Despite talking of the U.K.’s long, slow lockdown easing as “irreversible”, the Prime Minister today told reporters that an anticipated resurgence of Covid, flu and other diseases means there may be a “rough winter” ahead. Noting that hospitalisations and ICU numbers are up around 30%, Boris Johnson said:
You can never exclude the possibility that there will be some new disease, some new horror we haven’t budgeted for or accounted for… but I think it’s looking good for July 19th to be that terminus point. Things like flu may come back this winter, we may have a rough winter for all sorts of reasons – but that is all the more reason to reduce Covid cases now, give the NHS the breathing space it needs now.
His comments suggest that the reason for the hugely costly decision to defer ‘freedom day’ for a month was to “reduce Covid cases” and “give the NHS the breathing space it needs”. That raises the alarming possibility that restrictions might be re-imposed whenever some pessimistic, unverified modelling suggests the NHS might come ‘under pressure’ during the winter – despite the fact that the NHS comes ‘under pressure’ almost every winter.
There are many criticisms that could be made of this, including that there is no real-world evidence that lockdowns make any significant impact on the course of a COVID-19 epidemic, and that it shows a very narrow and warped sense of priorities when it comes to managing public affairs and public health.
But besides that, even on its own terms it makes no sense to “give the NHS breathing space” by continuing or re-imposing restrictions. Since the main reason experts are so worried about flu this year is they are concerned that lockdowns and social distancing have successfully suppressed flu and other pathogens and left people unexposed to them and thus more vulnerable. In addition to this, Matt Hancock warned last week that the backlog in the NHS of people in need of elective procedures such as hip, knee and eye operations is now estimated to be as high as 12.2 million, resulting in the NHS facing the “biggest pressure in its history”.
But where is this pressure coming from? By the Government’s own admission, the backlog is caused by people staying away from the health service. So how can re-imposing restrictions and stoking panic be the solution to pressure caused by the very restrictions and panic that led people to avoid seeking medical treatment? The only way to break out of this vicious circle is to accept that lockdowns cause more problems than they solve.
Yet with the latest delay, the Government shows no sign of kicking the bad lockdown habit it has picked up in the last 15 months. No wonder even Cabinet Minsters are starting to complain they’re not being listened to.
Increasingly it seems that we are living under a SAGE dictatorship, where those with the real power are rewarded with billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to hand out to their friends in industry and academia – friends whose reputation they may have helped protect by covering up their role in creating the virus in the first place.
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‘As he is set to take Collins’s old job as NIH Director, there now is hope for the future. It falls on Jay’s shoulders to restore the integrity of medical and public health research so that it deserves to regain the trust of the public. He is one of the few scientists with both the track record and humility to do that.’
Spot on. If anyone knows of a better summary of the covid debacle, I’d like to see it:
‘It is an epidemic that’s hitting the United States and everyone’s worried about what the death rate is from it. I did some research on the spread of the disease, but I’d been reading the literature on how deadly it was. So the first reports for H1N1 were really high, 4%, 5% mortality. And I noticed in the literature, there were a whole series of serial prevalence studies, studies, essentially, of antibodies and what they was that for every case of H1N1, there were 50, 100 people that had it that they didn’t identify, the public health hadn’t identified.
When I saw the World Health Organization in 2020 say that we have a 3% mortality rate. They were very cagey about what they meant, but I knew what they meant. They meant that three out of 100 people that had been identified with COVID died from it. And they were looking at Chinese data, they were looking at Italian data. And the first thought I had was, well, maybe this is like H1… It’s a respiratory disease, respiratory virus. It spreads very, very easily, obviously. It seems likely that many more people have had it than had been identified. Our testing resources weren’t all that good at the time. So that was what motivated me in that piece was we don’t know the mortality rate ’cause we don’t know how many people actually had been infected. I wanted to know the denominator.
We did one in Los Angeles County and we did one in Santa Clara County, which is where Stanford is. We learned that in both LA County and Santa Clara County, there were 40 or 50 infections per case identified. 40 or 50 per case identified.
The problem is that if you have a situation in mid April, 2020, where 3, 4% of large Metro centers had evidence of the disease already, you know the disease is very, very infectious, that’s a strategy that cannot work. At that point what folks should have realized, including folks like Fauci and the CDC should have realized, is that a strategy to stop the disease from spreading down to zero was not possible.
The typical finding in these seroprevalence studies is that for people that are under the age of 70, there’s a 0.05% mortality risk. So 99.95% survival after infection for people under 70. For people over 70 it’s 5% mortality. So 95% mortality, 95% survival, a huge difference. It essentially changes smoothly with age. So roughly speaking, I’m 53, my infection fatality rate from these studies is something like 0.2%, 99.8% survival if I get infected.
So herd immunity is not a synonym for zero COVID. I think Hancock, I think, that’s the mistake he made there. The other thing about herd immunity with these disease is, it was clear in October of that year of 2020, and even more clear now that if you are infected, you actually gain substantial protection against re-infection. So there was a study that was just released actually recently, but verifies a whole long line of studies. At one year… This is out of Italy. At one year after infection, 0.3% are reinfected.
we sent people in the early days of the epidemic that were infected with COVID back into nursing homes who then infected a large number of vulnerable people, instead of realizing who the vulnerable were and seeking to protect them, that was the scarce resource. We thought hospital beds were a scarce resource. Most parts of the country in March, April 2020 were empty hospital beds.’
Jay Bhattacharya 21 Oct 2021
The indictment is that various experts around the world had correctly identified covid as a novel common cold coronavirus from February 2020 onwards.
But no-one listened to the real experts……and Lady Hallett is not listening now.
Why not?
And another thing…….
Why has it taken U.S. democracy to get us to the point where someone who really knows what they are talking about is appointed to clear up the public health shambles, corruption, when all that the supposedly exemplary British democratic system can do is saddle the taxpayer with a £208m inquiry wandering slowly and expensively down an illusory yellow brick road…..with a bunch of total nincompoops in charge?
Systemic reform is indeed required…….
Interesting question
Americans just seem more right wing than people in other rich world countries
More religious people
Maybe because it’s a younger nation founded on the idea of freedom from tyranny
Also the presidential system allows for an outsider to barge in unlike our parliamentary system
I am not sure about “systemic reform” (whatever that is). We had the chance to reject the Uniparty and most voters didn’t take it. People with views like mine seem to be in a tiny minority here
I don’t think it’s the Americans (in the US), it’s that Europe has been suffocated by the EU infrastructure, along with Establishment Smugness. In the UK, it is shown by the lack of STEM (and Business) expertise in Westminster and Whitehall:
https://conservativehome.com/2020/11/18/luke-tryl-were-failing-to-turn-pure-research-into-new-industries-a-challenge-which-the-government-must-help-to-meet/#comments
And:
How the Deep State Fails Britain:
https://youtu.be/5EK3diXgqbI
Well in the US there was a majority vote against the Establishment
Not in the U.K. or France or Germany- not yet anyway
It is possible that many of those taking part in the Inquiry are behaving in a defensive way, or if you are a real cynic, some might be opportunistic. As many were, selling junk of one kind or another. But despite the negative commentary here yesterday about Jay B’s appointment by Trump, it does seem like a wise move; we’ll see.
If you can keep your head when all about you are loosing theirs and blaming it on you….
Jay Bhattacharya is that man.
…and there you have almost the entire Covid fiasco in a few short paragraphs…. I say almost, because Kulldorff doesn’t touch upon the dreadful amount of politicking, power play, and corruption that also drove the fiasco, almost undoubtedly in every country
Never forget that the contribution to the Covid fiasco of the noble, learned and historic Mother of Parliaments included the immortal wisdom that “a Scotch egg is a proper meal”
That, and a debt of say £400Bn, plus £200m for the utterly pointless whitewash Hallett inquiry
Yet further proof that Trump is racist.
Interesting that almost all of the Indian Subcontinentals chosen by Drumpf worship VISHNU in some form or other, because the AntiChrist is also associated with Vishnu (who is also associated with Metatron).
Such Indians pretend that they worship the Great God Brahma, but shove him into the background while really worshipping the Evil Vishnu and his Evil ally Shiva=Satan, who are both protected by the Hideous Moon Spider “Goddess of All India” called Kali-Allah, the Goddess of Death. Here she is riding a white horse across a Lake of Blood, while seated on a saddle-blanket made from the skin of her own son. Here she is called “Palden Llamo KALI-deva” by the Tibetan Buddhists. Different name, same bug.
Sounds daft, I know, but you will eventually see.
She is the one the Tibetan Buddhist monks ask to choose the next Dalai Lama, believe it or not. Truth is stranger than fiction.
Note the Crescent Moon above her head, and the head of her skinned son dangling below her foot, with his skin spread out beneath her. You can also see his hands on either side, where his skin is tied around the horse as a horse blanket. This is “The Mother Goddess of All India”, who is especially fond of human sacrifices.
Then the Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, & Buddhists say to the Gullible Christians of the West, “Oh, don’t worry, we worship the same God as you!”
And yet another professional, who really ought to know better, maintaining there was an actual pandemic. These people will go to their graves clinging on to the fallacy there was a chuffing ”pandemic”! Hey, maybe if we obsessively test for flu using the exact same approach as we did with ‘Covid’, we can enjoy pandemics every single year…
Anyway, great work by Martin Victor Sewell here;
”To say that this is a comprehensive review of the COVID literature is an understatement. I commend Martin’s work to you.
A seasonal influenza-like illness became a pandemic of governmental overreach and collective hysteria. Lockdowns turned out to be the greatest health economics mistake in modern history, face masks served no useful purpose in the community, in schools or in healthcare, whilst vaccinations were effective against severe COVID-19 in the elderly in 2021, but ultimately likely did more harm than good.”
https://metatron.substack.com/p/the-effectiveness-of-lockdowns-face
He calls it an epidemic, which it was….in the same sense as, in Britain, we get Influenza Like Illness epidemics on a regular basis.
You could argue that a ‘pandemic’ is an epidemic accompanied by panic.
There certainly was a great deal of unnecessary panic in 2020.
Mr Bhattacharya did a great deal more than almost anyone else to allay that panic.
At least in my humble estimation, he is a living legend.
P.S. Unnecessary fact: Epidemic was a 1991 heavy metal album released by the prescient band ‘Panic’. It included the tracks ‘Blackfeather Snake”, “High Strung”, and “Hypochondriac”.
Why do you keep saying that? You do know the article was written by Kulldorff, and you did see the bit where he says “The only major country which took an evidence-based approach to the pandemic was Sweden”? There is a huge difference between a pandemic and an epidemic, which I’d expect somebody in Kulldorff’s position, and his colleagues, to know. Language is key and you most certainly cannot get away with using these two words interchangeably and expect to maintain any sort of credibility.
There was a ‘casedemic’. Without those fraudulent tests none of it would’ve been possible. Deaths due to government policies and at the hands ( and neglect ) of doctors are what killed people in any greater number than any other flu season.
Also, anybody pro-death jab, such as Ioannidis, most certainly have lost any respect and credibility, as far as I’m concerned. Profs Fenton and Neil have debunked this particular topic many times now. To say these injections saved any lives is pure bunkum.
I made the mistake of assuming that your comment would have been directed at Bhattacharya and the article above.
My apologies.
Hear, hear!
No.
The just ‘reward’ for Fauci would be to have his reputation comprehensively dismantled such that he lives out his meagre few years left in complete disgrace.
And preferably behind bars. He and Bill Gates of Hell could share a cell
I wish I had your confidence that science will prevail in the £200 million UK enquiry.
Delighted to see this appointment as I was to see RFK Jr. Trump is appointing all the right people to roll back the authoritarianism of the last few years. No wonder they tried to kill him
The medical profession will be bereft of integrity for the foreseeable future. Heinous crimes have been committed.
Measures must be put in place that ensure the corruption of Big Pharma, Regulators, Journals, Health organisations, is never allowed to destroy our established ethics and morality again.
Assisted dying bills are extremely dangerous in our broken society.