I’ve written a comment piece for Mail+, praising the Prime Minister for refusing to give in to the gloomsters and doomsters. Here is an extract:
I think he’s been muddling through as best he can, driven by a combination of Machiavellian calculation and a sense of what’s in the public interest, like most national leaders.
At the beginning of the pandemic, that meant school closures, shuttered businesses and stay-at-home orders. But 21 months later, in the midst of a fifth wave, the political and economic calculus has changed.
To begin with, we now have a keener sense of the cost of lockdowns. I’m not just talking about the economic toll – £400 billion and climbing, as well as the collapse of thousands of shops, pubs and restaurants – but the social impact, particularly on the most vulnerable. Tens of thousands of cancer patients may die unnecessarily as a result of delayed treatment, the country is facing an unprecedented mental health crisis and education experts tell us it will take two years for children to catch up on the schooling they’ve missed.
Just as importantly, it has become clear that the non-pharmaceutical interventions favoured by governments around the world only have a modest effect on the life cycle of each viral outbreak, if any. The various waves triggered by new variants seem to rise and fall according to the same pattern, regardless of the severity of the restrictions imposed. They are self-limiting and eventually burn out of their own accord.
The starkest illustration of this fact is Sweden, which didn’t impose any lockdowns in 2020 and experienced an excess death rate below the European average. But it’s also true of US states such as Florida and Texas, where Republican governors resisted calls to follow the lead of Democratic governors in states such as California and New York, with their draconian shutdowns.
If you throw in the mass vaccination programmes, as well as the fact that Omicron appears to be milder than previous variants, the cost-benefit analysis has fundamentally changed.
Needless to say, most political leaders have doggedly stuck to the original playbook, responding to this wave as they have to every other, including Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, Mark Drakeford in Wales and Paul Givan in Northern Ireland.
That has made it particularly difficult for Boris to resist the huge pressure he’s been under from his scientific advisers and their outriders in the media to impose another raft of restrictions.
But resist he has.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Patrick O’Brien in the Spectator thinks Boris’s decision not to impose any more restrictions could be the start of a comeback in the polls in 2022.
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So when the Fascist pigs want to terrify their own people, each scariant is deadlier than the last, including the Kentiscariant. But when Macron wants to score a point against Britain (how very novel for a French leader!), our Fascists suddenly find that the Kentiscariant is a tame lapdog.
Well well.
I am not giving Macron a ‘pass’ here, he should have resisted the enormous pressure from his ‘experts’ that sometimes make SAGE look like poodles. But in his speech he was careful not to phrase reference to the Kent ‘variant’ as if it was a ‘britsh/brexit’ issue, which is how most of the UK MSM and this article are painting it. This doesn’t help anyone.
I agree that the almost linear rise in ‘cases’ is more a function of increase tests than anything else, but its also reflected in numbers of hospitalisations and ICU admissions, again in a linear increase.
This is highly unusual behaviour for a virus. There is no explanation I have seen for this.
I suspect some of the numbers are very suspect, and are part of an attempt to convince at least part of the 50% of the French population that are saying no to vaccination.
If people will need a booster jab in September that’s billions more in profit for big pharma and another reason to reintroduce restrictions if there is a seasonal rise in cases before everyone has their booster. I wonder who is lobbying who to push the largely nonexistant dangers of all these variants.
Since viruses continously mutate, and presumably have done for hundreds of millions of years it seems obvious that the immune system would evolve to be able to fight variants of a virus as well as the strain that is currently circulating. Any organism that was immune against new variants and not just the old one would have a competative advantage and be more likely to pass on the genes for developing this immunity. This is another reason why it would’ve been better to allow the virus to spread among people at low risk of serious illness. Natural herd immunity is likely to be better than vaccine induced immunity. Sadly this is one more basic principle of biology/virology that the “experts” seem to have ignored, for reasons only they can know.
Not yet.
A few months ago someone leaked the contract. They can choose to make a profit from July, if I recall correctly
It depends on who gets to call the end of the emergency at which point
1. AstraZeneca can start charging market rates.
2. Authorisation for use under ’emegency’ provisions must surely be called into question ?
… which gives the rationale for continually upping the ante in terms of new Scary Fairies, and continuing the suppression of possible cheap prophylactics like Ivermectin.
They are experimenting on millions of subjects for free, whilst getting lots of coverage, that’s a nice win-win
Your link to the PHE study is hilariously, embarrassingly wrong.
It is actually the link to a BMJ study (March 10) concluding that the Kent variant is indeed much more deadly.
Please provide the correct link.
Yes – even in the report written by the “Swiss Doctor” there is only a link to an article in the Daily Telegraph. The study seems not to have been published (or peer reviewed) yet, and its existence is only known due to a press conference at 10 Downing Street.
There could be an easy explanation for increased hospitalization rate not accompanied by higher mortality rate. The propensity to admit could have been increased compared to the first wave ie less sick cases admitted. The health care sytem did not collapse in the first wave might increase “overhospitalization” ie doctors admit more,knowing it would have less effect on the system. Really the excess mortality and the the true C-19 mortality is the only way to estimate if a variant really is more dangerous.
The Swizz doctor is a bit leaning to van den Bosche scenario saying if neutral antbodies are affected as above could be problematic although they allude to something called T-cells immunity. But another study published a few days ago,again showed that T cells have a broad immunity incl. against variant.
One would bet that natural acquired immunity ,is the most effective T cells response as known by everybody pre 2020 and that an artificial immunity like vaccine can never come up to that level. The article above is down here
https://academic.oup.com/ofid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ofid/ofab143/6189113#.YGTXD75sdDQ.twitter
CD8+ T cell responses in COVID-19 convalescent individuals target conserved epitopes from multiple prominent SARS-CoV-2 circulating variants
This study examined whether CD8+ T-cell responses from COVID-19 convalescent individuals (n=30) potentially maintain recognition of the major SARS-CoV-2 variants suggesting that virtually all anti-SARS-CoV-2 CD8+ T-cell responses should recognize these newly described variants.