Professor Mark Woolhouse, an expert on infectious diseases at Edinburgh University, has a new book out, The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir, in which he blasts lockdowns as morally wrong and highly damaging. He writes:
We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt. All this to protect the NHS from a disease that is a far, far greater threat to the elderly, frail and infirm than to the young and healthy.
The Observer has run a feature on the book this morning.
There was a distinctive moment, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, that neatly encapsulated the mistakes and confusion of Britain’s early efforts to tackle the disease, says Mark Woolhouse. At a No 10 briefing in March 2020, cabinet minister Michael Gove warned the virus did not discriminate. “Everyone is at risk,” he announced.
And nothing could be further from the truth, argues Professor Woolhouse, an expert on infectious diseases at Edinburgh University. “I am afraid Gove’s statement was simply not true,” he says. “In fact, this is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15.”
And it was this failure to understand the wide variations in individual responses to COVID-19 that led to Britain’s flawed responses to the disease’s appearance, he argues – errors that included the imposition of a long-lasting, national lockdown. This is a strategy that Woolhouse – one of the country’s leading epidemiologists – describes as morally wrong and highly damaging in his forthcoming book, The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir. …
“We were mesmerised by the once-in-a-century scale of the emergency and succeeded only in making a crisis even worse. In short, we panicked. This was an epidemic crying out for a precision public health approach and it got the opposite.”
Prof Woolhouse argues that largely voluntary behaviour changes, as in Sweden, would have been sufficient to limit the impact. But we instead went for an enforced lockdown, in part because because modern technology made it possible.
However, Prof Woolhouse criticises the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing it “would have led to an epidemic far larger than the one we eventually experienced in 2020”, and that it also “lacked a convincing plan for adequately protecting the more vulnerable members of society, the elderly and those who are immuno-compromised”.
Unfortunately, he still supports attempting to suppress the virus using masks, testing and other measures intended to make interactions ‘safe’. And while he is emphatic in opposing lockdowns – “Lockdowns aren’t a public health policy. They signify a failure of public health policy” – he is a proponent of responding to the next variant with a pre-prepared “sliding scale of interventions and trigger points for implementing them”.
In other words, he still supports ongoing extreme public health interventions that seriously impede people’s ability to live normally, run businesses, access healthcare and so on, he just doesn’t call them ‘lockdowns’. Presumably he is unfamiliar with the studies that show such interventions do little or nothing to suppress the virus.
Still, allies on some points aren’t always allies on others, and it’s good to have another eminent voice decrying lockdowns as “mad”, and even getting sympathetic coverage in the Observer. A sign of things to come, perhaps.
Worth reading in full.
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This was never about a virus!
It was never about the science either.
They got the memo too early!
Lol, if you don’t laugh at this…
Update: I soon descended into sobs.
It’s their country – let them have their own circus.
I expect the uptake is far higher than 10% in the major cities and I don’t think people are going to be checking out in the countryside. its kenya’s guardian reading class having a moral panic
That was my guess too, it will be the urban elite who have taken the vax.
Why should they care about the rural poor not having access to their bars, shops and restaurants?
Rather similar to the Soviet Nomenclatura having exclusive use of such places.
“Kill The Poor” as Jello Biafra would put it.
Might be a problem for their houseboys, cleaners, nannys and other domestic servants.
Might be a problem for their houseboys, cleaners, nannys and other domestic servants.
That’ll be a bonus to the NPD grauniad-reading classes.
Coherent with the general global strategy. Impose the new order on the gentry and the plebs will eventually follow.
At this point the well to do, urbanites are the only ones they care about. For now.
They’ve set up a good system of capture with the vax for travel rules.
Orwell foresaw this quite well in 1984. The regime cared mostly about the upper.echelons. The lower classes were.left to themselves.
That’s what the Kenya thing is about.
Going to be some very empty bars.
Winter surge, in Kenya, in December ???
My thoughts exactly.
Nairobi average temperatures in November and December are 19 – 20 degrees Celsius.
In Africa It’s just a little more obviously a shakedown exercise than about health.
Shit for brains, typical of them!
No longer news and no longer surprising.
Me thinks is about international donors to public health than any attempt to handle their epidemic. He who writes the checks writes the rules. Given a) the young age of the population b) expose to other viruses c) limited benefit in stopping infections from vaccine (trending to nil over time) and d) the larger issues facing Kenya, this rule makes about as much sense as requiring everyone to have their wisdom teeth pulled before entering. I’m not conspiracy theorist but have seen and read of international donors demanding odd thing of nations in return for grants in the best of times.
So, any intrepid investigative journalist want to tackle this? Because the answers could be very illuminating.
Jabbing at risk populations made sense. Jabbing everyone didn’t make sense when we still had high hopes for the vaccine. I wonder if Kenya will be required to jab it’s 5 year olds too?
I sure the Kenyans have the infrastructure in place to police this. Thought not, none story.
Africa skipped/leapfrogged land lines so there are a lot of internet connected mobile phones.
Again, a biased intro taking the official narrative as truth.
Kenya catches up with Agenda 30. Let the backhanders begin.
Didn’t Nigeria introduce a similar policy months ago, with an even lower uptake? Any news how that has worked out for them?
Sturgeon’s 70-page dossier finds no evidence for vaccine passports
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sturgeon-s-70-page-dossier-finds-no-evidence-for-vaccine-passports
Send to your MP, MSP or MS: https://www.writetothem.com/
Headline should read, ‘African nation bows to NGO’ s financial incentives…again’.
NGO colonialism.
Has Gates been talking to them recently?
Roll on the Kenyan riots.
UNcle Bill’s altruism is well understood in Africa….
https://lichtnahrung2015.wordpress.com/2020/09/06/un-forced-tothat-admit-that-gates-funded-vaccine-is-causing-polio-outbreak-in-africa/
Our healthcare system is about to experience a tsunami! Potential side effects of jabs include chronic inflammation, because the vaccine continuously stimulates the immune system to produce antibodies. Other concerns include the possible integration of plasmid DNA into the body’s host genome, resulting in mutations, problems with DNA replication, triggering of autoimmune responses, and activation of cancer-causing genes. Alternative COVID cures EXIST. Ivermectin is one of them. While Ivermectin is very effective curing COVID symptoms, it has also been shown to eliminate certain cancers. Do not get the poison jab. Get your Ivermectin today while you still can! https://ivmpharmacy.com
That’s right, play the game, you wouldn’t want to end up like that Tanzanian president, would you?
Well done Kenya. I should like to see how this works out. Thankfully it’s a warm country and so no one will be left out in the cold so to speak.
That reminds a little bit of “cargo cults” behavior… Just jab enough arms and the cargo will come. After all that’s what all the great white people are doing.
We all know countries are being paid a lot of money to do as they are told.
How did Kenya get the vaccine? Where did they pull the dollars from?