In a previous post, I looked at where ‘The Science’ of community masking came from. Here I’ll do the same thing for lockdowns.
As many lockdown sceptics (including myself) have noted, lockdowns represent a radical departure from conventional forms of pandemic management. There is no evidence that, before 2020, they were considered an effective way to deal with influenza pandemics.
In a 2006 paper, four leading scientists (including Donald Henderson, who led the effort to eradicate smallpox) examined measures for controlling pandemic influenza. Regarding “large-scale quarantine”, they wrote, “The negative consequences… are so extreme” that this measure “should be eliminated from serious consideration”.
Likewise, a WHO report published mere months before the COVID-19 pandemic classified “quarantine of exposed individuals” as “not recommended under any circumstances”. The report noted that “there is no obvious rationale for this measure”.
And we all know what the U.K.’s own ‘Pandemic Preparedness Strategy’ said, namely: “It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.”
As an additional exercise, I searched the pandemic preparedness plans of all the English-speaking Western countries (U.K., Ireland, U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand) for mentions of ‘lockdown’, ‘lock-down’ ‘lock down’ or ‘curfew’.
Only ‘curfew’ was mentioned, and only once – in Ireland’s plan. The relevant sentence was: “Mandatory quarantine and curfews are not considered necessary.” None of the lockdown strings was mentioned in any of the countries’ plans.
So where did ‘The Science’ of controlling Covid using lockdowns come from? As everyone knows, China implemented the first lockdown (of Hubei province) in January of 2020. Yet it wasn’t until March that lockdowns became part of ‘The Science’.
As this chart taken from the paper by David Rozado shows, major Western media outlets did not start mentioning ‘lockdown’ frequently until March:
And this chart confirms that worldwide Google search interest for ‘lockdown’ was essentially nil until March 8th, 2020:
So what happened in early March? Well, Italy was the first Western country to lock down – on March 9th last year. And as Michael Senger argues, its decision appears to have been prompted by the WHO’s report of February 24th, which gave a glowing evaluation of China’s lockdown. (Senger’s piece is well worth reading.)
Other Western countries then followed suit. The next most important event, following Italy’s decision to lock down, was the publication of a report by Neil Ferguson’s team on March 16th.
This report has been described as the “catalyst for policy reversal”. Up until then, the U.K. had been more or less following its pandemic preparedness plan. As late as March 5th, Chris Whitty told the Health and Social Care Committee that “what we’re very keen to do is minimise social and economic disruption”.
Although other, similar reports had already been published, the analysis by Neil Ferguson’s team was seen as particularly authoritative. According to the New York Times, the report “also influenced the White House to strengthen its measures”.
On March 17th, Neil Ferguson and his colleagues held a press conference after returning from Downing Street. They confirmed that Britain would be adopting a new strategy. “The aim is not to slow the rate of growth of cases but actually pull the epidemic into reverse,” Ferguson said.
As to why the U.K. was changing tack, Ferguson noted, “We have had bad news from Italy and from early experience in UK hospitals”. However, subsequent revelations suggest that “bad news” was less important than the shifting of the Overton window.
In an interview with the Times published in December last year, Ferguson noted that “people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March”. Referring to China’s lockdown, he elaborated, “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… And then Italy did it. And we realised we could”.
After China’s initial response in Hubei, it took two months for lockdowns to go from ‘unprecedented’ to ‘unavoidable’. They received two major doses of intellectual credibility: first from the WHO, and then from Neil Ferguson’s team. Italy set the all-important precedent for Western countries.
As to whether one should trust ‘The Science’ on lockdowns, a reasonable answer to that question would be, “Do you mean the pre- or the post-Covid science?”
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good article
it needs repeating – we didn’t follow the science – we panicked and threw the science out
And yet, a recent statement suggests they are claiming to have followed the plan that was in place for a flu pandemic. One wonders whether they still have any grasp on what constitutes truth.
“One wonders whether they still have any grasp on what constitutes truth.” I think it reasonable to assume a lot of them know they are lying. They are not stupid. It’s possible they have gone barking mad, though I doubt all of them have.
We call that ‘saving your bacon’. They know they fucked up and lockdowns don’t work but they’ll sacrifice everyone else and keep justifying their reasoning and ‘science’ to save their own backs. Hang them all.
Every Tory MP knows what was and is going on, as do the other parties. Every MP is lying through their teeth at us.
100% right imho.
I think we were following the response plan from 2011 until Dominic Cummings soiled himself and convinced Boris to throw it out.
Just what we needed – an idiot scientist showing stupid graphs to an idiot advisor who then advises the idiot PM that ‘the science has changed’ when it hasn’t
We didn’t panic – the powers that be seized the WuFlu to control us, body and soul. They didn’t panic. They had been preparing this in collusion with the Gates/Soros/NWO gang from the start.
Damn right.. I’m sick of all excuses given for these arseholes.. they didn’t panic.. what they are doing is following a script laid out from them by a tiny minority who are the real power on this planet..
Davos
/thread
Lockdowns are based upon assuming that social distancing will have an effect. An that assumption is based uponsolely a high school project of a14 year old, rediscovered and then abused by 2 Bush admin neocons for their strategic purposes. Even the MSM admits that. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distancing-coronavirus.html
Therefore, their devastating results and boths utter inefficiency and total failure should not be a surprise to anyone.
Nor that those who advocated and implemented them are doubling down on them and their failure instead of abandoning them.
Mass internment is based on exercising the power of Davos over the proles.
Once you’ve accepted the position that your ability to survive is conditional on permission from the State, you will never dare to rebel against it.
From memory there were a total of 8-9 studies published on social distancing, pre March 2020. All bar 2 found no evidence that they worked and those 2 were sketchy at best.
“abused” seriously understates the mendacity of those who misrepresented the schoolgirl’s project.
When read, the paper written by her father and others based on her project did NOT advocate full lockdown, only confinement of children who were considered o be transmission vectors for the purpose of the model. ALL other persons were deemed to go about their business as normal, without any restrictions.
Properly read, the paper is more in line with the much maligned concept of Focused Protection than Lockdown!
Here is the paper, read it and decide for yourself:
Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza
Robert J. Glass*, Laura M. Glass†, Walter E. Beyeler*, and H. Jason Min*
Author affiliations: *Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA; †Albuquerque Public High School, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/11/06-0255_article
Did Italy not ask China for advice, who then sent over a team of advisors?
China exerted massive pressure for lockdown in Italy.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-covid-lockdown-propaganda
It has to be emphasised that Italy and especially Lombardy is the primary Chinese Belt and Road terminus in Europe.
There were plane loads of Italians working in China and plane loads of Chinese working in Lombardy, flying back and forth in January – the period around New Year and Chinese New Year- including the time when internal travel in China had been banned.
Remember the Mayor of Milan “Go and hug a Chinaman!”
I remain unconvinced that anything associated with Ferguson could be thus described.
I’m sure he’s very good at theoretical physics, and probably pretty decent at computer modelling. His ability to determine the correct assumptions to feed into those models is another matter, and when he starts making pronouncements on what ‘needs’ to be done politically, people need to understand that he’s going far beyond what he’s qualified to be considered ‘The Science’ in.
He also neglects a key process of modelling – namely, feedback from reality. That’s not expertise.
He’s useless at modelling. His code, in the words of a modelling professional ‘resembles a bowl of angel hair pasta’. It gave differing results when run on different machines. He tried endless ‘patches’ without understand the effect they would have on the rest of the program.
Most significant of all. He’s never been right. Not once.
The suffering of tens of thousands of farm animals, and the farmers who lost everything thanks to his ‘modelling’ should never be forgotten or forgiven. His lack of self-awareness and conscience is shocking. Why anybody still listens to him is the mystery.
Judging by the forensic dissection of his programming by an early LS contributor, his computer modelling skills can best be described as non existent. How exactly did anyone give credence to his forecasts – and still do?
If we can trace this disastrous policy decision to his faulty modelling can we now arrest him for monumental fraud and sue imperial for damages as a start.
We should have done that when his X-box prognostications (and gormless and malignant politicians) led to the cull of millions of healthy livestock in the foot and mouth “crisis”.
It’s a wonder that Ferguson didn’t propose the same treatment for the proles this time.
Perhaps he did, but Boris/ the NHS had run out of syringes and cyanide, as well as gloves, surgical gowns and masks, swabs and all the rest.
“Ferguson” and “good at computer modelling” = oxymoron; he has patently not got close to reality for two decades. He is a “small” person drunk with the power of being able to
scareinfluence gullible – or should that be jointly culpable – politicians.I see my damning with faint praise has drawn some comment – essentially that there was not enough damning and too much praise. That’s fair, though I thought “probably pretty decent” was faint indeed for somebody being held up as the ultimate authority.
The’ science’ was handed down in the form of a madman’s scribblings on a white board in the Pig Dictators office
(The ‘science’ was then validated by a hysterical woman running into the room and screaming ‘we are all fucked’)
British science and innovation at it’s very best
It has been a good job that this country has locked down every winter over the past decades otherwise the flu epidemics wouldn’t have gone away each spring.
You mean ‘pre-Covid science and post-Covid mumbo-jumbo’.
Err China?
Socialism always ends up an authoritarian regime, socialism is a middle-class liberal endeavour, the simple fact is lockdown was a middle class liberal idea, to protect middle-class liberals & guess who will pay the price for lockdowns consequences.
That’s right the working class, those who either continued working to serve the middle-class liberals or those that suffered most, locked in their single rooms, tiny flats or pokey houses.
And what about those middle-class values of inclusivity & equality, until it comes to bodily autonomy & vaccine passports, even then schizophrenic liberal’s hypocrisy can be seen for what it is communism.
Where does identity politics come from? Middle-class liberals. So my conclusion is middle-class liberals are the problem. It is & always has been about class, don’t let the liberal middle-class convince you otherwise!
Global communism is a middle-class liberal, wet dream & a working-class nightmare, just look at climate change mitigation measures, they’ve hardly started implementing them & its killing & impoverishing the working class further.
The future is technocratic pseudo corporate communist, guess who benefits most from that?
Middle-Class Liberals!
We must not kill off the working class, I need them to bring me things during future lockdowns
Had a bit of a political rant there, apologies. Good news, after weeks of intensive research, I found the science behind the covid pandemic.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072572/
That was real event TV when I was a kid!
I get some of what you said above, but I think the real reason for the Wuhan lockdown, was a panicked CCP chest puffing and showing the rest of the world they were in control. Something only an authoritarian regime would do.
The complete original ‘Survivors’ series is available on YouTube. The girl, Jenny, in the opening scene is Lucy Fleming, niece or Ian Fleming.
China is the product, not the originator.
This disaster came from green ideology, which originated in Germany before the Weimar Republic.
— unplanned reply —
Green ideology originated in the late 1960s/ early 1970s. While the original Green party was (as far as I know) formed in the FRG, they were most likely just imitating similar developments in the USA as that’s all what they’ve been doing ever since: Whatever the US wokesters throw up onto the floor, the German Greens greedily & speedily lick up.
I’m still very much unconvinced China ever locked anything down. Just encouraged the rest of the world to do so, which admittedly wasn’t very difficult.
They certainly built a lockdown ‘set’ in Wuhan to provide the optics.
Complete with people dropping down dead on the street as if they’d been shot through the head. From a respiratory virus.
Me too. I’ve been living in China in the past (although a few months only) and I doubt the Chinese goverment has the enforcement apparatus for doing something like this, considering that this would have to cover densely packed masses in sprawling cities no one who hasn’t actually seen this has an idea of.
The normal street level traffic in Hong Kong after working hours is equivalent to a densely packed UK night club, just without all the drunk dickheads trying to be in the way of everybody else in order to impress the girls, as the inhabitants prefer getting their own stuff done over preventing others from doing the same.
You are so right. The original Labour party, a political home for the real working class, soon after its inception was hi-jacked by middle-class liberals who took over and implemented their own agenda. They never stopped regarding working people – those who labour with their hands and really run the country – as ‘the Great Unwashed’. They used to think it was a waste of money to put baths in council houses because they would just ‘use them to keep the coal in’. Not much has changed except that, like scum, middle-class liberals have risen to the top, from where they continue to p*** down on us from a great height.
I finally got around to reading ( speed read ) The Great Reset last night, by a certain Mr Schwab. God it’s a borefest full of fluff and utopian aspiration. One surprise though, were his views on lockdowns. Some of it could have been commentary written on these pages. Even he can’t defend them.
But what was most bizarre, he prefaced most of these arguments by normalising lockdowns using very inaccurate historical examples. It was as though he’d set out to tell the world how much he was against these measures, but got the hook in early that they were inevitable and entirely normal.
I suppose that’s because they want us to hate lockdowns and reject them in favour of nice efficient vaccines and vaccine health status QR codes. They were the reaction and vaccines were the solution.
There is & never was any science in lockdowns, it was politics period.
It came from more than a century of mediaeval philosophy.
Kindly don’t insult medieval philosophy. Or before you do,
equip yourself by studying it. I suggest you start with Boethius.
Sod off. Mediaeval philosophy was revived by Kant, Hegel, Marx and company.
A communist or fascist is necessarily a mediaevalist and green ideology is mediaeval.
If you read ‘Ominous Parallels’ by Leonard Peikoff, you can see how such philosophy took hold in Germany and, then, in the rest of the world.
“Lockdown” is where middle class people stay at home and working class people bring them things.
Unsurprisingly, lots of middle class people supported it, and still do.
The redoubtable Jeffrey Tucker covers the 2006 origins of lockdown theory (related to Bush’s ghastly Patriot Act) in detail in his book “Liberty or Lockdown.”
I don’t have the book to hand, but essentially a 14 year old girl called Laura Glass wrote a school science project promoting the idea, her influential father touted it around, and Ferguson had his sticky fingers on it even back then.
The great Donald Henderson (who loathed Ferguson) was aghast at the idea and dismissed it out of hand, saying: “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”
Sorry I see a couple of others have already provided the details.
On 6th March Johnson met with World Health Organisation, CEPI, and B&M Gates Foundation. Perhaps this has something to do with where lockdowns came from.
He met Gates again yesterday.
Incoming…
Well, Noah, I’ve criticized you for being too kind to Narrative Nonsense at times. So its only fair to compliment you on starting to get to grips with one important aspect of the shit-show – namely, a more forensic examination of what might be called ”The Great Reversal’.
This turn-around on almost all aspects of disease management, on the basis of nil evidence, is a key feature of the detailed history of the last two years – casting rationalists as ‘conspiracy theorists’.
There’s a PhD thesis in the full examination of this piece of history.
Science? Not seen much of that lately, i’ve noticed an exponential increase in stupidity!
Watch a maskovist follow illogical covidian cult leader’s orders!
The post covid science isn’t science. It’s political theatre.
There is no post-Covid science in the traditional sense. This is what happened with the climate change narrative. Once there was normal science, and then ‘post-normal’ science, which is not science as we know it. Post-normal science was dreamed up by the Marxist-leaning Jerome Ravetz decades ago and has infected everything where science is now used as a political tool.
Eva Kunseler in Towards a new paradigm of Science in scientific policy advising helps with understanding:
We are continually (and rightly) complaining that the Covid narratives are unscientific nonsense. Indeed they are when judged by normal science.
Mike Hulme (founding director of the Tyndall Centre, and onetime Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia (UEA), who prepared climate scenarios and reports for the UK Government, the European Commission, UNEP, UNDP, WWF-International and the IPCC) espoused post-normal science and was at least candid about it furthering his personal socialist agenda:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58965650 delta+ variant conveniently appears
Definition: The “SCIENCE”: Social Consensus Ignoring Empirical Non-Conforming Evidence
Good points. I especially like the google search data and media usage. Because at the end of the day, it was all about panic. And politicians, being risk averse, will always flow with the desires of the panicked.
The fact we a) trusted any data out of China and b) trusted any models from a man who has never been within a factor of 10 in any of his 20 years of previous modeling is what is unbelievable. We now know Cummings and his henchmen were pushing lockdown and had Boris’ ear. If only our PM had done a simple search on his phone, “How often has Neil Ferguson been right” he might have told Cummings and Co to hit the road (to check their eyesight of course). To quote Agent K from Men in Black, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky and dangerous.”
That pretty much is the science behind lockdown.
Isn’t the slogan “Follow The Science” the most infantilizing no-brainer of an assertion you’ve ever heard?
“Oh really, you’re following the science? I thought science was just for fun! Never did I imagine you’d actually have to use it to inform pandemic management policy…”
It’s like asking an author what they write, to which they reply “books”. (no way!)
“We will henceforth mandate that everybody holds their breath when in a public place”.
“Why?”
“Because we’re following the science.”
“But won’t people suffocate?”
“The Science says that that is a small price to pay for mitigating the spread of a virus.”
“What happens if someone breathes in, say, a supermarket”?
“They will instantly be removed from the premises and permanently barred from said supermarket.”
“But it doesn’t make any sense, people have to breathe!”
“Breathing is the principle way in which a pathogen spreads among a population, and hence must be prohibited at all times”.
“Whoever suggested that?!”
“Well, it’s The Science, you see.”
“Thanks for explaining, it makes perfect sense now.”
“…he elaborated, “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… And then Italy did it. And we realised we could”.
This still makes me angry all this time later. Since when was “getting away with it” a sound, ethical, legal and/or moral basis for implementing a policy that, it turns out, has had a catastrophic impact on the lives of millions of people? March 2020 by the looks of things
Ferguson, the man who changed the world, again and again.
“Likewise, a WHO report published mere months before the COVID-19 pandemic classified ‘quarantine of exposed individuals’ as ‘not recommended under any circumstances’. The report noted that ‘there is no obvious rationale for this measure’.”
Considering social media have aligned their censoring along WHO lines, folks should post this ‘WHO report’ out to every platform. I suspect they’ll still censor it though.
The evidence from the various US individual States policies, not to mention Sweden, clearly showed lockdowns made no difference; and arguably made things worse. Yet the world continued with these lockdowns.
The Great Barrington Declaration – which was not mentioned in the article – also urged health professionals and policy makers to consider wider public health. This aspect was widely ignored. So while lockdowns were apparently worth it for “saving just one life”; thousands of lives have been sacrificed for non treatment of other conditions.
Monkey See, Monkey Do.
There’s your science.
The core of the scientific process is to formulate an hypothesis, experiment to test it, and observe/collect & analyze the data, cycling around with a new/adjusted hypothesis where necessary. None of this was done in the pandemic response, so cannot be called ‘science’ in any shape or form. Moreover, the use of a model is to help formulate the hypothesis, not to produce the data – models are not ‘science’.
There is a problem with this link :
its decision appears to have been prompted by the WHO’s report of February 24th,
Who to contact ?
MG
March 16, 2020 was also the day that UK Gov issued their Guidance for Social Distancing for everyone in the UK where we were commanded that the over 70s and at risk groups should isolate for 12 weeks and everyone else should minimise contact, work from home, avoid pubs etc etc.
March 16, 2020 just happened to be the 169 th birthday of Martinus Beijerinck, one of the fathers of virology who is credited wit the discovery of viruses …
MG
And it was around this date that SARS COV2 was downgraded , by HMG, from a highly infectious disease to …something else.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid#status-of-covid-19
As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK.
March 16, 2020 was also the 109 th birthday of the Holocaust Nazi doctor at Auschwitz, Josef Mengele …
March 16, 2020 was also the day that UK Gov issued their Guidance for Social Distancing for everyone in the UK where we were commanded that the over 70s and at risk groups should isolate for 12 weeks and everyone else should minimise contact, work from home, avoid pubs etc etc.
March 16, 2020 just happened to be the 169 th birthday of Martinus Beijerinck, one of the fathers of virology who is credited wit the discovery of viruses …
LOCKDOWN LOGIC NUTSHELL
The chessboard islands are remote. There are two of them. They are square and are divided into one mile by one mile squares.
Homes on island A are built one home per square in the middle of each square so lockdown on this island keeps people apart and is productive but no immune systems get updated.
All people on island B live in a single block of flats on one of the squares so lockdown on this island keeps people cooped-up together and is counterproductive but immune systems get updated.
Lockdown on any other island that mixes the two dwelling models above will be a leaky lockdown that ultimately becomes counterproductive but immune systems get updated.
Anything else to say?
I’m liking the article but ‘.. decision appears to have been prompted by the WHO’s report of February 24th, which gave a glowing evaluation of…’ does not link to a WHO report of February 24 2020…