In the Christmas issue of the Spectator, Lionel Shriver has thanked her anti-lockdown allies in the media and elsewhere for helping her to “maintain my sanity and my faith in humanity”. In particular, Shriver has applauded the Daily Sceptic – and has an unbreakable habit of combing through our daily newsletter during her morning routine.
Beginning the second week of the U.K.’s original lockdown, our own Toby Young has doggedly put out a free daily newsletter, which is still the first thing I read when I get up. Lockdown Sceptics has now morphed into the more broad-based the Daily Sceptic, but under both titles the newsletter has encapsulated new scientific studies at odds with stock narratives, excerpted dissenting articles and provided a forum for isolated prisoners of quasi-police states like Australia. The bulletin has furnished hyperlinks to thousands of blogs, interviews, podcasts and essays that collectively reassure us not everyone is a robot or an idiot, and civilisation isn’t, or not completely, kaput. That newsletter is meaty enough to last through a large, strong coffee and compelling enough that some mornings the coffee gets cold.
Shriver has also heaped plenty of praise on the Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption, Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, the Spiked team, and many others.
On the Telegraph podcast Planet Normal, Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan have managed a beguiling balance of hard-hitting commentary and jocular repartee. They’ve never let up on NHS neglect of non-Covid patients and disappearing face-to-face GP appointments. Through my headphones in the kitchen, their congenial company has seen me through mounds of chopped onions, bulbs of peeled garlic and bags of individually shelled pistachios, even during the long months when asking friends over to help me eat all this stuff was against the law.
Former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption has tirelessly advanced the case that subjugating democracy to public health tyranny puts the West in a grave political danger bound to persist beyond the pandemic. Ever temperate, articulate and urbane, Sumption bears a faint resemblance to my husband, who never twigs that I mean the comparison as a big compliment.
Every week, professional curmudgeon Peter Hitchens has given grumpy, disgusted and deliciously disdainful interviews on Talkradio. He’s even appeared in legacy media, in the rare instances a discouraging word about illiberal, epidemiologically inane Government policy is allowed on mainstream shows. Hitchens’s primary shortcoming is a belligerent conviction that he’s the only person standing up to the new authoritarianism. Look around you, Peter. You may spurn the helping hand, but you have confederates.
The crew at Spiked, among them Brendan O’Neill, Fraser Myers and Tom Slater, have remorselessly produced Covid content against the grain; ditto the faux-naïf self-styled nerds at Triggernometry. True to its name, UnHerd has consistently run pieces that contest received coronavirus wisdom, and I’d particularly commend terrific recent essays by Paul Kingsnorth (‘How Fear Fuels the Vaccine Wars’) and Matthew Crawford (‘The New Public Health Despotism’). Along with many other freelancers, Ross Clark, Matt Ridley and Douglas Murray have swum against an exhausting tide of ideological uniformity.
The oncologist Karol Sikora has warned about the dire consequences of blinkered obsession with Covid for cancer patients. Epidemiologists such as Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan have put reputations on the line to interrogate ‘known facts’ in their profession. Shockers, even a handful of British politicians have stuck up for their constituencies’ civil rights, including MPs Steve Baker and Sir Desmond Swayne (“Masks are about sending a message — well I don’t like the message!”).
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Obvious innit
The virus goes home in the evening. A shower, evening meal and a good nights sleep before out and about the next day
Am I the only one who knew this?
It seems people have been standing up at home, when they should have been sitting down.
“In other words, the shit in the timing of night curfew had – at best – a marginal impact on mobility.“
Might want to correct that typo…
Interesting piece, thanks, anyway.
Thanks.
I think it was a Freudian correction
“ This finding suggests that governments should focus on protecting care homes and hospitals, rather than trying to control the epidemic by tweaking people’s shopping habits.”
Yes, IF governments wanted to control the epidemic. But their aim is to control people’s minds. So tweaking shopping habits is a spot-on strategy. Keep it random, keep it complicated and keep the fear.
“They’ve got the F.E.A.R.”
“As more people were present simultaneously in high-risk places such as supermarkets, the early curfew backfired”.
“Backfired” is a very generous interpretation considering all the other barrage of lies we get.
Well, whodathunkit!
People need to realise that the most important factor in infection is the acquisition of a sufficiently high viral load to beat your body defences. Casual, transient contact does not transmit sufficient to be dangerous to all but the weakest immune system, lack of symptons means that even with the virus they are not shedding large quantities of virus. The places where you run a risk are where you spend a long period in contact with others – homes, care homes and hospitals.
Perfect. I concur, transmission was of minor importance out in the ambulatory community. All fear & fraud.
Finally, a scientific study shows us how to get the BBC to cover anti-lockdown protests.
Attack the BBC reporter who’s there to report on any violence. Then he can do his job AND make it all about him. Added bonus – you’ll get “Boris” and “what does her prettiness have to do with it, you sexist oaf” Patel involved too. Sadly, there’ll still be no reporting of the actual anti-lockdown protest as such.
All you get is the message that anti-lockdown protestors are violent, nasty people, based on the actions of a handful who are not even verified as true supporters and may have been deliberately place by opponents to discredit the protest.
PS Who believes this man had gone out to film it. Where is the film crew and sound people. The only footage I saw was from a phone, maybe, just maybe, held by another agent provocateur.
This is just evil
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-covid-vaccines-safety-strong-immunity.html
A group of scientists led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian reported that the Moderna mRNA vaccine and a protein-based vaccine candidate elicited durable neutralizing antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 in pre-clinical research. There were no adverse effects.
The research, published June 15 in Science Immunology, suggests that vaccines for young children are likely important, safe tools to curtail the pandemic.
Evil indeed.
Politicians around the world are trying all methods to control people (not covid), regardless of how ridiculous they are.
The control is required so as to ensure that the genocide runs smoothly.
“Ooh! A passport! Are we going somewhere?”
“Don’t worry about your washbag. We’ve everything you’re going to need”
Pretty obvious. And it’s pretty obvious that this happened when we shut down “non essential” retail here in the UK. All those shops that had a wide range of products became very busy – I’m thinking here of The Range, which I popped into to get some PVA glue, it was rammed. They stayed open because they sold “essential” items too – food and DIY – but most people were just there for something to do.
If smaller craft, book, clothing shops had been open people would have been more spread out, leading to less transmission.
6pm curfew? Who’d have thought the Greeks would make our bunch look like libertarians?
When will the penny drop for governments all over the world, that lockdowns don’t work? When will they look at the evidence, sorry, DATA, from Texas, Florida, South Dakota, etc. proving the point? Or maybe they DO know, but keep using futile tactics to keep us oppressed?