Now that Covid restrictions are being rolled back, various commentators are declaring victory over the miserable virus. Lockdowns, we are told, worked. Only a fool could argue otherwise.
Devi Sridhar, the Chair of Global Public Health at Edinburgh University, who was formerly an exponent of the Zero Covid strategy of completely eradicating the virus, has recently announced in the Guardian that “delaying and preventing infection as much as possible through this pandemic was a worthwhile strategy. In early 2020, there were few treatments, limited testing and no vaccines. The costs of those lockdowns were big, but the effort to buy time paid off”.
At the other end of the political spectrum, Tom Harwood of GB News says much the same. Lockdown sceptics, he writes in CapX, are “bizarrely claiming victory now that restrictions are coming to an end”. The sceptics, Harwood asserts, ignore the success of vaccines. “There is a blindingly obvious distinction between the need for non-pharmaceutical interventions amongst a non-immune population, verses [sic] one with incredibly high levels of immunity.” He points to a lower death toll from the Omicron variant which appeared after the “stupendously successful vaccine rollout”. In conclusion, Harwood writes that to “deny lockdowns worked to reduce spread is to deny logic”.
Let’s examine the logic. If lockdowns bought time for the rollout of vaccines, then we would expect fewer Covid deaths in places that locked down early and fast. That is the case in Australia and New Zealand, which early in the pandemic sealed their borders against the virus. But the trouble with this policy, as our Antipodean friends are discovering, is the difficulty of exiting. Their policy of national self-isolation has lasted nearly two years, and continues in large measure even after most of their population has been vaccinated.
By contrast, in Europe there is no evidence that lockdowns significantly reduced Covid deaths. Sweden, which never locked down, has the same number of deaths per million as Austria, which did (see chart below). It’s true that Swedish deaths ran higher somewhat earlier than Austria, but this ‘bought-time’ doesn’t appear to have changed the final tally.
The evidence from the United States points to a similar conclusion: the Covid death rate (as a share of the population) in Florida, which largely avoided lockdowns, is slightly below the U.S. national average and far below that of New York, which had (and continues to impose) relatively tough restrictions.
It’s true that mass vaccination has reduced the risk of hospitalisation and death from Covid. But lockdown exponents imply that vaccines alone are responsible for the decline in the infection fatality rate. The evidence from South Africa, whose vaccination rate is around a quarter of the European average (49 doses per 100 people versus 180, or 27%), suggests otherwise.
It appears that either Covid has evolved to become less virulent, as the South African doctors suggested back in December, or South Africa’s population has built up strong natural immunity from prior infection – a possibility overlooked by most commentators. It seems likely that both factors have played a role in reducing the virulence of the disease. Even if lockdowns had succeeded in reducing Covid deaths until the vaccine rollout that wouldn’t necessarily justify their imposition. From the start, lockdown sceptics were concerned about the collateral damage caused by closing down the economy, shuttering schools, neglecting conventional health care and forcing people to isolate in their homes for months on end. They railed in vain against the cruelty of lockdowns: mothers giving birth alone, old people dying alone or left for months without visitors in nursing homes, the damage to children’s education, funerals unattended, small businesses crushed and so forth. Finally, the public appears to waking up to these cruelties. Hence, the fury at the hypocrisy of Downing Street officials who imposed harsh rules for the nation which they didn’t scrupulously follow themselves.
Then there are lockdown’s immense financial costs. At the time, these could be ignored since governments financed them with interest-free loans from central banks. But all that money-printing is now fuelling inflation that will lead to further immiseration in the coming years. The sceptics argued that lockdowns were never subject to a proper cost-benefit analysis which took social and economic costs into account. That remains the case. Thus, not only has there been no ‘victory’ in the war on Covid – on the contrary, the highly contagious Omicron variant appears to be overcoming all attempts to constrain it – but the argument over lockdowns has yet to be decisively won by either side, so that lockdowns are either accepted as a tool of sound public health policy or roundly condemned as a colossal mistake. The sceptics’ work continues.
Edward Chancellor is a financial journalist and the author of Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation (1998).
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There was no real argument. You had a whole population of frightened people versus simply an assemblage of human beings who used their brains. You could’ve discerned such truths from the start. Lets not pretend that this situation was more remote from us than it actually was.
Deliberately frightened – by governments and MSM. Without that there would have been no public support for the measures.
Really?
I’m sceptical
I think there was a period in the middle of 2021 when this was the case.
I’ve not done the calculations, but there are suggestions that the increased case loads that appear to have resulted from the mass vaccination programme have resulted in a net increase in deaths in the latter half of 2021, compared with if we’d only vaccinated the most very vulnerable.
We now appear to be entering the next stage of this mess, with negative vaccine protection against death starting to appear. We also seem to be levelling off at a very high number of cases per day. It is starting to look rather worrying (but not very worrying, at least not yet).
And do we have any news on how the Amish and other “unvaccinated” populations are doing? And can we draw any conclusions if so?
They’re doing the best to eliminate those control groups.
They didn’t get Covid because they “don’t have TVs” haha.
Seriously, it came and went, apparently there was “something going about” for a bit.
Since being in quarantine last year and seeing on Al Jazeera that jab rates in the African continent were very low I have been keeping my on Burundi courtesy of worldometer.
August 2021 deaths from covid were 38 – just looked now and the figure is the same. 12 million people.very few jabbed.
Says it all really?
It’s possible that groups like the Amish would not be particularly representative, since they tend to keep themselves to themselves.
The unvaccinated who live among super-spreader populations are those that must worry the authorities, since we’re bound to undermine the narrative.
Don’t forget, the jab didn’t exist, nothing like it had been produced and there would have been no time to test one if they did magic one up, yet they still went into lockdown.
What was their exit plan? It wasn’t the clot shot. So no, lockdown was not a sound public policy (even if it did do any of the things they claim, which it doesn’t).
Lockdown was just a fancy word for ‘panic’.
A bunch of innumerate Arts and Classics graduates got bamboozled by some leftie ‘scientists’ and their sadly-imperfect spreadsheets.
What continues to surprise me was that Cummings was apparently more easily spooked by this lot than was Boris.
‘Lockdowns’ were the way of telling people that The Government were in charge, and if you didn’t like it they’d set the Police onto you.
That’s about it, really. Control by fear.
it’s as if the pfiser trial had all cause mortality lower in placebo part…
There is no evidence that the injections reduced the risk of hospitalisation and death.
The BMJ (26/11/20) and The Lancet (20/4/21) showed the injections have zero efficacy.
All we have is a junk in-junk out ‘modelling’ charade that churns out fabricated efficacy data, which the Daily Sceptic continually promotes as being accurate.
Mass vaccination with an ARR of less than 1% for a virus with an IFR of less than 1%.
It could be argued that mass vaccination is even more preposterous than lockdowns.
Lockdown etc was the means of pressuring people into accepting the injections, which are needed to usher in a ‘vaxpass’ as the forerunner to a full scale digital ID/full spectrum surveillance society.
Eventually. Don’t forget the prospect of a vaccine (or so we were told) wasn’t that promising at the onset. I would argue we still don’t have a vaccine worthy of the name and it is largely a placebo but that’s just my opinion.
It isn’t even a placebo, as my understanding of a placebo is that it doesn’t cause harm and just induces the recipient to believe they have been treated with something.
people who have been vaccinated have suffered harms. VAERS and MHRA data says so.
The fact is that, regarding the jabs, all we have had from the very outset are unsubstantiated claims.
When people say the jabs work, I’m puzzled.
Work how?
Infections are at record rates following the jabbing of a majority of the population. So they clearly do not stop infection.
There are lower deaths and hospitalisations, but that also happened after 2 years of the Spanish flu without any vaccine. That’s what happens naturally after a disease gets around. Why would this one be any different?
How do we know that the jabs aren’t taking credit for the natural evolution of a disease? We don’t. We just have assertions.
“Infections are at record rates following the jabbing of a majority of the population. So they clearly do not stop infection.”
Assuming PCR and LFT’s are of any use whatsoever.
Take them out the equation altogether and what are we left with?
You are absolutely right. But if the authorities are going to formulate policy that is dependent on test results, then I’m going to use test results as an argument.
We now appear to be entering the next stage of this mess, with negative vaccine protection against death starting to appear. We also seem to be levelling off at a very high number of cases per day. It is starting to look rather worrying (but not very worrying, at least not yet).
You just wrote We must urgently have a really drastic lockdown! in a somewhat convoluted way. Hence, please stop claiming you’re opposed to them. You’re peddling Sars-CoV2 horror stories whose only conceivable outcome will be another burst of we-must-do-something-itis (and I’m seriously tired of that) if they’re believed.
That the clowns who run mass testing of the healthy would manage to stop the fall in so-called cases at the false positives capacity of their equipment isn’t a surprise to anyone. These ‘cases’ and the equally false ‘COVID hospitalizations’ fabricated in the same way will reman as an artefact of the testing infrastructure for as long as it continues to exist.
It’s not a pandemic, it’s a damn PCR-demic.
Couldn’t that just have been because it was summer?
It’s true that mass vaccination has reduced the risk of hospitalisation and death from Covid.
“I think there was a period in the middle of 2021 when this was the case.”
Please clarify why you think mass vaccination “reduced the risk of hospitalisation and death” in the middle of 2021.
Yes, and could you (not you Cornubian!) also mention the other things, used in other countries like India, like Ivermectin, and HCQ, and Vitamin D. If these things had been used sensibly from the get go along with the GBD, then no lockdowns would ever have been needed and we wouldn’t have had to vaccinate out way out.
why do they keep repeating this bullshit? It’s clear the first wave killed off the most susceptible so everyone left after that is less likely to either die or just end up in hospital.
Why? Because otherwise they’d have to admit that they’ve been wring all along about everything.
They’ll have to do that eventually, but they won’t do it until they have to.
The supposed ‘first wave’ never occurred.
The excess deaths in March 2020 arose from care homes being deliberately seeded with very ill hospital patients; care home staff fleeing their positions and residents dying from neglect, dehydration and in some cases starvation; patients being wrongly but on ventilators that blew their lungs out; given Midazolam which induced respiratory disease symptoms; wholesale community DNRs; cancelled medical treatments for people in critical condition and others vulnerable people being too frightened to seek treatment.
Under the newly implemented WHO death registration guidance, most of these deaths were falsely attributed to ‘covid’.
This genocide has been falsely labelled “the first wave”.
Any honest doctor working in a hospital will openly admit that death from covid without any other compromising health problems is extremely rare.
Judging by the FOI to the ONS which revealed that ~17,000 people, over 15 months died whilst ‘positive’ for covid alone, I’m now beginning to wonder if the Wuhan wet market and/or the lab leak narrative isn’t just smoke and mirrors.
This virus ’emerged’ largely during the northern hemispheres traditional influenza season. Add in a PCR campaign and somehow convince every government in the world to respond in precisely the same way to it (with only a few exceptions like Sweden) which has never happened in earth’s history, and suddenly we had a ‘case pandemic’ with probably no more covid deaths than we would expect in a bad flu season.
From memory, I think it was the winter of 2017/18 in the UK which saw 25,000 excess, excess winter deaths attributed to the flu (excess, excess being that we endured 50,000 excess winter deaths in total, 25,000 of which was the expected norm – if that makes sense).
That’s ~8,500 deaths in 15 months (566 per month) due to covid, and 25,000 deaths in one year (2083 per month) due to the flu. I daresay amongst those 25,000 deaths there were co-morbidities included however, it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to assume that ~25% of them (roughly 550) were due to the flu alone, or at least in the ball park.
Was the wet market/lab leak just an excuse to launch a PCR-demic to terrify the whole of humanity?
Why is the question of course.
Happy to be corrected on dates and numbers.
Good analysis.
BTL doing better than ATL on this one.
Yes, you’re right. The funeral director whistle-blower here in the UK, John O’Looney, made that very clear in either his first or second video, some months ago. That the criminal use of Midazolam in care homes created what the corrupt Establishment referred to ‘the first wave’ (and all the gullible, brainwashed people out there, not knowing what was really going on, fell for it all…).
It did seem to (at least initially, and while the more virulent strains were prevalent).
What’s not known is whether there are long-term effects from these new and relatively untested vaccines.
It would be a supreme irony (giving the Creator a laugh, if he/she is watching) if we saved some from immediate death from covid, only to have millions more die over the coming years, from the long-term effects of some hastily-introduced ‘vaccines’.
“It’s true that mass vaccination has reduced the risk of hospitalisation and death from Covid. “
HOWEVER the pfiser jab raises all cause mortality. In the trial it tripled vascular mortality.
In the wider population
There never has been a rational justification for lockdown, only moronic screaming, personal abuse and demands for faith in the omnipotent state have ever been presented.
All governments state and federal in Australia had pandemic plans drawn up well before 2020. None mentioned masks or lockdowns as part of the operation. Those plans went out the window as soon as this shitshow began.
As I’ve said before, it has been clear at least since the Belarus all cause mortality figures to March came out that lockdowns do not make a significant difference to the course of this virus. On the other hand, it is well known that lockdowns kill many, and any lockdowns since the Belarus information came out should be considered as (possible?) crimes against the people.
Indeed. Governemnt claims of “Growing Evidence” for whatever measure it is, faithfully reported by the MSM – and of course the evidence never appears.
Yes. Ages ago. Now if only the other side would admit it…
I keep reading about this Harwood fellow. He sounds like the sort of fellow who ought not be listened to.
He was calling for vaccine mandates. He’s a total cretin.
He is indeed. From Guido Faulks, I’m glad he left there. Just listening to him on GB News is enough to make you cringe. Any impartial observer knows that he’s far from an impartial journalist and one of those bitter kids that didn’t quite make school prefect… I mean just an opinionated mouthpiece.
He’s not doing GB News any favours.
Absolutely – I had to wonder about the GB News tagline when i read the assertion and thought to myself “he’s not keeping up with the play on there”
Then I remembered he is the kind of “limp” one who is on in the daytime.
For some reason there is a distinct pro-narrative bias during the day on GB News which then dramatically switches to lockdown sceptic at about 7pm.
I think the term you Brits have for folks like Harwood is ‘pompous twat’.
‘Nasty fascist’ is how I tend to think of him.
Journalist……
It’s an unfortunate (but widespread) combination of inexperience and self-promotion that plagues Tom. I expect he’ll grow out of it.
He has been a disappointment when I’ve seen/read about him on GBNews.
He’s a bloody dangerous pillock.
“Hence, the fury at the hypocrisy of Downing Street officials who imposed harsh rules for the nation which they didn’t scrupulously follow themselves.”
The fury has been at the rule-breaking, not at the absurd and totalitarian rules themselves
Yes. My take from this is that those in power knew that there was little risk to most and that not much could be done about it anyway.
The question is then why they imposed lockdowns on us? I have a suspicion that they really really don’t want us to know that answer to that question…
Spot on
Meanwhile Dominic Cummings at the moment seems very interested in the idea of life on Mars.
My guess is that he is under a lot of stress. Many see him as an elemental force. He’s not. He’s human.
If he freaks, it could be spectacular.
I don’t see him as human,
What do you see him as?
Locutus of Borg probably.
‘Elemental forces’ don’t need to ‘test their eyesight’.
or they knew the things they “mandated” would have little effect.
This interesting article may answer that question:
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-systemic-collapse-and-pandemic-simulation/
Yes 🙂 It does a brilliant job explaining what is going on. I’m very struck by Vighi’s use of/reference to the “capitalist automaton”, its invisibility, its reproductibility, its probable outcomes etc.
So, like we always knew, never about health and all about the money and lockdown to never end, next one will be for climate catastrophe or some such.
Brilliant article CG – best I have read yet which analyses what has been done and why over the last 2 years. Should be shared widely in order to try to wake people up.
“The question is then why they imposed lockdowns on us?”
Oh dear, are we still at this point? It was to frighten people into thinking there was a dangerous virus going round, so that they’d panic and rush off to get their Magic Vaccines. And it worked. And still is working.
Why? Because they believed they’d be unpopular if they didn’t.
That’s the essence of populism.
Also, green ideology paved the way for this by inculcating doomsday cultism.
Lockdowns didn’t have much affect on the spread of the virus.
It is rather remarkable, given that there wasn’t much in the way of social interaction, but the data keeps on suggesting that social biocontrol measures didn’t do very much.
Similarly with facemasks — covid just did what it was going to do anyway.
Western governments are like a modern Canute, telling everyone that they’d saved the world just as the tide was turning anyway.
Now, vaccines almost certainly helped reduce deaths around summer 2021…
… However, there’s more to the impact of the vaccines than meets the eye. From summer 2021 we had endemic covid at a sustained level of around 30-40k cases per day, rather than the wave behaviour previously, where it was falling to reasonably low levels in between waves. It is possible that this occurred because of the strange immune response in the vaccinated (IgG antibodies at huge levels protecting from systemic infection, but very little in the way of IgA antibodies and cellular immune response in the upper respiratory tract). We now appear to be levelling off at around 90k cases per day — if this very high level due to vaccination making a reservoir of disease carriers (as I suspect), then the vaccination programme might well have resulted in a net negative position for the vulnerable (ie, more deaths than if we’d not vaccinated any other than the vulnerable). This appears to be becoming even worse, with negative vaccine effectiveness at protecting against hospitalisation/death.
I’m sure this game of covid and the vaccines is still very much capable of throwing a few more surprises at us — IMO we’re in for an interesting few months.
What evidence do you have that the injections reduced deaths in summer 2021?
Why are you calling a positive PCR test a ‘medical case’?
He has no answer.
Canute still gets this undeserved ‘bad Press’ when his alleged intention was to demonstrate to his brown-nosing courtiers that he could not turn back the tide.
The lockdowns were total nuts. We didn’t like them and we did lose our livelihoods but we were all able to lock down. Apart from the people who might have actually had trouble with the virus – the vunlerable. They weren’t able to lock down. They needed the care worker in twice a day and frequent trips to hospital where you are going to catch something because there are sick people there.
Normally a virus would have burned itself out in a few weeks. But with lockdowns we delayed it. We kept it burning for a year or two. If the lockdowns were perfect it would only ever be the vulnerable that got exposed to anything.
Given healthy under 65s were at very little risk it might have been an idea to keep on as normal as we usually do (used to usually do). There is nobody over 65 at my work – they tend to retire. Mandating the year of solitary confinement with no income for me actually made things worse for others.
I would have been happy to stay off work when I caught the thing. Just for a week or so. Couple years is a bit damaging to my earnings and vastly reduces the taxes I pay to HMRC.
Devi Shridhar seems to be saying that the Gates directed strategy worked. According to Cummings at the Committee hearings, this is what went down.
“The conventional wisdom was that we were not going to be able to have any vaccines in 2020. In March, I started getting calls from various people saying, “These new MRNA vaccines could well smash the conventional wisdom, and don’t necessarily stick to it.” People like Bill Gates and that kind of network were saying that.
Essentially, what happened is that there was a network of Bill Gates-type people who were saying, “Completely re-think the whole paradigm of how you do this. Build in parallel—here is the science thing; here is the manufacturing thing; here’s the distribution; here’s the supply; here’s the logistics; here’s the data.”
The normal thing is that you do those sequentially. What Bill Gates and people like that said to me and others at No. 10 was, “You need to think of this much more like some of the classic programmes of the past—the Manhattan project in world war two or the Apollo programme—and build it all in parallel. In normal Government accounting terms, that is completely crazy, because if nothing works out you have spent literally billions building all these things up, and the end result is nothing—you get zero for it, it’s all waste.
What Bill Gates and people and Patrick Vallance and his team were saying was that the actual expected return on this is so high that even if it does turn out to be all wasted billions, it is still a good gamble in the end. All the conventional Whitehall accountancy systems for that cannot basically cope with it, and you have to throw them all down the toilet. That is, essentially, what we did.”
Cummings was clearly deeply enamoured of the idea he could be part of a “Manhattan Project” and everything he did at the time and since can be interpreted without bending the known facts as a huge ego trip followed by him feeling hard done by when his toys got taken away from him. As the great Cecil B would say, he’s a ****
Fauci was on a panel saying the whole paradigm needed to change years prior and he was joined by someone commenting, ‘yeah, we could have something escape a lab’ etc etc – Amazing foresight you might say…
I read something recently which quoted Fauci as saying that he needed covid because he needed to add it to a flu shot, because “the people were not scared enough of the flu to take a flu shot”. And lo and behold, what is a jab manufacturer now working on but a combined flu and covid shot.
So, covid because he couldn’t sell enough flu shots.
On the say so of Bill Gates.
Boycott BBC Question Time!
https://vernoncoleman.org/articles/boycott-bbc-question-time
He is right – I also think that the BBC in making their selection of participants for this will carefully screen out those unjabbed who are intelligent and educated and capable of making a good case against the vaccines so that what they present to their viewing audience might be what appear to be “daft people” who for spurious and unjustifiable reasons do not want to have the jab. The unjabbed are being set up to fall by this stunt.
The BBC have form with this – I well remember the QT audience immediately post 9/11 was heavily biased against the US Ambassador; he was still in shock and his treatment from certain ethnically orientated folk was outrageously badly timed.
That’s why “You can trust The BBC”.
Of course we have won the argument. Not sure you can call it an argument – the other side just shouts, lies, ignores us, censors us, fiddles the figures, useds power and money to evil ends. It isn’t so much an argument as a struggle between good and evil, truth and lies, life and death.
Rather like with Brexit, we shouldn’t let our guard down because some think we’ve won.
This fight, and it IS a fight, won’t be over until those shouting on the other side are all thoroughly and publicly humiliated through showing to everyone they were hiddeously wrong time and again, and have caused huge damage to society.
Even then, the shadowy (and some not so much) and rich / powerful forces behind them are STILL there, so they need similarly to be exposed for what they are and strong measures must be taken against them ALL, including prosecutions and taking away their ill-gotten gains from what they’ve done.
They must never be allwoed to put the very future of our nations and livelihoods in such jepardy ever again. I suspect that other measures will need to occur, including not allowing the media to be so corrupted and to change the political system to stop the same, including lobbying by such people and groups.
I also suspect that society (assuming it survives this all and whatever comes out of the Russia-Ukraine/NATO and China-Taiwan/US hot potatos) will need to change in a big way, because most people either didn’t see anything like this coming or worse still, turned a blind eye to it all hoping it wouldn’t affect them (much) until it was too late.
This includes not concerning themselves with what goes on in their road, town, constituencies, county and in Westminster aside from marking a cross in a box every few years and thinking their work in a democracy is done.
Not over by a long chalk – clearly not in most of the rest of the world and not here either. People in general still think we had to do something in March 2020 and that the mass vaxxing was good. There’s no general acceptance of the truth that covid as an unprecedented threat was a Big Lie and that what has been done is folly and evil.
Exactly.
Yes, read the long but very informative article Crisisgarden has posted above and share it widely to wake people up.
We have been manipulated big time and then some.
At this stage of the game, and it is a game, their game, I am at the point where I am sick of analysing data and infection rates etc which now seems like no more than naval gazing and playing the game ‘they’ want us to play for a totally manipulated “health event” which if you read CG’s linked article was nothing more than re-purposed and media-weaponised flu. I know it has to be done by someone because we need the evidence but I’d far concentrate on trying to educate people in order to change minds and wake people up.
Cant wait for the non aligned Public Enquiry to be set up, televised and the final report issued…..taking its lead from the Warren Commission.
I always find such arguments with lockdown leaning folk very narrow. They ignore so many elephants and seem to want to focus on whether locking down harder would have been the answer.
We had pandemic preparedness documents which recommended against lockdowns, school closures (except in very specific scenarios) and border closures.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2020/feb/27/what-are-the-uks-plans-for-dealing-with-a-pandemic-virus
These recommendations, developed over years and consistently updated by epidimelogists and not some guy off the Internet, were thrown out after this speech in Feb 2020.
https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2020-02-26/-Copy-China-s-response-to-COVID-19-WHO-expert-urges–OnNfwORI3u/index.html
Copy China was the call. So tell me, why are no longer copying China? If they are so innovative? Why aren’t we locking down millions on identification of a hundred cases?
I’m going out on a limb here and saying that we now realise the lockdowns have been a disaster. The budget deficit went from £65bn to £355bn for one (much of which was not productive, paying people to do nothing via furlough, another chunk fraudulent). Across Europe it tops a trillion €.
The claim that this saved countless lives, ignoring the costs, doesn’t hold up. Given the average age of death hasn’t budged, at best, lockdowns in the main only extended the life of very frail and vulnerable people by a short time. The risk stratification of SARS-CoV-2 infection is extremely weighted on such groups. We knew it, but the “follow China” diktat came down and that was that.
China, who created this virus (with help from Fauci and the CEO of Moderna who helped build the L4 lab) and lied about it. The WHO origins team laughably returned a “no lab leak” verdict when they went looking for answers. A team headed by Peter Danzak, whose Eco Health Alliance was the conduit funding the research that created the virus.
The covidians never want to discuss these issues. But masks, they really love to talk about how glorious the masks are and how if we all just wore 5 under an N95 this pandemic would be over. Its a cult.
One reason why lockdowns in China succeeded like they did almost nowhere else is because the Chinese built environment works in their favour. Effectively almost everyone in Chinese cities lives in a gated community, which means you can lock down 20,000 people with just a couple of security guards.
To lock down a similar number of Westerners to the same extent you’d likely need a whole battalion.
Not sure why I wasted 3 mins reading that, typically these days whenever I see or hear the following line (repeated verbatim across all the media for some odd reason!?) I switch over knowing full well the rest will be garbage. Guess I figured that for the article to make it here it was worth it, more fool me.
‘It’s true that mass vaccination has reduced the risk of hospitalisation and death from Covid.’
Yep, a Big Lie that DS and otherson this site appears happy to endorse.
I’m not sure we will ever really know.
On the one hand I hear from the doctors and nurses I know that the unjabbed are overrepresented among people hospitalised for covid. (But the absolute numbers are small and the people have health problems)
On the other hand, I know lots of unjabbed all of whom have caught something in the last month or so and not one of which has experienced more than a bad cold. And that includes children all the way to 70+ year olds.
My sense is that the effect at best is small, and is magnified by a failure to recognise that the numbers dying and hospitalised – vaxed or otherwise – are a tiny proportion of the population. Absolutely tiny.
ONS are using fabricated data to give false impression uninjected are over-represented in ICUs. https://www.hartgroup.org/problems-with-the-ons-denominator/
That’s why I have taken the time to get as many impressions as possible directly from doctors in hospitals.
I treat all stats with extreme caution.
Quality adjusted life years – NEXT!
Tom Harwood of GB News is universally awful at everything.
he always seems quite pleased with himself though
Pleased by himself too, I dare say.
This is… interesting:
https://rumble.com/vt7f7z-attorney-thomas-renz-statement-on-dod-whistleblowers-findings.html
Another important panel organized by Sen. Johnson that was ignored and censored by mainstream journalists.
The point is, it’s now on record, and the get out of ‘plausible deniability’ can’t be used by the covidians in the future.
The thing about Harwood and Snowdon is that they have refused to challenge the institutions and individuals that have grabbed power over the last two years. They’re too busy demonising ‘frownies’ and ‘smileys’ (as they would say) – mostly ordinary people that have views at the extreme ends. Occasionally they’ll have a pop at an individual lockdown fanatic from a scientific background or some celebrity challenging the Covid orthodoxy, but neither of them have ever had the guts to criticise those that have directly profited; pharmaceutical companies, PPE suppliers, civil services, multi-billionaires etc. Harwood and Snowdon are gutless cowards.
That’s a bit harsh. I mean, there’s no evidence whatsoever that pharmaceutical companies have ever been fined record amounts of money for fraudulent behaviour before………
Or that Fauci funded GoF experimentation on Coronaviruses….
Edward,
Haven’t you worked it out yet?
This is the first skirmish, it’s a long way from over. It was a fake pandemic to hasten the march to totalitarianism. It’s not stopping yet. Boris is on his way out because he was too liberal as well as careless. They will not stop unless they are destroyed. The WEF is at the centre but the real movers and shakers are in the shadows, we can guess who they are but not know until either we are enslaved or they are waiting for the gallows.
Unless a miracle happens it’s a real problem. Witness the behaviours of leaders in New Zealand, Australia, France, Austria, USA and many other countries. These are despots, call them communists, fascists, post modernists, neo liberals it amounts to the same. They are narcissistic psychopaths or sociopaths and they care not one iota for their people. Whatever happens, whoever prevails, it won’t end well, it will be bloody. It may even result in the extinction of humanity.
Look at modern history. Nazi Germany was only one country before Nukes, before bio-weapons, before the advent of AI powered killing machines. Think about the damage that caused. Look at how the unvaxed are being setup as unclean like the Jews were.
Agreed this is an early stage. On a very crude level, one can compare the “You’re free – go to Ibiza!” stuff from summer 2020 and 2021 with this year – and then look what happened after.
The slaughter in Europe in WW2 killed less than 10% of the population (and most weren’t Jewish). Planned depopulation this time would be much heavier.
Incidentally, Thursday is Holocaust Memorial Day. According to Pippa Crerar, political editor of the Daily Mirror, this makes it unlikely that the Sue Gray report will be published on that day. Yes, because of crimes committed by Germans in Poland, Hungary, etc., 80 years ago.
But never mind Crerar. Key material from the Sue Gray report is actually set to be revealed tomorrow (it is even possible some will come out before midnight tonight) – perhaps in time for Prime Minister’s Questions but in any case in ample time for Bullingdon Boy Boris Johnson to announce his resignation before tomorrow is out.
(Bullingdon Boy has tried a few moves, including pulling levers with the London police – as I suggested would happen – and they’ve all failed. He bought himself a few days’ reprieve but he didn’t extricate himself from the corner. So who will replace him? Apparently Rishi Sunak walked in on one of the Number 10 parties without realising, or he was in the room and then everybody else started partying and he got a big surprise – anyway there is some story like that. A photo will be made available if necessary. The next non-caretaker PM will be Truss or Hunt.
An interesting question is what will happen to Dominic Cummings’s biggest “little man” of all, Michael Gove. Had things shaken down a bit differently he could have been in a strong position, but they didn’t and he isn’t. Perhaps he will be “parked” at “housing, communities, and local government”. It could be worse – Georgy Malenkov was sent to be the director of a hydroelectric plant. I will genuinely feel sorry for Gove if he’s sent north of the border full-time.)
Latest: Jacob Rees-Mogg (who unlike Johnson is a genuine idiot) has said on the BBC’s Newsnight that “a change of leader requires a general election” and that Britain now has a “presidential system”. Hahaha! Oh dear, oh dear. The Johnson administration is finished.
This guy thinks Boris Johnson has some kind of popular mandate to be prime minister! Talk about not understanding stuff. In fact if there were a general election tomorrow I doubt Johnson would even retain his seat in Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
Snap election then?
God help us if there is
It appears to me that the key to this wasn’t whether vaccines work or not, but could we control the rate of hospitalisations to a level that the NHS could cope with. In the end it seems it was largely a waste of time, but did shift demand for hospitalisations away from peak load, and the NHS did not collapse. Sadly it has also meant that many people who should have got treatment for other conditions have not received it, and probably still haven’t. The hangover will last years.
As the Chinese had a lock-down strategy which the WHO supported, and the rest of Europe was locking down, it would have been difficult for the Government, already under pressure from the media and with the Unions spitting their dummies, to have done anything else, even though the 2012 plan said exactly the opposite. I think the key moment was when Boris used the term ‘herd immunity’. I think that so horrified the left that there was no way the policy could continue. Perhaps he should have called it ‘Sunshine happy feeling’ and we’d have all looked forward to catching it.
We should be careful judging what was done then by what we know now.
I think that enough people realize that most of the world cannot really know what is really happening in China at any time.
And I think it would have been helpful for people gawking at sensationalized footage from China to realize that all-cause mortality in China averages 800,000 per month, of which 80,000 is from respiratory illness.
Well said, Mr Chancellor. Thank you for exposing how Sridhar and Harwood embarrass themselves with their laughable attempts at back-filling justification for the hysterical and criminal response to The World’s Deadliest Virus™.
We won the argument(s) a long time ago. Funnily enough, largely without really having to engage in actual debate/discussion. We always had the arguments, and for this reason the COVID bedwetters and cultists have, by and large, attempted to smear us and generally acted like irrational adolescents. They’ve existed on irrationality and fear. They couldn’t keep that up. They couldn’t keep interacting with us/our argumentation by using irrationality and fear, hence they sought to silence us and, in a wonderful turn of irony/projection, created the narrative that we were the lunatics.
They knew, and still know, that they cannot interact with our arguments. The few who have tried have failed miserably. All they could do was smear us and engage in brazen projection.
This is why we must never forget. Untold deaths and harms have come and will continue to come from the arbitrary decrees of this regime, and supporters of these decrees could not even defend their position.
I agree about the harms to come, but unfortunately I don’t think they will be quantified with anything like the same assiduity as ‘covid’ harms – and until they are, there is no possibility that lockdown as a measure will be discarded
I’m starting to think Toby Young is more deluded than the covidians.
Why?
What argument, What debate? What facts? When will it sink in, it was never about a virus!
It’s what’s coming that is the worry. This scam was just an entree
It was about ideas and the way for lockdown was paved by decades, if not a century, of green ideology.
When in early April 2020 it was clear from the evidence that COVID was nasty but not remotely as dangerous as initially feared and we continued our panicked overreaction, society and our relationship with the state changed, possibly forever.
Lockdown sceptics will have won the argument if and when we abandon the fanatical, irrational crusade against a not very dangerous virus and return to a world without censorship, with a press that challenges authority, authorities that aren’t at odds with reality and a society that gets back to living and letting live.
Until then, we haven’t won anything and have last everything.
and the window is rapidly shrinking for us to get all of that back
I don’t care about winning. My wife, my two kids and I just want to be able to travel freely as a peaceful family, to visit our family members, to enjoy life without needing to succumb to invasive procedures or the administering of drugs to our person which we neither want nor need. Simples.
Ditto.
I also don’t want to have to justify my state of health to an authority. Ever. Under any circumstances.
MSM is trying to make fun of people wanting to protect themselves with cheap and proven drugs. Ivermectin has been FDA approved for human use since 1996. It also beats Pfizer’s new wonder drug hands down, and costs next to nothing. Ivermectin doesn’t make tons of money. So they know the Covid shot is on its final gasp, so they take it add something different to it, rebrand under another name and charge 20 times what they would for ivermectin. I cannot wrap my head around this nonsense. When I explain this to my relatives they label me as crazy and ask me if I know better than science. I don’t make up these information out of my ass. All this information is true and proven. For some people it is near impossible for them to wake up. They are comfortable in their clown world life. If you want to get Ivermectin you can visit https://ivmpharmacy.com
Well logically there was never an argument, it was obvious we were right from the start.
But we’ll only know we’ve won politically when the likes of Devil Sridhar are behind bars or in padded cells.
I’ll just use the US as an argument. If lockdowns helped get us to vaccination and safety, why were there more deaths in 2021 than 2020? Why is it that those infected with earlier versions in 2020 avoided Delta infections, the far deadlier version? Of course state by state comparisons help too.
There is no doubt lockdowns delayed infections. But we saw with nations that avoided outbreaks in 2020 were hammered by Delta. Now, because it is becoming less deadly, those who managed to avoid any infections until December have gotten lucky. But did they know in 2020 that in less than 2 years it would mutate to “a bad cold”? Not unless they have a Tardis. And were it not for Omicron, lockdowns would be the course of the day still.
Symptomatic people are the drivers of respiratory epidemics. I know it, you know it, Fauci knows it, Ferguson knows it, Whitty knows it, Vallance knows it, the WHO knows it, Gates knows it. And when that simple fact is accepted, then maybe the whole god damn futile sh1t show will be understood and wont be repeated. Unfortunately there is no way the c***s incharge will admit they have got this and everything else wrong.
Its political. There will never be agreement, never be reconciliation. The most we can hope for is that the drive for ‘common purpose’ etc is at least halted for a period. Its not going away, the fight for individual freedom, the ability to live a something remotely like a ‘normal’ life will remain something that will now be a constant battle. The lines have been drawn, we have seen what awaits us.
What we previously took for granted is for now on under constant threat.
In a speech delivered Sunday in Brussels, Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav described the striking parallels between what she witnessed as a child in Nazi Germany, and COVID policies being enacted today by governments around the globe.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/vera-sharav-never-again-is-now-unless-we-all-resist/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=26cf2504-60c3-4d8d-826f-e930553c5dbc
How dare she belittle the holocaust narrative by comparing it to the current situation… er… hang on a minute…
My local library has a stand dedicated to holocaust memorial day with leaflets and appropriate books on the theme.
It is also in full on covidian mode with all kinds of restrictions and posters asking users to mask up, sanitise, not sit on seats and follow the covid rules.
I am standing looking at the display stand and the conditions in the library and the cognitive dissonance is off the scale. These are not unintelligent people – why can they not see it???
Look, if completely crippling two generations both financially and emotionally, and shredding the most basic of personal freedoms and all concepts of bodily autonomy bought just one 82 year old another 6 months of existence, it was all worth it.
One covid death is one too many……
The graph below from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) shows that those over 30-years-of-age who have received triple injections of the gene serum have far higher infection rates that those that have not received the gene serums.
Figures from the United States show that in the 12- to 20-year-old age group, cases of Myocarditis rose dramatically in 20:
Here’s the graph from the UK Health Security Agency:
Fit, well, happy and healthy …
And then the jabs …
It doesn’t really matter a fig what Devi Sridhar or Tom Harwood have to say. Both have spent far too much time spouting their half-baked opinions on national tv rather than carefully studying and evaluating the evidence. It is really important that work continues on debunking the lockdown case. Otherwise useless non-pharmaceutical interventions will become the basis of all future health policy making. It is time that the quack scientists who manufactured this global panicdemic and ruined so many peoples’ lives were held to account.
I don’t think we have won the argument at all and if we ever do it will not be in my lifetime. History is written by the victors and those victors are those who have supported lockdowns and all associated restrictions. It will always be a given that lockdowns worked and there was no alternative course of action. Despite Sweden’s (and later Florida’s) initial stance we sceptics cannot prove and can never prove that an alternative approach (ie original virus policies) would have been a better way forward.
The proper argument is that there was no pandemic in real terms but only because the WHO said so, a few years after changing the definition of what a pandemic is. Those who now admit to supporting initial lockdowns to ‘flatten the curve’ but not those that followed were fools. I knew instantly in March 2020 that it would lead to the mess we are still in now nearly two years on. It’ll be a long time before we get back to anything resembling a proper normal let alone claiming to have ‘won the argument’.
I am afraid I have to agree.
We will only have won the argument provided the following actions are implemented:
As you have said Dave Angel Eco Warrior, I cannot see this happening in my lifetime.
Re point number 5 – sad to say I don’t think this will ever happen.
I get irritated by the terms of reference about “did lockdowns work” which seem to focus on lives saved – or not. What NEVER gets considered is the massive loss of fun during lockdowns which includes a long list of family holidays missed, social events cancelled, sporting events, big marriages, laughs with old friends etc etc etc – everything that makes life worth living. These things can’t be quantified but that does not make them irrelevant. Quite the opposite. There was never any debate about this and it was the height of selfishness to assume these things could be foregone so that old Mrs Coggins might – or might not – be protected from catching covid.
Absolutely. If a short time is all that you have left, anyone who forces the cancellation of all the things that make life worth living for most or all of that short time is taking your life, not protecting it. My grandmother has survived it through this madness, but the last months when she was capable of enjoying activities were taken from her. Families all across the country have similar (and many much worse) stories, yet so many lockdown enthusiasts who aren’t involved in the care of elderly relatives claim that they’re the ones that care about the elderly.
More than a year ago, I recall reading someone on another forum relate the following: that in their town or village, here in the UK, a woman in her early 90s couldn’t cope with the (illegal) restrictions, ‘not allowed’ to see her friends, etc, and so, in the middle of the night she went out, walked into the local river, and drowned herself…
There will, of course, as you so rightly say, be many more, equally horrific, stories, around the world.
Indeed, any cost-benefit analysis has to include a massive figure on the cost side for loss of fun/liberty – anyone who doesn’t accept this is either an idiot or a lizard
Erm Beef, did you not notice that Conservative party/ civil service and Downing St had over 17 parties in one year alone of lockdown and our dear leader got married and had 2 babies. So there was fun to be had, but only if you were in the right place of course….
Lockdowns clearly did more harm than good. Even people who don’t accept the individual liberty factor (which I consider the most important thing) don’t have any good arguments when you start talking about just some of the costs of lockdowns in human lives.
Lockdown delayed cancer research by around two years (https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/london-institute-of-cancer-research-cancer-research-science-b930360.html).
Cancer kills around 9.5 million people a year (https://www.cancer.org/research/cancer-facts-statistics/global.html).
When the next breakthrough in cancer research comes, it will come two years later because of lockdown. The same goes for every subsequent breakthrough. In the meantime, 19 million people will have died of cancer.
Comparing stats like this assumes uniform and legitimate attribution of deaths across all the countries. Yet we know countries have different interpretations and, shall we say, different approaches to the accuracy of info on death certificates.
“It’s true that mass vaccination has reduced the risk of hospitalisation and death from Covid”. Didn’t do this young lad much good. Died of a heart attack at the age of 12. The twelve-year-old boy who fell ill during a cross-country race died (italy24news.com) Any child over the age of 12 in Italy who wants to take part in sports activities and events has to have a Green Pass.
How about a graph showing the Covid deaths as a percentage of population density. We just might be at the top of that table which will go to show that we’re full and don’t need any more gimmegrants.
Harwood is another tin eared toss pot. How can we take a ‘man’ that doesn’t accept that there are biological differences between the sexes seriously? Just ignore.
“The costs of those lockdowns were big, but the effort to buy time paid off””
healthcare disaster. And if there was any honesty in the appraisal of lockdown’s efficacy, they would conclude that the cost was greater than the benefit. Between the cancers left undiagnosed and incorrectly treated, the heart disease, diabetes and CKD left unmanaged, and the mental health issues across the generations, lockdowns have been an unmitigated, unacknowledged health care disaster
‘It’s true that mass vaccination has reduced the risk of hospitalisation and death from Covid.’
But hospitalisation and death were made artificially high because repurposed cheap generic drugs were suppressed so as to give the deadly vaccines a clear path.