Dominic Cummings has fired off his latest salvo against his former boss ahead of his appearance before MPs to give evidence on May 26th, laying into Boris Johnson and the Government for not locking down sooner, among other complaints.
The disgruntled former chief adviser to the Prime Minister wrote a series of posts on Twitter that began by criticising Sweden’s response before ranging over other issues including human challenge vaccine trials and the transparency of SAGE.
Those of us “obsessed with spreading nonsense on Sweden/lockdowns” are treated to Dom’s “summary evidence on lockdowns”. Unfortunately for him, however, he seems to get his facts from somewhere other than the real world.
Dom takes a shot at the “trade-off argument” – the argument that lockdowns intended to control disease have a lot of downsides. He argues that Taiwan shows how “fast hard effective action [is the] best policy for [the] economy AND for reducing deaths/suffering”, and that “if you REALLY get your act together not only is [the] econ[omy] largely unscathed but life is [close to] normal”. He claims the Government is “totally hostile to learning from East Asia” because they and their advisers believe “Asians all do as they’re told it won’t work here”.
It’s true that East Asian countries have suffered considerably fewer deaths during the pandemic than the countries of Europe and the Americas. But the idea that that is because they imposed lockdowns hard and fast is palpable nonsense. Japan has not imposed a strict lockdown and neither has Taiwan or South Korea (see below). Worth recalling that South Korea has more commonly been lauded for avoiding hard lockdown by being so good at contact tracing, not for being fast to lock down hard. Contact tracing is also very unlikely to be the main reason for South Korea’s epidemic remaining small, but either way there is no basis to Dom’s claim that East Asia’s success is due to hard and fast lockdowns. As for Taiwan’s current “normal”, that involves very tight border restrictions that have been in place since February 6th 2020, and the country has just imposed new restrictions on the capital region Taipei.
Countries with the strictest lockdowns, such as Peru and Chile, have suffered far worse than some with light measures like Sweden. The reasons for the large differences between countries and world regions are not well understood (likely a combination of demographics and prior susceptibility) but there is no evidence the speed and strictness of lockdowns has played an important role. There are now numerous peer-reviewed analyses that come to this conclusion. Dom is known to be a fan of big data and this is big data he should definitely familiarise himself with.
He then moves on to the claim that Sweden had a voluntary lockdown anyway, stating: “Data shows despite no official ‘lockdown’ behaviour changed enormously. The closer your measures are to ‘welding people inside homes’ (per Wuhan at peak) the [much greater] effect on transmission”.
Leaving aside the alarming approval of the Chinese policy of “welding people inside homes”, the claim that “data shows” that Swedes essentially locked themselves down in 2020 is not true. As can be seen below, Swedes did change their behaviour in 2020, but not as much as elsewhere. Use of workplaces, for example, decreased by only around 20-25% in spring 2020, whereas in the UK it dropped by 65%. Residential use increased by about 10% in Sweden, but in the UK it increased by about 25%. Fraser Nelson (who happens to be Dom’s wife Mary Wakefield’s boss – is he one of the “political pundits obsessed with spreading nonsense on Sweden” that Dom has in mind?) – has done a good overview of the data from Sweden in the Spectator.
Dom warms to his theme and says the “nightmare rumbles on” because our lockdowns have been too late and too lax:
If you are going to have to do measures [like] lockdown to avoid health system collapse then the harder/earlier the better & the sooner they can be released. Pseudo ‘lockdowns’ [without] serious enforcement are hopeless: econ[omy] hit & people die anyway, nightmare rumbles on.
Again, though, for someone who loves science and data this shows a striking lack of familiarity with the scientific literature, which has shown time and again that the timing and severity of lockdown measures have no relationship to the size of the epidemic in a country and the number of deaths. Professor Simon Wood has shown that infections were already in decline ahead of all three lockdowns in England, so could not be the cause of the decline. If lockdowns work and enable us to get back to normal, why do we have to keep imposing them, and why does normal never arrive?
By focusing entirely on Sweden Dom also shows he is behind where the conversation is up to as he fails to engage with the experience of American states which have not locked down or have lifted restrictions. Texas, which was accused by President Biden of “Neanderthal thinking” when it lifted its restrictions in early March, recorded a day with zero Covid deaths on Sunday. It can’t be repeated too often that states like South Dakota which imposed no restrictions, Florida, which lifted its restrictions in the autumn, and Texas, which lifted its restrictions in March 2021, have fared no worse than other states which have implemented or continued with various lockdown measures.
Dom is a man with an axe to grind after his ignominious defenestration from Downing Street in November, apparently at the behest of the Prime Minister’s consort. With his latest Twitter rant it is now beyond doubt that he was a lockdown hawk in Downing Street (although, bizarrely, they call themselves the “doves”), pushing for harder, faster and longer restrictions and the imitation of oppressive regimes overseas. Sceptics can be glad there is one less supporter of “welding people in homes” who has the Prime Minister’s ear – though there seem to be no shortage of them, sadly.
Dom still has the potential to do the Government a lot of harm, appealing to the pro-lockdown sentiment in the country that he helped to foster and hammering ministers for not being hawkish dove-ish enough. It’s hard to see how this can be good for lockdown scepticism. But he could at least get his facts right.
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I read some of the (lengthy) articles on his blog/website once. You wouldn’t believe the things he spends his time thinking about, for example a “computer” that consists of real people in a real house who spend time figuring out “problems” with sheets of paper and coloured toys. Mentally, he is so far divorced from the real world that it is frightening to think of the influence has has had on government in recent years.
Presumably kind sharing Dum’s idea of a stronger earlier lockdown wouldn’t apply to anyone worried about their eyesight. Nor would it apply to the working class oiks who deliver essential hampers from Horrids and the like.
Great article Will. Overdue and welcome shift from Fraser Nelson.
So the guy who very publicly stuck two fingers up to the covid regs (and to a pliant, obedient public) now says that he should have had those restrictions imposed upon him earlier. Presumably so he could have flaunted them earlier?
Does anybody actually give a toss what the cretin says about anything?
Someone should weld his mouth shut and do us all a favour.
You can try everything in the COVID-19 playbook to avoid deaths and basically the final number comes down to how many old and fat people you have in your country.
Poverty and population density also come into it. Poor diet leads to obesity and possibly diabetes, the worst condition for increasing susceptibility to other disease.
Wouldn’t it have been great if Dominic Cummings had put this much time and effort in to investigating and recommending early treatments for COVID which would have saved thousands of lives. The information was available early on and throughout the past 15 months. Lockdowns? I don’t get it. Why on earth would he spend his time recommending lockdowns? How exactly does that treat someone with COVID?
Could it be to do with hygiene. Having lived in the Far East, we noticed that some countries pay far more attention to hygiene than others. HK and Taiwan will always wash their hands thoroughly after close contact on metro and markets. Many of these countries are not highly multicultural with many different attitudes to hygiene or indeed abilities deal with disease. Noticeably areas in UK that are not a total mismatch of races have fared better than others. The same with Sweden, America, etc. Every race has a different physiological make up, as my husband learned when doing clinical trials.
It surprises me that the Government’s so called scientific advisers don’t understand that multiculturalism brings many health problems to any country and its population in far more ways than crime, overcrowding and religious differences.
I wonder if the fear of being called racist has again stopped common sense from prevailing, or was this all planned to bring down Western economies.
How relevant is hand hygiene to Covid though given that it’s an airborne virus?
I think the real advantage of East Asian countries was that they were a lot more willing to shut down international travel at short notice. One reason is that two of the most-cited examples (Taiwan and South Korea) both face existential military threats from aggressive communist neighbours.
While another may be that they don’t really feel any strong affinities with a civilizational grouping outside their own sovereign states. On that score of course the Sinosphere is at one extreme, Muslims are at the opposite extreme (the enduring appeal of the Caliphate shows that they still aren’t really reconciled to the nation-state) while Westerners are somewhat in between (with their Greco-Roman heritage pulling them in the direction of sovereign-state loyalty while their Judeo-Christian heritage pulls them in the direction of civilizational loyalty).
(Or as Samuel Huntington would have put it, in imperial China and Japan Caesar was God, in Islam God is Caesar, while in the West God and Caesar have separate spheres.)
Indeed, you may note that even East Asian countries didn’t do so well if Abrahamic religion was strong there (eg Catholicism in the Philippines,… Read more »
Hygiene is always relevant. Washing hands regularly with soap and water is the first thing Florence Nightingale realised saved soldiers lives at the Front in WWI. Lots of hot water.
we touch out faces hundreds of times in the day. Viruses are miniscule and get into hair, eyes, noses and mouths. They can easily be transferred from surface to surface. Our immune systems are perfectly geared up to deal with these viruses if we take a few sensible precautions. Fresh air, good diet and personal hygiene.
I agree shutting borders quickly also helped. We have cheap and daily travel like never before so viruses can be spread very quickly. However, I really do think the Government knew all this but and also knew that this was not a dangerous virus. I truly believe there is a sinister agenda. Otherwise they would mot be using such heavy propaganda and hysteria to frighten people.
No. Sorry. Less than one in 10,000 chance of getting Covid from touch
The touch thing. after May last year, was another Big Fat Lie from Toad and Sage.
Florence Nightingale’s hygiene improvements related to the Crimean War, not to World War I (she died in 1910 at the age of 90).
Dr. Sommelweiss also proposed hand washing by doctors when moving from patient to patient in maternity wards as a way of cutting down the the high mortality associated with childbirth. Other doctors looked down on him as they considered gentlement doctors couldn’t possibly transmit disease
A disease he thought so terrible, he went galivanting around the North East of England. Another lying charlatan that we are well rid of.
His arguments for lockdowns are complete bollocks. Its like the rantings of a uneducated child.
Why would anybody even listen to this tosser anymore?
The unevidenced opinionated bigotry on display from so many over the last 14 months can only be categorised as bovine stupidity.
Denmark looks after its elderly predominantly in the home not in institutions.
So does Greece.
Consequently neither country has had the care home mortality experienced, for example, in this country and Sweden, exacerbated by lethal government interventions.
We have paid a high price for our failure to support the family in this country and elsewhere.
This takes about 5 minutes on the internet to establish, as did the fact that covid 19 is another now endemic seasonal common cold coronavirus.
Seriously, what is wrong with these people?
“Seriously, what is wrong with these people?” Human weakness. Vanity, ambition, evil.
All these people like Cummings and sage dispensed with science in March 2020 and replaced it with data. The problem with this approach is that it lacks any search to find out what is really behind the numbers. For example recently I was communicating with this guy from NZ who honestly believes like Dom lockdown saved his country. He gave a long list of countries in that part of the world which showed how well these countries had done under lockdown. So on the surface lockdown works but when you scratch below the surface and look at things like prior immunity, diet, health and age of population you see lockdown pales into insignificance. This is what science does,it searches for truth and doesn’t just look at the numbers and quite often is counter intuitive.
Great summation in your first sentence.
Cummings and sage are just data junkers who don’t seek truth but what they can get away with and simple put two fingers up to truth.
Very cynical to use lockdowns to try and get even with the Prime Minister. DC knows perfectly well that the country has been brainwashed into believing the fairy story that ‘we did not lockdown soon enough”. Unfortunately for Boris he jettisoned the original pandemic preparedness plan in favour all this nonsense. Now the nonsense has become the political narrative.
We start to see that the Rasputin-type influence this fraud had over Government, and Johnson in particular, was almost completely malign. Maybe Carrie is not all bad after all.
The buck stops with the PM.
He’s a knob always has been – eos.
I think he’s missed one of the essential weaknesses of mandatory lockdowns. .
Yes, Sweden self-limited but so too did the UK. The gains to be had from that ‘last mile’ of mandatory stay-at-home-orders are meagre, destructive, expensive and target those who 1. not at risk 2. are likely to disobey them anyway (quite wisely).
This is a man broke his own covid rules and then drove his car with his child in it to test his eyesight – I think that says it all.
Actually he didn’t break the rules by driving to Co Durham. Being him, he studied the full text of the regs. rather than relying on summaries in the press, like the rest of us did at that time. I learned something useful from him then. Not here, though.
Dominic Cummings: totalitarian bag of shite.
Is this the guy who writes poems to Molech on his blog? No surprise there then…
I think the man is a psychopath. Even if lockdowns had the claimed effect on transmission of Covid, it doesn’t follow that they are they are moral or proportionate. This is a man that sees only models, papers and power. He doesn’t see people and their dignity.
And on Sweden… how many deaths did the models predict? It was somewhat larger than reality as I remember.
Lockdowns – like all measures taken are a total irrelevancy. Not only because they are ineffective, but because Covid is a big ‘nothing’, contributing little to the normal totals of mortality. It’s scam upon scam upon scam.
Totally correct – he doesn’t seem to even recognise that balance. No mention of the effects on children.
He’s not wrong in that the British public is at least as pliant and obedient as “Asians”. And with much less force and coercion.No need to weld Brits into their homes as they’re quite happy to isolate themselves and rat on anyone else who doesn’t.
True. It has been a shock to me how compliant people are, how fragile our society really is, and how manipulative our politicians have been.
I’m shocked at how easily people are manipulated. Though I guess I shouldn’t be. That is the basis of advertising after all.
I’ve read through his tweets – well quickly, they don’t merit much time wasted. Not a mention of the downsides of lockdown, in particular no mention of the dire effects on children. His kids were probably OK – they probably just hired a tutor as rich people did during lockdown (I know a couple who did – I think it was widespread).
His simplistic thesis seems to be that if we had welded people in their houses (he’s so mad, I’m not sure he doesn’t mean it literally) then we would have resolved the Covid problem. The useless government of which he was such an important part (he’s no civil servant) had no pandemic plan and could not even organise sufficient PPE. How were they going to organise the feeding of 70 million people in their homes (including the feeding of millions of illegal immigrants who wouldn’t be appearing on any official lists)?
He seems to have absolutely no understanding of virology or immunity. I’m not claiming I have any great understanding but it seems obvious to me that people in the Far East have some sort of heightened immunity, probably due to previous SARS infections. The twat… Read more »
This is the chap who managed to minimise his movement by driving from London to Durham, and had that excursion to wonderful Barnard Castle ‘to test his eyesight’, when he’d supported policies that made such a trip possibly illegal, and whose sole achievement in politics was not being worse than Will Straw CBE, head of the Remain campaign.
The government did have a pandemic plan but they jettisoned it for the new (build back) better plan!
Ah but one thing DC is good at it’s reading the room… Making a big play of the atrocities Bojo could have imposed on the UK but chose not to makes the buffoon look like a flipping saint compared to China in the eyes of the deluded herd.
And… I’m convinced he’s still in Bojo’s employ somehow, I don’t believe that entirely stage managed departure through the front door was in any way true – DC simply spotted that as long as he was visible to the public then Bojo’s credibility and popularity were at risk. There was an article in the Daily Fail in May 2020 which reported that DC said he would leave in 6 months… lo and behold.
See also Bojo’s stint in hospital in March last year…
I was about to write much the same.
I see this as theatre. Countering the lockdown pushback argument with the exact opposite to take the heat of his dear friend. I too don’t buy his dismissal from #10. These are slippery fuckers we’re dealing with and none are to be trusted, least of all this weasel; he’s still playing his part.
Nah, they’re having a good old fashioned pissing contest.
Cummings is about to experience what everyone else in Britain has felt over the last year: the awesome power of the state crushing him.
Maybe he works for someone else higher up the food chain.
Among his insane ramblings, Cummings notes, correctly, that:
Starship is ~x1000 performance improvement on shuttle, 1/200 cost & x5 payload
Starship is Space X’s rocket designed to get humans back on the Moon and to Mars for the first time. Space X is owned and led by Elon Musk. Elon Musk is 1000 the man that Cummings is. During the worst of the pandemic he insisted that work on the Starship proceed at full speed and would have nothing to do with furlough. It is people like Musk who get things done (and also warn us about the dangers of AI, by the way). He understands life is about taking on challenges and correctly weighing risk – not hiding at home behind a welded up front door.
No he’s a conman his space rockets are all bs
Showing you know nothing about rockets. His Falcon 9 is the most successful rocket ever. Period, as the Americans say.
Having read the Cummings tweets I’ve come up with my own recommended book title:
The Bull-Shitters: How the modern world became a playground for mountebanks, lunatics and fanatics and how we can stop the BS.
Why are you calling the nowhere near as bright as he thinks he is goblin “Dom”?
I did wonder which way Cummings swang on lockdowns. Aside from that I couldn’t give can toss on his opinions.
He is Gove’s dog, so this tells us how Gove thinks.
Hmmm – who should I listen to regarding the effectiveness of lockdowns – a former political advisor with the hump and who bears a grudge against his former boss … or the virus pandemic experts around the globe who will tell you now that lockdowns do not work and will prove to be far more deadlier than the disease itself.
Its a tough one to call?
PS: Sweden called it right … the rest of the western world were wrong and they will pay heavily for this dreadful decision for decades to come.
Sweden was and is far too restrictive.
Only Belarus and Tanzania had it right.
And Taiwan is just closing schools…
As for New Zealand’s future, just google North Sentinel Island.
New Zealand will be a new horror movie ‘Planet of the Sheep’.
NZ policy:
Dig a hole.
Pull it in after you.
Pretend it isn’t a hole.
End of.
New Zealand is Howard Hughes * 4,857,178
Maybe Mr Cummings would like us to enslave ethnic minorities and sell their organs to the NHS like China too?
No, but perhaps the whole population?
Probably the unvaccinated, pariahs that we are.
Haha Bonkers Barnard in this Twitter thread just reminds me of Russell Crow in the end of A Beautiful Mind
I bet he has an actual wall like this, any suggestions as to what he has on it?!
“I must remember not to believe what I say. I must remember not to believe what I say. I must remember not to believe what I say.”