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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Well done both of you, you have my gratitude and admiration for the path you are taking.
Seconded
being deselected from attending an event show the range of censorship being applied to those who step out of line and off message. As for Ms Harries, hopefully there is a place somewhere warm for her in the afterlife.
meanwhile, please keep up the good work. Thank you
We may assume the event was tax payer funded so a Parliamentary question ought to be asked about why you were excluded, why they did not sell all the tickets and what was the purpose and outcome.
Indeed, furthermore deselected from an event to which only invited are those with vested interested in pushing vaccines, and nobody who would caution against their rampant use… A nice balanced discussion it must have been, of course!
Could have been an April Fool’s joke, of course. If so it is one of the worst in history!
You deserve the title “Doctor”, Doctor Dalgleish.
But. There. Was. No. Pandemic!
There was a “pandemic”, but only under the new definition of pandemic which reduces the threshold of severity for it to be categorized as such. Furthermore, it’s a “pandemic” we have to be told about: Of course many people are bereaved and my heart goes out to them, but have we really experienced a “pandemic”? I would say no. Many years in the recent past have witnessed excessive spikes in death levels due to being a bad flu year. If our metric for classing an event as a pandemic is the collapse of the health services, then at least this country has experienced a “pandemic” every winter for as long as I can remember!
With all due respect the “science” here on DS has long been settled:
“There. Was. No. Pandemic!”
I was a bit wary when reading this article, on account of the date! April fools day in the morning. However, a possible answer to the first question is that they need to shift the stock they purchased before it all goes off, after it’s “shelf life”. The usual UK shenanigans across the fiscal year boundary might have had an effect as well.
Yeah, roll on summer, warm days, barmy nights, BBQs, holidays, on the beach, swimming in the sea, ice creams, fish and chips and who could forget summer boosters.
An excellent article, thank you. The Uriah Heep School of Obsequiousness; perfection.
I’m not sure these pharmafia minions are in denial, so much as fully aware of their collusion/collaboration, standing with their fingers in their ears saying la la la and hoping the dam doesn’t breach before they’ve taken their swag and fully retired.
It’s a bit like Custer’s Last Stand. Or are they between Roche and a hard place?
I posted this article in the NR yesterday so it’s good to see it being given an editorial push.
Are your death jab boosters in the UK being recommended for anyone who wants them or only those deemed ”high risk” from Covid? Over here the authorities are saying only those at high risk of getting ill should get any more as everyone else has immunity and the virus is now endemic.
Anyway, on the subject of increased cancer rates…no surprises really given what we now know about how the clot shots are responsible for screwing up people’s immune systems. Here’s an account from an ex-pharma exec, looking at the increase in cancer drug sales as further evidence rates are increasing;
”In the last two months, I had three family members diagnosed with cancer (thankfully, none have dropped dead suddenly). All of them are triple-jabbed with the Pfizer mRNA experiment.
It made me curious because I was expecting more cases of Myocarditis and cardiac-related issues to crop up. Still, from my direct personal social circles, it looks like the cancer is accelerating.
In-Market Sales data shows a more accurate demand for drugs because hospitals, clinics and pharmacies purchase them. Usually, they keep a fixed level of stock (for example, 30 days’ worth of inventory), and they do some forecast to ensure stock levels stays stable. If a particular drug is used up faster than expected, they will purchase more in the next cycle.
Since governments are hell-bent on fudging/delaying diagnosis data, we can use in-market sales to examine what’s happening in the market.”
https://pharmafiles.substack.com/p/explosive-dataset-showing-increase
Thanks for this. I didn’t know or had forgotten that EU big cheese Fonda Lyin’s husband is a doctor who runs a pharma co subsidiary of fizer. https://twitter.com/Resist_05/status/1583065527483715584
Small world ain’t it?
It’s all a hideous spider’s web, a la judge’s brooch.
The last time I heard anything about it was for age over 75. Admittedly that was on the BBC R4 world propaganda programme early this morning.
In the UK the booster vaccines are available for the most vulnerable to medical propaganda, such as residents in care homes:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-65138237
The MHRA say SAEs of 1 in 800 is rare? If everyone in this country had the jab, that would be 85,000 people either dead, disabled or hospitalised with serious injury. That’s pretty much a 2023 Turkish earthquake here in the UK.
Their definition of “safety” is weird. It’s as if the pharmaceutical and medical trade is in a foreign country, compared with many branches of engineering that deal with safety related systems. There is a well established numerical methodology called ‘Safety Integrity Level’ (SIL); Lot’s of info about that lot, e.g. https://www.crossco.com/resources/articles/determining-safety-integrity-levels-for-your-process-application/ That one is about industrial processes. The general concept is valid in all sorts of modern system design.
Note the function between frequency and hazard severity. They don’t talk about this concept in medicine, at least not when dealing with the general public.
I think it’s even worse than that because the 1 in 800 figure relates to the number of injections. According to the Government’s website there have been approximately 145 million injections administered in England, which would work out to approximately 181,000 serious adverse events. But if Dr Dalgleish and others are correct that the boosters are more harmful than the first two doses, then the number of serious adverse events would be higher still. As if that’s not enough, I don’t think the 1 in 800 figure includes SAEs that occur after a period of months.
If I am wrong about this, I am happy to be corrected.
I just found my husband’s vaccine card: Spaces for 6 jabs, 5 filled out with Moderna since April 2021. So CDC printed those cards knowing there’d be numerous jabs given. So far, he doesn’t have any side effects that he’s told me about. (We don’t discuss covid anymore). He even had the flu-covid double jab, one in each arm in January, right before the “whoops, taking the flu and covid jabs at the same time increases risk of stroke” announcement. He’s 59, healthy and fit. Ridiculous that an intelligent man fell for all this.
Oh dear, and yet they are intelligent men just don’t want to consider that the status quo which has always been on their side up until now might possibly be harmful to them!!!!
But some still insist the whole thing, is down to error, hasty decisions in the face of the unknown, bumbling incompetence, some Ministers drunk with power.
It is evil and an organised attempt at power and control by a few over the masses on a global scale.
Well if a picture is worth a thousand words then this graph kind of says it all. I’ll be interested to see if births go back up to normal levels this year in the UK and elsewhere. 2022 could be just a blip, after all…;
https://docbrown77.substack.com/p/the-decrease-in-births-in-2022-in
What a good spot. Talk about the UKHSA not seeing the wood for the trees!
The tide has changed. In 2021 and 2022 I was receiving formal complaints for my attitude to Covid rules and vaccination harms. Now most patients are grateful to have their post vaccine problems taken seriously.
Last Thursday I received an invitation from the National Death Service for a “spring booster”. Naturally I declined. Yesterday I got a text asking if I wanted to avoid future invitations. Naturally I accepted! Perhaps that was their idea of an April Fool’s joke
This aligns almost exactly with what Andrew Bridgen said in his speech to an empty parliament when all but 2 politicians who weren’t there by the need to follow procedure decided to show no interest in their constituents’ health by their mass exit from the chamber.
This demonstrates what a despicable bunch of morons our politicians are and none of them not present for this speech deserve our vote.