Toby has already gone through in detail the new report from the Science and Technology Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee of the House of Commons on the Government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and taken it apart.
One point worth underlining further is that one of its central conclusions – that “if the national lockdown had been instituted even a week earlier ‘we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half'” (the report quoting Professor Neil Ferguson here) – is demonstrably false on all the data available. That’s because it assumes that the epidemic was continuing to grow exponentially in the week before lockdown was brought into effect on March 24th, a growth which supposedly only the lockdown brought to an end.
That this is not the case is evident from all the data we have, as has been shown on numerous occasions.
For example, already in April 2020 Oxford’s Professor Carl Heneghan had noted that by projecting back from the peak of deaths on April 8th it could be inferred that the peak of infections occurred around a week before the lockdown was imposed. This early deduction was subsequently backed up by Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty himself, who told MPs in July 2020 that the R rate went “below one well before, or to some extent before, March 23rd”, indicating a declining epidemic.
Further support arrived in March 2021, when Imperial College London’s REACT study published a graph showing SARS-CoV-2 incidence in England as inferred from antibody testing and interviews with those who tested positive to ascertain date of symptom onset. It clearly showed new infections peaking in the week before March 24th (see below), as well as a similar peaking of infections ahead of the subsequent two national lockdowns.
Analysis by mathematician Professor Simon Wood, also published in March 2021, came to the same conclusion, confirming that Covid infections peaked in the week before March 24th (as they also did ahead of the two later lockdowns).
This being the unmistakable state of the data, as confirmed by multiple sources including Professor Chris Whitty and Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College London, any assertion to the contrary, even if deriving from sophisticated modelling or embedded within a parliamentary report, must be considered to be misinformation unless backed up with clear new evidence to counter the available data.
Since, then, the epidemic was peaking and declining in the week before lockdown, it isn’t possible to argue on the evidence that locking down a week earlier would have saved tens of thousands of lives, as clearly the lockdown could not have been the cause of the epidemic peaking and entering decline, which it was doing anyway. We also know that Sweden, which did not impose a lockdown, likewise peaked and declined at around the same time and the same prevalence, showing that there is no basis for thinking the rise would subsequently have resumed.
Note that this argument does not depend on accepting that lockdowns or social distancing have no significant impact on infections. Those are separate arguments which can be left on one side, as regardless of what effect lockdowns might have on infection rates, given that infection incidence was already peaking and declining in the week before lockdown, locking down a week earlier was not necessary to curb a growing epidemic and thus claims it would have prevented tens of thousands of deaths are fanciful.
A further point is that, even if you ignore this evidence and suppose that bringing the lockdown forward a week would have prevented a large number of deaths at that time, given there was subsequently a large winter surge with a further tens of thousands of deaths, how many of the lives ‘saved’ would have been spared for more than a few months, particularly as viruses are often more deadly in the winter? Even lockdown proponents accept that lockdowns can only defer infections and deaths, they can’t prevent them. So how many lives would really have been saved over the course of the year by locking down a week earlier?
Time to put this one to bed.
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Very interesting can we start the violent push back?Who will throw the first stone?
Yes to the push back, but an emphatic no to the violence.
We’re already viewed by much of society (and certainly by MSM) as a bunch of nutters, violence will merely confirm their suspicions and make absolutely sure that we make no further headway in converting the millions who feel in their gut that something ain’t right but haven’t yet progressed to the point where they say enough is enough. We just have to bide our time: we have science, logic, ethics and morality on our side – they are the only weapons we need. Push back with your (virtual) pen Teddy, which is mightier than the sword.
Agree 100% re absolute ‘No’ to violence and have posted my reasons before but I don’t buy biding time either. Actions speak louder than words: –
There is no one to rescue us but ourselves doing obstinacy, sheer cussedness, pranks; ‘passive resistance’. Spread-the-word, humour, consumer-power, mess-up accidentally-on-purpose e.g.
2 phones; one left for government to bully, other out-and-about with you.
3 or so families sharing work-load eases home-schooling of kids with their friends.
Never using government’s words for ‘jabs’, ‘abnormal’ etc.
Not wearing a mask and looking confident, happy, healthy and giving ‘frowners’ a friendly smile says: – all well despite non-compliance.
Home-printed leaflets hand-delivered, terrestrial post and face-to-face. Chats re current affairs with checkout assistants, saying hello to dogs opens chats with their owners. Anonymity of strangers enables both parties to speak non-mainstream; undocumented, every chance valuable.
Face-to-face builds trust quickly, gossip spreads to friends, family and colleagues – olden-days’ mass media.
A woman, smiling broadly, took empty trolley quickly up and down every aisle in shop in opposite direction (direct opposition) to arrows. Customers subtly aided her fun; no staff tried stopping her. All arrows soon gone, never reappeared.
Jokes at another shop re getting from near-side of one line at check-outs to far side of next line 2m away without stepping between ‘disappeared’ those lines.
Those arrows and lines stayed elsewhere but by poking fun at them we’d got rid of them locally by end-April 20.
Boycott pubs, hospitality, travel industry – no custom unless they use their power against government to bring us our real pubs back. They’ll stop kow-towing to rescue their pockets.
No custom, not even on-line, for cash-refusing businesses either. Cash instead of plastic. ‘Loyalty’ cards binned.
For Profit Companies Ruling Your Lives With How They Report Covid Cases
https://rumble.com/vnn94j-for-profit-companies-ruling-your-lives-with-how-they-report-covid-cases.html
We can start the peaceful revolution
Saturday 16th October
Hold the Line Stand by the Road (bring your Boards & Banners) event
– plus walk to the Town Centre
Stafferton Way Maidenhead SL6 1AY
Stand in the Park
Make friends – keep sane – talk freedom and have a laugh
Wokingham Stand in the Park Howard Palmer Gardens RG40 2HD Sundays 10am
behind the Cockpit Path car park in the centre of the town
Bracknell Stand in the Park South Hill Park Sundays 10am & Wednesdays 2pm
Reading Stand in the Park River Promenade Sundays 10am
Telegram http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
–
Government makes appalling decisions, based on appalling advice, then says it’s not our fault!
Peers review peers, then says it’s not our fault.
It must be the voters’ fault then, because we elected this shower of shit.
Forget the ‘we’!
Government announces ‘we saved millions of lives, by not dropping an H bomb on China.’
Can’t argue with that.
If I were an Uhgur, or a Tibetan, I might be inclined to wonder.
Unfortunately the media and usual political trolls will be harping on about this lie about lockdown to coverup what an obvious disaster it has been wherever in the world it has been implemented.
secondly it needs to be drummed into the lumpenpolitic in order to prepare them for the next viral panic and crush the economy yet again bringing more of the population into state dependency.
Build Back Better requires a builder, Back requires a destruction and better requires a hierarchical agenda. That every leader does and says the same thing should alert TY and other normies to the obvious plot against humanity.
I always hope that in the longterm the truth will get out. But we are 18 months into this easily discredited lie and still it persists. I get Labour, SNP, and the like repeating it: that’s politics. It’s that it’s main sponsor is a man whose models have been so spectacularly wrong that 200 years ago he’d have been chased from the village with rotten vegetables. How long before Ferguson is finally called to account? Or does having grants from the right people mean never having to say “oopsie!”
The media, social and mainstream is totally compromised by the Pharma lobby who are run by billionaires who are all fanatics about a global reset. There is no room for real journalism or real medical science.
I don’t think the long hoped for eureka moment from our media will EVER come.
Exactly. And too many on the sceptics side still haven’t accepted that reality. This isn’t about a virus, the models are just a tool to flood the airwaves with fear and numb the populace. The politicians just repeat because they need the media.
So with all that as the distraction, the real agenda plays out in the back rooms.
People cannot honestly think that the BBC will suddenly start looking the Ferguson and his models with any critical eye? It ain’t happening, ever.
Have faith; the desperate moves by Government controlled “fact checkers” against unimpeachable information – witness “Official data shows 269 drugs are known to dangerously interact with the Pfizer Covid-19 Vaccine including the Flu Jab; but both are being given to the elderly and vulnerable at the same time” (Expose 11/10/2021) and the recent bombshell disclosure that official data pertaining to the adverse effects of the jabs on pregnant women – never tested by the manufacturers as has been disclosed BY THEM – which gives a ratio of circa 12% EXCLUDES women who are post 20 weeks confinement which when included increases the ratio to >80% means it is “they ” who are fighting and retreating at the same time – don’t have to be a Sandhurst graduate to understand that is not a position of strength.
Select Committee report has fired their bullets too early – notwithstanding the grandstanding and breathtaking hypocrisy of “Jeremy Misspelt-Surname” in being critical of the current NHS – he sure has history there – they have committed the cardinal sin of trying to be clever and fire their bullets first whilst exposing their ingrained support for strategies that do not work – lockdowns.
Every time these professional idiots open their mouths they render themselves “not fit for purpose” – personally I will not rest until more people understand – not the conspiracy theories – the trails from Fauci/Baric/Daszak/Farrar and Wellcome/BMG andGAVI/Vallance/US Intelligence Services support of GoF research/Drosten/WHO/CCP/EUA jabs and the utterly disgraceful lack of testing/ gross manipulation of data to hide the true picture of deaths, adverse reactions of the jabs/the extremely narrow effectt of the jabs on ONLY the Alpha variant S1 spike protein……the litany is now very very extended.
IMHO, what these criminals all suffer from is a form of endemic mendacity that does not ever meet the description of “honesty” – being “sincere according to truth”, coined by Noah Webster. Alistair Cooke used this definition when, in one of his seminal “Letter from America” broadcasts in 1974 describing Richard Millhouse Nixon has being, in plain fact and out of his own mouth, incapable of meeting this description of honesty after his televised resignation speech ignored every single element of his culpability in the Watergate scandal. The more they spout the bigger the hole they dig – “keep going”!
It’s almost like they are reading from the exact same playbook….
Beyond seasonality issues the other thing the peak prior to lockdown indicates is human beings are actually decent at understanding risk and responding to it. The mobile data shows a massive shift to less travel and less mixing time in the ten days prior to lockdown. People began doing the basic behaviours that reduce risk like better hygiene and staying home when feeling at all unwell (the single biggest reducer in infections is paid leave for illness, but many employees who don’t work don’t get paid).
What is more, does the report ask the key question: was society ready for lockdown a week prior? Up to date on their shopping? Had time to relocate closer to family to endure the experience? Created more capacity for home shopping delivery? All these happened the week prior to lockdown as we all saw this coming knowing Boris had the spine of melted licorice. Such rear-facing judgements always separate out their desired outcomes from realism to achieve them. Oh, and quick inquiry, does the report address the fact that by the second week of April (the original end scheduled for lockdown) thanks to seasonality we no longer needed lockdown and retaining it cost and continues to cost lives? If it doesn’t, then it is an opinion piece and nothing else.
“human beings are actually decent at understanding risk and responding to it”
well yes sort of – we were *told* that the risk was that the NHS might be overwhelmed by covid and that we needed to stay at home for three weeks to “flatten the curve” (note – never reduce the area under the curve ie stop death, just spread it out over a slightly longer period). We did it, although I’m not even sure that this has turned out to be worthwhile?
However, post Easter 2020, this notion completely falls apart. You have the majority of people terrified and bamboozled into being completely unable to assess the risk and having lost all sense of the meaning of what it even means “to live”. There’s only a minority of us left who still have a grip on risk and are responding appropriately.
Actually, human beings are crap at understanding risk.
If anything, we fear the wrong things
Indeed. To reduce any sort of contagion, this should have been the advice all along.
1) Wash your hands.
2) Stay home if you are sick.
3) Avoid touching your face.
4) Cover your coughs and sneezes.
5) Vulnerable people should avoid crowds as much as possible.
That’s it. Just like the flu. Any NPIs beyond this do more harm than good.
And opening windows and doors for ventilation is good as well, of course.
Typically dishonest trick……..focussing entirely on whether LD was too late or not, projects the unassailable assumption that LD was unequivocally necessary.
When all sensible people know that it wasn’t.
When parliamentary committees are rigged and their conclusion are unchallenged in the media, we know that something very unpleasant is happening.
It’s just a question of the pace in which totalitarianism is imposed – here in UK, things are being done with much more subtleness – the final destination is the same though.
East Germany/North Korea…….but with better stuff in the shops.
Parliamentary committees aren’t particularly ‘rigged’. They just display the low intellectual ability and analytical capacity of their majority membership. No surprises – at best, one might have had a dissenting individual report.
Anything involving Jemima *unt is going to be shite.
It’s that 1000 yard stare when he criticises others for the same failings he exhibited – cretin imho.
There are lies …. and then there are Ferguson’s lies – which are on a very special kind of life-wrecking scale. A Senior one of the Guilty Men.
They are all ass covering now. The useful idiots, slaves and minor actors in this coordinated fake pandemic are now so implicated in this they will keep lying rather than admit their part in the biggest lie in human history.
And then there are the multitude of sheep/guinea-pigs (the ones who willingly jabbed themselves) who would be psychically destroyed if they faced the truth.
The unravelling continues….
Epidemics never grow exponentially as then they would be breaking the rules of Maths
Indeed. If you can’t work that out, you should go away and do something more corresponding to your ability – like shoveling real shit.
For God’s sake, Tony Young, get your head out of the sand!
This is not about health. They’ve already told us: Build Back Better. The Great Reset. Who are the authors? What is the plan? What is the endgame? Who benefits and why? Look to the UN. Look to Agenda 30. Create a crisis: climate change, Covid-19. Exploit the chaos.There are your answers!
A link to help you.
http://www.wickedtruths.org
Apologies for the typo. Toby, not Tony. Hi downtick. What have you got to say?
‘Downtick’ is a bot.
But, Early Treatment of Symptoms Would Have Saved Thousands of Lives.
Like, those of all the ancients who died of cancer, heart failure, pneumonia, kidney failure and all the usual causes, only to have lies written on their death certificates?
Completely; and that is the charge for which the guilty verdict for these criminals can never ever be plea bargained away.
Given that the committee producing this report is chaired by one Jeremy Hunt would you have expected anything else ?
ie. The politician whose task in the previous administrations was to run down the NHS so that it couldn’t cope with normal demand. I don’t suppose he was questioned about that failing.
Just sick of the lies, lies, lies.
It doesn’t follow from the fact there was a down turn before the lockdown that that downturn was a “peak”. We have had many downturns in cases since July – none of them have turned out to be peaks.
Hard to spot much of a pattern anywhere, almost as if government actions didn’t make much difference
The main pattern has been increased all-cause mortality after vaccine rollout. Possibly a coincidence
A real deadly pandemic of exceptional severity requiring unprecedented measures would have shown a less equivocal pattern than it has
The ups and downs roughly correlate with ups and downs in mass testing of healthy people.
“ .. increased all-cause mortality after vaccine rollout. Possibly a coincidence.
Agreed. Whereas any vague, divined ‘benefits’ of the ‘vaccine’ are definitely a coincidence.
BINGO
Didn’t they?
This chart seems to illustrate my point quite nicely. I see two definite downturns (about the 1st August and about the 10th of September) and other couple possible downturns (1st Sep and 28 Sep). Let’s take 10th of Sep as an example. Suppose lockdowns do work (and I am not recommending them) and a lockdown was introduced about the 10th of Sep – then, instead of rising again, the cases would have plummeted. Looking back critics could say “but look the cases had already peaked before the lockdown was introduced”.
Your claim was that case had not peaked and then fallen again since July. The graphic shows that this is wrong: There have been two peaks followed by sharp downturns, with the second one being smaller than the first.
NB: I don’t claim that this means anything in particular as the change in the speed of case number changes started to suggest tampering after the first peak, the usual pattern being that of a gradual decline stopped by a sudden, sharp uptick. Sort of as if the alien invasion force again dropped from the sky to spread some infections out of the blue, ie, not related to already existing infections.
I guess it comes down to what you call a peak. I intended it to mean a rise followed by a continuous drop to something negligible, e.g.2,000 cases a day, which is then sustained a low level. The lowest we have managed get to since July is about 18,000 and that didn’t last long.
“Cases” – please define.
Just a rabbit hole. Covid is not exceptional. Move on.
Engaging with whatever lies are being spouted is tempting and may be the right tactic, but it may not. It’s probably just another distraction tactic, another rabbit hole, best ignored. Stick to the basics – covid was/is not exceptional. Everything that comes out of the mouths of all those who have collaborated in the folly and evil will almost certainly be a lie.
Yes, concentrate on life filled plans and events. For example I’m applying to do a music course to take me back into my career as DJ & musician.
Much of the last 18 months is pure necrophilia (obsession with death). Forget the fake “mental illness” pushed at us my the media and pharma. This was a genuine collective nervous breakdown. A true sickness of our times. But at the basis of it is necrophilia and the counterpoint to that is LIFE. JOY. HUMANITY.
You couldn’t be righter, BorisP.
The labels here are a little bit hyperbolic – but, in essence, correct. Sweden had a very light touch compared to the UK. I’m surprised there’s anyone left alive in Sweden
Ross.Clark excoriates SAGE in Daily Mail article
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10085607/Demands-herd-immunity-prediction-500-000-Covid-deaths-call-Sage.html
But consider the full horror of a country that had no coercive mask mandates, virtually no coercive lockdown, no school closures except for older ages, and even now only has 65% “vaccination” (remember all those panickers insisting that it’s so “necessary” to get to 80-90% “vaccination” to achieve herd immunity that we must accept the open manipulation of truth by our supposed betters, and an unprecedented trampling on our basic civil liberties, to achieve it?)
https://softwaredevelopmentperestroika.wordpress.com/2021/10/12/sweden-seasonal-mortality-excess-deaths-flu-seasons-2015-16-2020-21-final/
No, but you know what would have saved tens of thousands of lives?
Care homes not prescribing two years worth of Midazolam in a few months.
BINGO
In order to understand this, one needs to realize that this is a bit like Schroedinger’s cat: For as long as the box isn’t opened, the cat is neither alive nor dead but in an inderterminate state. This is mirrored by locking up people in their homes as a rule. It prevents observable deaths due to people being locked up in their homes in an indeterminate state. Hence, lifting lockdowns causes deaths because the indeterminate state transistions to confirmed-alive or confirmed-dead.
Granted, this applies only to death as third-party experience but that’s what they make headlines from.
The average age of covvideath is, I believe, 83.
How long would those allegedly ‘saved’ lives have gone on for?
This is an important point. Who does COVID kill? Primarily the very old and already ill or weakened. We assume or accept that COVID had not claimed anyone’s life before January 2020. But old people WERE dying in the “flu” season just before the “official” COVID pandemic. Does anyone else think it’s possible that some of these deaths were people that had COVID and were just attributed to the flu or pneumonia or any other cause of death?
COVID deaths were already happening months before the lockdowns. But very few were among the young and healthy. The vast majority of these deaths were instead in the age cohorts where they would, in fact, be “missed.”
Most people who are infected by COVID don’t even show any symptoms. Some do get sick, but the symptoms are almost identical to the flu. My belief is that many people had COVID – they got sick from it; 99.9 percent simply didn’t die from it. But the virus was circulating before we have been told it was circulating.
By latter March some kind of critical mass had been achieved in some communities and locations and deaths did begin to spike noticeably. But this doesn’t mean some number weren’t already dying before this.
The report is entirely discredited by this egregious nonsense, using totally discredited sources.
It took nine months (for some reason), but the CDC actually tested about 7,000 units of stored blood collected by the American Red Cross over four days in mid-December 2019 and then a few more days in mid-January 2020. These samples came from blood donors in nine U.S. states.
116 of these blood samples tested positive for COVID antibodies. Two percent of the samples from three states (Oregon, Washington and California) contained COVID antibodies. These antibodies had already formed by mid-December 2019.
If one extrapolates the findings of this serology study to the entire U.S. population, you have about six million Americans (2 percent x 330 million) who had already been infected before the first PCR test had been administered.
I guess one can say that all 116 of these positive antibody results were false positives. So too (I guess) were every one of these 16 positive antibody results (from people in four states who were sick with COVID symptoms in November or December 2019).
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/20200516/coronavirus-florida-antibody-tests-bolster-suggestion-covid-spread-early-in-florida
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/antibody-test-results-of-2-snohomish-county-residents-throw-into-question-timeline-of-coronaviruss-u-s-arrival/
https://uncoverdc.com/2020/06/25/an-alabama-man-nearly-died-from-covid-19-the-first-week-in-january/
https://www.foxnews.com/world/china-new-jersey-mayor-coronavirus-november
… But if at least a few of these people actually did have the disease these antibody test results suggest they had, then this virus was spreading across America FOUR months before the lockdowns of latter March 2020.
So I don’t think lockdowns one week earlier would have somehow slowed or stopped the “spread” of a virus that had already been spreading for months.
Here’s some more details on one of the 16 Americans who believes she had COVID before January 2020 ….
According to a story published on Page 1 of The Seattle Times on May 14, 2020, two Snohomish County residents who were sick with COVID symptoms in December 2019 later tested positive for COVID antibodies. According to this and other Times’ articles, these two “probable” cases are among 55 other local cases where “serology tests linked to COVID-like illnesses, (throw) into question whether the coronavirus arrived in Washington, and the United States, earlier than previously known.”
Times’ journalist Lewis Lamb’s first article provides details about only one of these “probable” cases – that of a 64-year-old retired nurse the story identifies by her middle name, Jean.
Various references in the article describe Jean’s symptoms as being similar to a “cold,” a “bug” or a “bad cold.” However, Jean herself and other passages of the story indicate this was no mild “bug.”
“She came down with a bug two days after Christmas, and for the next week or so, Jean … suffered through a series of worsening symptoms: a dry, hacking cough, a fever and body aches, and finally, a wheeze that rattled her lungs …”
“… The cold …. caused her to cough up blood and throttled her breathing … ‘I told people, if that wasn’t coronavirus I had, then I’ll be dead if I really do get it,’ she said.” The illness was severe enough that Jean made “two trips to the doctor … After her condition worsened on Jan. 4, a doctor found her lungs hyperinflated.”
Other than the “bug” that caused her to “cough up blood and throttled her breathing,” Jean said she “didn’t get sick any other time. If I didn’t get the virus then, I can’t imagine when I would’ve gotten it.”
In late April 2020, Jean received a positive antibody test. According The Times, “the test Jean received — designed by Abbott Laboratories and now widely performed by the (University of Washington) Medicine Virology Lab — is considered highly accurate.”
And probably why the West Coast had fewer deaths than the East Coast, as the West Coast already had the virus many months earlier, likely a milder strain.
“A lie well believed is just as good as the truth.”
That anonymous statement of truth is an excellent reminder
of the fact that a lie repeated often enough will become
the truth.
Joseph Goebbels takes the credit for:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Just back from what started as a pleasant lunch out with friends. We have always been on completely opposite sides of the Covid debate so we did manage to skirt around the dreaded subject for quite some time. But, perhaps inevitably, something was mentioned and it all ended very badly with the female of the couple storming out of the pub. I’m pretty sure it was because I made the comment that I couldn’t understand why people who I’d always considered intelligent have been so willing to follow even the most ridiculous of ‘rules’. I usually avoid conflict and perhaps I should have kept my mouth shut but I think I’d just about had enough of the totally nonsensical way most people have behaved over the past 19 months and I just couldn’t keep quiet any longer.
Not sure what the odds are of the friendship surviving..……
Neil “Professor Pantsdown” Ferguson should really have been thinking with his third eye, not his third leg, lol.
The REACT study alone should be the biggest kryptonite of all to the lockdowners. I wonder what turncoat Christopher Snowdon would say to this?
“if the national lockdown had been instituted even a week earlier ‘we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half’” What a bizarre contention. So much for amnesty.