Home Secretary Priti Patel appeared on Andrew Marr on Sunday and repeated the Government line that “herd immunity” was never the Government’s strategy. “Our strategy was always about protecting public health, saving lives, and protecting the NHS,” she said.
Outside Government it seems to be accepted, including by its defenders, that this is untrue and herd immunity was originally part of the Government’s plan. Referring to allegations by Boris Johnson’s former Chief Adviser Dominic Cummings that the Government was following a herd immunity strategy until March, UnHerd editor Freddie Sayers writes:
Cummings’s big accusation that the initial pandemic response plan, based on flu, included the goal of herd immunity is long-established, as is the fact that the Government initially considered it, then deviated from it rapidly when its implications became clear.
If this is so, why does the Government continue to deny it?
Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the Minister for Business, appeared on Good Morning Britain today to try to explain:
It was never the policy of this Government. Boris Johnson was very clear that the only thing that mattered was that we make sure that we saved lives and we keep our NHS safe and able to function, not only to protect those who might get Covid but also everybody else. … I’m very comfortable that the Prime Minister never had as his policy herd immunity.
Trevelyan was asked about remarks by Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance on March 13th 2020, when he said: “Our aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely. Also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease.”
The Times explains the distinction Trevelyan and the Government are seeking to draw.
Trevelyan said that Vallance was explaining that herd immunity was “something that would be likely to happen” and that he had suggested it was “one of the potential tools in the armoury”, but insisted it was not the policy goal.
At the time officials believed that the spread of coronavirus could not be stopped and that suppressing it through lockdown would mean a resurgence in the winter. Instead the plan was to use social distancing to prevent so many people becoming ill at the same time that the NHS would be overwhelmed.
Cummings tweeted yesterday: “‘Herd immunity’ was officially seen as UNAVOIDABLE week of 9/3. It wd come either a) in a single peak over by Sep, or b) in a 2nd peak in winter. (a) was seen as easier to manage & less of a catastrophe”.
Trevelyan’s comments suggest the Government is attempting to draw a distinction between an attempt to make use of an inevitable outcome, and a desire for millions of people to catch the disease so that the pandemic would be over.
This may seem like a semantic distinction, but if we revisit the Government action plan for COVID-19, published on March 3rd 2020, and the “UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011” it was based on, we see that, regardless of what ministers and advisers were saying to journalists or behind the scenes, neither the action plan nor the preparedness strategy mentions “herd immunity” as a goal or strategy. Herd immunity is not referred to at all in the action plan, and it only comes up once in the preparedness strategy, in the context of explaining that if pre-emptive vaccination (for influenza) to achieve herd immunity isn’t possible, the only alternative is to “reduce the impact of the pandemic”.
Accordingly, when Chris Whitty explained the emerging strategy on February 13th 2020 he did not mention herd immunity: “At this point in time… we have a strategy that relies on four tactical aims. The first is to contain, the second is to delay, the third is to do the science and the research, and the fourth is to mitigate so that we can actually brace the NHS.”
Whitty at the same time rebuffed Neil Ferguson’s Covid alarmism that had first been aired that week:
On the Today programme on Wednesday, Prof Neil Ferguson, an infectious disease expert from Imperial College London, said he thought new cases of the virus could still arise and the world was in the “early phases of a global pandemic”. He estimated about 60% of the UK population in such a situation could be affected, which if the mortality rate was 1% could result in hundreds of thousands of deaths. But Whitty said it was unhelpful to speculate on numbers without strong evidence. He said the fourth strand of the UK coronavirus plan was mitigation, and ensuring the NHS was able to cope.
You might say this is dancing on the head of a pin, as whether or not the Government included the phrase “herd immunity” in its action plan, it was talking about it in the media and behind the scenes. And as a matter of fact a mitigation strategy only means mitigating the impact of the disease on the way to herd immunity, which is what brings a pandemic to an end.
In fact, though, the distinction between what the disease is doing (infecting people) and our response (mitigating its impact) is a key one that has been largely missing in action over the past 15 months. The point is that when you vaccinate people you are aiming for herd immunity because you are making a pharmaceutical intervention to try to prevent disease by inducing immunity. On the other hand, when you mitigate the impact of an epidemic and end up at herd immunity by default you are not aiming for it because you are not deliberately infecting people to make them immune, it’s just what happens because there is no practical way to prevent it that doesn’t end up doing more harm than good. It’s not Government policy to infect people and give them immunity, that’s what the disease and our immune systems are doing of their own accord. Government policy is to mitigate the harm that occurs as that unavoidable course of events unfolds.
Cummings’s claim that without Government intervention hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths would have resulted is refuted by U.S. states such as South Dakota and Florida which did not impose restrictions while the virus ran through the population and did not experience a worse course than states which imposed strict lockdowns. Sweden also shows that a strict lockdown is not necessary to prevent health service meltdown or the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Perhaps, then, we should be mildly encouraged that the Government is seeking to resurrect this distinction between what the disease is doing and how the authorities are responding, if only to save face. Understood correctly, it underpins the difference between a public health tyranny, in which the Government sees it as its responsibility to try to prevent all evils (and in the process does more harm than good), and a free society where risks are baked in and the Government recognises the limits on what it can and should attempt to control.
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Those 2 look like characters from a Le Carre novel.
Yep, just before they are stretchered off the scene – an eminently desirable next step!
“ On the other hand, when you mitigate the impact of an epidemic and end up at herd immunity by default you are not aiming for it because you are not deliberately infecting people to make them immune, it’s just what happens because there is no practical way to prevent it that does more good than harm.”
Also, though I am very vaccine-antagonistic, I do like this turn of phrase.
This is, finally, correct.
HI is a possible, eventual outcome.
It can’t be actively pursued, neither naturally nor through vaccination.
The HIT is unknowable and will differ from region to region, delaying and interrupting the process ever further, to the hundreds of years.
And no one in the world, not even Tanzania or Belarus let alone Sweden, pursued deliberate infection- that would have meant asking people to go clubbing and putting plenty of known sick people on the dancefloor.
What they denounce as HI strategy is actually the world’s and the UK’s pre 2020 Covid madness pandemic plan, and it would have been the best approach and will continue to be the best approach.
But only if public health was the key concern, which it obviously ceased to be in March 2020.
All based on wildly exaggerated assumptions about c19 that were known at the time to be exaggerated
Indeed. Cummings saying 100s of 1000s choking to death is herd immunity.
Sweden
It looks to me that the government is playing with semantics and Cummings is doing his damnedest to paint them as evil. I say a plague on both their houses and one without any mitigation.
I don’t see why so many people now seem to be taking Cumming’s seriously. This time last year, after his Barnard Castle exploits, a lot of people, or at least the liberal/left wing media, branded him the world’s worst lier and the embodiment of pure evil. Now that he’s criticizing the government it suddenly seems as if he can do no wrong. He’s nothing but a selfish self publicist who should be ignored until he crawls back under whichever rock he’s been hiding under for the past 5 months. He’s just in a tantrum cos he was kicked out of Downing Street and would say anything to try and get revenge.
“Prof Neil Ferguson, an infectious disease expert”
If only there really had been an infectious disease expert involved in the government’s response.
Ferguson’s only expertise is alarmism.
Gravity was never considered in government policy making, our action plan always relied on homeopathy and magic to prevent buildings falling down.
God save us from the insufferable Righteous Brothers in the picture. They are secretly loving every minute of their fame while doing their best to put on an air of being very serious and strict followers of “the science”. Yet both have murky associations with Big Pharma: I don’t see much possibility of independent science there
Roll on the charges for crimes against humanity.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-future-of-citizen-data-systems
And Vallance is also involved in setting policy for government ‘big data’ systems such as Digital Ids, Health passports etc. See his Preface in this document.
“This report highlights the importance of having a clear vision for what we want to achieve with citizen data”
Anyone who can’t join the dots is burying their heads in the sand.
Anyone else not care? I actually couldn’t care about the strategy or lack there of now. This is what the enquiry will be fought over. This, and why didn’t we lock down in 2015.
Very biased questions, still, let them know what you think of the governments handling of the pandemic and what support was needed etc.
https://lse.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9B4Eq1JUMymHJTU
I let them know. By the living God that made ne, I let them kmow.
Were ministers lying?
Did their lips move?
Can’t tell if they’re hiding behind a cloak; they might just be playing back a pre-recorded script on their iphones.
It’s banal “when you mitigate the impact of an epidemic and end up at herd immunity by default you are not aiming for it because you are not deliberately infecting people to make them immune, it’s just what happens because there is no practical way to prevent it that does more good than harm.” Who gives a hoot? Herd immunity is a good thing, if they aimed for it they should boast, if they did not aim for it it happens anyway. So why suffer the stink of a cover up over ‘did nothing, it happens anyway’?
Well that ain’t my recollecion.
They now claim going into lockdown saved tens of thousands of lives, maybe 100s of thousands…
So if it’s that easy why didn’t they effing do it straight off and save EVEN MORE lives.
They didn’t because they knew then it was not a good policy. The policy then was to reach herd immunity without saying “we are aiming to reach herd immunity”. Vallance simply spoke frankly, out of turn. Initially they hoped to reduce the spread through voluntary reduction in social contacts.
It wasn’t his normal job, and spoke too frankly. He’s been learning how to be a politician since then.
Why is it that if we lie to the government, it’s a crime, but if the government lies to us it’s politics?
The same reason for why it is a crime for oridinary people to fiddle their expenses, but totally acceptable for politicos.
Rules and Laws are for little people.
This is symptomatic of the MSM. ‘he said, she said’. Personality politics. Never get below the surface, write about personalities, confuse the punter.
The facts are that by March everyone knew about Drosten and PCR, everyone knew about the lies. Well everyone who was paying the slightest attention to the underlying issues.
Its a fallacy that the UK or anyone else had reason to panic, that is just a story to cover up the initiation of what followed. S. Korea put out very informative information that made it very clear what was happening. It was only after the signal was given by people in the US in March that the world reacted as it did. Probably the motive was a combination of opportunity, power , money and politics. But I doubt they realised how easy it was going to be to cower so many people so quickly and so easily.
The UK is an important side-show, but that is all it is. The two major centres of focus were the US and Germany. The centres of economic power in the west.
The aim was to introduce a biosecurity totalitarian regime which would make it so much easier to control the populations as zero carbon was enforced. Why? A combination of economic disruption that would enrich the first movers, and enslavement of the population in a web of biotech that keeps the elite in power for the forseable future. Why now? because brexit and the election of Trump scared the elite sufficiently to bring forward their plans.
Will they succeed? probably the only thing that will stop them is paradoxically the vaccines. They don’t work, and are killers. Its terrible to think that the one thing that might save humanity is the death of millions.
It is still too early to be certain how many movers there behind these events, and what was chance, and who exploited opportunities. But China, with its Wuhan lab and soft power control of Who looms very large.
What are the links between Fauci and China? When did he begin to get so close to them? Exactly how close is he?
Why was the CIA not watching and warning against the defence risk from gain of function research being funded in China with US dollars?
Is it a coincidence that Neil Ferguson, creator of so many imaginative models destructive to the UK’s economy is a WHO man based in Imperial College, said to be Communist China’s favourite university?
And why do countries under the will of a web of WHO loving scientists seem to turn into copies of Communist China under their influence?
It’s a nonsense argument.
‘Herd’ immunity is just what happens with a virus. Trying to advance it with a vaccine is useful – if the vaccine is well tried and tested – unlike the current snake oil. Other NPI measures provoke inevitable harms that require unusual justification.
Herd immunity was first identified as a mechanism in 1927. The herd immunity effect is a result of the variability person to person of immune response to a pathogen (assuming the pathogen isnt sufficiently lethal to kill everyone). The greater the variability in immune response of a given population, the lower the level of exposure needed to stop spread of the disease. Somewhat paradoxical, but so are many things.
Kermack, W. O. and A. G. McKendrick. 1927. “A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Epidemics.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A 115 (772): 700–721. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.1927.0118.
Load of ballcox.
Cummings is just another sideshow, doing his job, following his brief, to make it look like he’s on Joe Public’s side in bringing the government to task.
Herd immunity or not? – it’s twaddle, to keep people occupied, to argue what could or should have happened. The government of the U.K., like several others, do not care about the people either way. They do not care about the health and well-being of anyone. They have their own ‘brief’ to fulfil – by force, fear and fraud – to subjugate the people into mindless puppets.
The ‘beloved’ NHS has been complicit every step of the way.
We must not forget.
…and neither should we forget it was and continues to be, based on lies.
“Boris Johnson was very clear that the only thing that mattered was that we make sure that we saved lives and we keep our NHS safe and able to function, not only to protect those who might get Covid but also everybody else.”
As they and their policies then failed on all those counts, she must be taking the p*ss out of us.
The steps this woeful inept government took worsened the situation by isolating people, and wearing face masks. The Diamond Princess cruise ship was the model to follow NOT Neil Ferguson’s computer modelling. Nothing will change my opinion of events other than this was and still is a deliberate attack on the British people by puppets of the WEF and UN, and don’t get me started on this insane vaccination programme!
We need to ask, why did the WHO change its definition of herd immunity in November 2020?
WHO website June, 2020: “the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.”
November,2020: “a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.” and “Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.”
I read this comment elsewhere and it makes an important point: The WHO not only chooses to ignore one of the main methods of achieving herd immunity, it also asserts some deceitful claims, if not flat out lies. For example:
Vaccines train our immune systems to develop antibodies, just as might happen when we are exposed to a disease but — crucially — vaccines work without making us sick.
As we know, this is not entirely true.
The question is why? Why after the Swine Flu scandal of 2009, when the WHO were accused of being too influenced by big pharma corps. are not more questions being raised on this issue? The hours of nonsense and discussion around the ravings of DC are a smokescreen to distract from what we really should be challenging.
WHO changed the definition again 31 December 2020.
I think they combined the June and November definition.
I haven’t checked again since, their constant lies are sickening.
…proving that the hindsight of these charlatans is no more acute than their foresight.
The reason for the ‘confusion’ is simple. Shortly before ‘vaccines’ were ready for use, the WHO changed its definition from ‘immunity can be gained via natural immunity or vaccines’ to ‘immunity can be gained via vaccination’ (or words to that effect). A whole realm of medical knowledge erased at the stroke of a pen. Stalin’s airbrush crew had nothing on this lot. WHO is now unambiguously just a PR agency for Big Pharma’s ‘vaccines’.