The alarmist claims of Neil Ferguson and his modelling team at Imperial College have fuelled vaccine scepticism and led to needless lockdowns being imposed all over Europe, according to several leading scientists. The Telegraph‘s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has more.
The Covid modellers at Imperial College have begun to back down. About time too. Over the past few weeks, they have made extreme claims about the omicron variant that cannot be fully justified by fundamental science, let alone by clinical observation.
Academic etiquette restrains direct criticism, but immunologists say privately that Professor Neil Ferguson and his team breached a cardinal rule by inferring rates of hospitalisation, severe disease, and death from waning antibodies, and by extrapolating from infections that break through the first line of vaccine defence.
The rest are entitled to question whether they can legitimately do this. And we may certainly question whether they should be putting out terrifying claims of up to 5,000 deaths a day based on antibody counts.
“It is bad science and I think they’re being irresponsible. They have a duty to reflect the true risks but this is just headline grabbing,” said Dr Clive Dix, former chairman of the UK Vaccine Task Force.
Needless to say, these headlines have spread as fast as omicron itself. Britain is the Covid laboratory of the developed world, and what Imperial says right now has global resonance. Its dire warnings are contributing to some European countries imposing full or partial Christmas lockdowns.
Governments are so alarmed by the possibility that healthcare systems might collapse under pressure that they have neglected the opposite risk – and much more probable outcome – that omicron will largely bounce off a population where almost everybody has cell immunity from vaccines or past infection, and in the case of Britain where most vulnerable people have been triple jabbed for good measure.
“To talk of 5,000 deaths a day is a very high number. It is risky to push apocalyptic scenarios that are highly unlikely to happen,” said Professor Francois Balloux, Director of the UCL Genetics Institute.
“What I am more worried about is a loss of trust in governments and public institutions for crying wolf. The mood is changing everywhere.”
Worth reading in full.
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Of course it is – the bat-shit crazy Net Zero requires a complete end to non-seasonal food.,
The intentions behind food supply disruption are entirely at odds with even the murderous intent of the WEF. If people are starving in this world, and they are, then removing appropriate land from food production is not just immoral it is a Crime against Humanity.
However, the WEF are determined on population reduction so the removal of productive land actually matches their real goals. As usual net zero is just the cover.
As in Australia this has occurred under years of “conservative” government.
And the other side is worse.
And people keep voting for it.
It really feels sometimes we’re surrounded by the living dead!
Spot on.
Zombies follow zombie “science” in the pursuit of Big Zombie Leaders’ profits.
All happily shuffling towards you, thirsting for brains…
Sadly there appears to be no ceiling on stupidity. A very malign and pernicious stupidity.
You get what you deserve if you allow the LibLabConSNP Party to continue to suppress us. The Heritage Party has an interesting set of policies that would change things around somewhat.
The utterly incompetent never-grew-up idiots pretending to be our government need a good clearout.
If ever there was a policy that could be described as “All pain, no gain”, it is NET ZERO. The public were never consulted on this horrendously expensive pretend to save the planet garbage, and they were never consulted because if they knew was instore for them they would tell government to go take a hike. Not one single MP of any major party asked any question as to the cost/ benefit of this eco socialist crap. It was simply waved through. Only a few countries are forcing themselves in law to indulge in this self-flagellation at astronomical cost, and the impoverishment of it’s citizens, and ofcourse the UK has to be one of them. Always having to be “World Leaders” in every absurdity going to get a little gold star on it’s lapel from the world government people at the UN and WEF. There are 22 million gas boilers in the UK providing us with the best heating system we ever had, and our own government is forcing us in law to get rid of them and replace them with expensive heat pumps that couldn’t heat a pancake. Or Hydrogen, which isn’t even a fuel and has to be manufactured at huge cost. How have we got to a situation where government pander to the UN and deceive the people who vote for them? A biased mainstream media that have simply become climate activists certainly doesn’t help. Wake up people before all your freedoms are GONE.
These pampered cake brained imbeciles need to be strapped to a chair with their eyes wired open in front of both seasons of Clarkson’s Farm, whilst being periodically waterboarded.
Someone I was at school with became one of the managers of the anti-terrorism department at DEFRA responsible for making sure our reservoirs weren’t being poisoned. This guy could struggle to run a bath and was far more interested in making sure everyone knew he was gay. This is what we’re dealing with.
If you read the detail of Blackett article, you realise it is very little to do with net zero (It appears that the link to net zero is there so as to follow The Telegraph party line). It may be that net zero measures will limit our ability to produce food in the future. But no way do they account for the current shortages which are caused primarily by reduced imports. Solar panels occupy less than 0.1% of UK land and rewilding projects have little to do with net-zero.
The essence of the article is further down.
We need to put our better land back into vegetables and fruit orchards, by getting our farmers off the hamster wheel of growing cereals to pump into cattle, pigs and poultry, with relatively inefficient conversion rates from grain to meat. We need to invest in new technologies such as insect farming to provide the feedstocks for pigs and poultry, and nudge consumer demand towards grass-fed meat and milk.
And we need to stop outsourcing our glasshouse vegetable production to the Spanish and the Dutch by building our own. But this shift in land use will not happen without incentives. And farmers, whose confidence in the Government’s agricultural policy has plummeted, need to feel more confident that they will be supported before they invest.
I think most of the “green blob” would agree with this.
The green blob would disagree if it needs fertilizers and petro-chemicals to operate the machinery.- we are dealing with insane people.
i have never understood these supply chain disruptions. In whose interest is it to reduce imports? If there is the demand, it makes zero sense.
if cargo flights carrying fresh food are restricted due to local policies on to net zero, this could be a reason.
Supply chain disruption is another useful catch-all to blame the usual suspects, and it only seemed to emerge at the start of the plandemic. Coincidence?
It’s all about controlling the plebs – throiugh starvation, if required.
I wonder where that photo of empty shelves came from? I bet not recently. That aside, I have been to two supermarkets today whose shelves are heaving with out of season veg from all around the world. I live rurally, so I do wonder if this is more of a metropolitan shortage and correspondents in, say, Islington, unable to get their vine ripened multi coloured tomatoes, automatically assume its the whole country having problems.
When I was a child in the 50s and 60s, I seem to remember that the average greengrocer (a rare breed now) sold only seasonal veg. There might have been some early salad stuff from Guernsey, but I always recall the excitement of seeing the strawberries come in in June in their wooden punnets, and they had flavour too. I am not a green nutter, but there is nothing wrong with just having local seasonal produce. Nearly all out of season stuff is forced and tasteless anyway.
Isn’t there also a fertiliser shortage because… Russia/Ukraine sanctions?
Net Zero defines fertiliser as no different to Zyklon B.