Wales,” says Nicola Lund in the Conservative Woman. “Perhaps First Minister Mark Drakeford had more in mind than controlling a virus when imposing lengthy lockdowns”
- “It’s time to open up international travel” – Writing for Spiked, Rob Lyons sets out the case for relaxing the rules on international travel
- “Don’t let the state tell you who you can hug” – “There is no better snapshot of Britain’s slide into Covid dystopia than the argument over whether Britons should be allowed to hug each other again,” says Fraser Myers in Spiked
- “The UK could only reach Covid ‘alert level one’ by using up limited third world medical resources” – Collingwood writes in Bournbrook that a “global vaccination programme similar to the ones that eradicated smallpox” is the only way for the U.K. to reach Covid “alert level one”
- “‘It was this big’: a corrective on COVID-19 mortality” – “The actual number of people who have died of COVID-19 is impossible to know,” write Roger Watson and Niall McCrae on the Unity News Network, but they “speculate that many of the people who supposedly died of COVID-19 succumbed to the same conditions that take thousands of lives every winter”
- “Why the obsession with masks?” – Rev Phill Sacre offers a Christian perspective on the obsession with masks and why they should be resisted
- “Italian woman mistakenly given six shots of COVID-19 vaccine” – The 23 year-old woman from Tuscany was kept under observation for 24 hours, according to the Independent, but has not suffered any adverse reaction from the overdose of the Pfizer vaccine
- “Here in Washington D.C., Dr Fauci is a messianic figure” – “Everywhere you look in the tonier precincts of our fair capital one sees the posters and placards and pictures: ‘Thank you Dr. Fauci!'” writes James Carden in UnHerd
- “Fauci must answer for his role in Wuhan’s Covid lab” – Stephen L. Miller argues in Spectator USA that Dr. Fauci has some explaining to do to Congress
- “Dr. Fauci, Do you still support… NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?” – Watch Senator Rand Paul give the good doctor a grilling about gain of function research
- “Covid restrictions are killing the national pastime” – Amber Athey recently went to a Major League Baseball game for the first time in two years but, according to her account in Spectator USA, nonsensical COVID-19 restrictions sapped “almost all the joy out of the experience”
- “Focused Protection Would Have Been the Right Pandemic Response” – “It is increasingly apparent,” says Ethan Yang at AIER, ” that a strategy of focused protection which respects the voluntary functions of society while taking reasonable steps to accommodate vulnerable populations would have been the most optimal pandemic response”
- “Would Australians support mandates for the COVID-19 vaccine? Our research suggests most would” – 73% of Australians would favour the Government making vaccination mandatory, say David Smith, Katie Attwell and Uswana Evans in the Conversation
- “The Flawed Assumptions Beneath COVID-19 Modelling (Epidemiological and Economic)” – An interview on the Letters from a Contrarian podcast with Dr. Doug Allen, a Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University and author of a noted paper on the costs of lockdown
- “Texas Governor Greg Abbott vs. The Experts” – An entertaining video from Pishpish Cat
Texas Governor Greg Abbott vs. "The Experts" (AKA "The Science ™️"). pic.twitter.com/1raXb9c9j7
— Pishpish Cat(@PishPishCat) May 11, 2021
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During the flu epidemics of 1957 and 1968 “there was a concerted effort by both government and the media to avoid spreading panic and fear”.
– which indicates the bad faith operating now: a contradiction of good public health policy.
In 1968 the news was always dominated by dreary film of Trades Union leaders going in and out of no.10 for ‘beer and sandwiches’ crisis meetings with Harold Wilson (and The Balance Of Payments Deficit).
My mum was a SRN in a north London hospital at the time but she didn’t mention anything about a serious flu epidemic so far as I recall. Dad was a middling civil servant and what concerned him was getting a council grant for loft insulation.
Yes, they want to go to Mars now (maybe they can take certain people with them?). They are claiming they might find the aliens there. To increase their funding, of course. Money and science…
Elon Musk has said that people who go to Mars can expect to die there, natural causes of course.
Except of course that landing on the moon was nothing to do with “white male supremacy” as it driven by America’s competition with a rival white superpower.
Maybe this is the key difference.
https://thecritic.co.uk/bekind-and-staysafe-or-else/
The age of manipulation and control.
That article is proving to be very popular here at LS, perhaps Toby should pin it somewhere
The key difference is that there isn’t really a pandemic this time.
Exactly. Because of there was, they’d be playing that thing right down!
127,603 deaths “an article of faith for lockdown proponents”. You mean there are actually people who believe that all these people would still be alive if it wasn’t for a “novel coronavirus”? Surely not!
No accounting for thick as shite.
I doubt if there are many relatives of Covid victims who seriously expected their loved one to survive the next twelve months given their their underlying comorbidities.
Comments made to me by care home workers back this up; ‘we always lose a few to flu in winter but most would be at deaths door anyway’ being typical but probably not company policy to say so.
Do you get the feeling that the fact a lot of people can be easily baffled by these figures has been ruthlessly exploited?
“Deaths in Britain below 5 year average” Telegraph from ONS
Similar to June last year when the ONS were reporting fewer deaths first in London but soon followed by the rest of the country*.
Picked up on Hector Drummonds blog and reported here at LS but ignored by the MSM who preferred to divert us with the stale news of cummingsgat for several weeks by which time Covid had mysteriously disappeared.
Reason being, as someone mentioned here ‘you can’t die of Covid in March and then die again in June from the comorbidity that was going to kill you the, statistically.
I know ‘5 year average’ is not the perfect metric but that’s how the ONS report.
Cummingsgate? – or should that be castlegate? (strange convention, this “gate” business, as if Watergate was the only scandal to matter).
Didn’t British political scandals more often have names of the form X for Y: as in “homes for votes”, “cash for questions”, or “cash for ash” in Northern Ireland?
And Watergate had very little to do with water.
If you want a water scandal, you could try this one, but not before dinner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_water_supply_contamination
Increase in cases in Texas?! Here are the facts for Texas and California going back to 5 weeks before the Sunday just gone, when a baseball game in no-winter-lockdown Texas had a crowd of over 38,000. Seriously, you tell me if this is evidence that winter lockdowns and face masks are working – and whether that baseball game was a disaster, and evidence for not having 38,000 at (say) Elland Road.
Reported covid deaths adjusted for UK population equivalent (ie times c. 2.3 and 1.7)
week ending: Texas California
9/5/21 777 615
2/5/21 824 822
25/4/21 813 700
18/4/21 876 1,025
11/4/21 1,196 1,222
4/4/21* 1,318 1,937
*The Texas baseball game happened about this date.
Is this really evidence for the ridiculous 10,000 limit at UK sporting events (but 0 this week)?
should read
…………..Texas……California
9/5/21…..777………615.
2/5/21…..824………822
25/4/21…813………700
18/4/21…876………1,025
11/4/21…1,196……1,222
4/4/21…..1,318……1,937
ie it is hard to see what benefit California gained from face nappies, winter lockdowns, refusing to allow sports fan back. Even just counting reported covid deaths.
And bear in mind this is adjusted for UK population, so actual reported deaths were less than that. This is so we can compare it easily with the UK and compare them with each other without having to do sums – so there were only two weeks when Texas had a significantly higher IFR – and even then the downward trend continued.
I suspect California did so much worse because of its sky-high real estate prices (and resulting overcrowding and homelessness).
California has more billionaires than anywhere else in the USA, it also has the highest proportion of citizens on welfare.
progressivism (tax work, subsidise title) is the welfare state for billionaires, so that’s entirely to be expected.
And the root cause of a lot of these issues is that so many globally-dominant monopolies (including Silicon Valley tech firms and Hollywood movie studios) are based there.
Bay Area and Los Angeles landlords then hitch a ride on these global monopolies, much as remoras do on sharks.
http://www.andywightman.com/docs/churchill.pdf
Winston Churchill Speech made to the House of Commons on May 4, 1909. LAND MONOPOLY is not the only monopoly, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies — it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly. Unearned increments in land are not the only form of unearned or undeserved profit, but they are the principal form of unearned increment, and they are derived from processes which are not merely not beneficial, but positively detrimental to the general public. Land, which is a necessity of human existence, which is the original source of all wealth, which is strictly limited in extent, which is fixed in geographical position — land, I say, differs from all other forms of property, and the immemorial customs of nearly every modern state have placed the tenure, transfer, and obligations of land in a wholly different category from other classes of property. Nothing is more amusing than to watch the efforts of land monopolists to claim that other forms of property and increment are similar in all respects to land and the unearned increment on land. They talk of the increased profits of a doctor or lawyer from the growth of population in the town in which they live. They talk of the profits of a railway, from the growing wealth and activity in the districts through which it runs. They talk of the profits from a rise in stocks and even the profits derived from the sale of works of art. But see how misleading and false all those analogies are. The windfalls from the sale of a picture — a Van Dyke or a Holbein — may be very considerable. But pictures do not get in anybody’s way. They do not lay a toll on anybody’s labour; they do not touch enterprise and production; they do not affect the creative processes on which the material well-being of millions depends.
Which is one reason why a land value tax would be such a good idea: it doesn’t just go after the most zero-sum winner-take-all variety of “wealth” (and one which is easily valued and cannot be hidden or stashed abroad), but it also indirectly taxes away the economic rents collected by the owners of other winner-take-all assets.
When Churchill made this speech the vast majority of the population were private tenants and the main obstacle to taxing land rent came from the not-yet-neutered House of Lords, while today the issue is more that the Tories figured out they needed to let enough people in on the racket (eg with Right to Buy) to keep themselves in power.
Oh the racket is going strong…
Just look at help to
land bankbuyLand Prices now 10 times earnings when they used to be 2-2,5 times… That’s real inflation and the biggest of the big lies is that it’s a good thing!
NUDGING
Thought provoking article from Patrick Fagan. It raises important issues that ought to be given a high profile to bring about change.
We are still constantly bombarded with Covid messaging to which almost no-one will give conscious attention any more.
However our subconscious will be registering them each time.
I was in Tesco yesterday and the broadcast message went on for so long that it did register and I actually told the tannoy to f off.
Time for a campaign to get this messaging removed?
Ah, the man who took us out of the EU, supposedly. I fancy he won’t be getting a knighthood
I notice “mater” is different from “pater”…
That excellent article “Be Safe, or Else” appeared yesterday on LS, I was particularly taken by the two Behavioralists who tried to raise their children according to their theory, they both attempted suicide (the parents presumably), one succeeded.
No, the children. Being brought up by nutters who denied them awareness of, and the following of, every natural instinct.
raising your children according to the latest fashionable theory – rather than whats worked for a million years
Gabor Mate is a superb speaker on parenthood for me. He basically says “just be there”. Especially in the early years 1 to 5. Keep routine and always hug them when they cry. That’s it in the smallest of nutshells.
Most of his patients have psychological issues he says he almost always traces back to childhood trauma.
I have 2 girls, 6 and 8. I have only seen them cry a couple of times ever.
I think my 70 part lecture series on Greek Stoicism which is our family Friday nights might be bearing fruit.
http://houseofdumb.blogspot.com/2021/04/theyre-not-handcuffs-theyre-freedom.html
Seriously, us sane people are already hanging on like Charlton Heston in The Omega Man without having our own side using nonsense phrases like ‘vaccine passports’.
No, they’re not ‘vaccine passports’, they’re ‘life licences’. Literally everything you want to do will be subject to government approval.
Forget talking about Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell or whoever your preferred villain from British history is, none of these guys insisted you needed their OK to drop into the local tavern or buy some turnips.
Once this system is in place it’s all over. And no, the government is not spending tens of billions on a system that they will scrap after a year. Surely everyone now realises that the constant stream of new strains – Brazillian! South African! Atlantian! – are just prepping the ground for them to wheel out new threats every time anyone suggests removing restrictions?
Of course, they say it’s all about muh saving lives except spending tens of billions on almost any other area of healthcare would save actual lives, not merely theoretical lives saved from the Fijian, Chilean or Nigerian strains. Overhauling our shambolic cancer and maternity sectors alone would save 10x the lives these life licences would save, and they’d be real lives, not theoretical deaths from the some hypothetical future strains.
It needs to be emphasised how intrusive this system will be. The government having a complete record of where everyone has been is the least dangerous part of it.
What’s our biggest health problem aside from the Worst Virus Evah?
Yep, obesity, so what’s to stop life licences being programmed to only allow people to visit restaurants or pubs twice a week?
Nothing. At all.
Equally, even if you’re a puritan and you think only an alcoholic would need to go the pub more than twice a week, it can work the other way. Fail to go to the gym at least twice in the last seven days? The system can take your £50 fixed penalty out of your account automatically at the start of Day 8.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory, this is a capability baked into the system. Once it’s up and running all this naturally follows. All it takes is for people to accept that the public is accountable to the government not the other way round.
yes, if I see the TV advert telling me to “join the millions” who have already got their jab (like it is some kind of cool club, after all millions of people can’t be wrong can they?) one more time I am liable to throw something heavy and damaging at my TV.
The Con is a full on health (and green) fascist mag.
I’ll bet they get some Gates money.
ITEM: The Conversation – Would Australians Support Mandates For The Covid-19 Vaccine? Our Research Suggests Most Would.
A whopping 73% of Australians would have supported mandatory Covid vaccination “for work, travel and study” back in 2020, says the survey. Terrify your citizens with tales of Corona doom, and promote the vaccines as the white knight, and what would you expect but majority support for illiberal de facto compulsory vaccination via discriminatory vaxx passports. Although that frightening percentage is down to 54% in January 2021, they add, the majority are still in favour of a vaxx passport to effectively force vaccination on people.
The authors do not mention coerced medical intervention, and how unethical this is, but that is what vaxx passports are – ‘No freedom for you!’ unless you give us your healthy body’s DNA for experimentation. The authors’ silence on this issue is, alas, in keeping with academia’s dismal performance during the whole Covid saga. The public outreach organ of academia, The Conversation, in particular, is a dependable cell of academic Covid hysteria.
For example, their 2020 survey also looked at the proportion of the population who would have the vaccine, finding a 30% ‘hesitancy’ rate, a figure which they say is “unfortunate” but they are relieved that “a comfortable majority of Australians still want the vaccine”. Still, our intrepid thinkers are worried about vaccine complacency. With the virus gone after a blazing Australian summer of ultra-high UV radiation killing off many viruses of all types, plus galloping herd immunity re Covid, and with the only ‘cases’ in Australia being imported from overseas and being cooped up in mandatory medi-hotel quarantine ($3,000 at heir own expense, for the privilege), too many Australians, say the authors, are apparently no longer fearful of the virus and are shunning vaccination as unnecessary, ineffective and potentially dangerous – in their survey, 70% of vaccine refuseniks had safety concerns about the vaccine whilst 16% indicated they weren’t personally concerned about the coronavirus (only 8% of vaccine naysayers were “anti-vaxxers” on principle or for medical reasons i.e less than 3% of the total population).
So, got to keep the pot of virus fear simmering (cue the threat of mini-lockdowns whenever an imported virus ‘escapes’ from medi-hotel isolation, alarm at above average levels of viral residue detected in wastewater, panic about variants, etc.) whilst maintaining a climate of a vaccine ‘emergency’ as part of a virus ‘emergency’ which demands ‘emergency’ measures.
The authors try to sound moderate and reasonable by saying that “well-funded and targeted public communications, easy access and incentives should come first” [i.e. a full-court press of propaganda, souped-up rollout logistics, and outright bribery] whilst believing that “vaccine mandates should only be a policy of last resort”. By leaving vaccine mandates/passports on the policy table, however, they clearly do not believe that mandatory vaccinations are unethical, nor that the ‘vaccines’ are potentially dangerous, nor that they don’t even work at preventing infection or stopping transmission.
Regime academics are unfortunately all too common the world over, in this case doing their bit to lead the citizen lambs, the (narrowing) majority desperately longing for the vaccine, to ‘pubic health’ slaughter via injection.
What has happened to the land that once was home to Ned Kelly?
They should rephrase the question
“Would you support the compulsory experimentation with untested gene altering serums on all Australians including your children?”
A straw poll of people I know who have had the vaccine…
100% are fanatically against it being given to children under any circumstances
Are people in your circle talking about it even? I find they just put everything to the back of their mind now, until it is too late of course.
only when I ask them
Government response to a petition demanding: “End all requirements to wear face coverings immediately” doesn’t cite scientific reasoning for wearing them, they just tell us we ‘must’ wear them.
Here’s a snip:
The closest it gets to suggesting this rule is based on science is later on when they say:
They do not provide any supportive evidence anywhere in their response. Notice however, the devious inclusion of the ‘asymptomatic’ lie they enjoy peddling…
I received this too. Same old, same old…dreary and predictable rhetoric, just like the responses I get from MP. Got to keep peddling that message through, though. Got an agenda to follow. How many times did they shoehorn in “spread of the virus”?
It’s this bit that is the important point.
“The British Retail Consortium has said that together with other social distancing measures, face coverings can make shoppers feel even more confident about returning to the high street.”
Essentially the gullible are the ones more likely to respond to the “spend money” marketing message put out by Retail establishments, and they are the ones most likely to want to wear masks to feel “safe” because they are easily brainwashed.
Those are the people that the shops desperately want back.
Hence it continues – for the same reason salt is Kosher and meat is Halal.
The gullible are the ones who want you and I and everyone else to wear masks so it makes Them feel “safe”.
£1.6Bn and growing spend with OmniCom gets you a lot of consistent messaging throughout society and the economy. The money is spent and keeps being added to, its not going away, there is no end in sight to the psyop.
If the supposed 73% of Australians who favour vaccine mandates were to get the vaccine themselves, then that would basically achieve the level required for herd immunity. Assuming these vaccines work. Of course if they don’t the mandates make no sense either.
If the BBC is bad then Global Radio is orders of magnitude worse. Their only excuse is that they are simply selling advertising space, but given they would probably reject certain adverts they clearly agree with the messaging.
According to one piece of Government propaganda messaging ‘around 1 in 3 people have Covid and are spreading it without knowing’. 20+ million asymptomatic ‘cases’? That’s Ferguson magnitude. The same drivel pushes the ‘self test twice a week’ bullshit. They have to keep the ‘cases’ coming I suppose.
Hot on the heels of this we have an equally nauseating Cruise Line advert. Appealing no doubt to the Zoom and Latte brigade who have not lost their jobs, businesses or sanity to the predations of Johnson, Hancock, et al. I can think of nothing worse than being cooped up on a ship with flocks of sheeple, all snatching bites of ‘5 star cuisine’ through briefly lowered masks and then walking the statutory 2m apart around the deck, accompanied by their no doubt jabbed larva.
No if someone was to offer an all inclusive (torpedoes) action holiday on board an attack submarine I’d have to seriously consider it!